Patrick's miraculous ride
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To listen to the silence on the other end of the telephone, you would have thought I asked Craig Patrick to pick the favorite of his four kids and four grandchildren.
In a sense, I guess I did.
"Would you rather have that miraculous Olympics hockey gold medal from 1980 or the two Stanley Cups with the Penguins in '91 and '92?"
"You can't pick between the two," Patrick finally said.
Who would want to?
"All I know is I've been a very lucky man," Patrick said.
No, it hasn't been a perfect career ride. The Penguins didn't renew Patrick's contract in 2006 after the franchise took a long, hard fall from those glory days of the early '90s. He hasn't been able to find work in the sport since. "I keep looking every day," he said. "I'm a young 63. I can make a difference someplace."
Patrick is a great hockey man, a Hall of Famer. At the very least, any organization should want him on its payroll so his eyes can evaluate its players and the competition's. But if it doesn't work out again for Patrick, he hardly can complain. There are those two Cup teams he built after inheriting Mario Lemieux. There is his sizable role in the Penguins' Cup win last summer. "Our staff did an absolutely wonderful job in helping to put that team together," he said of drafting Marc-Andre Fleury, Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby, among others. And, of course, there's his role as coach Herb Brooks' top assistant on that '80 U.S. team that beat the powerful, hated Russians and went on to win the gold medal by beating Finland.
"Thirty years later, it's still a big deal. That just amazes me," Patrick said.
It's a big deal because Team USA's gold at the Lake Placid, N.Y., Games is widely considered the greatest sports moment of the 20th Century. It seems like an especially big deal today because they will pass out another hockey gold medal today at the Vancouver Olympics. And, let's face it, we just love to celebrate the anniversaries of our feel-good sports moments.
First Published February 28, 2010 12:00 am
