We the People: The Moment We’re Born For

The winter Olympics are near the top of my favorite sporting events. What’s not to love? Ski racing and ice dancing among the plethora of competitions. That includes hockey. I’m not a huge hockey fan, but the USA’s defeat of the Soviet Union’s team in the 1980 Olympics remains etched in my memory as it likely is for many older Americans.

The American team’s victory had profound effects and repercussions beyond the Olympics. One was that it helped revive the spirits of a nation in doubt. It gave us hope and reminded us that despite our woes, our best days weren’t behind us.

When the Olympics opened, America was still reeling from the twin pincers of inflation and gas shortages from the 1970s. Unemployment was soaring. Revolutionaries in Iran who had overrun the American embassy in 1979 still held the American diplomats and other personnel hostage. The Soviet Union was on the march, having just invaded Afghanistan, a colossal mistake America would repeat two decades later. In short, things looked dire.

But life went on. The Winter Olympiad opened in February at Lake Placed, NY under a mixed spell of pride and a touch of fatalism about the seemingly hopelessly outmatched American hockey team that consisted of middling amateurs from upper Midwest and New England universities. I say “middling” not because they weren’t skilled but because of how they stacked up against other nations’ teams, especially the one from the Soviet Union. It was the big red monster that ostensibly was undefeatable. But the American team, under the disciplined coaching of University of Minnesota Coach Herb Brooks, did defeat it in thrilling fashion. It’s a story of legend, one for the ages.

That was forty-six years ago, but another Olympic feat played out forty-four years prior also had profound effects and repercussions. The 1936 Olympics were to be a spectacle, an aggrandizement of the power and glory of Nazi Germany. It’s eight-man rowing squad was considered a favorite to win the gold. But it was not to be. An upstart crew from the University of Washington that had little rowing experience took the gold despite the Nazis rigging the competition to give their team a distinct advantage.

Both feats come to mind because of the circumstances Americans faced then and face now. In 1936, Nazi Germany was growing in power and getting poised to overrun Europe and threaten America. In 1980, the heavily nuclear armed Soviet Union was a threatening menace. Today though, the threat to our democracy comes not from outside but from within.

While watching the Netflix documentary, Miracle: The Boys of ’80, I was delightfully carried back to that time. I found myself simultaneously laughing and choking up when listening to the surviving players tell their stories and watching vintage film clips of the players as young men and of those epic games.

I couldn’t resist comparing and contrasting it to the 1936 row team’s feat. One way they were different was in the players’ initial skillsets. The hockey players were already highly skilled, so Coach Brooks had plenty of raw talent with which to work. The row team, on the other hand, was anything but. Although they weren’t complete naifs when it came to rowing a boat, they were lightyears from being able to row an eight-oar boat in perfect tandem.

They—rowers and hockey players alike—shared a notable commonality: They were sons of blue collar, working class families, although Joe Rentz, the heart of the Huskies’ crew, sadly didn’t have much of a family. As such, they shared important character traits: grit, determination, and mental toughness, requisite attributes for not just surviving under a hard-nosed coach but thriving and excelling.

That steeliness in resolve was instilled in them by their families and culture and developed and hardened through tough lives filled with hard work. And they reveled in it.

It’s the same steeliness in resolve evinced by regular people protesting on the bitter-cold streets of Minneapolis and across the nation. They’re among the ones Teddy Roosevelt called “the man in the arena,” polar opposites of elites hiding—cowering—behind secure lives of status and privilege. Exemplars of what James Madison and company envisioned when they penned the First Amendment, they’re inspirational and reassuring.

In challenging times, it’s not in self-centered and soft-hand economic elites we should trust, but in the common people. Their—ours—steadfast resolve and accomplishments both as teams and as individuals, often against all odds, feed the fire of hope.

In his terse words to the squad before the game against the Soviet Union’s team, Coach Brooks cut to the chase when he said: “This is the moment you were born for.”

As it is ours.