Debacle on Ice Was the Stuff of Nightmares

And now, meet our Bad Dream Team.

On second thought, don’t. Say sayonara. Check-out time is here for the United States of America’s hockey boys. I call them boys deliberately, because Brett Hull calls our gold-medal women (ages 18 to 31) “the girls.” You remember our women, those hockey players who came to Japan and didn’t stink up the rink.

Our boys didn’t last very long. I guess you could say they skated an Olympic short program. We could have sent the Mighty Ducks over and done better. (Not the ones from Anaheim. The ones from the Disney movie.) If I had my way, I would give each and every one of these guys directions to the Tokyo airport and a Sweden passport.

The judge’s scores: 0.0, 0.0., 0.1.

(Be fair. We did whip Belarus.)

I agree with Keith Tkachuk, one of our players, who said “we deserved to lose” and called this less-than-herculean Olympian effort “the biggest waste of time.”

We sure did and it sure was.

Our whole team Tkachuk’d out there.

We won once. We seldom scored. Of our 20 guys (not counting goalies), 14 didn’t get a goal. Some people thought the Bad Dream Team didn’t try very hard. Some people thought the Bad Dream Team didn’t make much of an effort (even to go to our women’s big game). Some people even thought the Bad Dream Team was too busy sampling the merchandise at Nagano’s fine after-hour spots for non-teetotalers.

One so condemned was Hull, who claims innocence. OK, so people have tape recordings of him warbling an ABBA song in a karaoke club at 4 in the morning. It doesn’t mean Brett was out enjoying those kind of hilarious Olympic hijinks every single night.

So what was he usually doing?

New York Times crossword puzzles.

“I was in bed by 8 on eight of our 10 days,” says the 33-year-old golden boy of the St. Louis Blues. “It was almost ridiculous, the amount of time I spent just listening to my CD player and doing crossword puzzles on my bed. We were absolutely bored stiff, not having anything to do.

“Maybe that was more our downfall than anything. We were almost stifled. Maybe that’s what we needed to do, have a few beers and relax a little. We weren’t exactly angels at the World [bleeping] Cup, and look what happened there. We won.”

No wonder our basketball Dream Team stayed in hotels.

Our kids have to get out more, not less! Right, Brett? Do the town. Hit those clubs. Have a few St. Louis brews.

Too bad the next Winter Olympics is in Salt Lake City. There goes another men’s hockey medal.

Oh, and so where were all those U.S. male faces when our women had a 6 p.m. face-off?

“As players, we’re told where to go,” Hull explains. “At 6:15, it’s be on the bus, we’ve got a team dinner. Next thing you know, they say we can’t get tickets. Nobody wanted the girls to win more than we did. But we were having enough trouble ourselves figuring out what the hell we were doing.”

Nothing our boys did worked.

Ron Wilson, the coach, even got a really scary haircut. The barber must have used a samurai sword on him. Every time I looked behind the bench, I thought our team was being coached by that guy from “Sling Blade.”

Wilson tried every trick in his book. Remember back when he was coach of the Ducks and he used snippets of “The Wizard of Oz” to motivate them? Well, Quentin Wilsontino went back to the old video store.

First, to teach patience, he played his players a clip from the golf film “Tin Cup,” as a hint on how to be smart and lay up.

Wilson felt they were being too aggressive. Some of his guys agreed, such as Chris Chelios, who said, “We just didn’t play with the patience Ron Wilson talked about. If you can win 1-0, win 1-0. I don’t think a lot of us understood that.”

Failing there, the coach tried another film before the Czech Republic game. He showed a John Belushi scene from “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” in which Belushi, to rally the fraternity, goes off on a rant, beseeching the guys never to give up.

“Did we give up after the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? No!” goes one line.

(Uh, maybe not a great scene to show here in Japan, coach.)

Are our boys stunned at what a flop they were here?

“We are stunned big-time,” Mike Modano of the Dallas Stars says. “It’s a big shot to our ego.

“We don’t even have time to drown our sorrows. We’ve got hockey back home next week.”

Ah, yes.

The curse of the Bad Dream Team:

Either drown your sorrows or do your puzzles.