E-Mail This Article to a Friend Of miracles and evil empires BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

A colleague recently gave me a capsule review of Disney’s new bio-pic Miracle, a feel-good movie that depicts the improbable run of the 1980 US men’s hockey team at the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. My co-worker completed his take on the film by saying, I only wish I had been alive to see it when it happened.

For those of us who were alive to see it, it seems incomprehensible that there are people out there who don’t remember it, but in reality it’s been nearly 24 long years since that remarkable turn of events, and indeed there are plenty of folks who weren’t born yet or were too young to remember it.

I have been supremely blessed by not only remembering it, but I recall it as perhaps the pinnacle event of my life as a sports fan. Being in college at the time surely sheltered me from a lot of the activities and problems of the real world, but attending a university that loved its hockey (and was only 80 miles from the bucolic hamlet which served as the setting for that Olympiad) gave me practically a front-row seat for the goings-on that February. In fact, our proximity to the Canadian border allowed us to pick up the CBC feed of the Olympic telecast, thereby giving us the opportunity to see the US-USSR hockey game live at 5 p.m. that Friday evening, rather than wait for the 8 p.m. delayed-broadcast that ABC forced the rest of the nation to wait for on pins and needles. In these days of the Internet and breaking news, the outcome would have been almost impossible to avoid back then, but of course that was a different time, and the US’s 4-3 upset of the hugely favored Russkies became our little secret in the North Country that magical night.

I saw Miracle over the weekend, and while I have never professed to be a cinematic critic, I did bear witness to the actual events, so I am certainly capable to judging whether the film adequately captures the aura surrounding that incredible fortnight in Lake Placid. I am happy to say that, in spite of my over-the-top expectations for the film, it lived up to my hopes, and director Gavin O’Connor and particularly actor Kurt Russell (who plays coach Herb Brooks) deliver solid work. While many a film could be criticized for what is left out, Miracle does a decent job of addressing most of the relevant issues, particularly the helpless morass in which the US was enmeshed during this period, including the Iranian hostage crisis and the Russians’ advance into Afghanistan. It also hints at the regionalism of the team’s individual players (East Coasters like Mike Eruzione and Jim Craig had some serious initial issues with those players ultimately culled from Brooks’s Minnesota program and other Midwestern teams) and nicely portrays the team’s eventual bonding. While the individual players’ characters probably could have been fleshed out a little more (only the goalie, Craig, who comes off as a feisty nonconformist grieving for his recently passed mother, and winger Jack O’Callahan are fully developed as personalities), Miracle rightly chooses to focus on the enigmatic Brooks, who chose to make himself the common enemy in hopes of uniting his disparate troops into a team that could compete at the Olympics. Russell, so familiar to cinemophiles in such pics as Tango & Cash, Backdraft, and Escape from New York, among his 50-some filmography, has Brooks’s voice and mannerisms down cold, and it is a damned shame that Brooks — killed in a single-car accident last fall shortly after principal photography for Miracle was completed — is not around to see it. Veteran actress Patricia Clarkson is somewhat wasted as Brooks’s wife, Patty, and realistically, all of the home scenes could have been eliminated to cut the film down from its 135-minute length, since they don’t add much to the overall story.

Composer Mark Isham, who has scored music for nearly 100 films, has done a magnificent job creating the background melodies in Miracle, and the music richly enhances the story throughout, but particularly in the game scenes that make up the film’s final hour. The producers were fortunate enough that Disney owns ABC, thereby ensuring that Al Michaels (who did play-by-play for the Olympic telecasts) and his unforgettable calls are included in the re-enacted action sequences.

Miracle is the third cinematic version of the story of this unforgettable sporting event. In 1981, just a year after the Olympiad and shortly after Ronald Reagan took office, ABC threw together a made-for-TV movie called Miracle on Ice, which starred Karl Malden as Brooks (at age 68, the big-schnozzed former Oscar winner was 25 years older than the former University of Minnesota coach back then) and Steve Guttenberg (Police Academy) as Jim Craig(?!). Miracle on Ice was a bit cheesy, and certainly not a great film, but it incorporated the archival footage of the games themselves, which were still fresh in folks’ minds but unavailable for viewing (don’t forget, this was before VCRs). Then three years ago, HBO produced a documentary film entitled Do You Believe in Miracles? The Story of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team, a fine effort which not only better established the mood of the country, but included interviews with six members of that gold-medal-winning squad, Brooks, and even a pair of the vanquished Soviet squad’s key players.

Miracle does not use ABC’s footage of the games, but instead chooses to re-enact the sequences, and the camerawork is probably the best ever executed for a hockey movie (certainly surpassing the classic Slap Shot). While those who hold dear the memories of that tournament may yearn for the actual film footage of the turning points of the individual games, the producers do a great job of recreating the plays almost exactly, and have wisely used real hockey players rather than actors in those action sequences.

I remember the hockey games of the XIIIth Olympiad as if they were just the other day, but I still found myself nervously watching the games unfold, and often would flinch as if to jump out of my seat each time a critical goal was scored by the US team. Seeing the movie in an actual theater allows one to feel as if you are at the game, and I urge you to see Miracle during its theatrical run rather than wait for the DVD or video. The hits, the music, and the sheer sound of the games make this a superior film experience, and while the movie conveniently skips over the actual gold-medal-winning contest against Finland, one can’t begrudge the writers for making the US-USSR game the movie’s centerpiece.

If you weren’t around for the actual events that unfolded in upstate New York 24 winters ago, you will leave the theater feeling revitalized in the belief that not always does the team with the best players win.

And that, of course, brings us to the next matter at hand: Alex Rodriguez to the Yankees. Based on what you’ve just read, there is plenty of justification and history for believing that the underdog can and will emerge victorious under the right circumstances. The Russian team entering the 1980 Games had won gold medals in 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976, and was the odds-on favorite to cruise to another one at Lake Placid. This was a team that did not play by the rules; they were not amateurs, as the Americans were, but instead lived and worked together nine months of every year, and as members of the Soviet army, they were compensated for their military duties, not for being hockey players representing the homeland that President Reagan later called the Evil Empire. The Russian team had annihilated an NHL All-Star team, 6-0, in an exhibition game a few months before the Olympics, and had in fact defeated Brooks’s lads, 10-3, just 13 days prior to the Miracle on Ice. The possibility that the US team could have competed with, much less beaten the Russians was laughable at the time, but it became a story for the ages and one that remains the highlight of many Americans’ sporting lives.

Stories of underdogs are heartwarming and uplifting, and we have seen relatively similar tales of against-all-odds glory in recent years, including wins by the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Anaheim Angels, the Florida Marlins, and even our own New England Patriots. In most of these cases, the concept of team somehow managed to overcome the long obstacles posed by talent.

But in all of sports, only one team in history has made such a pronounced habit of collecting talent at whatever price it takes, and in recent years that concept has paid off on a fairly routine basis. You all know where I'm heading here, and it makes no sense to go on, at least for today. Yankees fans will always accuse other teams and their fans of whining and being jealous of their success, and will never understand the disparity that King George has created with his free-spending ways. But the legions of Yankee-haters are ever-expanding, and someday fiscal sanity will reign supreme and the rules will apply to everyone.

Yes, the Russians lost in 1980, but between 1956 and 1992, the Soviets won eight of 10 gold medals because they had the most talent and didn’t exactly play by the rules. The Yanks won titles in ’96, ’98, ’99, ’00, and made additional World Series appearances in ’01 and ’03. That's six years in eight of either being number one or number two. Feel free to make your own comparisons, using the empirical data available to you.

And if the Yankees win this year’s World Series, it would be appropriate if a nice little asterisk appeared right beside their name on the champions list — one that says, As well they should.

Sporting Eye runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com, and Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com