Success for Brooks Found in More Than the Results

There was no such thing as a short conversation with Herb Brooks.

He had too many ideas to spill out, too many plays to diagram in his angular, left-handed scrawl on borrowed bits of paper, too many opinions to offer -- whether solicited or not -- to merely chat.

He enlightened. He expounded. No point about hockey was too trivial for him to embrace with the zeal of a true believer.

Just as he told the members of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team each of them was “born to be a player” and destined to use every experience that led them to their game against the vaunted Soviet Red Machine at Lake Placid, Herb Brooks was meant to be a coach.

And he was a coach all of his life, a life that ended Monday at 66, too soon, in a one-car wreck on a Minnesota highway.

It was a life fully lived, and not only because he’d coached a bunch of mostly college kids to that stunning gold medal in 1980 and come back at Salt Lake City in 2002 to guide a team of NHL stars to a silver medal. It was enriched by his irrepressible wife, Patti -- she called him “the Mister” or “Himself,” gently poking fun at his occasional tendency to take himself too seriously -- and by a son and daughter who had made him a grandfather many times over and reduced this most stoic of men to jelly at the sound of a coo.

Patti’s Christmas newsletters were always the first to arrive in the holiday mail. She would describe her latest adventures and breezily add that Herb was “out somewhere,” whether that meant scouting in northern Minnesota or coaching at the Olympics. They didn’t need to live off that gold medal, and they never did.

He was proud of it, as well he should have been. It will never happen again.

It was convenient and catchy to call that triumph a “Miracle on Ice,” but that was adopted only by those unaware that during the team’s three-month pre-Olympic tour, Brooks pushed his players to the breaking point.

To make them fast and fit, he ordered them to do countless board-to-board sprints, which they derisively dubbed “Herbies.” Few people knew that, or knew that Brooks assumed the role of “bad cop” to assistant Craig Patrick’s “good cop,” giving players someone to cry to. If they united in hatred of him, he didn’t care, as long as they had a purpose and the strength to carry it out. And they did. Their young legs helped them pull out a tie in their Olympic opener against Sweden, rally to beat the more polished Soviets and score three times in the final period of the gold medal finale against Finland.

What Brooks’ team accomplished was singular in its sheer improbability, a moment in time that, fermented in the tense political atmosphere enveloping the world outside the remote village of Lake Placid, unwittingly turned a hockey team into a life lesson and a game into a political parable. But he wasn’t a relic, frozen in time or given to dawdling along Memory Lane. He remained open to learning, a teacher always eager to be taught. The best kind.

After Lake Placid, he coached several NHL teams. He never equaled his Olympic success, but he was never a failure.

As with the Olympic team, he challenged players to think and push themselves beyond their perceived limits. His “motion system” was denounced by lovers of blood-and-guts hockey and those scared by the idea that intellect could be applied to the game, but his small, swift New York Ranger teams -- derided as “Smurfs” by then-Flyer Coach Bob McCammon -- had some superb moments. It was his misfortune that his teams peaked during the rival Islanders’ dynasty years, and, as is inevitable for even winning coaches, his players tuned him out.

Many found it too tough to think and move their legs and plumb every ounce of their talent. They undermined him and he lost his job. The real loss, though, was theirs.

A native of St. Paul, Minn., and the last player cut from the triumphant 1960 U.S. hockey team, Brooks was a passionate advocate of reserving the Olympics for non-NHL players. However, when pros were admitted, he went behind the U.S. bench with a pragmatic attitude.

“A lot of people debated the question of pros in the Olympic Games and I don’t take that back at all,” he told The Times in November 2000. “But that side lost the debate. If you lose, you move forward, go backward, or drop out. These are the rules now, and I accept that. The overriding thing is the cause of progress in the American hockey movement, and I do care about American hockey.”

He had campaigned for the Olympic job several times after Lake Placid but, never a politician, was passed over for the more pliable, comfortable choices. He returned to the Olympics with the French team at Nagano in 1998 and, finally, won a ticket back with the U.S. team at Salt Lake City. He knew he’d face comparisons to Lake Placid but didn’t care.

Being known as coach of the “Miracle on Ice” team was only part of his identity. When those 1980 players gathered to play an exhibition game in Los Angeles in January 2002, just before the NHL All-Star game at Staples Center and weeks before the Salt Lake City Games, Brooks enjoyed watching them revert to their old roles -- class clown, leader, follower. But at that reunion, their first since a post-Olympic White House visit and now, sadly, their last, Brooks was more inclined to praise what they had become than reminisce about what they had been.

They had been adopted by a country eager for a ray of joy while American hostages sweated in Iran. They had been turned into political symbols and heroes. But each had maintained his integrity and lived a productive life, and maybe that was part of the lesson Brooks had been imparting on the road to Lake Placid.

It’s the journey, not necessarily the destination, that makes life worthwhile.

“The moment was public property, not the team,” he said. “These guys were mature guys. They’ve all been very successful. They’re doing different things and they’ve all made adjustments in their lives. They’re not narcissistic people. They don’t live off this. They’ve made the transition to everyday life and they’re not hung up on themselves.”

If there’s any justice in the hereafter, Brooks is standing behind the bench of a hockey team in heaven today facing his old Wisconsin foe, Bob Johnson. The ice is wide and smooth and every player can skate like the wind and pass the puck perfectly from tape to tape, skating in seamless and ceaseless motion. There are no neutral-zone traps, no goonery. Just smart, swift playmaking and intelligent defense, the hallmarks of Herb Brooks hockey.

Johnson, whose sunny nature shone in stark contrast to Brooks’ serious reserve, saluted everyone he met by declaring, “It’s a great day for hockey!” Monday was not a great day for hockey. It lost a passionate advocate for everything that is right and good about the game, a man who never rested on his laurels, or on anything else.