so would I (Marty Balin)
In the aftermath of the Mark Pavelich passing i turned to You Tube. I re-watched a 1 hour documentary about that 1980 team and memories galore came flooding back.
in the summer/fall of 1979 i closely followed the US Olympic hockey team as best i could.....which if you too were old enough to remember 1979 meant i would check the NY Post for the overnight scores and hope they had a blip about international or exhibition scores. only about 10 Ranger road games a year were carried on channel 9....no home games of course unless you went to Manhattan for cable......there was no E.S.P.N...heck the 1975 Stanley cup finals appeared on PBS..the flyers-sabres classic series was briefly interrupted by Monty Python commercials and some liberal flames begging for donations..........no articles about the team to speak of......nobody covered college hockey so i had never heard of any of the players or even knew who the coach was.......but every week or so a score would appear in the paper....just the final score....and i being a naïve 14 year old started to believe that we had a pretty good hockey team......i remember telling my oldest brother Jay that we were going to win a medal at Lake Placid....he laughed........a few months before the actual Olympics they held a pre-olympic tournament at Lake Placid.....according to the papers.....still no real coverage......and we beat the Russians....Holy Cow....I was Right.......i couldn't wait to tell my brother.......but he scoffed and laughed some more.......he told me that the Russians were so good that they had a B Team and a C team......he told me that Tretiak and the others would never play in a silly pre-olympic tournament....he reminded me that when the Russians mopped up the NHL the prior year that they sent a second team in addition to the National Team......(Moscow Dynamo if i recall).........deep down i knew he was right , but i held out hope.......one night during a Ranger road game in November they ran an ad for tickets to see the USA mens team play the Russians in mid December at the Garden......i begged my father to get tickets from work..........i think...and i could be wrong.....but i think he could have gotten them but nobody was wiling go to the game with me on a weeknight in December....and there was never a possibility that i was getting the Pfizer Red Seats to go to the game with Steve Mac......even at 14 i was knee deep in trouble 80% of the time ...and Mac was Mac.........the game wasn't televised and i couldn't find a radio feed.......i distinctly remember calling sports phone for an update and hearing Pat Hallas state that the russians were putting on a clinic at MSG.......i think it was 3-0 before people settled into their seats.....and 10-3 final........in the documentary i watched over the weekend Al Michaels referenced that game and said it wasn't as close as the 10-3 score indicated.........well.......i grudgingly accepted the fact that my brother was right.
tomorrow i will share the fascinating tale of where in the world i was on February 22nd 1980....it's a doozy.....and one of the top moments in my life where I thank God that the stars alligned just the way they did.
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