No Miracles for Taylor : Coach of 1994 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team Had a Difficult Time Dealing With Lack of Success

Fine old Gothic buildings climb toward a cloudless blue sky, making a winter scene fit for the cover of Yale’s recruiting brochure.

Sunlight slants through the windows of Tim Taylor’s office in Ray Tompkins House, illuminating photographs of hockey players he has coached who have gone on to NHL careers. On the wall next to his desk hangs a stylized photo of hockey equipment laid out in a stall, tools awaiting an artisan. To his right hangs a poster promoting a college tournament.

There is no reminder of the 1994 Olympics, in which Taylor coached the U.S. hockey team to a 1-4-3 record and eighth-place finish, its worst ever. The omission is not accidental. A year after Lillehammer, Taylor still is coming to terms with an experience that devastated him personally and professionally.

“I’ve pretty much ridden through the depression of it all,” he said.

It has been a rough ride. Until the Olympics, he was an idealist. Now, at 52--too old to cry, too young to retire--he’s no longer sure what life holds and how much his beliefs matter.

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For months after the Games, Taylor shut himself off from the world. He stayed home in North Branford, Conn., analyzing where he had failed and what he should have done.

“I’d call him and ask, ‘How are you doing?’ and he’d say, ‘Better than yesterday,’ ” said Dave Ogrean, executive director of USA Hockey, which oversees the Olympic program.

“I don’t think his reaction to the lack of success we had over there was unique, but he was in the spotlight to a greater degree than ever before and a lot of people, falsely or otherwise, had greater expectations. We didn’t peak at the right time. And he had been given a lot of latitude to put a team together and to do what he wanted. He carried that on his own shoulders.”

A sense of responsibility is the price Taylor has always felt compelled to pay for having been born into a life of privilege.

His father was president of the Boston Globe, and his brother and cousin hold top executive positions at that newspaper.

Taylor, however, was determined to make his own way and his own name. After a collegiate career at Harvard, he played semipro hockey in Waterloo, Iowa, for $60 a game. He worked at a factory and sold advertising at the local newspaper, a job he got by knocking on the door, not by pulling strings.

At Yale, he took a team that was 4-21 and within three years made the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference playoffs. In 16 seasons, he made the playoffs 10 times and won three Ivy League titles. He was an assistant to Lou Vairo at the 1984 Sarajevo Games, led Team USA to a second-place finish in the 1991 Canada Cup after Bob Johnson fell ill, and coached the U.S. team at four world championships.

He knew what to expect at Lillehammer. He knew what to do. He was prepared for success. What he got instead was “tragic and very hard to take.”

“When my teams fail, I try to take the blame,” he said. “Obviously, I’ve been around enough and am smart enough to know that it’s not always the coach’s fault. In this particular case, it was my job to select the players, train the players and to prepare them physically and mentally. I’m not one to make excuses and shift blame to other areas. I tried to stand as tall as I could and take the brunt of the blame myself.”

The healing process took a long time, he said.

“I don’t dispute that. . . . I defend the players. I defend the system. I thought we had an excellent plan.

“I was doing a lot of soul-searching, trying to figure out where it went wrong and where we could do a better job in the future,” he said.

“I was reeling from a lot of the disappointment. The disappointment was real. I didn’t feel like going out and enjoying myself, so I didn’t. I just didn’t want to be with a lot of people for quite a while. I stayed in touch with people, a close circle of friends, and I did battle with it. It just had to pass.”

Friends dragged him back into the world. Todd Marchant, who was the Olympic team’s top center and is now a high-scoring rookie with the Edmonton Oilers, called him in April and urged him not to wallow in self-pity.

“I told him, ‘There’s no reason to blame yourself.’ There was nothing more he could have done or could have said. He was a great coach and he will always be a great coach,” Marchant said. “It’s not fair to dump on him just because he didn’t win the gold medal, like in 1980. That’s the problem the U.S. has. Everybody is compared to 1980, and that was a miracle.”

Fellow Olympian John Lilley also saw the pressure weigh on Taylor, and he, too, praises the coach. “A lot of things fell on him,” said Lilley, who has split this season between the Mighty Ducks and their San Diego affiliate. “Tim Taylor did all he could do. He prepared us well. Things just didn’t work out.”

The strongest prod came from an old friend, Robbie Ftorek, a former King coach who now coaches the New Jersey Devils’ top farm team. Ftorek urged him to return to Yale, to a job he enjoyed and was sure he could do. After nearly four months of uncertainty, Taylor decided that returning to New Haven was right--for the moment.

The length of his stay is open-ended and the team’s performance this season will influence its longevity. The Elis are 8-15-3 overall, 6-11-3 in conference play.

Had he done well in Lillehammer, Taylor might have received the NHL offer he always wanted and his future would have been set. He got no nibbles. And Ogrean, while welcoming Taylor’s help with future U.S. developmental teams, acknowledged that Taylor probably won’t get another shot at the Olympics.

“That’s the yin and the yang of it,” Taylor said. “If I--if we--had won, if we had done a little better job, perhaps there would be other doors open. But we didn’t.”

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They probably went wrong even before the team got to Lillehammer. The ambitious exhibition schedule, designed to challenge the players, instead exhausted them.

“There was kind of a flatness,” Marchant said. “Here you were, playing in the Olympic Games, and it was like we wanted to roll through the whole thing. Afterward, I talked with our assistant coach, John Cunniff, and he said it was almost like we were tired. Maybe we did too much.”

The team should have beaten France in its opener and was deflated by a 4-4 tie. Two more ties made for a tentative start. Taylor, never a rah-rah type, appeared tense. He says he wasn’t nervous, but players looking to him for inspiration found none.

“If Tim Taylor has a flaw it would be . . . his emotions, the way he displays them,” Marchant said. “He’s not a cheerleading type of coach. He sticks to basics and he’s been successful. We were very inexperienced and we didn’t have a lot of leadership. Pete Laviolette was our captain but he could only do so much.

“A lot of guys were playing for other reasons, whether for NHL contracts or for themselves, and the team split. The first three games, we tied and we were doing OK, but you could see the split happening then.”

Said Ogrean: “I think the team should have done better. But to say the team should have medaled is a stretch. . . . It underscores how dependent every country is on good goaltending. (Mike) Dunham and (Garth) Snow didn’t play their best. When we’ve had success, it was because of Jim Craig (in 1980) and Ray LeBlanc (on the fourth-place 1992 team).”

Taylor has since concluded that the team’s youth was its undoing, though that wasn’t entirely his fault. He wanted players such as Derek Plante and Jim Strong, but they went to the NHL. And if he had taken some of the older players who were available, he would have had to cut kids who were there from the start because they were idealists--as he was--and shared his belief in the sanctity of the Olympics.

He couldn’t shatter their dreams the way his had been ruined when he was a late cut from the 1964 squad.

“They had displayed the strongest commitment to the Olympic program and they had done well in tryouts,” he said. “We had succeeded at so many levels. Then, maybe I convinced myself that wasn’t the problem.”

He can see that now. He still can’t see why his players had no inner fire.

“The first thing I criticized myself about and the team about was that we didn’t play with the emotional fervor and the abandonment you have to play with at the Olympic Games to medal, and I don’t know what I could have done to get us there,” he said.

“It sounds like an excuse, but maybe if we had beaten France (they would have succeeded). We took 44 shots and held them to 14 and it was pretty clear who the superior team was, but we didn’t win the game. The next couple of games were against teams that were similar to us. Perhaps with a lot more emotional juice we could have beaten Slovakia too. Whether that would have come from older players or a different mix, I don’t know.

“Emotion is one of the things you bank on when you have a young team, and with the exception of (Ted) Drury and Pete Laviolette, they hadn’t been there before. We expected them to be real excited about being there and hopefully to be confident.”

Said Lilley: “If you’re in the Olympics, you should be motivated enough. You shouldn’t have to rely on the coach to motivate you. I thought he did a fine job. We just didn’t produce. It’s funny how that happens sometimes.”

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Taylor once felt sure coaching was his mission, but that certainty is gone. His is not a bad life, but it is an incomplete life, and he’s uneasy being adrift after having been so focused for so long.

“I still feel like I have a lot of energy left, a lot of hockey energy, but whether it’s in coaching or not, I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t come back to Yale to sort of stop my travels and end my working days here as the Yale hockey coach, but something’s got to move me.

“I’ve got to be pushed toward something or I’ve got to go out and grab something. I haven’t gotten to the point where I see the next logical step for me in terms of a career change.”