Herb Brooks

[ScottM]

I found this in The New York Times Magazine. A nice tribute to one of the giants of US hockey.

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: December 28, 2003

Herb Brooks is most famous for coaching a single hockey game -- the upset victory of the United States team over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics. His Olympic success earned him stints in the N.H.L. -- with the Devils, Rangers, Penguins and North Stars -- but his record there was indifferent. Among the pros he was just another coach, not a miracle worker. Brooks was impatient with the puck-dumping, clutch-and-grab style of the N.H.L., and his rinkside manner became increasingly detached and cerebral. Standing behind the bench in one of his bad suits or ill-fitting blazers (he was one of the worst-dressed coaches ever, in a sport that has produced a number of fashion disasters) and with his eyes burning like coals in their sockets, he sometimes seemed like a mad scientist in want of a project.

Hockey coaches, like coaches in almost every sport, come in two varieties. There are the strategists (yes, even in hockey, which so often seems merely random) -- the coaches who grow pale and haggard from hours in the projection room, brooding over defenses, jotting x's and o's on their clipboards -- and then there are the skull doctors, the dressing-room psychologists, who like to mess with their players' heads and drive them, out of fear, usually, into achieving things they didn't know they were capable of. The skull doctors usually have a mean streak as well; it's not part of the job description, strictly speaking, but it never hurts.

Brooks at his best was both. He combined the egghead wizardry of, say, Fred Shero -- the Fog, as he was known, because of his tendency to lapse into trances, coached the Philadelphia Flyers in the mid-70's and sometimes made his players practice with tennis balls instead of pucks -- with the relentless psyche-dismantling of the inscrutable Scotty Bowman, whose nine Stanley Cups (with the Canadiens, Penguins and Red Wings) made him the most successful coach in N.H.L. history. Bowman was the Bill Parcells of hockey; he had a knack for terrifying grown, very highly paid men and making them worry about what the coach would think of next.

On his Olympic team, Brooks had for the most part unseasoned college kids with little or no experience at the international level. He devised for them an uptempo, run-and-gun offense that took advantage of their speed, and then he crawled inside the team's collective brainpan and rewired it so that the players had no idea how outmatched they were. To do this he employed those most fundamental coaching tools, terror and a hint of craziness. He made a scapegoat of Jack O'Callahan, one of the team's best defensemen -- with the plan, he admitted later, of causing the others to unite on O'Callahan's behalf. He threatened to cut Mike Eruzione, the captain, and even as the Olympics drew near, he talked about benching the other starters or else dropping them entirely and bringing in brand-new ones. (Brooks was himself the last player cut from the 1960 Olympic team, and he knew just how anxiously his charges were clinging to their spots on the roster.) Then, with all the pieces in place, he suddenly erased himself: he let the team play without benchside meddling (before the game against the Soviets, the next-to-last match of the tournament, he told the players, ''You were born to be here,'' and then walked out of the dressing room), and after his players won the gold medal, he let them have all the credit.

Self-effacement came easily to Brooks. He was at heart a small-town Minnesota hockey guy. He grew up in a blue-collar suburb of St. Paul, and in 1955 his high-school hockey team won the state championship -- which for a Minnesota hockey guy is the next best thing to winning the Olympics. (The high-school tourney is televised throughout the state, and school kids are excused from class to watch.) He played for the Gophers, at the University of Minnesota, and after taking over the coaching chores there, led them to three national championships. Until the Olympics he never aspired to anything higher. He died driving home from a hockey benefit in Minnesota, and a lot of Minnesota hockey guys thought that was a pretty good way to go.

Charles McGrath is the editor of The New York Times Book Review