Miracle (2004)
Everyone who is anyone who is queer or a purposeful ally to queer sports enthusiasts is writing, or talking, about Heated Rivalry. And anyone who is interested in romance novels, especially those with, as some would say, a lot of chili peppers, are also talking about Heated Rivalry.
I will someday talk about Heated Rivalry. I promise.
Today, I want to talk about Miracle (2004).
I loved this movie as a kid. I’ve always loved watching sports, especially hockey, and I also love history.
Miracle hits that sweet spot.
A brief summary:
There are three main paths sports fiction tends to tread. The first is the lone fighter, the second is the rivals and the third is the come-together story.
(I know what you are thinking, ‘where is the underdog story?’ Dear reader, almost all sports fiction is an underdog story.)
Miracle might seem, at times, to be following the first path. But really, this movie is all about Herb Brooks, the team’s head coach.
This choice is in part due to the casting decisions. There aren’t a lot of experienced actors on this team, and Kurt Russell is more than talented enough to carry this movie with assists mainly from Patricia Clarkson as Patti Brooks, Herb’s wife, and Noah Emmerich as Craig Patrick, Brooks’ assistant coach and assistant general manager.
If you don’t know the story, and if you have somehow found this post I don’t know how you don’t already know the story, the United States hosts the Winter Olympics in 1980 at Lake Placid, and they manage to beat the U.S.S.R.’s legendary national team before going on to win gold.
Now, about Coach Brooks:
The movie focuses on Herb’s crazy plans to get 20 young college hockey players, some of whom hate each other, to play as a cohesive team, with a new, different dynamic playing style, that is able to compete against other national teams, especially the Soviet team. And he has to do it in a few months.
Team USA is not as talented as the Soviets. Herb tells his players this multiple times sometimes a bit cruelly- “You think you can win on talent alone? Gentlemen, you don’t have enough talent to win on talent alone.” -and at other times as a reassurance- “If we play them 10 times, they might win nine. Not tonight.”
Herb is distant from his players, purposely so, and Kurt Russell purposely took the same approach to the young hockey players-turned-actors on the cast. In the movie, Herb tells them to go to Craig Patrick or the team doctor, played by Kenneth Welsh, for a friend.
While he is most often cold instead of cruel, he is more than willing to be mean if it will bring results. He will play mind games, like having the players introduce themselves, stating their name and what team they play for over and over, or bringing in a potential new teammate shortly before the final roster is due.
While at the Olympics he sneers at one player with an extremely painful bone bruise high on his thigh, calling the player a “candy ass.”
That scene:
In what may be the movie’s most famous scene, Herb makes the team skate lines after an exhibition game after he overhears the players discussing pretty women in the stands and they lose in embarrassing fashion. He yells a few different perfect yet cliche phrases as they skate the lines, and continue skating long after the rink manager has turned off the lights.
One phrase in particular about the jerseys each player wears still haunts modern North American hockey culture- “...the name on the front is a hell of a lot more important than the one on the back.”
In a piece of movie magic, they stop when Mike “Rizzo” Eruzione, the eventual team captain, calls out his name and when Herb asks who Rizzo plays for, instead of saying his college team, for the first time he says he plays for the United States of America. Herb lets the team leave.
In reality, the post-game lines didn’t end until a player broke their stick over the glass in frustration.
And this is the real crux of the movie, as well as the proof that media literacy did not up and die out of nowhere in like, 2017. People have been missing the messaging of this movie since it came out in 2004.
Miracle positions Herb Brooks and the way he coached 1980 Team USA as the exception that makes the rule in regards to how to treat the athletes you coach.
I can’t really say if the real Herb Brooks loved his players. The 1980 roster has made it clear they had a love-hate relationship with their coach, and for some players that sliding scale was much closer to hate than love.
At the beginning of the movie, Doc tells Craig Herb has never acted like this with another team, but perhaps if the players are tired and too preoccupied hating Herb, they won’t have enough energy left to hate each other.
In Miracle, Herb Brooks loves his players, or at least cares deeply about them.
We see him agonize over the final cuts to the roster, and he refuses to leave an injured player behind. At the team Christmas party, Herb is given a whip by the players (all of the gifts exchanged at the party have been gag gifts) and when he gets up to thank them, Herb instead pauses, and looks at them all, and retreats.
Even when they beat the Soviet team, instead of joining the team on the ice, Herb retreats. He celebrates alone in a tunnel under the stadium, and then he slides against the wall with his head in his hands.
Herb sacrificed a relationship with his gold medal team in order to make them a gold medal team.
North American hockey culture:
Sadly, the approach Herb Brooks took with the 1980 team left an impression on the hockey world. Which is a little crazy, because even Herb Brooks didn’t usually coach like 1980 Team USA Herb Brooks.
The man had like 6 months to turn a group of hot-headed young, white teenagers and twenty-somethings. who all had egos and grudges against their new teammates into a cohesive unit. They also needed near-constant conditioning to catch up with their competition around the globe.
This is not the norm with hockey. A juniors coach is not going to get peak performance from his teen players if he bag skates them until they solve his riddles three. An NHL general manager is not going to be able to fire up his team by making them hate him and still keep them playing at peak performance for a full 82-game season.
Even on the national teams, these players don’t need to be put in a pressure cooker to mesh and become a cohesive unit. Due to modern development systems and national training camps, many of these players do have a history as teammates, even if they spend much of their year as rivals.
Sure, it’s cute when modern Team USA players reference Miracle during their warm-ups, but pretty much every cliche Herb Brooks barks at his players as they skate lines in Oslo are still repeated in locker rooms across North America. And many of the coaching tactics in this movie are still used by coaches.
It is amazing how “player-friendly coach” has become the catch-all for a coach who is not an asshole to his players.
And if hockey can’t even move away from mind games and situational cruelty for short-term results, are we really surprised these same ‘leaders of the sport’ can’t, or just won’t, address sexual violence, racism, homophobia and xenophobia in the sport?
I like Miracle, I will always like Miracle, but sometimes I think everyone else watched a completely different movie.
Extra notes on the movie:
Very funny that Herb Brooks didn’t really get the Coneheads reference everyone else was making about the Conehead line.
Their plane hit a moose?!?
I know I talked a lot of shit about Herb’s cliche lines, but I do like “the legs feed the wolves.”
The original announcers for the Miracle on Ice game were amazing and I’m so glad they stuck with the original commentary, with voice over when necessary.
Of course I still get choked up by the final in memorandum for Herb Brooks. “He never saw it. He lived it.”
If you haven’t done so, you need to watch the 30-for-30 documentary Of Miracles and Men (2015). I’ve heard it generally described as the Soviet perspective on the Miracle on Ice game, and while that is true, I feel like that undercuts how much more is going on in that documentary.
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