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Mike Eruzione was the captain of the 1980 United States Olympic hockey team. Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; George Tiedemann / Sports Illustrated / Getty Images
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In Mike Eruzione’s words, he’s not a very “deep” person.
Which is funny, considering his résumé is stacked with experiences that people spend their whole lives dreaming about.
For one, as captain of the famed 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, Eruzione scored the winning goal against the Soviet Union in the semifinals, then led his team to a gold medal with a win over Finland.
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Yet amid all of the buildup to those games, and even minutes beforehand, he wasn’t thinking too hard about what any of it meant or what would happen if his team won.
“I was just enjoying it,” he said, laughing.
It’s not that Eruzione hasn’t lived deeply; it’s that he has. However, the gap between the scale of his experiences and the casual way he frames them reveals his mindset. Maybe that’s also why he thrived under pressure.
Eruzione believes anyone can tap into that mindset. Here are three ways:
It wasn’t until the “Miracle on Ice” team went to the White House that Eruzione had his “holy s— this thing is huge” moment.
However, in many ways, that was a good thing.
The U.S. team stayed in a little village in Lake Placid, N.Y., for the Olympics, where there were three TV stations and obviously no social media. He called their living situation “a little cocoon.”
They weren’t aware of what was being said or written about them. Every one of them was trying to enjoy the moment and embrace what they were doing. They weren’t going downtown to bars or restaurants, Eruzione said, just sharing the time in the village with their teammates.
Looking back, he believes that was crucial to their attitude throughout the games. They fed off each other’s positive energy without having to spend any more energy on blocking out negative comments.
It’s why Eruzione hopes that this U.S. Olympic team, and anyone really, finds ways to avoid negative energy in any form.
“There’s always going to be somebody that doesn’t like something that you do or are doing,” he said. “You’re always going to find somebody that’s critical of you. So ignore it. People can be cruel. And jealous. But we can’t control any of that anyway. Laugh it off or smile and just move on with your life.
“You can’t let it bother you.”
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Eruzione’s sense of self didn’t come from his Olympic success.
“I was very happy with who I was before the Olympics and very happy with who I am today,” he said.
From an early age, he established values he wanted to live by: working hard, respecting others, kindness. By leaning into those values when he needed them most, he developed a mindset that made it easier to trust his preparation, compete freely and perform at his best.
When nerves do take over, Eruzione found that focusing on being a good teammate enhanced his performance.
In his words, it’s “kind of a simple formula.”
If you ask Eruzione, the 1980 team’s head coach, Herb Brooks, must have said the words, “play your game” 500,000 times during the Olympics.
However, each time, the meaning of those words was drilled deeper and deeper into the players’ heads.
“Let them worry about us,” Eruzione said. “And we’re not going to worry about them. We’re just going to do the things that we need to do in order to win.”
It was a simple motto, but it had a real impact.
Then, when Eruzione and his team beat Norway in their third game of the Olympics, they were “on to the next game.” And again, even after they beat the Soviets in the “Miracle on Ice” game, they were “on to Finland,” Eruzione said. The way Brooks talked kept their focus from wavering.
When they did make it to the gold medal game, and they were losing 2-1 after the second period, it was this kind of language that set the tone.
“I can’t tell you how many guys were saying: ‘There is no way a bunch of Fins are keeping us from a gold medal,’” he said.
That was it. It wasn’t, Oh no, we’re losing. It was, There is no way we are going to lose.
The shift in how players talked to themselves and each other was, in many ways, their secret formula. And it’s been Eruzione’s formula ever since.
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Elise Devlin is a content producer for Peak, The Athletic’s new vertical covering sports leadership, personal development and success. Before joining The Athletic, she worked as a TV news reporter and anchor for WSPA 7NEWS, a CBS affiliate.
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