Favorites Friday: Jim Craig

Welcome to the new series I'm starting here, folks! My plan is to dedicate Fridays to my Olympic favorites; athletes, moments, logos, whatever. I can't promise a post every Friday (because let's be real), but that's what I'm going to shoot for. Dream big, right? And hey, I do rather enjoy talking about things I love, so I'm sure I won't have to twist my own arm into blogging regularly.

So, onwards!

There really isn't a better place to start my list of favorites than with Jim Craig. (I know, I've been on a serious Miracle kick lately. Sshh. Just go with it.)

Prior to reading The Boys of Winter, all I really knew about him was that he was the goalie of the most well-known hockey team ever, and that his on-screen counterpart was Eddie Cahill, who is extremely attractive. I, however, am not one to like an athlete (or anyone, really) just because he's attractive (or, in this case, the guy portraying him is attractive). There has to be a good human being in there for me to care. So I liked him and all, but was pretty ambivalent about it.

Jim Craig and Herb Brooks.
(Eddie Cahill might have some competition...)

But this was one of those cases in which the more I learned about him, the more I grew to love him. Seriously. I'm still waiting for something to make me like him less, but I'm now a movie, a documentary, two books and at least a dozen articles in and it hasn't happened yet. It's a bit of a situation.

I think all that really needs to be said about him is that he would write a note to his mom before he went to school every morning that said, "Have a great day, mom, I love you." And that, when his mom got really sick during his first year at Boston University, he took the T to visit her in the hospital almost every night after practice. And that, "[d]uring the pre-Olympic tour, the players moved into apartments together in the Twin Cities area; Craig lived in the basement of Doc Nagobads’ house. It not only spared him from paying rent and left him more money to send home each month, but it was the homier, family environment he preferred. Craig missed him mother profoundly and became especially fond of Velma Nagobads, Doc’s wife. He was much more inclined to spend time at the kitchen table with the Nagobadses than to go out with the guys." And, of course, there's the iconic image of him on the ice at the Olympics, clutching the American flag, eyes scanning the crowd, asking, "Where's my father?"

Do you want to hug him, or is it just me? Because I really, really want to hug him.

He was also apparently a bit of a loner, very self sufficient, and not overly chummy with most of the guys on the team because it just wasn't his priority. However, "If you were Jim’s friend, he absolutely could not do enough for you or say enough to make you feel good.” I think we would've been best friends if he wasn't 22, oh, eleven years before I was born. Sigh.

I hear he lives in St. Petersburg, FL now, though. He sounds like the kind of guy that would want to come to a University of Miami men's ice hockey game, right?

Hey, a girl can dream!

The Boys of Winter

Is it just me, or does anyone else own movies and rarely watch them, but freak out in excitement and glue yourself to the couch if they're on TV?

That's what happened to me early in my holiday break. One night I stumbled across Miracle airing on AMC. It was almost halfway through, but I hadn't seen it probably in years and I LOVE it, so I settled in for the night. It aired again the next three nights in a row, and I watched parts of it each time. And each time, I got goosebumps when Mike Eruzione yelled, "I play for the United States of America!," cried when Ralph Cox got cut, and found myself nervous, sweaty and on the edge of my seat during the game against the Soviets.

This is a big part of the reason why I can't watch Miracle too often; it requires a certain mindset. It's not just a mindless movie I can pop in at any time. It's a pretty emotional process. But watching it reminded me how utterly obsessed with it I am, which spawned my current quest to learn as much about the 1980 US hockey team as possible. So I hit Amazon and ordered The Boys of Winter by Wayne Coffey. It's a book written by the co-author of RA Dickey's autobiography, about America's greatest Olympic moment ever. How bad could it be?

Not bad at all. In fact, pretty spectacular.

When you watch the movie, you kind of forget that there are 20+ guys on the team, because we only really meet Mike Eruzione, Jim Craig, Jack O'Callahan, Rob McClanahan, and Ralph Cox. All other names are mentioned in passing, faces shown in montages. You don't pay attention to "Mark Pavelich, UMD Bulldogs," or "Knocked away by Morrow!" But in this book, each player gets the focus. It might just be a paragraph, or it might be an entire chapter (only Jim Craig was bestowed that honor), but suddenly all those background boys became real people.

Buzz Schneider was the only guy on the 1980 team that was also on the 1976 team, and very well could've been voted team captain over Eruzione. Mark Wells was sent down and spent months playing in the minors before being called back up to the team only days before the games. Bah Harrington kept a little spiral notebook where he recorded all of Herb Brooks's sayings. Steve Janaszak was the only hockey player in Lake Placid to not play a single minute in a game. Mark Pavelich accidentally shot and killed his best friend when they were out hunting together. Jack O'Callahan was accepted to Harvard but chose to go to Boston University because he thought it gave him a better chance to win a national championship. Mike Eruzione was very nearly cut from the team in January before the Olympics.

What's also really cool is watching Miracle and being able to notice character traits that I hadn't before. When they're all at the bar doing their psychology tests, Phil Verchota finishes first; he was a decorated student. The first shot of Rob McClanahan is of him meticulously taping his stick, then unraveling it and doing it again; the guys on the team apparently teased him about "the fastidious manner in which he prepared his sticks." When Herb calls the Conehead line into his office, Buzz and Bah chat away while all Mark Pavelich says is, "Yeah. Pass, shoot and score"; he was extremely introverted and quiet, even around his closest friends. We almost never see Jim Craig interacting with the team in a chummy sort of way; making friends wasn't his priority, and he was very self-sufficient and a bit of a loner.


Unfortunately, though, I now also know which aspects of the movie are nothing but Hollywood. I won't ruin the illusion for you (because a lot of it is massively disappointing), but I will say this: would it have killed them to tell the guy playing Ken Morrow to grow a beard?

All in all, it's a really fantastic read. It blends the boys' stories in with play-by-play from the Soviet game and includes some really cool insights into the Lake Placid Games. I highly recommend it if you're interested in learning more about the individual people that made up the most famous team in American sports history!