100 Things Minnesota Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die
256
100 Things Minnesota Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781633198722 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Triumph Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2017 |
| Series: | 100 Things...Fans Should Know Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Herbie
They flocked by the thousands to the old church on the hill on a sweltering summer day to say goodbye to the man who turned the Gophers into a championship destination and a team of shaggy-haired college kids into heroes during that bygone winter when America badly needed them.
A lone bagpiper played while a soloist sang the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as 33 honorary pall bearers raised their hockey sticks in unison. Vintage World War II aircraft flew over Saint Paul Cathedral and the capital city skyline, their whirring propellers piercing the somberness before disappearing over the Mississippi River.
The aging men who wore the Maroon and Gold or Red, White, and Blue in their youth choked back tears as the casket bearing their coach, their mentor, their friend was carried down the sun-scorched steps and into a hearse for a private burial.
Herbert Paul Brooks earned fame as the hard-nosed head coach who defeated the mighty Soviets to win Olympic gold in the 1980 "Miracle on Ice." He was feted at the White House, glorified by Hollywood, and stalked by corporate titans for inspiration on the lecture circuit.
But Brooks always considered himself a lunch-pail guy from St. Paul's hardscrabble East Side, an Episcopalian who called himself a "back-door Catholic." He would rather drink light beer from a can than sip Cabernet out of stemware.
The iconoclast undoubtedly would have been tickled to see casually dressed laborers and clock punchers rubbing shoulders with politicians and hockey glitterati in designer shades and suits celebrating his life inside such a resplendent house of worship.
Attending the funeral were 19 of the 20 players Brooks coached on the U.S. Olympic team. He was the last to take credit and the first among them to go.
"It's the one reunion that nobody wanted to go to," said Buzz Schneider.
Brooks turned 66 less than a week before he was killed midday August 11, 2003, driving back to his suburban St. Paul home after playing in a charity golf outing for the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in northern Minnesota.
Brooks was ejected from his Toyota minivan when he swerved and lost control on southbound Interstate 35, about 20 miles from his front door. He was not wearing a seatbelt, according to Minnesota state police.
Unrivaled as a transformative hockey coach, sharp-elbowed innovator, and restless intellect, Brooks figured to have one more big play to make, which made the pain from his untimely death cut bone deep. His vagabond career started at the University of Minnesota in 1972 and included layovers in Switzerland, New York City, Minnesota, France, and Pittsburgh before a 2002 encore with Team USA that closed the circle on Brooks' professional life.
"America's Coach" was more than a taskmaster in a track suit with a whistle between his lips.
He was married for 39 years to his indefatigable wife, Patti; dad to son Danny and daughter Kelly; grandfather of five; David's and Gayle's big brother. His closest friends were Minnesota hockey royalty, from the late John Mariucci, Glen Sonmor, Warren Strelow, and Wendell Anderson to John Mayasich, Lou Nanne, John Harrington, and Tom Vannelli.
Most, however, knew him simply as "Herbie." The guy who returned to his East Side barber for haircuts, hobnobbed with the regulars at Vogel's Lounge on Payne Avenue, and once spent two weeks helping an old friend clear brush because the tree trimmer's workers bailed on a major landscaping project.
"I'm sure he was the greatest coach ever," eulogized Bill Butters, Brooks' first Gophers captain. "But he was a father figure, a man of integrity, a man of character, and a man of passion."
People were drawn to Brooks' everyman quality and his sardonic wit, which could leave dinner companions in stitches and the press eating out of his hands.
Even his players chuckled at his barbed-wire "Herbisms."
"You're playing worse every day and right now you're playing like next month!" he would bark from behind the bench.
Flying to Nagano for the 1998 Winter Olympics, Brooks was seated next to a woman who started breastfeeding her infant.
"I hope you're not offended, sir, but it's the only thing that will stop his ears from popping," she said.
"I'm not offended but all these years I've just been chewing gum," Brooks quipped.
One night Brooks was waiting for a table at a Philadelphia restaurant when he spotted a picture of former President Jimmy Carter.
"He called me three times in two days a few years ago but I haven't heard from him since."
Hockey made Brooks a global celebrity, but his passion for the sport matured on the tiny 10-by-20-foot rink his father built alongside the family duplex near Lake Phalen.
Born August 5, 1937, Brooks was the oldest of three children raised by a tough Irishman and frugal Swede. Herb Sr. sold insurance and coached junior hockey. Pauline was a proofreader at a local publishing house and a summer lifeguard.
Brooks played forward and first base for the hockey and baseball teams at St. Paul Johnson High School. In 1954–55 he helped lead the Governors to a 26–1–2 record and state hockey championship. Brooks was a swift skater and fierce competitor with a sneaky playmaker's touch. He scored two goals in the title game in vanquishing Minneapolis Southwest 3–1.
He dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot, but color blindness prevented him from attending the Air Force Academy. Brooks had a scholarship offer to Michigan, but his father leaned on him to walk on at Minnesota, which was coached by Mariucci, in those days one of the few Americans with an NHL pedigree.
"He was one of the fastest, if not the fastest, players in college hockey in that era," Mariucci said.
Brooks scored 18 goals among 45 points for the Gophers from 1957–59 and graduated in 1961 with a degree in psychology, which he leveraged to diabolical effect willing his 1980 team to victory.
The U.S. Olympic team recruited Brooks to play in 1960 at Squaw Valley, California. The Soviet Union emerged during the early days of the Cold War as the dominant force in international hockey, having mastered the free-flowing and creative style Brooks counterattacked 20 years later. The United States was an afterthought behind the Soviets and traditional powers Canada and Czechoslovakia.
Just days before the Opening Ceremony, U.S. coach Jack Riley convinced 1956 Olympian Bill Cleary to rejoin the team. Cleary agreed on the condition that baby brother Bob Cleary come too. Brooks was the odd man out.
The team photo had already been taken. So Cleary's head was pasted over Brooks' body. It was humiliating.
Still, Brooks could not look away as the Americans upset the Soviets and roared into the gold-medal game against the Czechs on February 28, 1960. That Sunday afternoon Brooks and his father watched at home on the family's black-and-white television.
The Cleary brothers starred in Team USA's 9–4 victory. When the game ended, Herb Sr. glanced at his son and said, "Well, I guess the coach cut the right guy."
Later in life Brooks turned his father's stinging rebuke into a punch line, but the snub ignited a competitive fire that burned until the day he died.
Brooks played at the 1964 and '68 Olympics and captained the 1970 U.S. national team. He met Patti in December 1963 after breaking his arm in a semipro game in St. Paul. She was an emergency room nurse who helped treat the dashing young player. They were engaged three months later and married in September 1964.
The NHL, still dominated by Canadians, remained skeptical of Americans, although Brooks had to think twice before turning down a chance to sign with the Detroit Red Wings.
"I don't think I was good enough to make it," he said.
So Brooks followed his father into the insurance business and had a lucrative job as an underwriter for W.A. Lang in St. Paul when Sonmor hired him in 1968 to coach the Gophers' freshman team.
"I knew he would make a great coach, even back then," Sonmor wrote. "He just had that special quality that made him a winner. He was so intelligent, too. He had an ability to see everything that was going on around him and then was able to pick out what was really important. His players maybe didn't love him but they respected him and went to war for him."
Brooks was also tenaciously self-righteous.
When athletic director Marsh Ryman told him there was not enough money to fly Sonmor's assistant coaches with the Gophers to the 1971 NCAA championships in Syracuse, N.Y., Brooks quit on the spot and founded a junior franchise to coach, the St. Paul Vulcans.
"I've never seen anyone carry things as far as he would for a principle," Sonmor recalled. "I said, 'Herbie, why do you always have to tilt at windmills?'"
In February 1972, Sonmor left Minnesota to coach the Fighting Saints of the fledging World Hockey Association. Interim coach Ken Yackel was the first choice of new athletic director Paul Giel but he turned down the job.
"The day I came to the university, I found myself without a hockey coach," Giel said. "It's no secret I tried to convince Yack to stay on but it's also no secret that Herb Brooks was the only other man for the job in my mind."
The expansion Atlanta Flames wooed Brooks for an NHL assistant coaching job. Sonmor offered him the position of assistant general manager of the Fighting Saints.
"I decided my first love is coaching. This is what I want to do, particularly at my alma mater," Brooks said at his introductory news conference. "I believe in the hockey players at this school and I only hope I can [make] the University of Minnesota hockey team the most desirable team to play for in the country."
Brooks, 34, became the youngest college hockey coach in the United States, inheriting a team that had finished last in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, with an average attendance of just 2,500 at 6,800-seat Williams Arena.
One of the first things he did was design a new jersey with the distinctive "M" on the front, which the team has worn in varying styles for 45 years. His mantra was simple: "Work hard, believe in the guy next to you, and everything will fall into place."
Giel showed his commitment to Brooks by awarding the hockey program six full scholarships rather than the partials his predecessors were forced to ration.
"When Paul told me I would have enough scholarship money and better facilities I was able to get the players necessary to do the job," Brooks told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1980.
The Gophers climbed to third place in 1972–73. The next season they were national champions after defeating Michigan Tech.
A "Brooks for Governor" banner flew at MSP International Airport when the Gophers returned from Boston on March 17, 1974, armed with the school's first hockey title and unbridled confidence.
"That was probably the most satisfying coaching period that I ever had in my life," Brooks recalled.
Minnesota won two more championships in 1976 and '79 while advancing to four Frozen Fours in Brooks' seven years at the helm. He coached five All-Americans and 23 players who went on to play in the NHL, finishing with a record of 167–97–18.
And he did it all with Minnesotans, refusing to recruit outside the state while his competitors combed North America and titled the ice by acquiring older, more experienced Canadians and junior stars. Brooks was a disciple of Mariucci's closed-ranks philosophy, which endeared both men to Minnesota's parochial hockey fans.
"John believed in Minnesota kids and gave them a chance," Brooks recalled in a 1979 interview with the Pioneer Press. "He could have been like other college coaches and done the bulk of his recruiting in Canada. But John was different. John cared."
On the ice, Brooks was notoriously strict with his players, and he was aloof to them off it. Captains, superstars, or checkers, it didn't matter. They would pass him in hallways without eliciting so much as a nod from their coach.
"Traumatic was the best way to describe playing for him," goalie Steve Janaszak recalled to author Wayne Coffey in Boys of Winter: The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream and the 1980 U.S. Olympic Team.
Brooks was intolerant of lackadaisical effort in practice and games. He would call out stars in front of teammates to deliver his global message, then circle back to the victim, embrace him in private, and quietly whisper encouragement — classic tear-'em-down, build-'em-up tactics.
Floaters were punished by having to skate "Herbies," back-and-forth sprints from goal line to blue line, red line, the far blue line, and the opposite goal line.
"We used to say if Herbie did this to a dog, the Humane Society would throw him in jail," Don Micheletti, a Gophers winger from 1976 to '80, said in an interview with author Ross Bernstein. "But it taught us to keep pushing each other as teammates and to be in shape that third period so we could win."
One year, after the Gophers were swept at Michigan Tech, Brooks was so upset he canceled the team's charter flight and booked a seven-hour bus ride home from the Upper Peninsula. The Huskies tended to bring out his ire.
In March 1979, with Minnesota en route to its third national championship, Brooks went ballistic in the dressing room after the Gophers surrendered three third-period goals in a 5–3 WCHA playoff win over Michigan Tech.
He hurled a case of soda pop across the room and shattered a blackboard. Afterward he unloaded to the media, touching raw cultural nerves to scold his team while threatening to quit.
"Talk, talk, I'm sick of talking to these fucking players! This game is still won by hungry people," he fumed. "I'm not going to go to bed with these cake-eaters anymore. This is a working man's game, not a game for some god-blessed rich kids from the suburbs. After this season is over, the University of Minnesota can have this job."
Headlines raged about Brooks' possible resignation, and he was forced to walk back his comments the following day. However, it was evident the end was near.
In 1977, Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Sid Hartman reported Brooks had decided to resign and enter private business. A November announcement was delayed. Then Brooks changed his mind.
In the fall of 1978, Nanne, then general manager of the North Stars, offered Brooks a two-year contract to coach Minnesota's NHL team. Brooks agreed. A news conference was scheduled. Then Brooks demanded a three-year contract. Nanne balked. The deal fell through.
Giel, Minnesota's athletic director, granted Brooks a leave of absence for 1979–80 so the three-time NCAA champion could coach the 1980 U.S. Olympic team. The plan was for assistant coach Brad Buetow to fill in as head coach that season so Brooks could return in the fall of 1980.
No one, not even a supremely confident Brooks, could have predicted the magical upset and geopolitical earthquake that erupted at Lake Placid.
The U.S. hockey team, average age 22, had been embarrassed 10–2 by the Soviets a month earlier in an exhibition game but would take down the CCCP's Big Red Machine 4–3 on that unforgettable Friday, February 22, 1980. Two days later, the Americans defeated Finland 4–2 to finish undefeated on the world stage.
Twelve Minnesotans, including seven who played for Brooks with the Gophers, won gold medals — the first for the United States since Brooks was cut from the 1960 team, and America's last men's Olympic hockey championship.
Brooks, who sequestered his players and commandeered media attention during the tournament, became a deity overnight.
There were the New York Rangers negotiating a coaching contract with his agent during the Games. There were Herb and Patti chatting with Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter in the White House the day after winning the gold medal. Endorsement deals poured in.
The world was Brooks' oyster. His days in Dinkytown were numbered. On April 9, 1980, he resigned as Gophers hockey coach and gave a series of exit interviews that were neither overly sentimental nor introspective.
"The common denominator of all the guys who played throughout my seven years was that they were really competitive, very hungry, very focused and mentally tough — to go along with whatever talent they had. I think that really carried us," he told the Pioneer Press.
Brooks rejected offers from the Rangers and Los Angeles Kings and decided to burnish his pro credentials in Davos, Switzerland. In 1981, Brooks returned from overseas and did sign on with the Rangers. He led New York to its best finish in 10 years, but his teams failed to gain traction. He was fired in January 1985.
Three months later, Giel tried to lure Brooks back to Minnesota but was spurned. Instead, Brooks took over the overlooked program at St. Cloud State. He lasted one season before Nanne finally brought Herbie back to the Twin Cities.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "100 Things Minnesota Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Brian Murphy.
Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Lou Nanne,
Acknowledgments,
1. Herbie,
2. Murray Warmath,
3. Bronko Nagurski,
4. Bruce Smith,
5. On to Pittsburgh,
6. "We Want the Pig!",
7. From the Cellar to the Penthouse,
8. Spitting Mad,
9. End of an Era,
10. Mychal Thompson,
11. "Defeat Is Worse Than Death, Because You Have to Live with Defeat",
12. The Brawl,
13. Take In "The Barn",
14. Mr. Everything,
15. The Grey Eagle,
16. Jerry Kill,
17. Paul Molitor,
18. Dave Winfield,
19. The Chief,
20. John Anderson,
21. Ponder the Wizard of ... Dinkytown?,
22. Lou Holtz,
23. Sandy Stephens,
24. Bobby Bell,
25. The Godfather,
26. John Mayasich,
27. Fire in the Hole ... er, Hall!,
28. Home Cooking,
29. Shock(ed) the World,
30. Bob McNamara,
31. Charlie Sanders,
32. Bud Grant,
33. The Sun Also Rises,
34. Maize and Blues,
35. Déjà Blue,
36. Baggage Unloaded,
37. The Little Brown Jug,
38. Tony Dungy,
39. Carl Eller,
40. Darrell Thompson,
41. Bob Stein,
42. Juice on the Loose,
43. Bert Baston,
44. Glen Mason,
45. Thunder and Lightning,
46. Dan Nystrom,
47. Rhys Lloyd,
48. Eric Decker,
49. Adam Weber,
50. Bud Wilkinson,
51. P.J. Fleck,
52. Pug Lund,
53. Mr. Patriot,
54. Yell "Yay ... Gophers!",
55. Paul Bunyan's Axe,
56. Floyd of Rosedale,
57. Trent Tucker,
58. Randy Breuer,
59. Jim Brewer,
60. Kevin McHale,
61. John Kundla,
62. Flip Saunders,
63. Dick Garmaker,
64. Jim McIntyre,
65. Neal Broten,
66. Thomas Vanek,
67. Pat Micheletti,
68. Glen Sonmor,
69. Lou Nanne,
70. Reed Larson,
71. Jordan Leopold,
72. Mike Crowley,
73. Jack McCartan,
74. Robb Stauber,
75. Brian Bonin,
76. Salute Lindsay Whalen,
77. Janel McCarville,
78. Rachel Banham,
79. Jerry Kindall,
80. Jim Rantz,
81. Terry Steinbach,
82. Glen Perkins,
83. Greg Olson,
84. Dan Wilson,
85. Bobby Marshall,
86. Hannah Brandt,
87. Amanda Kessel,
88. Natalie Darwitz,
89. Krissy Wendell-Pohl,
90. Noora Räty,
91. Laura Halldorson,
92. Brad Frost,
93. "From the Graveyard to the Champion's Circle",
94. John Harris,
95. Tom Lehman,
96. P.J. Bogart,
97. Ray Christensen,
98. The Man with the Golden Voice,
99. Cheer "Ski-U-Mah!",
100. Governor's Victory Bell,
Sources,