In February, when Jack Hughes found the space under Team Canada goalie Jordan Binnington’s left pad, a space slightly bigger than the one made earlier on his front teeth, snatching the first U.S. Olympic men’s hockey gold medal in 46 years, it triggered euphoria, relief, redemption and whatever else you got.
For me, it was just triggering. Why did the hero have to be named Jack Hughes?
Hughes is the 90th most popular surname in the United States, and the Jack in front of it consistently lands in the top 30, and parents still wake predawn to take their kids to the rink. But come on. Jack Hughes? The same name as the last player cut from the 1980 Miracle on Ice team?
There’s irony, there’s karma, and then there’s rubbing it in.
Five nights after the victory over Canada, I’m up watching Miracle, the 2004 much-more-good-than-flawed Disneyfication of the 1980 team. Twenty-nine minutes in, Patti Brooks (Patricia Clarkson) has this exchange with her husband, U.S. coach Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell):
Patti: “I know what this is about. I know it and you know it.”
Herb: “What? Know what?”
Patti: “This. What you’re doing. Chasing after something that you didn’t get. That you may never get. What if it doesn’t work out, Herb, huh? Are we gonna do this every four years?”
I had a prime seat for what happened with the original Jack Hughes: the press box. I covered him for three years at Harvard, where he was a Geryon-like, three-bodied defenseman (block, bang, finish), and I followed the Olympic team in the last three months of 1979 for the Albany Times-Union, where I wound up after I left Cambridge. If you’ve been to Albany, you know it’s not some of God’s best work. But it was the only job offer I got in May 1979, and I knew the Winter Games were only nine months and 140 miles away in Lake Placid.
By Christmas, I was in Placid for a pre-Olympic hockey tournament, where I interviewed Herb Brooks for the first and last time. I asked a couple questions. It, uh, did not go well.
Me: “Is there anyone you wish was here?”
Brooks: “Like who?”
Me: “[Boston College goaltender] Paul Skidmore.”
Brooks: “I got my goalie. Next.”
Me: “What about [All-American and future Hockey Hall of Famer] Joe Mullen?”
Brooks: “Joey Mullen made a decision to take care of his f—ing family.” (Mullen’s father was ill and his family’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment had collapsed, forcing him to turn pro and grab a $30,000 signing bonus from the Blues. Noted.)
Me: “You have to cut two more players.”
Brooks: “Right.”
Me: “How tough is that?”
Brooks: “Well, you’re talking to the guy who was the last player cut from the 1960 team, so you tell me …”
This. What you’re doing. Chasing after something that you didn’t get. That you may never get.
Herb Brooks was cut two weeks before the opening ceremony in Squaw Valley, Calif. Coach Jack Riley added three players at the deadline. All were silver medalists from the 1956 Games in Cortina: John Mayasich, formerly of the University of Minnesota, and the Cleary brothers, Bill and Bob, two years out of Harvard. Post-Miracle, younger brother Bob often told the story of pulling on his hockey pants before the first game in 1960 and seeing BROOKS inked into the lining.
“Jack Riley was calling me all the time to come out and join,” recalls Billy Cleary, now 91 and sharper than you or I ever were, and who would win an NCAA championship during his 20-year coaching career at Harvard. “I said I can’t afford it. He brought in me, Bobby and John. It caused some problems. They had been playing in Denver against Denver University the night before, lost, and had another game there the following night. We showed up. No one said a word. I thought, Well, this is gonna be fun. We went out for warmups and the three of us didn’t get a puck. But we wound up tying Denver.”
The 1960 team upset the Soviets (after Khrushchev ordered them to “bury the U.S.”) and the Czechs in the gold-clinching finale. The Clearys and Mayasich combined for 19 goals in seven games, all wins. Back home in Saint Paul, the 22-year-old Brooks watched the 9–4 win over the Czechs with his father. “Well,” his dad said, “looks like they cut the right guy. …” (Brooks wasn’t just cut from the team, he was retouched. In a post-Games photo of the 1960 squad distributed by USA Hockey, he’s in the back row, except that his head had been lopped off and replaced by Mayasich’s.)
The U.S. won the 1980 pre-Olympic tourney easily, dispatching JV teams from the Soviet Union and Sweden, and were presented with gold medals that seemed more like upgraded participation trophies. I was aware of how precarious Hughes’s spot was, especially after Brooks moved Dave Christian, a lock to make the team, back to defense. I thought Jackie was more versatile and a step faster than the lumbering Bob Suter from Wisconsin. And I was confident Brooks wouldn’t be so uber-provincial that he’d carry nine of his former players from the University of Minnesota, and only four players from back East, all out of Boston University. But I was 22 and you couldn’t tell me anything. I’d seen Jackie Hughes dominate the ECAC for three seasons, and I’d seen him at an Eliot House party one night, doing a beer-soaked version of “Mother’s Little Helper” with two other guys years before karaoke was in the lexicon, or the appliance store.
Doctor, please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
So, you tell me.
“You’re wrong about Suter,” says John Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter and author of One Goal, the definitive and relentlessly vivid book about the 1980 team. “When Suter was healthy, he was a better skater than Jackie, more speed. Much better at puck movement, which was Herb’s whole Soviet-style game. Also, he was the kind of tough guy Herbie loved. Suter broke his ankle in late November and he thought he was done. That’s why he looked slow. But Herbie took him aside and said, ‘Take care of the ankle. You won’t lose any ground.’ Which he didn’t say to anyone. He wanted to keep them all on edge. The Wisconsin guys [Suter and leading scorer Mark Johnson] were always afraid they were gonna get cut because Herbie hated their coach [and Mark’s father], ‘Badger Bob’ Johnson. He hated the way his wife would show up at games in a red jumpsuit clanging a cowbell. Herb would say, ‘If Patti Brooks did that, I’d kick her ass all the way back to Shoreview.’ ”
What if it doesn’t work out, Herb, huh? Are we gonna do this every four years?
If Brooks had kept Hughes any more on edge, he would have had to use his stick like a Felipe Petit balancing pole. Powers had been writing about Hughes since he was a one-man gang at Malden Catholic, five miles north of Boston. “Herbie really got into his head,” Powers remembers, “Jackie told me he’d lie in bed at night and hear Herbie muttering ‘Hughes … Hughes …’ every time he would lug the puck out rather than pass it. Another time, he took me aside and said, ‘You know me. You’ve seen me play. I can play.’ ”
I left Placid just after Christmas, confident Jack Hughes and I would see each other in six weeks. But two things happened. At the end of January, I was told I would not be going to the Olympics. It was a plum gig for the closest midsize metropolitan daily, and the Times-Union decided to send two other guys, both older, both not me, one I had a problem with. Which was all you needed to know about me then.
Not long after—less than two weeks before the Games began—Jack Hughes was let go. Don’t believe Miracle, which claims that Ralph Cox from the University of New Hampshire was the last player cut. No. Herb called Jackie’s room, got no answer, then called Cox’s apartment, which he shared with Mike Eruzione. Cox was not surprised. (As Brooks often said about him, “Ralph’s got one problem. He just scores goals.”) Herb then called back and asked Eruzione, who answered, if he’d seen Jack.
“He’s right here.”
“Hand him the phone.”
Three days before the Olympics, the U.S. was routed by the legit Soviet team, 10–3, at Madison Square Garden. During the game, Jack O’Callahan, a gifted backliner with an infectious core, got his occasionally cranky knee caved in by a cheap shot. At first, doctors said he would need surgery and be out eight weeks. Herb was about to phone Hughes in Fort Worth, where he was playing for the Colorado Rockies’ CHL team, and tell him to get on a plane. The kind of phone you want to be handed. Instead, Brooks sought a second opinion, and was told O’C might miss three games. There was no call to Fort Worth. O’Callahan only missed the first game against Sweden, which the U.S. tied in the closing seconds after two and a half periods of play that Powers’s book described as looking “flatter than a 14th century globe.”
“Herbie wanted the uncommon man,” Powers says. “He loved O’Callahan, especially after he volunteered to be his whipping boy.” The deal had been made early in the Team USA’s barnstorming tour. “When I call you Jack,” Brooks tipped, “I’m yelling at you. When I call you O’C, I want them to see me yelling at you .”
Street-savvy and scary bright, O’Callahan had turned down a virtual full ride at Harvard for the actual full one on Commonwealth Ave., which Brooks adored. “O’Callahan’s smarter than you are,” Brooks said to Hughes at one point, “You were both admitted to Harvard, and he decided not to go.”
O’Callahan was also a townie’s townie. Another guy I had covered for four years. I wanted to interview him in Troy, N.Y, after the U.S. beat RPI in November, but was told he had gone home early to get his cranky knee checked out. I waited till just after 7 p.m. and called the Dugout Cafe, the dive-iest of BU dive bars.
“Dugout.”
“Jack O’Callahan there?”
“Hang on.”
“Hello?”
“O’C, this is Billy Scheft. We’ve known each other a while.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m in Albany following your team, and I was told you’d gone home, so I figured I find you here.”
“Well, aren’t you a hot s—?”
Yes. Yes, I was. Just ask me. After I learned that I wouldn’t be returning to Lake Placid, I set out to: 1) drink a good bit more; 2) turn myself into John the Hockey Baptist about how overlooked Team USA was; and 3) try not to be smug and bitchy when I was proven correct. I went two for three. I wrote two columns for the Times-Union. The first (u.s. hockey team not like ‘pick-up’ squads from the past) ran two weeks before the Games and opened with the lede “Americans like two things—underdogs and underdogs who live in the United States,” and concluded that anything less than a medal would be a disappointment. I also referred to lightly regarded Finland, which the U.S. wound up having to defeat Sunday morning after the Miracle game for the gold, thusly: “Here’s your sleeper ….”
The second column (“… and we did it their way”) came out two days after the Finland game. The point I was desperate to make was that the upset had nothing to do with America, that it was ultimately a tribute to the Soviets. We had co-opted their style of play, their commitment to conditioning and their belief that amateurs should play for pay. (The 1980 team was the first to give players a stipend, $7,200 for six months, twice what I was making at the Times-Union.) It was a point that certainly could have waited (see: smug, bitchy), but I got to squeeze in the phrase “jingo jangle of the morning,” so there was an urgency. Yes, I did get some mail, most of which contained suggestions to the effect of “Maybe Comrade Scheft would be more comfortable covering sports in Minsk.”
I saw the team when they reunited that summer for a parade down Main Street in Lake Placid and the four players from BU were now sporting Massachusetts vanity license plates with the Olympic rings and USA next to their uniform numbers (Jim Craig: 30, Eruzione: 21, O’Callahan: 17, Dave Silk: 8).
There would be more reunions in the ensuing 45 years. Ralph Cox and Jack Hughes were always invited. Don’t know about Cox, but Jack never showed. And really, can you blame him? Jack Hughes moved on. For many years, he and his brother George (another talented Harvard iceman, the older half of a pair, who, in mid-disco era, I had nicknamed the “Hughes Corporation”) were in business with O’Callahan: Beanpot Financial Services. Though originally based in Chicago, the outfit was named for the iconic local college hockey tournament, the Beanpot, held at the Boston Garden every February.
So yes, the original Jack Hughes moved on, which is more than you can say for me. Which dovetails back nicely to the subject of uniform numbers.
During the last three years of my 24 writing for David Letterman, the boss and I came up with a semi-regular segment, “Uniform Numbers with Bill Scheft.” The format was what we used to call a “refillable.” Me in a fake soundproof booth. Announcer Alan Kalter asking me obscure uniform numbers for a ridiculous amount of money. Me nailing it. Alan then correcting me on a wrong answer. Me correcting Alan. Alan asking nonexistent judges for confirmation. SFX: A bell. Alan reducing the money to nonsense and asking me to come back next week.
It was, like more than a few things, developed to tickle Dave, and it did that, along with me and almost no one else. We wound up doing five. The third featured Alan asking me for the numbers of the last four players cut from the 1980 team. Purposely, I did not give my answers in order. I just booth-barked, “Tim Harrer, No. 18; Jack Hughes, who shouldn’t have been cut, No. 12; Ralphie Cox, No. 14; and … Les Auge, No. 2.”
I thought about reaching out to Hughes, especially after his name was unwittingly resurrected, but come on. Not the phone you want handed to you. I did try to get a hold of the woman who had put us down this road: Ellen Hughes. The former UNH hockey standout and Team USA player—who served as a player development consultant for the 2026 U.S. Olympic women’s team—had dubbed the second of her three NHL boys Jack. The roux of this karmic gumbo only thickened when I learned that Ellen Hughes was in fact Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, with whom I had worked on the 1998 ESPYs, where she was a first-line member of the production team and I was adding the wiseass to Norm Macdonald’s now legendary monologue. (A monologue that ended with a line I still wish I could take credit for: “Heisman Trophy winner Charles Woodson is here. Charles, that’s something nobody can ever take away from you, unless you kill your wife and a waiter.”)
Ellen and I never connected. But really, what could she possibly have said? “Yeah, I heard that …”
Cleary chuckles when I run the name irony over him. “I hadn’t thought of it, in those terms.” he says. “Jackie was a great kid, but that has to happen when you’re putting a team together. I never talked to Jack after it happened. It was a fait accompli. You’re certainly not gonna second-guess a coach.”
One other thing. Herb Brooks had gotten the Olympic job only after it had been turned down. By Billy Cleary. Harvard coach Billy Cleary. Jack Hughes’s coach Billy Cleary.
This. What you’re doing. Chasing after something that you didn’t get. That you may never get.
Patricia Clarkson’s Disney dialogue compelled me to raise the unconscious. I suggested to Billy that maybe on some level, having been replaced on the 1960 team at the last minute by a Harvard guy, a Cleary brother no less, and getting the ’80 U.S. Olympic coaching job only after the other Cleary brother had passed, Herb Brooks was, on some unprobed level, trying to avenge a wrong.
“Absolutely not,” Billy says of Brooks, who died in 2003. “I was happy when Herbie got the job. I vouched for him. We were friendly. I knew him. I liked him. I coached against him. He was always a straightforward, principled guy.”
And then Billy Cleary sweep-checked that notion away with one story.
“Lake Placid was the only time I had gone back to the Olympics since 1960. I went to the arena before the game with Russia. I saw the players coming off after warmups. Hell, I knew half of them because I recruited them. I saw Herbie. I said, ‘I wish you well.’ That’s it. I start to walk out of the arena, and the trainer came after me and said, ‘Herbie wants you to speak to the players.’ I said, ‘Me?’
“People asked me, ‘What did I say?’ I told them, ‘I think I know what’s going through your mind. You’re up here in oblivion, in the middle of nowhere, and you think you’re isolated and no one is paying attention. But I’m telling you, you have captivated everyone. And there’s 20 guys rooting harder for you than anyone. And that’s the 20 guys from the Squaw Valley team.’ ”
All this way, and nobody’s sharing the trigger. Flailing, I reached out to Ed Swift, this very magazine’s Virgil for the epic poem that was Placid. “I actually didn’t put that together till later,” he wrote in an email from New Zealand. “I did love it that the winning goal was scored by the guy who lost his teeth, highlighting how friggin’ tough hockey players are compared to other sports. Absolutely nothing, nothing ever reminds me of or compares to 1980.”
O.K., O.K. … Don’t rub it in.
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