Another Miracle Is the Goal

By RICHARD CORLISS

We 'II need every break, need to go at full intensity to steal a medal

Do you believe in miracles?"

shouted ABC-TV Announcer D Al Michaels over the uproar of an ecstatic Lake Placid crowd as the last seconds of the Soviet-American Olympic hockey semifinal game ticked away with the Americans leading 4-3.

The horn sounded, and Michaels and the nation exploded: "Yes!" With this victory and the next, a 4-2 win over Finland, the ragtag squad of 20 young amateur athletes had done more than bring U.S. hockey its first Olympic gold medal since 1960. For a few happy days, they had set America skating on air.

That was 1980. Now, as another Olympics looms, Lou Vairo watches an even younger bunch of Cinderella kids preparing to skate into Sarajevo in hopes of picking up the other glass slipper.

Vairo, the ebullient Brooklyn native who serves as head coach, cheerleader and godfather figure of the 1984 Olympic hockey team, tugs at his dark chin and says, "This is probably the best U.S. team ever. But on skills alone we can't match the Swedes and Finns, let alone the Czechs and Russians. We'll need every break, need to go full time at full intensity, to steal a medal. Still, we know it can be done--the miracle of 1980 proves that.

We'll just need another, bigger miracle to repeat this year."

Miracle. The word hangs around the necks of the '84 squad like a talisman and an albatross. The new team has traded in the pre-Olympic obscurity of their gold-medal predecessors for celebrity with an uneasy edge--avid media attention, sold-out exhibition games and an offer to pose en masse for Vogue--all in the reckless anticipation that miracles can strike twice. It puts unholy pressure on the young skaters, some of whom had hardly begun shaving four years ago, when Jim Craig, Mark Johnson and the rest were working their legerdemain at Lake Placid. But if any coach can reproduce a mir acle, Vairo, 38, may be the one: his own success story points to the moral that in sport, anything is possible.

Most hockey coaches come from the frostbelt--from what Vairo, with an outsider's irony, refers to as "the Massachusetts-Minnesota hockey establishment."

Vairo learned the game on the streets of Brooklyn. Literally. He played with roller skates on asphalt, using a roll of friction tape for a puck. Until he was 21, Vairo had never put on ice skates. But soon he was hanging around New York Rangers practice sessions and reading anything he could find on the subject. By 1972 he had saved enough money to send himself to Moscow, the mecca of European hockey. "Soviet teams made magic with the puck," Vairo says. "Their tempo was quick, and they were always in superb condition. I figured this was the model to copy."

Appointed head coach of this year's Olympic team in 1982 (after directing squads in Brooklyn and The Bronx to five league championships and a state title and an Austin, Minn., team to a national crown), Vairo assembled his four-man coaching staffand, last June in Colorado Springs, held tryouts for Sarajevo. From an original list of 250 amateurs, the coaches chose 80 top skaters. Vairo was looking for players fast enough to cover the wider Olympic rinks and adaptable to what he calls "sophisticated pond hockey"--the patient game of weaving and passing that wins Olympic medals, as opposed to the dump-and-chase, bump-and-grind National Hockey League variety.

The meticulous selection process bore fruit. Most observers agree with Hockey Historian Stan Fischler, who says, "There has never been such talent on a U.S. team as this year. And they are every bit as well coached as in '80. Vairo can match [former Head Coach] Herb Brooks at the blueprint table, and then top him with psychological motivation." Says Ken Morrow, an '80 alumnus who now plays dogged defense for the New York Islanders: "The 1984 team is more talented than we were, in speed, skating skill, stick handling and goal tending."

It is precocious talent indeed. Even with two grizzled veterans from 1980 (Captain Phil Verchota, 27, and John Harrington, 26, both forwards) returning to the '84 team, its average age is only 20.7 years--the youngest in U.S. Olympic hockey history. Leading the offense is "the Diaper Line": Center Pat LaFontaine, 18, and Wings David A. Jensen, 18, and Ed Olczyk, 17. LaFontaine, sweet-natured and teen-idol cute, left his home in Pontiac, Mich., in 1982 to sharpen his skills in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, where he scored 104 goals to break records set by Islander Mike Bossy and Montreal Canadien Guy Lafleur. The U.S. Olympic chief assistant coach, Tim Taylor of Yale, praises LaFontaine's See-ing-Eye hands: "He has a quick stick and a fast release with no waste motion."

Though his teammates call him "Franny" (short for "the franchise"), LaFontaine is modest about his celebrity. "Playing in the Olympics is a dream come true," he says. After Sarajevo, LaFontaine will join the four-time Stanley Cup-winning Islanders; he could thus follow in Morrow's skatesteps as that rare athlete who wins an Olympic gold medal and a professional championship ring in the same year. "Gosh, wouldn't that be great?" whispers Superkid. "Two dreams come true."

LaFontaine is not the only budding superstar on the 1984 team.

Fellow Diaper Liner Olczyk is judged by pro scouts to be an instant starter in the N.H.L. Born in Chicago, he started playing hockey at six. "My ankles hurt so much I cried," he recalls. "But my mom wouldn't let me quit." Now Olczyk is the Olympic team's third-highest scorer, chugging up the ice with deceptive speed, passing sharply and firing one of the hardest shots on the squad. "I play like it's life and death all the time," he says with intensity. This fall, when his team played exhibitions against the N.H.L., Olczyk would give the pros fits during the game, then earnestly ask for their autographs afterward. Another Olympian, baby-faced Al lafrate, 17, describes himself as being "in shock when I heard I'd made the team." The smooth defenseman will soon make another team: scouts say he may be the first pick in this June's N.H.L. draft.

At the very least, all the Olympic skaters would be in shape for the pros' grueling schedule; they will have played 65 exhibitions and logged more than 50,000 miles, traveling to rinks from Finland to Soldotna, Alaska (pop. 2,320). Their record is good: 37 wins, 18 losses and 8 ties, including a 3-3-1 split against N.H.L. teams and 5-4-3 against the Canadian Olympic team.

The highlight of the U.S. Olympic exhibition season has been a six-game series against the Soviet Selects, 20 players just below the level of the U.S.S.R. Olympians.

Playing before huge crowds that waved American flags and chanted "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" the locals won the series, 3-2-1. It was the first time any North American national squad, U.S. or Canadian, amateur or N.H.L., had defeated a Soviet national team in a series on this continent. (Since 1977, U.S. amateurs have an honorable 10-12-3 record against Soviet hockey squads.) "We grew up as a team against the Selects," says Vairo.

"There was a game we played in Cleveland, with 16,700 people in the stands, and in the first period we scored three goals and shut them down on every inch of the ice.

I wish I could have bottled that period. That was gold-medal hockey."

Team U.S.A. will have to play gold-medal hockey in Sarajevo if it has hopes of winning even a bronze. The U.S. is seeded only fourth in the tough Blue Division, behind Czechoslovakia, Canada and Finland. It must gain at least a split of its first two games (against the Canadians and the Czechs) to advance to the medal round.

And there the Soviets--the real Soviet team, which former Canadien Goalie Ken Dryden has called "the greatest hockey team in the history of the game"--lie in wait, hot for revenge. In the recent Izvestiya international tournament in Moscow, the Soviet team handily won every game, playing all likely Olympic opponents but the Americans. One Philadelphia hockey writer imagined a U.S.-U.S.S.R. game in Sarajevo as being like "the Brady Bunch going up against the A-Team." U.S. Assistant Coach Dave Peterson, who scouted the Soviets, finds them better and deeper than in 1980. "But I didn't see a single team in Moscow, including the Soviets, that we can't skate with," says he. "If we play our best, it's not unrealistic to expect a medal."

It was unrealistic in 1980. Indeed, it was the furthest thing from the minds of just about everyone in the world. Now the 1984 team laces up its skates to see if a children's crusade from America can beat the world's best. The smart money says no. According to Fischler, "Our defense can probably handle the physical part, but when the Russians start their razzle-dazzle checkerboard game, they could psych our young guys out and drive them crazy." Others argue that beyond the Diaper Line, the U.S. team does not have the scoring punch to stay competitive on offense. "Maybe so," says Vairo. "But a lot of the same things were said in 1980, and look what happened. I'm still a believer in dreams. And in my dreams, we win." --By Richard Corliss. Reported by Lee Grlggs with the U.S. hockey team

With reporting by Lee Griggs