‘Miracle’ Man

The plaid pants did it.

And the moment during a practice when Herb Brooks barked an order to his players, hitched up his shoulder and skated away.

Sitting in a screening room in Burbank, alone except for my memories and a predisposition to dislike Walt Disney Pictures’ “Miracle” for dramatizing an event that needed no theatrical enhancement, I gasped, shaken more deeply than I’d expected.

For an instant I saw Herb Brooks, the brusque, steely-eyed hockey coach who had guided a group of college kids to an incredible upset of the Soviet “Red Machine” and to a gold medal at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, the basis for “Miracle”

It was Herb, wearing those ugly brown plaid pants, allowing himself a whoop of joy after the U.S. hockey team beat the unbeatable Soviets while the crowd erupted in chants of “USA! USA!” and ABC announcer Al Michaels asked the world if it believed in miracles and answered his own question with an emphatic “Yes!”

But it wasn’t Herb. It was actor Kurt Russell, wearing a brown wig that was shaggier than any hairstyle Herb would have cultivated but otherwise capturing the essence of a complex man who turned a hockey team’s success into a metaphor for life -- as does “Miracle,” directed by Gavin O’Connor.

Some of his gestures -- the way he skated, the quick, left-handed strokes of his pen as he diagramed plays -- were uncannily like Herb’s. I wanted to call Herb and joke about the casting of Russell, who at 52 is only 9 years older than Herb was at Lake Placid. In a 1981 TV movie about the Olympic team, Brooks was played by Karl Malden, then 68. I remember calling Herb to tell him Malden had been cast and hearing a second or two of silence on the line before he replied, in a tone dripping with acid, ‘Isn’t he a bit old?’ ” There would be no such phone call this time.

Brooks fell asleep at the wheel and died in a car accident last August, a few days after his 67th birthday and shortly after principal photography for “Miracle” had ended. For anyone who was at Lake Placid and knows the story, to see this movie is to have him back and lose him all over again.

“It was eerie,” said Lou Nanne, a former U.S. amateur hockey executive who was portrayed as being far more doubtful of Brooks’ then-revolutionary ideas than he was in real life. “Kurt Russell was terrific in capturing the way he looked, the nuances, his voice, his inflection.”

Mike Ramsey, who played on the 1980 U.S. team and went on to a distinguished career in the National Hockey League, felt that same jolt. “It would have been nice just to see what Herb thought of it,” said Ramsey, now an assistant coach of the Minnesota Wild. “I think he would have enjoyed it.”I’d covered the U.S. hockey team’s triumph at Lake Placid for Newsday and was covering the NHL Rangers when he became their coach in 1981. I kept in touch with him through his later coaching stops; I’d had dinner with him and his funny, spirited wife, Patti (played by Patricia Clarkson), and exulted when he got another chance to coach the U.S. Olympic team, at Salt Lake City in 2002.

“I’ve seen our country come a long way,” said Brooks, who was the last player cut from the 1960 U.S. Olympic team before it won a gold medal at Squaw Valley and played for nonmedal-winning teams at the 1964 and 1968 Games. “A lot of us went from being apprentices to journeymen to masters of the trade. Now the American hockey movement is alive and it’s good and it’s moving forward.” He interviewed for an NHL coaching job but decided he didn’t want to leave Patti, the kids and the grandkids in Minnesota; he was still a strong and vital advocate for U.S. hockey and was consulting on “Miracle.” He worked closely with Russell, a hockey fan and father of a junior-level hockey goalie, and Russell’s performance found many kernels of truth.

“I think he was more like my dad was in his later years, a kinder, gentler version of my dad. I remember my dad back then being ... tougher,” said Brooks’ son Dan, who was almost 13 during the Lake Placid Games and is now a stockbroker in Minneapolis.

“Some of the things he said, only me and a few people were able to pick up and know that he got from meetings with my dad.... It was very odd. One of the scenes, I was just floored. It was like looking at a ghost. The scene where [Rob] McClanahan and [Mike] Eruzione pull him off the bus and say they object to him bringing in Timmy Harrer, the way he said to them, ‘Harrer can flat-out play,’ it was like, ‘Whoa.’ That’s what he always said and how he said it.”

Jack O’Callahan, a defenseman on the 1980 team, also was spooked.

“In most movies you see Kurt Russell, he’s Kurt Russell. But this wasn’t like watching an actor,” said O’Callahan, a financial advisor in Chicago. “This was actually like watching Herb Brooks, and ... I give a lot of credit to Kurt for getting to know Herbie and really picking up little things about him.”

For the hockey scenes the producers found hockey players who could act, not actors who faked skating. There’s no Gary Cooper awkwardly mimicking Lou Gehrig in “Pride of the Yankees.” Russell played hockey. Mike Mantenuto, who played hockey at the University of Maine, does a fine job as O’Callahan. Patrick O’Brien Demsey, who plays team captain Mike Eruzione, played college hockey for two years. The goals were re-created based on tapes of the actual goals scored at the Olympics.

“It was like watching home movies, in a way,” O’Callahan said. But it’s not a documentary. For historical reference, watch a documentary HBO made a few years ago. “Miracle” acknowledges it’s “based on a true story” and it takes liberties. “I saw a few things, but they have the right to do what they want with it,” said Ramsey, who nonetheless praised Russell.

The Hollywood treatment

“It’s a movie, not a miniseries,” O’Callahan said. “I recognize the fact they had to tell a story in two hours and had to focus on certain aspects of the larger story and condense five or six characters into two or three characters.” Dan Brooks singled out a scene in which his father is driving home from a team Christmas party in a decrepit car and is listening to a radio newscast, which allowed the filmmakers to establish the political tension that existed in the world and suggest why the U.S. team’s victory meant so much to a nation tired of waiting on lines at gas stations and fearful about the fate of the hostages in Iran.

“My dad did actually drive a nicer car,” Dan Brooks said, “but I thought that part was great because it really gave you a feel for the time and what things were like.” “I’m sitting here, almost 25 years later, realizing how much time has passed,” Nanne said. “To remember it when it happened, you’d have to be maybe 33, 35. There are a hell of a lot of people who don’t know the story, and I like the story. I love the theme.... The way they captured Herbie was far and away the best part of the show.”

If only Herb were here to see it.