Once upon a time, they taught us to believe. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, a blue-collar bunch led by an unconventional coach, and they engineered perhaps the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. Their “Miracle on Ice” has become a national fairy tale, but the real Cinderella story is even more remarkable. It is a legacy of hope, hard work, and homegrown triumph. It is a chronicle of everyday heroes who just wanted to play hockey happily ever after. It is still unbelievable.
The Boys of Winter is an evocative account of the improbable American adventure in Lake Placid, New York. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, Wayne Coffey explores the untold stories of the U.S. upstarts, their Soviet opponents, and the forces that brought them together.
Plagued by the Iran hostage crisis, persistent economic woes, and the ongoing Cold War, the United States battled a pervasive sense of gloom in 1980. And then came the Olympics. Traditionally a playground for the Russian hockey juggernaut and its ever-growing collection of gold medals, an Olympic ice rink seemed an unlikely setting for a Cold War upset. The Russians were experienced professional champions, state-reared and state-supported. The Americans were mostly college kids who had their majors and their stipends and their dreams, a squad that coach Herb Brooks had molded into a team in six months. It was men vs. boys, champions vs. amateurs, communism vs. capitalism.
Coffey casts a fresh eye on this seminal sports event in The Boys of Winter, crafting an intimate look at the team and giving readers an ice-level view of the boys who captivated a country. He details the unusual chemistry of the Americans—formulated by a fiercely determined Brooks—and he seamlessly weaves portraits of the players with the fluid, fast-paced action of the 1980 game itself. Coffey also traces the paths of the players and coaches since that time, examining how the events in Lake Placid affected and directed their lives and investigating what happens after one conquers the world.
But Coffey not only reveals the anatomy of an underdog, he probes the shocked disbelief of the unlikely losers and how it felt to be taken down by such an overlooked opponent. After all, the greatest American sports moment of the century was a Russian calamity, perhaps even more unimaginable in Moscow than in Minnesota or Massachusetts. Coffey deftly balances the joyous American saga with the perspective of the astonished silver medalists.
Told with warmth and an uncanny eye for detail, The Boys of Winter is an intimate, perceptive portrayal of one Friday night in Lake Placid and the enduring power of the extraordinary.
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“A wonderfully detailed enrichment of the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. Wayne Coffey's fresh perspective artfully takes a twenty-five-year-old story and advances it to the present with an enhanced appreciation of that stunning, breathtaking, still too-amazing-to-believe accomplishment.”
—Al Michaels
“The 1980 U.S. hockey team has been mythologized in print and on screen for almost twenty-five years. Wayne Coffey's The Boys of Winter goes much deeper than that and, for the first time, gives us a clear picture of who these remarkable boys—and men—were . . . and are. It is a very fine book.”
—John Feinstein
“I celebrated my fifteenth birthday on the very day that the 'Boys of Winter' beat the Russians in Lake Placid. Wayne Coffey brilliantly weaves the behind-the-scenes story that amplifies how improbable this ‘miracle’ really was.”
—Pat LaFontaine, NHL Hall of Famer
“The great stories can always be retold, but when they are retold with the emotion, the muscular prose, the freshness that Coffey brings to the Miracle on Ice, they seem new.”
—Robert Lipsyte, New York Times, and author of The Contender
“No matter how many times I hear the story of the U.S. Olympic hockey team's heroics in Lake Placid in 1980, I want to hear it again. It is allegory, fable, wonderful drama. Now Wayne Coffey comes to the campfire to tell the tale again, raising the requisite lumps in the requisite throats, adding new details to the familiar pictures. Very nice work. Very nice, indeed.”
—Leigh Montville, author of Ted Williams
“First came the Hollywood version of the Miracle on Ice. Now comes the real story, rich in context and texture, as only a journalist and author like Wayne Coffey can report it and tell it.”
—Harvey Araton, New York Times
“Meticulously researched, entertaining, and enlightening as an example of sportswriting and social history, Wayne Coffey has re-created the event that would eventually put the Cold War on ice. The Boys of Winter is the definitive book on a defining moment in American culture.”
—Jay Atkinson, author of Ice Time
“Wayne Coffey re-creates the excitement of the unlikely run the U.S. men's hockey team made through the 1980 Olympics . . . an adventure that seems even more unlikely now than it felt twenty-five years ago.”
—Bill Littlefield, host of NPR’s Only a Game and author of Fall Classics
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