“I put my equipment back on, and I was a gimp. But I played,” McClanahan says proudly. “He got what he wanted. It’s hard to argue with the results.” Just two weeks after the tirade, the Americans would discover gold. His hockey strength en- gaged, McClanahan toughed it out for the rest of the Sweden game on a leg he could barely bend due to a crippling thigh contusion. He occasionally stood be- tween shifts because the leg would seize up when he sat down. In the closing sec- onds, the U.S. team rallied to tie Sweden, itself an international powerhouse picked to medal. As we now know, the rally didn’t stop there.
The American team would go on a historic roll and upset the Soviet Union, the best team in the world and widely regarded as one of the best teams of all time (they had won six of the previous seven gold medals) in what is now known as the “Miracle on Ice.”
When the Americans moved into the gold medal game versus Finland, it was, of course, McClanahan who scored the game-winner.
It has been thirty-six years since Brooks viciously went after McClanahan. The fire has been dampened, and the smoke has long been cleared out. But my dad be- lieves that Brooks didn’t question McClanahan’s toughness and his hockey strength because it was weak, but rather because it was one of the strongest on the team.
“Herbie knew McClanahan could take it,” my dad says, his words filled with admiration for McClanahan. “In six months, Herbie got to know all the players on the 1980 Olympic team. When challenged, he knew who could take it, who would play better, and who would player harder. He also knew what players would throw in the towel.” In hindsight, my dad believes that if it hadn’t been McClanahan who got hurt and laid up in the dressing room but rather a different player with a dif- ferent degree of hockey strength, it’s quite possible destiny would have taken a de- tour, and a national miracle would never have occurred.
“What people don’t realize is that a week earlier, Jack O’Callahan hurt his knee in an exhibition game,” he points out. “O’Callahan was a great player, a team lead- er, and a tough player from Charlestown, Massachusetts. But Herbie didn’t go after him, didn’t question him. At the time, [goalie] Jim Craig was kind of fragile because his mom had just passed away. Herb wouldn’t have gone after him, because he could’ve broken him.”
Because of Brooks’s constant mental tinkering, he sometimes knew his players even better than they knew themselves.
“Herbie took in the McClanahan situation,” my dad says, leaning back in his re- cliner. “He had a history and a familiarity with McClanahan unlike his relationship with the guys from the East Coast. Herbie knew that Robbie was maybe ready to pull the chute and throw in the towel. And Herbie wouldn’t let him do it. He showed McClanahan that he could come back from adversity, and he played through it, and my God, McClanahan scored the goal that won the gold medal.”
THE SUNLIGHT OUTSIDE THE family room begins to fade, and the story my dad tells of the time Rob McClanahan went head-to-head with Herb Brooks comes to an end. But the story of the 1980 United States men’s hockey team never really ends. It lives on in a generation of American hockey players, in the collective memories of hockey fans the world over, in the mythology of American sports, in motion pictures, and in displays in the Hockey Hall ofFame. On a personal level, the story of “Miracle on Ice” lives on in the ring on my dad’s right hand as he pass- es the anecdotes down from father to son.
My dad is now tired and cashed out. He has a few valuable hours left in his day off, and he wants to use them now to do nothing. So he settles into his chair, done for the day.
I turn off my digital recorder and sit there for a few minutes, wrapped in the warm glow of his story. After all these years, my dad and I are still tethered together by the sports stories we share, by the games we love, and by the thread of the hockey-strong ethos that connects us. He looks over at me while I put my walking boot back on.
“When is your next game?” he asks.
“This Saturday at Arden Park. Eight a.m. Dark versus White. Same as always.”
Before he reclines, my dad asks me the one question that’s at the very heart of what it means to be hockey strong. It is a question directed at a player’s mental and physical stamina. It is a question of how much pain a player can endure. It is a question as old as the game itself. It is a question that does not discriminate, one that was aimed at Rob McClanahan’s heart during the 1980 Winter Olympics and has been faced by every player in this book. It is a simple three words that define the sport. And it is a question my dad has spent a career asking.
“Can you play?” my dad asks me.
“I can play,” I answer.
“Then you should play,” he says.
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