To find hockey players that could brave exhaustion, hockey fights, and sleet and snow, we have to go way back to 1905 and an early Stanley Cup contest. The Stanley Cup had started in 1892, and in those days there was no playoff structure, so an opposing team could simply issue a challenge to the reigning champion. The team from Ottawa presently held the title, and a team from Dawson City in the Klondike issued a challenge to Frank McGee and his Ottawa team. The Klondike in the Alaskan wilderness that was having a gold rush just like the one in California in the 1840s. Adventurers and people looking to strike it rich rushed into the area, and one of the lucky ones, Colonel Joe Boyle, issued a challenge to the Ottawa Silver Seven for the Stanley Cup.

The Silver Seven were known for their physical and sometimes cruel playing style, but this rough and tumble town felt they were up to the match. The team had raised the $3000 they needed to get to Ottawa, and now they just needed to get a few more players. They picked up Albert Forrest, a seventeen-year-old goalie, and the youngest player in Stanley Cup history. In the middle of their journey the rag-tag hockey team picked up their last team member.

The journey started in mid December in the frozen north, leaving Dawson City by dogsled. The team covered about forty miles a day, and temperatures got as low as twenty-eight degrees below zero. Travel by dogsled requires that you walk alongside the sleds for large stretches of time, and most of the team got sore feet and blisters on this part of the trip. They arrived near Juneau, Alaska too late for the weekly steamboat, and waited a week for the next boat to Seattle. The hockey team finally got to Vancouver, where they caught the train to take them to Ottawa. As the train traveled across the Canadian north, towns were alerted that the hockey team was coming, and they were met at the station by enthusiastic crowds that
cheered them on.

It took twenty-four days to go from Dawson City to Ottawa, and the visiting hockey team arrived only one day before the Stanley Cup competition was scheduled to begin. Tired from travel, the train, and the dogsled, they asked for an extension. The Ottawa Silver Seven said no, and so the contest of three hockey matches began the next day. Ottawa won the first game nine to two. That evening one of the Klondikers remarked that the legendary McGee of the Silver Seven, who was blind in one eye, “didn’t look like much”, since he had scored only one goal.

The remark was reported to McGee, who responded in Game 2 with fourteen goals total, including eight goals in a row. The final score for Game 2 was twenty-three to two. One of the most difficult trips to get to a Stanley Cup competition ended in the worst rout of any game in its history. And the final blow for Forrest, the youngest of the Klondikers: once he was back in Alaska, he had to walk the final 350 miles to his home.

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Let’s go back twenty years to the Olympics of Lake Placid. It was 1980, and in those years the NHL hockey stars could not be chosen for the Olympics. The athletes were chosen at the National Sports Festival in Colorado Springs, Co., where they went to demonstrate their skills. After rigorous training and months of playing together as a team, they were finally at the Olympics, and the chant “USA! USA!” was making the arena shake, as this team of young college men were about to upset Czechoslovakia by a score of 7 to 3.

Czechoslovakia won the silver medal in the previous Olympics, and was the world champion team in both 1976 and 1978. This was only two days after the US team had battled to a 2 to 2 tie with Norway, another game no one really thought they had a chance to win. For the hockey faithful in America, this was starting to be the best Olympics since 1960.

Maybe the crowd gave a home advantage to the hockey team, allowing them to put their emotions into the game so that it improved their play. As coach Herbie Brooks said, “We had our minds going flat-out and our legs under control.” His style was hard and fast skating, and working together as a team, and in that game each player showed how well he understood that style of hockey. The Olympics ice hockey rink is 100 feet wide, which means there is a lot of open ice, and Coach Brooks style tended toward breaking toward open ice and skating hard. He had adopted the European style of hockey in order to be able to fight against it most effectively. As he said “We had to cram two or three years of experience playing this way into five months of exhibition games.”

There are always key players on hockey teams, and Coach Brooks knew he would need a very good goalie, who at times could give a superior performance. Jim Craig, the former Boston University goalie, came through against Czechoslovakia. The opposing team goalie, Jiri Kralik, did not have a good night. The entire US team was young, with an average age of twenty-two, and perhaps a young team did not have enough experience to know that they weren’t skilled enough to beat the top European teams.

When all of the teams arrived in Lake Placid, right wing Dave Silk spent some time looking over the other teams and nationalities. He saw that the Czechs had “Russian muscles”, which meant that it wasn’t hard for them to hold a defenseman at bay during the game. He found the East Germans the most unsettling, for they used their spare time to play a game called Submarine, where they kept sinking American battleships. Coach Brooks knew that his team was comparing themselves and told them “You go up to the tiger, spit him in the eye, and then shoot him.” The strong hand of the coach, the amazing effort of the young team, and the enthusiasm of the crowd allowed the team to bring home the gold medal.

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