BOWLING GREEN — Ken Morrow and Mark Wells didn’t have to believe in a miracle.
They were a part of one.
The one.
The one in which the United States, a team of amateur players hand-picked by Herb Brooks, upset the former Soviet Union, a team that won four consecutive Olympic gold medals and was composed of well-traveled, hyper-talented, and imposing professionals, in the medal round of the 1980 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, N.Y.
Recall broadcaster Al Michaels’ words as the final seconds ticked away.
“Eleven seconds. You've got 10 seconds. The countdown going on right now. Morrow, up to Silk. Five seconds left in the game...”
That “Morrow” was once a Bowling Green State University Falcon.
As the United States’ bench poured onto the ice once the clock struck zeroes, the television broadcast cut to a brief shot of the crowd celebrating. When the broadcast cut back to a tight shot of the players, the back of Wells’ No. 15 sweater was shown as part of the top of the pile-up behind the Americans’ net.
That same Wells was also a BGSU Falcon.
Morrow and Wells were recently honored at a Bowling Green hockey game.
The duo were proudly clad in red, white, and blue sweaters in representation of the United States on that historic day in 1980.
“They were our nemesis,” Morrow said. “They were Darth Vader to us. The Russians were the archenemy. ... People ask me if they were intimidating, and I’d say they weren’t intimidating in the sense of the Philadelphia Flyers, beat-you-up intimidating, but they were very intimidating as a team that just were so dominant.”
Before Morrow and Wells made Olympic history, they spent 1975 though 1979 donning orange and brown sweaters at Bowling Green State University.
Wells was a two-time All-Central Collegiate Hockey Association first team selection who was drafted in the 13th round by Montreal in the 1977 NHL draft. Morrow was BGSU and the CCHA’s first-ever All-American who was later drafted by the New York Islanders in the fourth round of the 1976 draft.
They were the third and fourth of what is now 11 former Falcons to represent their respective home countries in the Olympics. Four players and one coach represented the United States, three players represented Canada, and one each represented France, Austria, and Latvia.
“That’s probably one of the greatest feats that the sports at Bowling Green State University have ever accomplished,” Wells said. “In any sport, to have that many represent the United States and coming from Bowling Green State University over the course of 40-some years is remarkable.”
The latest Falcon representative was in Beijing for the most-recent Games. Defenseman Ralfs Freibergs, who played from 2012 to 2014 at BGSU and spent the 2015-16 season with the Toledo Walleye, played on Latvia’s team.
“Ralfs was a really, really good player for us,” said Falcons head coach Ty Eigner, who recruited and coached Freibergs when he was an assistant. “It’s really, really cool to see it come full-circle now, and it’s a little bit of redemption.”
Freibergs would have played in the 2014 Sochi Games, but he was disqualified from playing after failing a doping test.
Bowling Green’s first hockey Olympians were Bob Dobek and Doug Ross, who played on the United States’ team in the 1976 Games in Innsbruck, Austria. They helped the Americans to a fifth-place finish. In five games, Dobek led the Americans with seven points.
Former Falcons goaltender Brian Stankiewicz represented Austria in three Games — 1984, 1988, and 1994. His best run was in the 1988 Games in Calgary, when he recorded a .855 save percentage in five games.
Kevin Dahl scored two goals during Canada’s run to a silver medal in the 1992 Games in Albertville, France. In addition to Stankiewicz, Pierrick Maia (France) and silver medalist Greg Parks (Canada) played in the 1994 Games in Lillehammer, Norway.
Rob Blake made his Olympics debut for Canada’s team in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, and he joined Stankiewicz as a three-time Olympian with runs in Salt Lake City in 2002 and in Turin, Italy, in 2006.
Most notably, Blake was tabbed as the 1998 Games’ best defenseman, and he recorded an assist on Joe Sakic’s power-play goal in the second period of Canada’s 5-2 victory over the United States in the 2002 gold medal game.
“When I look now, I think it was my freshman year at Bowling Green, so it would have been the ’88 Olympics,” Blake said. “At that time the U.S. Olympic team had a schedule through the season of playing college hockey teams. We played that team at Bowling Green.
“I can remember it was Kevin Stevens, Brian Leetch, Tony Granato, that era. We got beat, and I remember getting called into coach [Jerry] York’s office the next day, and he told me, ‘Listen, I know you want to get to the NHL and everything. That’s the next generation of NHL players that came in here and they beat us that bad.’
“That was my first real exposure to any kind of Olympic hockey, and it made you realize that’s step now to the NHL. Those guys all went on to have great NHL careers.”
Another former Falcon earned his spot on the world-wide stage as a head coach in between.
Dan Bylsma led the United States to the bronze medal game in 2014, after quickly ascending up the coaching ranks in the NHL. He took over as the head coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 2008-09 season and led them to the 2009 Stanley Cup over Detroit, and he guided the Penguins to five straight playoff appearances up through the 2013-’14 season.
“I think that playing for your country and wearing the colors is the highest honor you can get,” said Bylsma, who is currently an assistant in the AHL. “It’s one with a lot of responsibility and a lot of pride, and I certainly felt all of that when I got the opportunity to become the head coach of the U.S. team for the ’14 Olympics.”
The 11 Olympians are testimonials to the sustained success of the Falcons’ hockey program. Through the seasons with coaching legends Ron Mason, York, and those beyond helped carry these players, among others, to rarified air within the hockey world.
“It feels like coming home,” said Morrow, who won four Stanley Cups and now serves as the director of pro scouting for the New York Islanders. “I spent four of the best years of my life here. Not only hockey-wise, but also growing up and maturing, and getting prepared for the next step.”
In an interview with The Blade at BGSU’s game Feb. 5, Wells interjected the conversation to ask Morrow, “Do you remember the support, though, that we had?”
Morrow responded: “Oh, gosh, people would invite you over to dinner. The lifelong friends that you met. They would take you under. As you would expect, in the small-town Midwest, they made you feel like you were a part of the community. It was just a great time. The team was winning, the building was full every night with the bleacher creatures.”
Wells chimed in: “Packed.”
“We would come over a couple hours before the game; as players you would walk over from the dorm,” Morrow continued. “There were already lines in the middle of January outside waiting for the door to open an hour later. People standing in the cold, because you only had so many seats in here, and it was a jam-packed arena every game.”
Said Wells: “Nothing like it. Nothing like that I’ve never seen or played in. And that many games in that many years. It just made you feel, ‘I’m going to get something done today.’ It’s like any boxer. You go into Madison Square Garden, you see 15-20,000, and you get intimidated like that in the positive to strike twice as hard.”
Blake, who is now the general manager of the Los Angeles Kings and whose son, Jack, is on the current BGSU roster, said the Falcons’ program and his experience as a student-athlete helped mold his work-life balance.
“When you come into that program at 18 years old and understand that partially living on your own — you’re in a dorm for a year, and then you move out — and balancing the work of hockey and schooling, just helped shape me for years to come,” Blake said.
“I know for me it was a shorter period of time. Three years, most can go four years, but it really helps define the responsibilities needed when you move on after that. For the group of us there and the group there now with Ty, but coach York was one of the best at doing that.”
Bylsma said York had a direct influence on him that later translated into his approach as a head coach.
“Probably the biggest thing for me as a person and, it turns out, as a player, is that coach York challenged me to be the best version of myself,” Bylsma said. “I wasn’t in the easiest of times in the beginning of my career at Bowling Green, and it was coach York that really laid it out on the line and challenged me to be the best version of myself, and that is a big part of my philosophy as a coach.
“I know many years later — we’re talking 20 years later, 25 years later that I turned into a coach — coach York’s drive and coach York’s challenge to me was a big part of my development as a person and as a player, and that’s something I take with me as a coach many years later as my style and how I want to coach.”
First Published February 20, 2022, 2:25 p.m.
