Tim Benz: Will America ever allow itself to have another 'Miracle'?

On Feb. 22, 2022, I’m going to start a new sports tradition at my house. On 2/22/22, I’m going to play the movie “Miracle” on a loop. Kinda like “A Christmas Story” on Christmas Day.

Corny as it may sound, I try to watch that movie on the anniversary of the American hockey team’s “Miracle on Ice” victory every year. It tells the story of how Team USA stunned the sports world by upsetting the seemingly invincible Russian team 4-3 (on Feb. 22) during the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics.

Sometimes I tear up when I hear Al Michaels bust out, “Do you believe in miracles?!” Sometimes during Herb Brooks’ pregame speech. Sometimes when the players enter the arena and stick tap the telegrams of well-wishers from across the country taped to the wall.

OK, not sometimes for the hallway scene. Every time. Maybe even as I’m writing about it right now.

Although when I watched it during the anniversary this Monday, I noticed myself getting emotional for different reasons. I didn’t get that welling sense of national pride or even the happy tears of nostalgia rolling down my cheeks.

I was welling up this time because I was bummed out when I realized something.

Our country is never going to let another great American team sports moment like that happen again. I seriously don’t think this nation is capable of unifying long enough to fully embrace, enjoy and collectively rally around anything under the banner of patriotism.

Especially since most of us see our own personal definition of “patriotism” as being accurate while dismissing anyone else’s.

Don’t worry. This isn’t going to be a backdoor attempt to dredge up another “kneeling during the national anthem” debate. But it’s awfully hard to get misty-eyed picturing our next American Olympic heroes gazing at the Stars and Stripes while the anthem plays, when nowadays all anyone seems to care about is who kneels during the song and who doesn’t.

Or, more to the point of late, maybe we’re just going to ditch playing the anthem altogether.

I’m going beyond “To kneel, or not to kneel, that is the question.” I’m talking about how major sports stories are covered these days. I’m talking about the seemingly unending need to suck the joy out of them long before “Oh, say can you see” ever comes off anyone’s lips.

Let’s not kid ourselves. If the “Miracle on Ice” had occurred in 2021 instead of 1980, Brooks never would’ve made it to Lake Placid. The social media police would’ve run him out of the job for making the players “bag skate” after tying Norway in a tune-up game. We wouldn’t have found out about that story years after the event. It would’ve been live-streamed on the rink manager’s Instagram story, and Brooks would’ve been fired before he got back to the hotel in Oslo.

Five minutes after Mike Eruzione scored against the Russians, some Twitter troll would’ve poured through his account to see if he had ever posted any illicit song lyrics. Maybe he would’ve been sent back to Boston before the gold medal game against Finland.

Somebody on ESPN probably would’ve launched into some kind of pearl-clutching monologue over how terrible it was that these college kids weren’t getting paid to play.

When, back in 1980, that was part of the charm of how they won.

If they won gold and went to visit President Biden at the White House, the right-wing opinion-makers would’ve fired up the “whataboutism” machine and screeched, “Why is that applauded, when many athletes refused to visit when Donald Trump was in office?!”

Meanwhile, the left-wing opinion-makers would’ve ripped the team for a lack of diversity and questioned if the women’s team got a commensurate amount of funding and television airtime.

Actually, the Huffington Post ran a full story stuffed with tweets jabbing some of the “Miracle on Ice” players for showing up at a Trump rally 40 years later. One of the tweets even used the word “scumbags.”

Then we would’ve lashed out at the players for running up seven goals on the Czech Republic in the preliminary round because that showed poor sportsmanship, American arrogance and “privilege.”

Think I’m exaggerating? Go back and read what was said about the second basketball “Dream Team” in 1994. Or when Charles Barkley of the original “Dream Team” pushed around Angola in 1992. And that was three decades before Twitter-shaming was a thing.

Not to mention, “Hockey?! How can we care about sports at a time like this? Don’t you know there’s a pandemic going on?! And why wasn’t Jim Craig double-masking under his goalie helmet, anyway?!”

Now, I’m not naive. I understand that political undercurrents were at the very core of the Lake Placid story. It was us against the Russians. Capitalism versus Communism. Afghanistan, n’at.

Yup. I get it.

But I also know that Brooks did whatever he could to keep the focus on winning a hockey game. Not winning the Cold War.

I’m also aware that for a few weeks before and after those Olympics, that team gave the country a distraction from political and social strife. It wasn’t used as a wedge to further divide the country within our borders while we also obsess over what was happening thousands of miles away.

Were those days oozing with good ol’ flag wavin’ propaganda? Of course.

So what? I could use a little of that right about now. I long for those years when Americans looked at that flag on Craig’s shoulders and saw the “us” in “USA” instead of thinking, “It ain’t my country if the guy in the White House didn’t get my vote!”

There was too much of that in 2008. Too much of that in 2016. And too much of that over the last three months as well.

In part, the 1980 story was easy to write because we had a “bad guy” on the other bench. Rightly or wrongly. Fairly or not. The Russians — as a team and a country — were cast as the evil, dangerous villains on the other side of the world.

Now in America, bad guys are at home. Just on the other side of the political aisle from where you sit.

That’s a lot harder to rationalize when the puck is dropped or a ball is put in play. And it’s harder to come together in unity when the enemy might live on the other side of your picket fence, as opposed to the other side of the Iron Curtain.

As the movie itself portrays, things really stunk in 1980, too. Like now, times were bad. But at least back then we were smart enough to see something good and treat it that way, instead of finding reasons for it to be flawed.

I think it would take the biggest “miracle” ever for us to understand that again in 2021.