Wayne Coffey

Best-Selling Author & Journalist

The Boys of Winter

Once upon a time, they taught us to believe. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, a blue-collar bunch led by an unconventional coach, and they engineered perhaps the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. Their “Miracle on Ice” has become a national fairy tale, but the real Cinderella story is even more remarkable. It is a legacy of hope, hard work, and homegrown triumph. It is a chronicle of everyday heroes who just wanted to play hockey happily ever after. It is still unbelievable.

The Boys of Winter is an evocative account of the improbable American adventure in Lake Placid, New York. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, Wayne Coffey explores the untold stories of the U.S. upstarts, their Soviet opponents, and the forces that brought them together.

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Critical Praise

"A wonderfully detailed enrichment of the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. Wayne Coffey's fresh perspective artfully takes a twenty five year old story and advances it to the present with an enhanced appreciation of that stunning, breathtaking, still too-amazing-to-believe accomplishment."
Al Michaels, Emmy Award-Winning Broadcaster

"The 1980 U.S. hockey team has been mythologized in print and on screen for almost twenty-five years. Wayne Coffey’s The Boys of Winter goes much deeper than that and, for the first time, gives us a clear picture of who these remarkable boys—and men—were . . . and are. It is a very fine book"
John Feinstein

"I celebrated my fifteenth birthday on the very day that the ‘Boys of Winter’ beat the Russians in Lake Placid. Wayne Coffey brilliantly weaves the behind-the-scenes story that amplifies how improbable this ‘miracle’ really was"
Pat LaFontaine, NHL Hall of Famer

"No matter how many times I hear the story of the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s heroics in Lake Placid in 1980, I want to hear it again. It is allegory, fable, wonderful drama. Now Wayne Coffey comes to the campfire to tell the tale again, raising the requisite lumps in the requisite throats, adding new details to the familiar pictures. Very nice work. Very nice, indeed."
Leigh Montville, author of Ted Williams

Wayne Coffey

Best-Selling Author & Journalist

The Boys of Winter

Available At

Critical Praise

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