Life in the Bus Lane : After Winning a Gold Medal in 1980 and Coaching in NHL, Herb Brooks Embarks on What He Hopes Is the Road Back

The longest bus trip is six hours, to Baltimore, but Binghamton, Glens Falls and most of the Utica Devils’ stops in the American Hockey League are a mere two or three hours away.

No charter flights await Herb Brooks and his Devils, and no parades mark their victories. The White House surely has lost his phone number by now. Brooks, who coached the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team to an improbable gold medal at Lake Placid, rides the buses these days in the obscurity of dark, frigid minor league nights.

“It’s been an interesting 10 years,” he said dryly.

Humility has touched Brooks late in his career, as evidenced by his presence in Utica, a city of about 70,000 in central New York that is home to the New Jersey Devils’ top farm club. If to return to the NHL he must pay his dues now, 15 years after having won three NCAA titles at the University of Minnesota, a dozen years after his Olympic triumph and 10 years after his NHL coaching debut, the autocrat of Lake Placid will eat his pride with the greasy hamburgers that are standard minor league fare.

“I’m not above the AHL,” Brooks said the other day. “My history of the AHL tells me there have been some tremendous players who’ve come through here. I’m not above it by any means. I’m happy to be here.

“I think I’m a better coach today than at any time in my life. You learn from your past mistakes and you don’t go backward.”

As much as Brooks wanted to get back to the NHL--to hockey at any level--hockey didn’t want him until the Devils hired him last year.

The committee charged with selecting the 1992 Olympic hockey coach rejected his plan to coach in Albertville and then stay on through 1994, saying that no one should coach in two successive Games. The committee then chose Dave Peterson, who had coached the 1988 U.S. team to a seventh-place finish at Calgary.

Brooks might have won more gold medals than friends among the clique that controls amateur hockey in this country. But what some who know the 54-year-old Minnesotan see as an uncompromising nature and hunger for power, Lou Lamoriello, the Devils’ president and general manager, sees as confidence and dedication.

Their arrangement has worked well, with Brooks having led an inexperienced Utica team to contender status in the AHL’s Southern Division. They started the weekend in second place, two points out of first,4 in the division.

“We work hard and make some stupid mistakes, but they come back to work the next day,” Brooks said. “It is a departure in the AHL to go with this developmental approach, but Lou has a plan. He tells me, ‘Herb, I want you to have patience, patience and patience. And persistence.’ ”

Lamoriello has high regard for Brooks, a rival when Lamoriello coached at Providence College in the 1970s.

“I knew he had been out of hockey and I knew this is what he was born to do, coach,” Lamoriello said. “I knew we were going to have a young team, with a lot of players coming out of juniors, and I thought it would be a good situation for him.”

Is Brooks a potential threat to Lamoriello’s job?

“Sometimes, people want other people not to succeed because they have different ideas,” Lamoriello said. “I don’t feel that way. Herb Brooks has been outstanding for our organization and a help to me.

“If you hire someone who’s weak, people criticize you. If you hire someone who’s strong, people still criticize you. I know Herb and Herb knows me, and that’s all that’s necessary for me. The relationship I’ve had with Herb and the respect I have for Herb as a coach and a person are what I went by. You have to be secure enough and respect what he has to offer.”

Not many hockey executives are that secure.

Brooks’ last go-round in the NHL was during the 1987-88 season, when he could squeeze only 51 points out of the injury-ravaged Minnesota North Stars. Hired 2 1/2 years after he had been fired as coach of the New York Rangers, Brooks was welcomed by Minnesotans as a hero, the guy from St. Paul who had made good in the big time and finally come home.

He departed in acrimony. General Manager Lou Nanne, who had hired Brooks, was forced out by owners George and Gordon Gund as the team declined. The Gunds then fired every employee and told the new general manager, Jack Ferreira, to rehire whom he pleased. Ferreira did not rehire Brooks.

“It was time to just make a move,” said Ferreira, now general manager of the San Jose Sharks. “The team had been in last place the year before and I really thought Pierre Page was the right guy and was ready to move in as head coach. I thought I had to make a change and even if it was Herbie, I thought the fans were looking for a change. The decision was mine.”

Brooks says he chose not to reapply for his job. Either way, he concedes, “If I’d been a little more political or diplomatic, I’d probably be there still.”

Whatever the cause, the abruptness of it all jolted him.

“It was a bad scene, and it was gnawing at me during the two years I was working (as a color commentator) for SportsChannel,” he said. “I was like a recovering alcoholic. I was close to the game, but I couldn’t get involved in it. It was like a giant magnet to me.”

That desire to get back into coaching was thwarted during the summer of 1989, when the Rangers, seeking a general manager, rejected his proposal for a general manager-director of player personnel and hired Detroit’s assistant general manager, Neil Smith.

Brooks tried again in 1990, when Olympic officials contacted him about the 1992 coaching job. He went through three preliminary interviews before the field was narrowed to four candidates, each of whom appeared before the selection committee during a session in Chicago.

Although Olympic officials had been embarrassed by Peterson’s public-relations blunders in 1988, they chose Peterson over Yale Coach Tim Taylor, Wisconsin Coach Jeff Sauer and Brooks.

“Everybody knew, no question, he was qualified to do the job,” a member of the selection committee said of Brooks. “The question was, who would he work with and would he go off on his own? From the assistant coaches he was going to hire, you knew he was going to do everything himself.”

Would that have been so bad, given the seventh-place finishes of Lou Vairo’s team at Sarajevo in 1984 and of Peterson’s ’88 team, considered the most talented group ever to represent the United States in the Olympics?

“I think if Herb Brooks coached those teams, maybe they wouldn’t have been seventh place,” said Mike Eruzione, captain of the 1980 Lake Placid team and a color commentator on telecasts of the ’84 and ’88 Olympics. “And that’s nothing against Dave Peterson. But Herb has a way with athletes, motivating them and getting them to be better than even they think they can be.”

That was true in 1980, when Brooks’ college kids stunned a superbly skilled and drilled Soviet team, then went on to win the gold medal. To forge unity among players who had been college foes, Brooks created a common enemy: himself. Relentless in his criticism and his insistence on thorough preparation, Brooks pushed his players within a step of mutiny. It was unorthodox, but it channeled frustration into determination.

“It wasn’t until afterward that any of us realized what he had done,” Eruzione said. “Herb was fortunate to have the guys he had, the best bunch of guys I’ve ever been with and a talented bunch, but when we were playing, we’d say to each other, ‘What the hell is the guy doing?’ ”

Brooks knew what he was doing, although he told no one but Craig Patrick, his assistant coach.

“He set out my role as the guy who handled all the problems, said Patrick, later Brooks’ boss in New York and now general manager of the Pittsburgh Penguins. “He set it up that way because he knew he had to be a hard nut.

“He only had these guys for a short period of time and he wanted the guys to be one group and not split into factions. Because a lot of guys were from Massachusetts and others from Minnesota, where he was from, he wanted to show them he treated them all the same: he was hard on all of them. That made them a unit. . . . It worked very well and I benefited from it because I was the guy who could be their friend.”

Although Brooks won admirers among his players, he has won few friends on hockey’s amateur or professional levels.

“The biggest problem Herb had was Herb,” said Eruzione, who will work for CBS in Albertville as an analyst. “He doesn’t deal with people telling him what to do.

“You look at baseball, at managers like Earl Weaver, Dick Williams. Those guys did best when they had total control. Herb never did, except at the University of Minnesota and with the ’80 Olympic team.

“Give him total control, and see what happens. If it doesn’t work, then fire him.

“Not a lot of NHL coaches are given total control. Bob Johnson (who coached the Penguins to the 1991 Stanley Cup championship) was, although he had a lot of talent, too. And Scotty Bowman was given control in Buffalo and Montreal. I don’t think Herb was ever given that in the NHL.

“I always felt bad for Herb because of that, but I don’t feel bad in a way because he created part of the problem.”

The problem with the Olympic selection committee, according to Brooks, was its refusal to think of the long-term development of American talent.

“They did not want to give me a 3 1/2-year contract. I felt this is a time there should be simultaneous training for both teams, I made a case for it and they were very nice,” Brooks said. “I also made a case that the developmental program should be changed. In their eyes, they might have looked at me as a respectful dissident. Maybe I was in the wrong spot at the wrong time.”

He was ahead of his time in 1981 with the motion system he introduced to the Rangers. Emphasizing skill and skating at a high tempo, it was greeted with horrified looks from players and sneers from rival coaches who called it too difficult to learn and too sissified to succeed.

Brooks gathered small, clever players whose talents previously were wasted and enabled them to excel. Although the Flyers derisively dubbed them “Smurfs,” Brooks’ Rangers twice had the last laugh over Philadelphia in the playoffs.

Mark Pavelich, the third-line Olympic center who was supposedly too small for the NHL, led the Rangers in goals, assists and points in various seasons. Diminutive Finnish defenseman Reijo Ruotsalainen made shocked goalies with his booming slap shot. Mike Rogers and Pierre Larouche, deemed defensive liabilities by other coaches, flourished under Brooks because he dwelt on their strengths instead of their faults.

The Rangers had 92 points after the 1981-82 season and 93 after 1983-84, numbers they have not matched since. Their 42 victories for 1983-84 remain the most by the club in 20 years.

“He got the most out of his players of any coach I know,” Eruzione said. “He had some good players in New York, but he made them better. Everybody I ever talked to who played under him says, motivationally, he was a great coach. And he has great knowledge of the game. God, he knows the game.”

It was Brooks’ misfortune that in each of his three full seasons, his teams were matched in the playoffs against the New York Islanders, who were finishing a run of four consecutive Stanley Cups and five trips to the finals.

“I always believe if the Islanders and Rangers were in different divisions, they would have met in the finals,” Eruzione said. “Maybe not all four years he was there, but at least two years. . . . He never won the Cup, but he should have.”

When the Rangers foundered at mid-season of 1985, Patrick fired Brooks.

“Business is business,” Patrick said of dismissing his former boss. “When I was let go (in 1986), I was told it was time for a change. Things weren’t going well and something had to be done.”

Brooks sat home for a while, coached at Division III St. Cloud State for a season to help the school gain Division I hockey status, and made motivational speeches for major corporations.

His disastrous experience with the North Stars and the rejections by the Rangers and Olympic selection committee dimmed his NHL prospects, and he was selling paper to corporate clients for Turnquist, Inc., in the Twin Cities when he was contacted by the Devils.

Warren Strelow, the Devils’ goaltending coach and a longtime friend of Brooks, mentioned to Lamoriello that Brooks wanted to get back into hockey. Soon afterward, Marshall Johnston, the Devils’ director of player personnel, approached Brooks at a high school game in Minnesota.

“It took off from there,” Brooks said. “Lou’s a good salesman. He hit my hot buttons.”

With a stick in his hand instead of a sales report and lessons to be taught instead of products to be sold, Brooks is in his element.

“It’s fun because it’s not a bunch of guys who are maxed out,” he said. “There are three or four veterans and 12 first-year players. It’s a completely different philosophy. Lou wanted it this way and he’s been great to work with.

“I wanted to see if I still had the intensity and desire to coach and I wanted to get back into it. I’m also not above going to the minor leagues, riding the buses, paying the price. . . .

“The game-practice ratio doesn’t work out for you to do as much teaching as you’d like, but there’s a lot of it. In the NHL, you’re teaching, but you’re doing more polishing. Here, with 12 first-year pros, there’s a lot of teaching. Some of the thrills come from helping young people get to where they want to go in life. In the NHL, you’re helping people stay at the level they’ve gotten to.”

When he was hired, it was rumored that he would replace Devil Coach Tommy McVie by Christmas because the Devils’ abundance of slick-skating European players was collected with Brooks in mind. But Brooks is still in Utica.

“Nothing was promised at all,” he said. “My job is to get players ready for the big club. Ethically, morally, professionally, you do that. Life’s too short to be sticking pins into anybody.”

He saw the 1992 Olympic team play Team Canada in Albany, N.Y., not long ago, but he watched as a spectator and not as a critic. He discusses his Olympic experiences politely, but reluctantly.

“I think about it around Olympic time,” he said. “It’s a nice memory. It was a tremendous moment, but life goes on. You can’t be walking around and expect to get anywhere in life if you’re always looking back.”

Brooks is assuredly looking ahead, to another stint in the NHL or perhaps to coaching the Olympic team again in 1994. Stranger things have happened.

“Who’s to say he won’t in the future?” said Patrick, a member of the coach selection committee. “There’s going to be lots more Olympics.”

Coaching in Utica might be the first step.

Said Eruzione: “I think he’s finally back doing what he wants to do. He got out of the game and I think he realized he should be back coaching, taking a job that was open and maybe climb the ladder to where he should be.

“I think he should be in the NHL, no question. . . . I’d love to see him running (the U.S.) hockey program. But he’d have to give a little, and I don’t know if his ego will take a step back and (allow him to) interview for ’94.”

Riding buses is helping to tame Brooks’ ego.

“I have no regrets,” he said. “The players here have a good attitude and while sometimes it’s tough, it’s fun in a lot of ways. The other coaches have been great and it’s been a positive experience. We’ll see where it leads to. We’ll just have to wait and see.”