The Boys of Winter: The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream, and the 1980 U. S. Olympic Hockey Team » (Reprint)

Wayne Coffey is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Daily News and the author of Winning Sounds Like This, among other books. He lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York.

The Story of the Greatest Sports Moment of the Twentieth Century

Once upon a time, they taught us to believe. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, a blue-collar bunch led by an unconventional coach, and they engineered what Sports Illustrated called the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. Their “Miracle on Ice” has become a national fairy tale, but the real Cinderella story is even more remarkable.

Wayne Coffey casts a fresh eye on this seminal sports event, giving readers an ice-level view of the amateurs who took on a Russian hockey juggernaut at the height of the Cold War. He details the unusual chemistry of the Americans—formulated by their fiercely determined coach, Herb Brooks—and seamlessly weaves portraits of the boys with the fluid action of the game itself. Coffey also traces the paths of the players and coaches since their stunning victory, examining how the Olympic events affected their lives.

Told with warmth and an uncanny eye for detail, The Boys of Winter is an intimate, perceptive portrayal of one Friday night in Lake Placid and the enduring power of the extraordinary.

Also available as an eBook

The New York Times - Charles McGrath

Coffey's game descriptions are precise and gripping (even if you've just finished watching the DVD of ''Miracle,'' last year's movie version of the 1980 story, in which Kurt Russell pulled off an uncannily faithful impersonation of Brooks, right down to his icy stare and appalling wardrobe), and the book is far better than the movie at evoking the lives and personalities of the players. Coffey, a sportswriter for The Daily News, is alert, for example, to the vast cultural differences that separated the streetwise New Englanders from the soft-spoken Minnesotans, many of them from the hardscrabble Iron Range, and he shows how these manifested themselves on the ice as well as in the locker room. He gives affecting portraits of, among others, Mark Pavelich, the team oddball, and Steve Janaszak, the backup goalie, who never got a minute of Olympic ice time.