Home : Olympic Ice Hockey :Winter Olympic Hockey, 1960
Living The American DreamU.S. hockey's original golden boysIf you knew anything at all about ice hockey at the start of the Olympic Games in 1960 you knew three things: 1 ) the Soviets were the best; 2) the Canadians and the Czechoslovakians were almost as good as the Soviets; and 3) the Americans didn't have a chance. It wasn't a pleasant fact, the host country's entry being held in such low esteem, but it was as much a reality as Eisenhower in the White House and Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Conventional wisdom gave the United States as much chance of winning an Olympic ice hockey medal as the Soviet Union of holding free elections. Incidentally, the same conventional wisdom said man would neverwalk on the moon, tail fins were the wave of the future, the Japanese would never make a decent car, and a Memphis singer named Elvis was a passing fad. Still, the case was strong for Soviet superiority and American inferiority. The Soviets trained together, ate together, roomed together, practiced together year-round, and ostensibly worked for the same company. They were the defending Olympic champions. The Americans were a rag-tag collection of students and working men, including a fireman, two carpenters from Minnesota, and one guy who sold advertisements for the relatively recent medium called television. They came from such hockey hotbeds as Harvard University, the Gleneagle fire station in Springfield, Ohio, and various minor league outposts. The coach, Jack Riley, was a hard-as-nails officer from West Point. No starryeyed dreamer, Riley admitted going in that his team's only chance was to out-condition the Soviets.
Even assembling the team wasn't easy. Riley's most sought-after player, Harvard star Bill Cleary, only agreed to join up if they also let his brother Bob play. Goalkeeper John Magasich initially refused to come because of a minor league hockey commitment and didn't show up until the rest of the team was already on the ice in Squaw Valley. At about that point, every hockey team in the Games was checking the schedule to see when they got to play the Americans. Then the tournament began and somehow the well-conditioned Americans survived the preliminary round and qualified for the six-team championship round. To everyone's surprise, the U.S. scored early medal-round wins over Sweden and Germany, a situation that left essentially four teams - the others were the USSR, Canada and Czechoslovakia-vying for the three Olympic medals. That was the good news for the Americans. The bad being they next had to play Canada. To that point the Canadians had scored 40 goals in the Games to their opponents' three. They had not allowed a single goal in medal round wins over Sweden or Czechoslovakia. There was essentially no way the United States could beat Canada. The first goal of the U.S.-Canada match was scored by an American, Bill Cleary's brother Bob. The pro-American crowd of 8,500 started to come alive. The United States actually had the lead in a game with the Canadians that really counted. The U.S. scored again in the second period, leading the Canadians - the same Canadians that had won the World Championship in Helsinki a few weeks earlier - in a serious state of shock. The American goalkeeper, Jack McCartan, while dreaming of a tryout with a minor league team, stopped 20 Canadian shots in the second period alone.
Canada scored with six minutes to play in the game, making the score 2-1, but the American defense then held firm. With a minute to go the crowd counted down the seconds while McCartan beat his stick on the ice in unison. The United States faced the USSR next. They had one day of rest. They could have used a year. There was essentially no way the United States could beat the Soviets. Within seconds of the game's start, Bill Cleary took a perfect pass from his brother Bob and slapped home a goal. The Soviets answered back quickly, scoring twice to assume what the over-capacity crowd of 10,000-plus - by now stone quiet - seemed to think was commanding. At the period break, Riley looked at his players and told them with military bluntness, "Everyone in the nation is counting on you. There are millions watching on television." When the team retook the ice, Bill Christian, a carpenter from Warroad, Minn., quickly scored a goal. In the third period he scored again. The Americans held on for a 3-2 victory that was easily the biggest win in U.S. hockey history. In the finale, the U.S. met Czechoslovakia. A win meant the gold medal. A loss gave the gold to Canada, a final-game victor over the Soviets. After two periods the Czechs forged ahead, 4-3. It appeared the magic was over. The Americans, drained from their win over the Soviets, were sluggish and tired. But just before the U.S. team came back on the ice for the final period an unexpected visitor came to the locker room. Nikolai Sologubov, captain of the Soviet team, entered the room. Sologubov had been watching the game, which Czechoslovakia led, 4-3, from the stands and noticed that the U.S. wasn't playing with nearly as much energy as the day before when they stunned the highly-favored Soviets, 3-2. Using hand gestures because he knew little English, Sologubov indicated to the Americans that they needed to inhale more bottled oxygen to revive them for the crucial third period. Many did as Sologubov suggested. Forgetting the fact that the only thing Sologubov and his teammates dreaded worse than an American win was a Czech win, it was a remarkable display of international relations. The oxygenated Americans scored six goals in the third period, including three goals by Roger Christian, Bill's brother and the other carpenter from Minnesota. The U.S. had a 9-4 victory, the gold medal, and the undying admiration of a television-watching nation. Twenty years later, at the Lake Placid Games, another lightly-regarded U.S. hockey team would do it again - beat the Soviets and win the Olympic gold medal. If anything, the 1980 team's success received more publicity and attention than the 1960 championship. Certainly the 1980 victory deserves its place in sports history as one of the most thrilling, against-all-odds performances ever. But of course it wasn't the first time. In 1960, the original Boys of Winter showed them the way. A Celebration Of A Great TraditionA boisterous crowd screamed with delight while the American fought off the Soviets in the closing minutes. The puck was in the Americans' end for many of the final minutes, and McCartan was brilliant preserving his country's first hockey win over "the Bear." "Every face-off seemed to last an eternity," Bill Cleary remembered. After the game, the teary-eyed Soviet coach, Anatoli Tarasov, entered the American dressing room and kissed Riley on the cheek, and the Russian interpreter Roman Kesserlov gave Bill Cleary a bottle of vodka he had to pay off a bet they had made. The vodka still sits unopened in Cleary's Massachusetts home as a memento of the triumph. Almost twenty years later, Bill Cleary would entertain coach Tarasov at his home overlooking the Charles River in the Boston area. Tarasov would joke that he "ended up in the Siberia" because of Cleary and his colleagues. The visit to Cleary's home was in the spring of 1979, and Tarasov had brought along a bottle of vodka. Before he left, he threw the vodka in the bushes and told Cleary not to retrieve it until the American hockey players won another Olympic gold medal. He probably assumed that wasn't going to happen for many years. Less than a year later, he would be wrong. Aside from Tarasov, the Russians didn't accept the loss in 1960 very well. A bitter Nikolai Romanov, the Soviet minister of sport, told the assembled media: "Perhaps we would have won on a neutral rink, but naturally it is the right of the spectators to cheer their team as much as they can and we just had to bear that handicap."
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