“This Impossible Dream Comes True!” – Al Michaels, 1980 Winter Olympics Gold Medal Game
45 years ago. That’s how long it’s been since the “impossible dream” followed “Do you believe in miracles?” FORTY-FIVE YEARS! Where has the time gone? Mike Eruzione, Jim Craig, Ken Morrow, Jack O’Callahan and the rest of the 1980 Team USA roster have long since etched their names in American history.
Now, 45 years to the day, Ken Morrow and longtime sports writer Allan Kreda, are bringing you back to where it all began, with a terrific new book entitled, “Ken Morrow: Miracle Gold, Four Stanley Cups, and a Lifetime of Islanders Hockey.”
Monday night, on the anniversary of the impossible dream coming true, the New York Islanders organization celebrated Morrow and Kreda’s new tome. Morrow took photos with replicas of the four Stanley Cups he won with the Isles after helping Team USA finish off the miracle. He posed for pictures with his Gold Medal from those 1980 Olympic games. Kreda, who has covered the Islanders (as well as the Rangers, Devils and NHL) for decades, took it all in alongside his family, friends and colleagues.
Together, they are the dream team and together, they have created this new book that is a riveting read for hockey fans. But as with any book that we review as part of our weekly “Blittner’s Blue Line” column, we had to talk with the authors to delve deeper into its pages.
So, first, let’s find out why these two came out with the book when they did. After all, this year is the 45th anniversary of “The Miracle.” It’s not the 40th or the 50th.
“It wasn’t something I ever thought about,” Morrow admits. “Over the last 40 years of my life, I would have people come up to me and tell me, ‘Hey, you should write a book.’ And I think it just didn’t register with me at the time. I was younger and had other things happening in my life. But, the timing was (now) right. A couple years ago, Allan Kreda, who I co-wrote the book with, asked me the question and I like to say it was the right person asking the question and it was the right time in my life. We decided to give it a try and I’m so thankful that I did.”
“It was more of just the happenstance of an idea at the time of the Islanders’ 50th anniversary season,” Kreda chimed in. “Two years ago, when we hatched the idea, Ken and I, of putting it all together, The Cups, The Gold Medal, all of it. And then, the publisher loved the idea. So, we targeted the 45-year (anniversary). That’s a five. It’s a key number. Go with that. So the whole essence of timing was to release it the week of the 45th anniversary of the Gold Medal at Lake Placid.”
Okay, so we can now see this book was in the works for a few years. But now that it’s here, how is Morrow feeling about being an author? After all, the four-time Stanley Cup Champion has admitted that he has been called many things during his life, but “an Author” was never one of them.
“It feels great,” The US Olympic hero detailed. “I’ve always said I’m not a spotlight kind of guy. I don’t seek that kind of attention and I certainly wasn’t looking for that with this book. The way Allan explained it to me and it was a big selling point, was, ‘that this can be your story that you can leave to your kids, your grandkids.’ And when I looked at it like that I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ Again, without all of his help, I never would’ve gotten through it.”
That help and support was obviously key and it also led Morrow and Kreda to become much closer friends.
“It has become a really super friendship,” Kreda explained. “Because we shared so much. We talked through so many memories, experiences and moments that maybe he hadn’t thought of in a long time. We connected with family and friends, teammates. So it became this sort of collection of stories that were organically put together, which created more and more stories. So, it just became a friendship beyond what we anticipated.”
Speaking of stories…This book certainly has them in spades.
“The book mostly covers about a 15-year period from my college playing days in the mid-70s through to the end of my career in 1990,” Morrow said. “I don’t know that I have a favorite story. There’s just so many things. I will say, the most emotional part of it, for me, was the chapter on my father. I did a couple chapters just on my childhood and then my father and having to kind of relive some of that in the writing of the book. To dig through old photos brought back so many memories and it was a pretty emotional time writing that chapter for me.”
Morrow may not have a “favorite” story of the many, many stories he shares in the book, but Kreda pinpoints a couple that stand out to him that fans will likely take notice of.
“There were several from both the Islanders side and the Olympic side,” Kreda explained. The Olympic one that really struck me was the story about a car with Mike Eruzione and Ralph Cox, who was the last player cut from the 1980 team. They bought Kenny’s brother’s 1972 Camaro for $400, to use in Minnesota, when they were sort of in the training zone, living on a stipend and making no money. They used that car for those few months and then literally gave it back and got the $400 back. That’s how they did it in 1980. It was so basic, so innocent and beautiful. So that had to go in.
“And then, as far as the Islanders, it was one story after another. We started with 1983, which was the year of the fourth Cup, being won in a sweep of the Oilers. In the fourth game, the sweep game, Ken Morrow put the puck in the empty net to cinch it and that alleviated all the pressure of potentially having to go back to Edmonton for a Game Five, which nobody wanted to do.
“When he put that puck in the empty net, in the waning seconds on May 17th, 1983, the guys hugged at center ice. They all said, ‘I love you,’ and Ken said ‘I love you guys.’ If you see the clip on YouTube, it’s as clear as day. ‘I love you guys.’ Bob Nystrom confirmed it. Denis Potvin confirmed it. That’s a theme from the Islanders dynasty. But the one caveat was that Bob Nystrom, to this day, is upset that Kenny didn’t pass him the puck for the easy empty-net goal.”
Maybe Morrow will take Nystrom out for a nice dinner one day to “bury” the hatchet. After all, it’s only been 42 years. But in all seriousness, this is a one-of-a-kind book and it also corrects some inaccuracies that people have assumed were true because they watched the movie “Miracle” that came out in 2004.
“The movie had some mistakes,” Kreda pointed out. “It had some misses in there. With Kenny in particular. They had him without a beard, which was ridiculous. They had him shooting lefty, which is wrong. And they had him being faked out on a goal by Sergei Makarov, I believe, putting the puck through his legs and scoring, which is not correct. It was more of a deflection that got back on somebody’s stick. So they had three errors that were directly related to Ken and we fixed those.”
Mistakes aside, that movie is a big reason why the current generation of hockey players knows about the 1980 Miracle On Ice team. After all, just look at the players on Team USA who just played in the Four Nations Face-Off Tournament. They all said how they watched the movie to get inspired and charged up for the recent competition.
“Disney did an incredible job,” Morrow said. “First and foremost they brought our story to a whole new generation of kids who hadn’t been born in 1980, which was very important. So yeah, when I get people who come up to me, if they were born before 1980, their memories of it when they were a kid, are with their parents watching the game. But because so much time has passed a lot of the people who come up to me wanna talk about the movie and ask me about it. So yeah, it’s helped this moment live on.”
1980 stories aside, this book also covers Morrow’s years with the Islanders when they were a dynasty, as well as his childhood. Overall, it’s one book that you should go out of your way to read. So check it out at: https://a.co/d/aXPMEUo.
