Forty years is a significant amount of time and it is impossible having sailed by it myself not to get as nostalgic as the newspapers and reporters who covered the event. My oldest daughter's in-laws are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in May, and it is not hard to for me to re-imagine what 1970 was like. The Mets had won the World Series the year before; the Jets had just as improbably won the Super Bowl, Ali-Frazier I hadn't happened yet, and most significantly for me as a season ticket holder, the Rangers were a great hockey team and knocking at Lord Stanley's door to drink from the Cup. Never mind it took another 24 years for that to happen. 1970 produced some great games.
I watched the game against Finland in my cellar in Flushing as I was putting together a wooden doll house kit my wife had bought. My wife thought this thing was easy to assemble. It wasn't. It was raw balsa wood that needed to be painted after being put together.
Soon after the first daughter there was another in 1982, and although I assembled that doll house, wallpapered the rooms and ordered and assembled miniature furniture, it was never played with too much. Typical thing for the kids that become for you. Like a train set.
The game against Finland was touch and go at some points. There were some bad penalties that Team U.S.A. took that nearly cost them big time. But of course they prevailed, and the rest is history.
How quickly anyone associated with that team became famous. There was one player, Ken Morrow who went straight from the Olympics to the Islanders, and won their first Stanley Cup with them. Several other players transitioned into the NHL: Mark Pavelich, who became the first American player to ever score five goals in a game.
Herb Brooks's coaching became a hot topic. The "Brookizies," as Captain Mike Eruzione called them that Brooks put them through with late night, punishing after game skates that had them doing speed bursts until they dropped.
Herb Brooks soon after Lake Placid became coach of the New York Rangers. I knew right away that couldn't work. He took a hand-picked selection of college guys and turned them into a hard working, disciplined team. There was no way that was going to translate to older, professional, contracted hockey players from different countries.
And it didn't. Herb was soon gone. Tragically, he died in an automobile accident skidding on a winter road in Minnesota.
Gerald Eskenazi of the NYT reminiscences how his story from covering the semi-final game got into the paper.
Mr. Eskenazi was a sportswriter for 41 years with the NYT and was basically the beat reporter for the New York Rangers. Being a lifelong Ranger fan and season ticket holder from the last '60s to 'late '70s, I read Mr. Eskenazi every chance there was.
In the early '70s when the Soviet hockey team was emerging as a dominant force he described their work ethic, and how they played on the "off-wing," right-handed shots played on the left side, and left-handed shots played on the right side. This created a better angle for forehanded shots against the goaltender. The shooter's angle was improved. The great Maurice Richard, "The Rocket" for the Montreal Canadians was a left-handed shot playing on the right side, and that was in the '40s and '50s, long before any Russian coaching influences came in to the game.
Eskenazi discussed how the Russians were tremendously fit, while the average Canadian player trained on beer. Nowhere was his analysis more on display than when the Russians STUNNED the hockey world in the first Team Canada game in 1972.
After the NHL players took a two goal lead in game one in Montreal, the world thought this was going to be easy, only to see the Russians come back with so much third period energy and swirling style that the exhausted Canadians could only watch as the Russians shot at what looked like an unattended net, winning the game 7-3. The Canadians looked like exhausted schoolboys.
The Montreal newspapers the next day, French and English, were draped in black crepe. Their vaunted North American game had been exposed.
I think it was a little before the Team Canada series that I saw the Soviet team play the USA collegians in the Garden. I don't remember a slaughter, but the Russians won easily, literally men against boys. Perhaps appropriately, the name of the captain of the U.S. team was Charlie Brown.
I had seat a near the Soviet bench and will forever remember seeing the security guys suddenly look back and up and ward off the charging Hasidics who wanted to protest the Soviet treatment of Jews. Security was ready for them. It wasn't like the Hasidics were hard to spot. They didn't exactly blend in with the crowd.
So, with Eskenazi so associated with covering hockey, it is hard to believe in reading his 40-year
look-back that he had to convince the senior editor to send him to Lake Placid for the 1980 Winter Olympic games. but they finally did, and added a winter coat to his traveling ensemble.
1980 by a few years predates desktop computers, and Eskenazi tells the story of his typing his story for the game, wadding up the pages and throwing them to Dave Anderson on the lower level, so Dave could race them to the basement where the Teleram (obviously a new name for telegram) machine was (too big for the press box) and where another reporter typed the copy into the Teleram so the story could make deadline and appear in the paper the next day. It did.
The relay system is reminiscent of the one described in Dave Anderson's obituary. Dave was a hockey reporter and covered the Rangers at home and away in the '50s and '60s for the Journal-American, unlike today when there is seldom a beat reporter's byline associated with a game result, if there is even a story about a game in today's NYT sports page.
At the end of Dave's obit is a recounting in 2014 by Dave of his sports writing days and the technology of the era that made a story appear in the paper. The obituarist Richard Goldstein tells us:
"The thrill of newspaper work never left Mr. Anderson, as he made clear in 2014 when he recalled a night in 1956 when he had covered a New York Rangers game in Montreal for the
Journal-American.
Mr. Anderson was on a train heading back to New York City when, as the train slowed at the border at Rouse's Point New York he had the task of tossing game stories by the New York sportswriters to a Western Union telegrapher standing by the tracks.
'It's the middle of the night, it's snowing and I'm standing between cars in the dark and toss the package of stories to him and hope somehow he teletypes the copy and it all gets in the newspaper," Mr. Anderson recalled.
In the morning he picked up a copy of The Journal-American at Grand Central Terminal.
'There was the story,' he said. 'It was exciting. Even now, when I'm writing, I wake up on a Sunday and still get excited if I'm in the paper.'"
And what is in the paper now? The sports section has changed to become filled with pictures, not text. In yesterday's paper there is an astounding two full pages devoted to childhood memories of snow in Wisconsin and the current snow accumulation in Minnesota. God help us.
We miss Gerald Eskenzai. We miss Dave Anderson.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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