Morrow talks new book, ‘Miracle On Ice’ in Q&A with NHL.com

In NHL.com's Q&A feature called “Sitting Down with …” we talk to key figures in the game, gaining insight into their lives on and off the ice. This week, we feature Ken Morrow, a four-time Stanley Cup champion with the New York Islanders and Olympic gold medal winner with the United States, His book, “Ken Morrow, Miracle Gold, Four Stanley Cups and a Lifetime of Islanders Hockey,” co-written with Allan Kreda, was released Feb. 18.

Feb. 22 marked the 45th anniversary of the “Miracle on Ice,” when a group of college kids representing the United States at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics defeated the Soviet Union in one of the biggest upsets in hockey history on the way to a gold medal.

Ken Morrow was on the ice as the seconds ticked away, fending off the Soviets for a 4-3 victory in the first game of the medal round. The U.S. would claim gold with a 4-2 win against Finland two days later.

“I may be exaggerating a little bit, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get reminded of it somehow,” Morrow said. “I still get mail, almost on a daily basis 45 years later. When the anniversaries come around and people hear I played on the team, the reaction I get through the mail or just talking to people when they come up to me, they tell me their story, whether they were a young kid watching it with their dad, or if they weren’t born yet but saw the movie (“Miracle”). That’s been the real joy for me, hearing other people tell me their story.”

Morrow was 23 and a recent graduate of Bowling Green University, where he was a star defenseman.

Sportscaster Al Michaels mentions him in the famous call as time wound down against the Soviets, and few could believe what they were witnessing.

“Eleven seconds, you have 10 seconds, the countdown going on right now. Morrow up to Silk, five seconds left in the game, do you believe in miracles? Yes!”

The win against the Soviets and then Finland was a culmination of five months with the U.S. Olympic team, but Morrow did not have much time to enjoy it.

Selected by the New York Islanders in the fourth round (No. 68) of the 1976 NHL Draft, Morrow signed his first professional contract a few days after the gold-medal game in 1980 and joined the NHL team that went on to win the first of four consecutive Stanley Cup championships that spring.

“We won gold on Sunday, the 24th, then we went to the White House the next day on the Monday,” Morrow said. “And then I went home for a couple of days and then I went out to Long Island on Thursday to sign my contract with them. Then I played my first game on Saturday. So, we won the gold medal on Sunday, and then six days later I was playing my first game with the Islanders and my whole career started at that point.”

Morrow played 10 seasons with New York, winning the Stanley Cup four times in a row and 19 consecutive playoff series. He coached for three years following his playing career and returned to the Islanders as a scout. Morrow has been with the organization for over 40 years and is currently its director of pro scouting.

Now 68, he lives in Kansas City, and his book chronicles his career through his childhood in Flint, Michigan, and goes into detail his time with the U.S. Olympic team and the Islanders.

NHL.com spoke with Morrow about the book and his outstanding career as a player.

What prompted you to write a book after all these years?

“I never saw myself writing a book. Over the last 40-some years people would come up to me and they’d say, ‘You should write a book,’ and it never kind of registered with me until just a couple of years ago. I was at an event, and I guy a knew a little bit, a hockey writer in New York (Kreda) approached me about it, and maybe the best way to describe it was just at this point in my life I gave it a second thought. I think what really sold me on it was just to be able to leave something for my kids, my grandkids. They’ve lived it a little bit, but they don’t know the whole story, so I thought of leaving something for them, and it turned out to be a much more enjoyable experience than I anticipated. It’s been a lot of fun.”

There is a wonderful chapter about your father Don, and you talk about him being a gentle giant and a great athlete who could have played Major League Baseball. He died in 1976 at 48 when you were a freshman at Bowling Green University.

“It’s a funny thing that generation, he never talked about his exploits. Rarely would we hear anything and would hear it from some of his friends when we were young kids that he was a great athlete. We would hear a little bit about it, but he never really talked about it. All these year later, I started digging though this huge scrapbook from my father and kind of started piecing together that, along with remember stories that were told. I have to tell you, I shed some tears writing that chapter and I think a lot of people can maybe relate to it, because through my childhood -- just the backyard rinks and spending time on them and your dad coaching you, so it was a very emotional chapter for me.”

Your father signed a contract to play baseball with the Detroit Tigers, played in the minor leagues for a couple of years, then was drafted into the U.S. Army. Do you think he could have played Major League Baseball?

“Yeah, he certainly could have played and again, a lot of that was from my uncle growing up playing baseball with my dad, he told me stories many years later about it. My uncle passed away not too long ago at 94 years old, and he was telling me stories even up to a couple of years ago that I hadn’t heard about my dad. I knew a little bit about how good he was, but not nearly as much as I do now having gone through this book-writing process. But circumstances and the way I describe it was, it was kind of what could have been, with my father and baseball.”

Was there a point when you were playing hockey in Michigan that you thought you could do it professionally?

“It sounds strange, but it all just kind of happened. I think nowadays, everybody tries to plan out their life and you try to do all this stuff. For me, I was literally just going out and having fun a lot of those years. We would put our skates on in the morning and skate until it got dark, then eventually we put floodlights on our little backyard rink. We would have our skates on from morning until dark and it was just so much fun for me, and you develop a real passion for it and then you get to play organized hockey. I never had dreams of playing college or beyond that, but things just started happening and getting to play at higher levels as it went along and I could have never, ever dreamed the way my career happened. I could never have planned for it, and still to this day when I look back it doesn’t seem real. There’s been so many players that have had great careers and everything else, and I think the question I used to ask myself is, ‘Why me?’ Why did I have all this good fortune happen to me? But it’s just timing and faith and all that kind of stuff plays into it all, I believe.”

You talk about Bowling Green in your book and the four years you spent there. What was your college experience like?

“I was so glad I was able to do all four years there, because I just felt every year I got better, and I don’t know if I would have been ready if I left a year or two before that. As I said, the timing, it all seemed to just have happened that way for me, I was able to play get better and get an opportunity to play in the World Championships in 1978, which kind of came right out of the blue. Just the fact that somebody reached out and gave me a chance, I had no clue that USA Hockey or anybody that I was on their radar. That was my junior season, and I knew the Olympic team was right around the corner after my senior year, so the timing was perfect for me. I got to play all four years and then just step right into the Olympic experience. It just took off from there.”

A lot of people are familiar with what happened at Lake Placid, but I don’t think people realize that Olympic team was together for five months before the tournament and you played 61 games before the Olympics. What was that like?

“I think that’s a credit to Herb Brooks and the Olympic Committee for that. Herb was a master planner; he literally had notebooks -- two-inch thick notebooks -- of his plans and what he wanted us to do. He’d been preparing to be the Olympic coach for years, and I’ve talked to people that say it was his dream job to coach that team. He basically went to the Olympic Committee and said we can’t keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing all these Olympics and expect better results, and so he sold them on the idea of us being together for five months, which meant we were going to travel around and we did kind of a banquet circuit, and all these cities we were playing in, you name it. We were the traveling show and playing college teams, minor-league teams, international teams, and in all those 61 games he was trying to implement a style that he wanted us to play.”

There is a chapter on Herb, who died in an automobile accident in 2003. How well did you get to know him while on the Olympic team?

“He was pretty hard to get to know back then, especially as one of his players. Even after the whole year with the Olympic team, I didn’t feel I knew him very well I knew him as a coach, but I didn’t know much about him. I knew he was a great coach, but didn’t know why he was doing all the things he was doing. But as more years went by, I started to understand why he did the things that he did throughout the year with us, and I give him so much credit for us being able to pull off what we did in Lake Placid. I’ve grown to appreciate everything he did and how he orchestrated everything he did with our team, and we wouldn’t have won the gold medal without him.”

Looking back on it now, how do you feel about winning an Olympic gold medal and Stanley Cup in a span of three months?

“Call it youth or whatever, but I don’t think I really understood what was happening. I probably hadn't let the Olympic thing sink in yet because some of the players were going back and having parades in their hometowns. Several players stepped into the NHL, but we were getting requests; people wanted to celebrate and have you to do these appearances and my hometown wanted me to come back for a parade, but I quickly had to change focus into earning a living. All of a sudden, I had to make a living playing hockey, and it wasn’t a given. I literally didn’t know if I was going to be going back to Lake Placid to playing in the minor leagues, I didn’t know what the plan was for me. Bill Torrey (Islanders general manager) told me at one point that they were going to bring me to Long Island after the [Olympics] were over, and so that was the next opportunity for me. I had to go win a job with the Islanders.”

You joined a special group with the Islanders. You won the Stanley Cup four years in a row and 19 consecutive playoff series, which is something that may never happen again.

“Yeah, that was incredible. I was so fortunate, and I use that word a lot when I talk to people about my career. They kind of quickly grew into a power in the League through the 70s, being an expansion team to the top team in the League in the regular season in the late 70s. But they got knocked out of the playoffs in ’78 and ’79, and then all these great players they drafted in the 70s … for me to be able to step in and get that opportunity, I describe it as getting caught up in the wave with all these great players and just doing my job and playing my role. Writing a book kind of helped me realize the fate, coming from behind in some games and winning some of those series; one goal here, one goal there could have changed things. Then you had all the overtime wins; we were winning in overtime regularly. Once we won that first Cup (in 1980), then it kind of unleashed. We were a dominant team through those years and you in those last two Cups in ’82 and ’83, we swept the semifinals and the finals. We weren’t even losing games in those series. We were a dominant team through a lot of those years.”

The Islanders and Rangers had some great playoff series during the Cup years. You scored in overtime in Game 5 in the best-of-5 first round in 1984 to keep the “Drive for Five” alive.

“It’s amazing we played the Rangers four straight years in the playoffs, and it’s hard to believe they haven’t met in the playoffs since 1994 and it’s such as shame because it’s a tremendous rivalry. We had to knock them out all four years we won the Cup, and they gave us some real tough battles. In ’84, Herb Brooks coached them, and they could have been a contender for the Stanley Cup. They outplayed us in that Game 5, and we were kind of finding ways to stay in the game. The overtime, I know it was described by some of the announcers as the best playoff game and maybe best overtime they had seen to that point. It was just up and down, and both goalies made great saves. If you ever get a chance to score an overtime goal -- which I have three of them, hard to believe -- scoring against your archrivals, the Rangers would be the one. I describe it as my 50 mile-per-hour slap shot found its way through a bunch of traffic and it was a great screen by Pat Flatley, so it was a thrill for me.”

The Islanders’ run came to an end in 1984, losing to the Edmonton Oilers in the final, who you had swept in the Final the season before. What do you remember from that one?

“We were kind of finding ways to win series. It had taken its toll on us, but we were still finding ways to win. We beat Washington and then Montreal to get to the Final, but you knew Edmonton’s time was coming, and they were deserved champions at that point. We were like the old prizefighter that wasn’t going to go down and they were the young heavyweight.”