It’s a Long Way From Sarajevo for Team USA

Gus Chelios is coming. I hope he throws a party.

Gus ran a restaurant in San Diego for a number of years. Before that, he owned a great Chicago joint called the Blue Note, good food, good jazz.

When we were in Yugoslavia, 14 years ago, Gus rented a restaurant for a night, up in the hills.

“Oh, yeah. The party,” says his son, Chris, the hockey player. “I didn’t go. I should have.”

*

John LaFontaine is coming. I hope we can sit together.

John used to be a Chrysler auto plant supervisor in Detroit. Later on, when his son was playing hockey in New York and got seriously hurt, he went along with Pat to the Mayo Clinic, for moral support.

When we were in Yugoslavia, 14 years ago, John and I sat in the stands, watching his boy play.

“You know, it seems like yesterday,” Pat says. “And it also seems like a million years ago. You know?”

*

Over what once was the Soviet Union, on their way to a second Winter Olympics for each of them, 14 years later, Pat LaFontaine of the New York Rangers sidled up to Chris Chelios of the Chicago Blackhawks on the U.S. hockey team’s chartered jet. Chris was looking down on Siberia’s bleakness out the window. He was thinking of Sarajevo. He hadn’t given it a second thought before this. In fact, he had done his very best to forget about it.

Pat hadn’t.

“Do you believe this?” LaFontaine asked, looking over Chelios’ shoulder out the window.

“What?” Chris asked.

“The last time either of us were going somewhere like this, it was August 1983. We were on our first trip as the American hockey team. Remember? We played a Russian ‘B’ team for four games, and then we went King salmon fishing.”

“We did?”

“Uh huh. I did. Didn’t you?”

Same as his dad’s party. Chelios shook his head. He said, “No, I should have.”

*

As the trip to Japan began, the U.S. team’s coach, Ron Wilson, sent back word that he wanted Chelios to come discuss something important with him.

Chelios wasn’t concerned. He said, “I knew I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Wilson took him aside.

“Chris,” the coach said, “we have decided to name you our team’s captain.”

Chelios was visibly moved. He has a well-deserved reputation as one of hockey’s tough guys. Chelios has a tough guy’s face, rock jaw, thick eyebrows, with a permanent 5 o’clock shadow. He is older now, though, 36 as of a couple weeks ago, and doing his best to stop doing his worst.

He was supposed to be Team USA’s captain, it was commonly believed, when the World Cup of Hockey was held in 1996. Brian Leetch of the Rangers was appointed instead. When their team won, Chelios believed that the writing was on the wall. Leetch would be the Olympic captain. If you are superstitious, you don’t mess with a good thing.

Still, he kept his fingers crossed.

“Were you surprised they made you captain?” Chelios is asked, on his first full day in Nagano.

“That’s a tricky word, ‘surprised,’ ” he says. “Thrilled, yes. Honored, yes.”

And determined to have a better time this time, yes.

A credential around his neck reads: “CELIOS, Chris.”

I tell him he’s off to a bad start. His name is misspelled.

Chelios spins it around, to see for himself. He says, “Look, my date of birth’s wrong too. They got me born in 1972.”

What a perfect way to turn back the clock.

“LaFontaine said you two spoke about Sarajevo on the trip over,” I mention to Chelios. “What did you remember about it?”

“Nothing good,” he says.

“That bad, huh?”

“You know what I remember? I remember machine guns. Getting off the train and seeing machine guns. Going to our rooms and seeing machine guns. We didn’t go out much, I can tell you that.”

LaFontaine recalls it vividly.

He wasn’t yet 19. Fresh out of junior hockey in Verdun, Quebec, he had just been drafted by the New York Islanders. It was a time of excitement in a young man’s life, and, looking back on it, LaFontaine leans against a wall in a Nagano hall and says, “We were on a train from Germany going through Czechoslovakia, on our way to Yugoslavia. I was having a good time when suddenly the train got stopped by a bunch of soldiers. Soldiers, or cops, or somebody.

“They locked us in our car and guarded the exits. Some of them came around carrying their guns, looking us in the eye, like, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I might now, because I play with a lot of those [Czech] guys now. But not then. For a guy my age, it was pretty traumatic.”

So were the Games themselves.

Sarajevo would be the first Olympics for a U.S. hockey team since winning the 1980 gold medal. Chelios remembers how everybody treated him and his teammates like kings. Anything they wanted, they got. Better food. Better uniforms. Cost was no object.

Then they had to play. I introduced myself to the LaFontaines, because they were living in Detroit at the time, as was I. The first game was scheduled before the opening ceremony. We sat together watching Canada defeat the U.S., and afterward, John LaFontaine took his son aside and said, “Pat, you can’t win ‘em all.”

“We did in 1980,” his son said.

Everything went downhill from there. Even with able players who would go on to some NHL success, such as Al Iafrate, Ed Olczyk and Corey Millen, the team won only twice in six games. The USSR went undefeated. Canada didn’t even win a medal, but Team USA was hardly cheered by that.

Chelios went from red, white and blue to red-hot. He threw away his USA jacket.

His dad, Gus, meantime, threw a private bash at a lodge called the Bellevue. Driving there drove us nuts. We had to corkscrew around and around the mountains. I finally found it, walked through the door and was confronted by five Gypsy musicians, four of whom patted me on the back, the fifth of whom tried to pick my pocket. I swear.

We had a wild time. Gus roasted an entire lamb on a spit. He ate parts of it I would rather not mention. We sat around talking about Kirk Douglas, the actor, and how his own dinner guests had reportedly been ripped off by another restaurant that overcharged Douglas’ party by something like 90%. There in Sarajevo, a waiter could be thrown in jail for that.

Our bill, Gus picked up, I think.

We tried to pay. I took out some money. A Gypsy violinist tried to snatch it from my hand. “I waiter,” he said.

“I Kirk Douglas,” I said.

Gus laughed and lifted his glass. “To Kirk!” he toasted.

*

Pat LaFontaine was the leading U.S. scorer at Sarajevo. He had five goals and five assists. Then he proceeded to have an outstanding career with the Islanders and the Buffalo Sabres, before a 1996 accident that caused him to sit out 69 games because of post-concussion syndrome, threatening his career.

“My dad went along to Minnesota to me, to the Mayo Clinic. He had just found out himself that he had prostate cancer. It was a mild form, but I said, ‘Look, as long as we’re here, why don’t we get you looked at?’

“It turned out it wasn’t mild.”

John underwent treatment in Minnesota, while he was there.

Afterward, he told Pat, “You know, by me going with you, I think you saved me some years.”

The gold medal game of the Nagano Olympics will be played Feb. 22. That will be Pat’s 33rd birthday.

“Is your dad coming?” I ask.

LaFontaine grins.

“He wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he says.

*

Chris Chelios’ two sons are coming to Nagano, with their grandfather. It wasn’t such a big deal to Chris back in 1984, the Olympics. He was already a member of the Montreal Canadiens’ organization at the time, and being touted as the best American to play the game. It was heady stuff.

In 1980, he was on a bus in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, with a hockey game on the radio. The U.S. team was defeating the Soviets in a magnificent upset at Lake Placid, N.Y.

“I was the only American on that bus,” Chris recalls. “I pretty much kept my mouth shut.”

Today, he says nothing would mean more to him than to win an Olympic gold medal, or one of any color, to have for his sons. The older you get, the smarter you get, sometimes, Chelios says. He is older now, a captain.

Chelios says, “This is the last go-around for me. If I make it to Salt Lake in 2002, hey, let’s face it, it’ll probably be as a coach. I’m having such a good time here now. All that red, white and blue we’re wearing, living in the dorms, it makes you feel young. I wish I was 15 years younger. Do you know how lucky I feel, to be at the Olympics and to get a second chance?”

“Is your dad coming?” I ask.

Chelios grins.

“Try and stop him,” he says.