Remembering the Miracle on Ice, with Help from Herb Driscoll of America's Heartland, Eyewitness to It

For American hockey fans of a certain vintage, and many patriots, February 22 each year is a day of high nostalgia and significance. I’ve long believed that it ought to be enshrined as a national holiday, a reminder nearly as powerful as our July 4 Independence of what the mighty American spirit can achieve. And in the highly unlikely event I’m ever elected President, my first act in the Oval Office would be to sign an Executive Order making it so.

It’s a moment appropriately frozen in time. Sports Illustrated iconically illustrated it. Watery eyes inducing books have been written about it. Disney made a memorable movie about it. It’s known simply and perfectly as the Miracle on Ice.

It was a February Friday in 1980 that dawned in dread and fear but ended in unprecedented, unimaginable, stranger hugging stranger national euphoria. And a whole lot of spontaneous singing of our national anthem. The lore of that Friday night includes accounts of motorists learning the result of the game from the car radio, honking their horns and pulling off to the sides of roads simply to share their shock and glee with fellow motorists, and of men and women in diners interrupting their meals and spontaneously breaking out into singing of our national songs.

It was a rare moment of staggering, sweeping national unity, occasioned by perhaps the least likely of events: a hockey game, in the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. But it was also so much more than that. Today’s elevated tension with Russia is perhaps a shallow reminder of our Cold War struggle. For an awful lot of Americans February 22, 1980, was in fact our Agincourt.

Quite incredibly, the miracle game was contested out of prime television time, and off of TV altogether, late that Friday afternoon. ABC aired it on delay that night. More than 40 years later, no hockey game has come close to matching its hold on this nation.

I was so inspired by its miraculous thrill that I spent three decades afterward with a vanity tag on successive automobiles I owned that read US4RED3, and I never tired of the car horns that happy-honked at me on highways; the rolled down windows and solicitations from strangers at stopped traffic lights, who simply, desperately needed to regale me with where they were that February 1980 night; and the requests for photos of the plates of my parked cars in shopping center parking lots.

And about that Disney movie. It was released in February 2004, and I made a point of securing about 15 tickets to one of its initial screenings for my beer league hockey team. To a man they would tell you that we became hockey players because of the Miracle. We watched it seated next to one another in one theater row in rapt, reverent attention, most especially when American bench boss Herb Brooks, played most memorably by Kurt Russell, addressed his charges in the locker room moments before they took the ice to make history.

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‘We Few, We Happy Few’

Framed in the living room of his St. Albans, Missouri, home are tickets Herb Driscoll and business associates used to attend the game in Lake Placid, New York, on February 22, 1980. That Driscoll made it inside the Olympic hockey arena that fateful Friday night is a small miracle in itself.

For more than a quarter century, I told Driscoll over our telephone interview, I’d been keenly interested in locating a regular American Joe who’d been seated inside the Miracle Rink that night, not so much to write more about the history-making night but simply to listen to that individual’s narrative and be absorbed by it, for posterity. I wanted to hold court with an American who sat crouched in an otherwise ordinary mid-size hockey arena seat on an otherwise ordinary mid-winter night and who rested his feet on cement 50 feet below which one Herbert Paul Brooks, near 4:40 p.m. that evening, delivered the coaching exhortation of a lifetime.

My father and I celebrated my 50th birthday by taking a tour of Lake Placid’s Herb Brooks Arena, our first and only journey to the village and rink, and it’s staggering to behold how small a venue hosted so enormous a moment.

What must it be like to have been one of only about 7,500 people on planet Earth to have experienced that globe-altering event in its actual environs?

The question grows more salient with each passing year; how many of those few eyewitnesses are even still with us??

Herb Driscoll’s story of bearing witness to sports history is certainly fortuitous. Today he’s 83 and retired from a distinguished, nearly 40-year career as a marketing and sales executive in biotechnology. But in February 1980, as an executive with his company, Driscoll was tasked with traveling to upstate New York to entertain a small group of his corporation’s favored clients on what turned out to be the recreational retreat of a lifetime: the Winter Olympic Games at Lake Placid, New York.

Not a bad gig, eh?

The group, numbering about a half dozen, lodged in a rented house just on the outskirts of Lake Placid’s Olympic Village. They were drawn to these Olympic games in no small part due to the excitement surrounding American speed skater Eric Heiden, who of course went on to win five gold medals in the games. Driscoll, however, was a hardcore hockey enthusiast.

“We were really avid hockey people,” Driscoll said of his family. “We lived in Detroit for seven or eight years, and I became an avid Wings’ fan. We had [Wings’] season tickets — for lots of [business] entertaining. But in Lake Placid, hockey was an important part of the entertainment package. I was really into [hockey].”

“My interest obviously was very, very high. I was very keen on seeing the Americans. For a lot of people there, the focus was on Eric Heiden, and this remained true even as the American hockey squad enjoyed some dramatic success.”

Driscoll’s Lake Placid clients, however, were “southern people,” not really into hockey “until we got them there,” he said with a chuckle.

It’s difficult to fathom now, but in 1980 tickets to Lake Placid Olympic sporting events were distributed in a primitive numerical system: one couldn’t simply request, for example, all of the games for the American hockey team. Driscoll vividly remembers the challenge this posed.

“You were allocated tickets by the event number, and when it came to things like hockey, you were assigned a game number but you were never sure who was going to be in game number 4, for instance.

“There was a little bit of luck involved in which tickets you drew.”

When it came to February 22, Driscoll and his client party initially ended up with tickets to the wrong game.

“We thought we had it figured all out. Actually, one of our guys had to get on the radio, the local radio station right in Lake Placid. They were letting people go on the air, to kind of participate in an auction, to try to buy tickets, and we were fortunate enough to get tickets to the event from that.”

The excitement around the game was high, Driscoll recalled, but the expectations for the Americans were not particularly so. The Russians had whipped the Americans badly in the team’s pre-Olympic tour, twice, with one such exhibition taking place in St. Louis, near Driscoll’s home.

“The U.S. wasn’t figured to do anything,” he reminded.

“When we finally realized it was going to be a Russian-U.S. competition, there seemed to be an unspoken undercurrent there, that it was more than a hockey game, it was a political event as well as a hockey game.  It was their way of life versus our way of life,” Driscoll said.

“People weren’t outspoken about it,” he added, “but I certainly felt it, and it became much more obvious after the game. I think people ‘let it out’ after the game.”

Driscoll and his associates had scored seats hard by center ice, about 10 rows up — not a bad perch by which to view history. He described to me an arena that for the game’s first two hours was fraught with sullen tension and apprehension. Time has a way of dulling or even eroding the reality the American skaters were confronting in the Soviets, a team so dominant for so long that it couldn’t even find much of a game against NHL All-Star squads. Entering the third period, the Americans were down a goal. The surprise — the miracle, really — was that the U.S. wasn’t being blown out. The great euphoria we’ve come to associate with Herb Brooks Arena that night wasn’t realized until the very end.

From their seats, Driscoll and his companions got very good looks at the enemy.

“The body language on the Russian bench and the coaches’ body language, throughout the game, was quite telling. You could just sense a Russian demeanor about them — the way we sort of visualize Russians as being autocratic, and it was almost like [Head Coach Viktor Tihkonov] was commanding them. Somehow or other they’d pull this win out of the hat there in the last minute and there was nothing you could do about it.  That really seemed to me to be the mood in the building.

“But we were not gonna be denied.”

“The truth of the matter is I don’t think anybody there, certainly myself included, believed this was gonna happen, even in the last minute of the game . . . until the very final whistle blew. And then it was just . . . an eruption of emotion. People back-slapping and hugging and kissing.

“I have to tell you, my emotion at the time, and I said to whomever I was with, this must have been something sorta like the celebration on VJ Day, the end of the war or something — everybody [in my section] just felt like they knew everybody.

“As I left the arena the thing that stood out to me was the chanting of ‘USA-USA-USA’ . . . there was this spontaneous singing of the national anthem, our patriotic song, as people were walking out.

“I wouldn’t call it collective in the sense that all 10,000 broke into the national anthem, but there was definitely singing of the national anthem. In groups you could hear it all throughout the arena as you walked out. In fact, somebody stuck a microphone in my face as I was leaving, and I was reluctant to even break the moment to talk to the person. I can’t remember the radio station. They asked me some crazy question and I gave them some crazy response like ‘We’ve already won the gold medal, we’ve already won the Olympics,’ because as far as I was concerned that was it. Gold was gonna be great, but beating the Russians was even more important.

“Because of that patriotic, political undercurrent.”

I wanted to know what the Lake Placid Olympic Village was like in the immediate aftermath of the unimaginable triumph. My interview subject was most certainly immersed in it.

“I stayed up til sunrise, as I remember,” he said.

“Being in the middle of all these diversified people remains a standout memory for me, all these languages and countries,” Driscoll told me. “But the Canadians and Australians always were close to the Americans, I remember. It was just a natural kind of bond. When you saw one in the bar, you could tell almost by what they were wearing . . . just glass-tipping and high-fiving all through that evening.

“Throughout the evening, the Olympic Village never shut down. It was pretty hard for an American to buy a drink for himself that night.

“People were more than happy, once they realized you were American — if you were fortunate enough to run into Canadians, for example . . . those types were back-slapping and buying drinks.

“I think that underscored . . .”  — and here Driscoll paused and reflected some while —  “You know, the Olympics weren’t intended to be like that, but it’s human nature, I think, particularly back then during the Cold War.”

Herb and Nancy Driscoll of St. Albans, Missouri

I also wanted to know what Driscoll thought of Hollywood’s treatment of the Miracle — ‘Miracle.’ The filmmakers had no easy task recreating the environment and action of so incredible a feat, and they put extraordinary effort and resources into it. I wanted to know how Driscoll related to the movie having actually lived through it. Turns out, ‘Miracle’ is a prized possession in the Driscoll family library, and the grandfather delights in watching it with his grandsons.

“The most dramatic thing that was depicted in the movie, which was absolutely accurate, was Jimmy Craig with the flag draped over his shoulders skating up and down the boards trying to find his dad. And he’s mouthing the words, ‘Where’s my dad? Where’s my dad?’

“Now I couldn’t make out what he was saying in the moment, I had to read about it in the paper later, but I could see him searching and searching and saying something.

“The movie brought it all back again and gave me the opportunity to reintroduce a more personal side of that story to my grandsons in particular, who’ve actually gone and bought that video. It gave me a neat opportunity to explain to them
a broader dimension of what the game meant, which I had done for my kids over the years as well.

“It gives you a little teaching moment for the youngsters, a never-count-yourself-out moment. They seem truly fascinated by that, too, to know more about the background and why it was so important.”

In 1980, there was no such thing as a cell phone or a Blackberry, and next I wanted to know how — or even if — Driscoll was able to connect with family back in Missouri, just to get reconnected with his loved ones in so special a moment. I imagined delirious Americans needing Olympic Village pay phones for such an endeavor. There might have been long lines at those.

“I have to tell you, I was so overwhelmed in the moment, and the people around me, carried away in the sweep of all that, rushing off to the closest bar to toast to the game, but as soon as my emotions got a little bit under control I called [wife] Nancy. I may be wrong, and I don’t want to over-dramatize the moment, but I think I got Nancy in the locker room of [son] Tim’s hockey game.

“One of the interesting things that my wife bugs me about with this particular event — while I was up in Lake Placid enjoying the event of my lifetime sports-wise, she was home trudging Timothy around youth hockey games and taking care of all those chores.”

The celebration in downtown Lake Placid, Driscoll reported, was overwhelming in both its national fervor and the extent to which it was joined in by seemingly just-as-elated foreign nationals. The Soviets then had few warm allies, so their athletic fall made for a remarkable village party.

“Prominent throughout the village that night, through my eyes at least, was a universal celebration. Some of these people were athletes! I recall that. I recall wondering, ‘What are they doing out so late?’

“I can distinctly remember someone who was on a European luge team, in the bar, and having some comments with him that night. It was probably the fact that these were athletes whose competition had been completed, and they were able to relax and enjoy the games themselves. The vast majority though were just ordinary fans.”

Lastly, I wondered how the event has endured in Herb Driscoll’s life, how prominent it has remained.

“I actually have the newspaper that was the local Lake Placid newspaper — the front page of it that was printed the next day, with a spectacular picture of [Mike] Eruzione scoring the goal.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to attend a lot of big sporting events — Super Bowls, those kind of things — but nothing, nothing could compare to the emotions of what you felt at this particular game, and the pride you felt, the falling of tears and the hugs at the end of the game was just. . . something really special.

“I haven’t forgotten it. I never will.”