Hockey proxy

Via TWO championships

If we’re going to hang our conviction of American exceptionalism on Olympic hockey tournament results, we at least ought to include credit to the women who also serve in that war-without-bullets.

Yes, the U.S. men this week conjured a rollicking gold-medal overtime victory over Canada, their first Olympic title since the so-called “Miracle on Ice” of 1980, a semifinal shocker over the Soviet Union, cast in the role of international menace. (Talk about a morality play!)

But it somehow was only reluctantly acknowledged by the self-appointed manly man in the Oval that the American women’s team was equally successful at the Milan Cortina Games.

In fact, if it’s global superiority Donald Trump yearns to reinforce through hockey, there is the matter of three gold medals won by the American women in eight Olympic tournament appearances, with four silver and a bronze in the other five. The U.S. men, meanwhile, now total three golds in 26 Winter Games over 106 years.

One of those successes by the guys, of course—the most recent before Sunday, 46 years ago—set off a similar beating-of-the-chests on these shores. But in far different circumstances.

In 1980, the Soviets were the established international hockey heavyweights and, on an implied level, were the athletic extension of a government considered the world’s most dangerous nuclear-age bully, its players assumed to be malevolent Communist robots.

Real enemies, if you will. Contrast that to the fact that this year’s winning American men’s goalie plays professionally in Canada, for Winnipeg, and 22 of the 25 members of the Canadian Olympic team make their living with U.S.-based teams. So this bunch of international opponents are now returning to NHL action as familiar professional teammates.

There were no NHL pros involved in ’80, the Cold War still was raging, and the Olympics—theoretically above politics but so often a proxy for ideological and political conflict—was handy for some sabre rattling and nationalistic bluster. Plus, we Yanks were hungry for some form of self-assurance, in a funk of insecurity over the Iran hostage crisis and outraged by the USSR invasion of Afghanistan two months earlier.

(Twenty-one years later, U.S. policy makers invaded Afghanistan, but that’s another story.)

So the meaning of that big game in Lake Placid was immediately inflated—perverted, really—as a representation of global pre-eminence. Herb Brooks, the U.S. coach, called his team’s 4-3 victory evidence that our way of life was better than the Soviets’. U.S. editorials declared that the hockey triumph “lifted the spirits of Americans everywhere.” The whole thing was schmaltzified—splendid hockey gone to hokey—and eventually Disneyfied in the 2004 movie “Miracle.”

Thoughtful people right after the 1980 game lamented the war mentality attached to that hockey summit, and how flimsy it was to hang one’s hat on the result of a sporting event. ABC-TV’s Jim McKay, widely respected for his work amid the Olympics’ brotherhood-of-man idealism, nevertheless had veered into jingoism when he signed off at the close of those Games, sounding near tears over the U.S. hockey victory. “What an Olympics!” McKay gushed. “What a country! Let’s say it here: We are a great people!”

Except: What if our hockey lads hadn’t won the Big Door Prize that winter? And what about the fact that, overall, the East Germans (23) and Soviets (22) both accumulated more medals in those Games than the Americans (12)? Were we therefore a lesser form of humans?

Plus, there was this: Because of the USSR military incursion into Afghanistan shortly before the Lake Placid Opening Ceremonies, President Jimmy Carter—who twice telephoned Herb Brooks with congratulations and called the hockey players “American heroes”—had ordered a U.S. boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow scheduled that summer.

A U.S. Summer Olympian, volleyball player Debbie Green, was among those outraged by the political hypocrisy. “The athletes in the Winter Games,” she said, “get all the praise for their work, and now just because our Games are in Moscow, we’re accused of being un-American” for wanting to compete.

Of course sports always is an Us-against-Them exercise. You choose your side, identify with your tribe. Here in 2026, you add Donald Trump’s Manifest Destiny pretentions and his mob-boss vision of Canada as the 51^st state, wrapping himself in the flag figuratively raised by our athletes in those two Olympic finals against our Neighbors to the North.

Let’s say it here: Whatever the hockey skills and player grit at work—and the championship games were fabulous theatre on the big stage—winning Olympic gold is no test of national strength, no proof that God is on our side. The competition is Us-against-Them, but the result is not a manifestation of Good-vs.-Evil, no verification of special virtue in the United States. Or, in this case, no evidence that it is a man’s world.

As Abigail Adams cued a previous U.S. President: “Remember the ladies.”