Olympic Plans Kept on Ice : Coach Must Await Decision on the U.S. Hockey Team

Tim Taylor is waiting and watching, his coaching plans in a holding pattern. To use a hockey analogy, it’s almost as if someone is icing the puck, and it’s taking forever.

The Yale coach, who fulfilled his career-long dream when he was chosen in May as coach of the U.S. Olympic hockey team, has stalled the preparation, out of necessity.

That completely goes against the thorough nature of a most thorough man.

But now, he waits.

The future of U.S. Olympic hockey is in the hands of 24 wealthy men from North America, also known as the NHL’s Board of Governors. In December, that fractious group will decide whether to allow the best NHL players to compete in the 1994 Winter Games at Lillehammer, Norway.

Thirteen yes votes and Taylor starts figuring out if Brett Hull, who holds dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship but probably would play for the United States, would coexist better with Jeremy Roenick or Pat LaFontaine as his center. Any fewer than 13 yes votes, though, and he dispatches his assistant, John Cuniff, to college games in Madison, Wis.; Ann Arbor, Mich., and Orono, Me.

It’s hard enough thinking about who can be found to play goaltender for Yale this season without having to answer questions about the Olympics.

Taylor has to be a politician on this issue. How can he look Hull or Brian Leetch in the eye if he denounces the all-stars idea and then it passes? Or, what happens if Taylor says he has to have the NHL players to win and the governors vote against it?

“I think it would be great from the perspective that it would be nice to have our very best players against their very best players,” he said. “But at the same time, you don’t want to sacrifice some of the other special aspects of being an Olympian. I always identify being an Olympic team as a supreme effort. Maybe we’re getting away from that.

“My position is, it would be a great honor to coach that team. I really enjoyed working with the pros during the Canada Cup. USA Hockey’s challenge is not to let the dream team kill the dream for a lot of American kids. We have to go on with developing our programs. I don’t want to see all the great aspects go up in smoke.”

Cuniff, former coach of the New Jersey Devils, traveled to Europe and the former Soviet Union last summer and discovered that all everyone wanted to talk about was the possibility of NHL players in the Olympics.

“The Europeans really want to see a dream team,” said Cuniff, who played on the 1968 U.S. Olympic team. “They were hyper about it when talk started last summer. Playing on the bigger ice surface, the U.S. (pros) could do better. Then again, Finland could beat you. . . . If a goaltender gets hot, anything can happen. We’ve seen that. The U.S. put together a good team in the Canada Cup with the pros. What we all want is what’s best for U.S. hockey.”

NHL players and a tragic turn of fate both had something to do with Taylor, 50, getting the Olympic job. Taylor was one of three assistants to Bob Johnson on Team USA’s Canada Cup team during the summer of 1991 when Johnson began suffering from the brain cancer that took his life.

Because of his extensive international coaching background, which included appearances in four consecutive World Championships, Taylor was promoted to head coach. And then the United States, stocked with NHL players, reached the Canada Cup final, losing to Canada’s NHL players.

Taylor, who has been at Yale since 1976, cites Johnson as one of the biggest influences on his coaching career. The others were Harvard’s Bill Cleary, under whom Taylor served as an assistant, and the 1984 Olympic coach, Lou Vairo. Taylor took a leave from Yale during the 1983-84 season to be Vairo’s assistant.

“It was almost like Bob was an extension of the Bill Cleary experience,” Taylor said of Johnson. “At a point in my life when I was a head coach, he gave me an awful lot of coaching opportunities, leadership and guidance in the game.

“And I miss him dearly.”

Johnson, the heart and soul of American hockey, was with the U.S. team, even though he wasn’t on the bench. From the hospital bed, he diagramed strategies and other instructions, giving them to Taylor, who still has them.

“It was a very difficult time,” Taylor said. “It only added to the respect I have for the professional players. They are just that--they’re professionals. They know how to deal with adversity and that was one of those times.”

Taylor has drawn on his experiences in dealing with adversity. A native of Natick, Mass., he captained the Harvard hockey team and led the Crimson to a 21-3-2 record and the East Coast Athletic Conference championship his final season. The year was 1963 and Taylor and his teammates turned down a bid to the NCAA tournament, protesting the recruiting practices of other national rivals.

Later that year, Taylor was one of the last to be cut from the 1964 Olympic team. He still vividly remembers when Coach Eddie Geremiah gave him the news.

“Two of us were cut the day after President Kennedy was shot,” Taylor said. “I remember I was on a bus from Minneapolis down to Rochester (Minn.) to play a game that night. I’m sure the coach had made up his mind he was going to cut us after the game. And I never got the chance to play. The game was canceled, of course. And he came up and tapped us on the shoulder.”

It was the first time Taylor was cut from any team. But he isn’t the only U.S. Olympic coach who had been cut as a player. Herb Brooks, the coach in 1980, was the last man cut in 1960.

Taylor played semi-pro hockey in Waterloo, Iowa, for five seasons and spent summers working at the family business, the Boston Globe. His father was the publisher, and the Taylor name still graces the newspaper’s masthead.

But Taylor wanted to be a coach, not someone who put out the paper with stories about coaches. He was an assistant with Harvard before moving to Yale in 1976.

In Waterloo, Taylor had met Walter Bush, and they formed an enduring association. Bush, who went on to become the president of the Minnesota North Stars, is now president of USA Hockey and a member of the selection committee that picked Taylor as the coach in May.

“He’ll never embarrass you,” Bush told reporters after the selection. “We won’t win every Olympic tournament. But Tim Taylor is a gentleman as well as one of the most competitive men I know.”

Embarrassment was a bit of a problem during the Dave Peterson era. Peterson, the coach in 1988 at Calgary and earlier this year in Albertville, France, struck sparks with reporters both years, although he was somewhat less secretive and confrontational last February. Close friends of Peterson were stunned when he seemed to develop a new and antagonistic personality in 1988, saying he was a genuine good guy.

That sort of thing is not likely with Taylor. Yale would probably start offering athletic scholarships before that happened. Taylor learned from watching Vairo handle the heat in 1984 and the two Peterson experiences.

Taylor’s idea of media relations is as simple as his coaching philosophy.

“I just try to use good, common sense,” he said.

Taylor and Cuniff are working on toning down their widely known levels of intensity. Fourteen-hour days are nothing out of the ordinary for Taylor, who sometimes falls asleep watching game film in his office. Cuniff is the same.

“Both of us are intense,” Cuniff said. “You have to have some humor on the bench. We have to recognize that. We’ve been trying to do something about that.”

King forward Bob Kudelski, who played for Taylor from 1983-87, said his former coach is so intense that he can become absent-minded. Taylor walks around with the idea of a hockey rink in his head. One day, Taylor decided to put a mini-rink in the Yale dressing room.

“It was a big, open space and he cut the white carpet for the ice,” Kudelski said. “He’d be sitting there with a stick moving pucks around. One puck would be the forward, another would be the wing. We’d be breathing hard in between periods and he’d be moving pucks around. I think it was his favorite toy.”

Until now, college and USA Hockey have been enough for Taylor. At Yale, he turned things around, taking a team that had won only five of its previous 48 games before he arrived.

He wants another shot at Olympic glory. In 1979, Brooks offered him the assistant coach-GM job that eventually went to Patrick. Taylor, feeling he couldn’t leave Yale for a year, told Brooks thanks, but no thanks. The rest, of course, is history.

Taylor laughs now about missing the miracle on ice at Lake Placid.

“In retrospect, I can list that as one of the biggest mistakes I ever made,” he said.