“HERB BROOKS HAD FINALLY lost it,” my dad begins. “He had finally gone too far."
It was after the first period of the United States men’s hockey team’s opening game at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, and American coach Herb Brooks verbally accosted forward Rob McClanahan in the locker room with a scathing indictment of McClanahan’s toughness. But the tirade had simply gone too far. Brooks’s biting words had dug too deep; the American players’ emotions exploded like a leaky gas main.
While it was not unusual for Brooks to blow his stack, this specific tirade seemed to cross the line. This was because for an entire year the men on the 1980 U.S. team had given their lives over to Brooks—to representing their country—and had trained exhaustively just to get to the Winter Olympics. The players were handpicked by Brooks, each chosen for specific reasons, and they were some of the most talented amateur hockey players and best-conditioned athletes in the world.
But after six months of preparation, there they were, twenty minutes into their first game in the Olympic tournament, and their coach had lost his mind and un- leashed a raw and deeply personal assault on one of the team’s best players. In that moment, Brooks nearly undid all the good things they had accomplished over the year.
“Brooks had a plan. He always had a plan,” my dad says bluntly, as he wrenches a massager across the bottom of my foot. “Now, remember: Brooks was not only a great coach. He was a psychology major, too.”
As head coach of the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers and the U.S. men’s team, Brooks was notorious for playing mind games with his players. He
had a habit of tinkering with their psyches, constantly poking and prodding them with both pointed and passive comments that were all strategically designed to elicit a response. He employed a never-ending process of addition and subtraction. He would reward a guy with playing time and then take it away without warning. He would pair guys up on lines, and just as things got settled he would scramble them as if they were lottery balls. He would offer up harsh criticism and subtle praise in a single breath.
“He never wanted the players to feel comfortable,” my dad continues. “He would motivate them by tearing them down.”
All of Brooks’s mind games and rigorous cardiovascular conditioning steeled his players both mentally and physically, and his teams achieved tremendous re- sults. He had won three NCAA hockey titles with a lineup made entirely of native Minnesotans and had produced scores of all-Americans and NHL players. Because of this success, his players understood that there was a true method behind his madness.
During his near-totalitarian reign over the U.S. team leading up to the 1980 Win- ter Olympics, the players were accustomed to the circuit-board tinkering of his mind games. In fact, all the hockey players who had ever played for Brooks had heard him tear into players before. This time, though, was an epic display of wrath, one of the greatest ass-chewings in the history of sports.
McClanahan, one of the best two-way forwards on the American squad, had been injured in the opening minutes of the Sweden game and was eventually sent to the locker room by my dad. McClanahan did not return to the game in the first period after being examined by the American medical staff, and was receiving treat- ment alone in the locker room.
Brooks, a curt man with as much subtlety as a cinder block, stormed into the locker room with no time for sentiment. The U.S. team had had a lackluster open- ing period and was down 1–0 after having given up 16 shots to the Swedes. Brooks needed to stir the team awake, and he needed to do it right then and there. My dad had worked with Brooks for years at Minnesota, and the two men had been in- volved in a similar situation when the Golden Gophers needed a spark in the 1976 Western Collegiate Hockey Association tournament. Brooks’s tirade that time in- cluded hurling a metal trash can against the locker room wall to charge his players up.
Brooks knew what he had to do, and whether it was right or wrong, he dug right in by questioning McClanahan’s toughness, which is a direct shot at any hockey player’s character. Brooks knew this, of course, and flayed McClanahan’s ego.
“When he came in and challenged me, I was caught completely off guard. To- tally off guard,” McClanahan says, reached by phone a few days after my dad told me the story in his living room. McClanahan is now fifty-seven and a well- respected and successful financial advisor in the Twin Cities. “He came in and carved me a new one. I was shocked. I’m still shocked today.”
0 comments: