Success for Brooks Found in More Than the Results

He had too many ideas to spill out, too many plays to diagram in his angular, left-handed scrawl on borrowed bits of paper, too many opinions to offer -- whether solicited or not -- to merely chat.

He enlightened. He expounded. No point about hockey was too trivial for him to embrace with the zeal of a true believer.

Just as he told the members of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team each of them was "born to be a player" and destined to use every experience that led them to their game against the vaunted Soviet Red Machine at Lake Placid, Herb Brooks was meant to be a coach.

And he was a coach all of his life, a life that ended Monday at 66, too soon, in a one-car wreck on a Minnesota highway.

It was a life fully lived, and not only because he'd coached a bunch of mostly college kids to that stunning gold medal in 1980 and come back at Salt Lake City in 2002 to guide a team of NHL stars to a silver medal. It was enriched by his irrepressible wife, Patti -- she called him "the Mister" or "Himself," gently poking fun at his occasional tendency to take himself too seriously -- and by a son and daughter who had made him a grandfather many times over and reduced this most stoic of men to jelly at the sound of a coo.

Patti's Christmas newsletters were always the first to arrive in the holiday mail. She would describe her latest adventures and breezily add that Herb was "out somewhere," whether that meant scouting in northern Minnesota or coaching at the Olympics. They didn't need to live off that gold medal, and they never did.

He was proud of it, as well he should have been. It will never happen again.

It was convenient and catchy to call that triumph a "Miracle on Ice," but that was adopted only by those unaware that during the team's three-month pre-Olympic tour, Brooks pushed his players to the breaking point.

To make them fast and fit, he ordered them to do countless board-to-board sprints, which they derisively dubbed "Herbies." Few people knew that, or knew that Brooks assumed the role of "bad cop" to assistant Craig Patrick's "good cop," giving players someone to cry to. If they united in hatred of him, he didn't care, as long as they had a purpose and the strength to carry it out. And they did. Their young legs helped them pull out a tie in their Olympic opener against Sweden, rally to beat the more polished Soviets and score three times in the final period of the gold medal finale against Finland.