Sub into Star

By nature, the U.S. is an underdog in Olympic hockey. Its team is a sometime thing, a pickup squad of former college stars who have retained enough interest in the game to stay in shape and to steal necessary time away from their careers. The Russians are more organized: their team is the cream of the most professional amateur hockey leagues in the world. So are the Canadians, by instinct and circumstance the world's best hockey players, who can draw their team from a galaxy of highly organized postgraduate amateur leagues.

This year, trouble dogged the U.S. team. Coach Jack Riley upset morale by tossing three members off his squad, adding three others who had not even shown up for the Boston tryouts: Defenseman John Mayasich, 26, a television-time salesman who once played for the University of Minnesota, and Boston's Cleary brothers--Bill, 25, and Bob, 23, a pair of insurance brokers who had been hard-nosed, hard-skating forwards at Harvard. To make matters worse, Goalie Larry Palmer was knocked out with an injured knee. Subbing for him was a bushy-browed, strapping (6 ft. 1 in., 200 Ibs.) second-stringer named Jack McCartan, a former University of Minnesota All-America who liked to talk more about his feats as a college third baseman (.438 batting average) than as a goalie.

But McCartan and his U.S. teammates came of age at Squaw Valley. Against the hard-shooting Canadians, Goalie McCartan turned acrobat to stop 39 shots, save the day while his buddies made up for their lack of teamwork by scrap and scramble to win, 2-1.

Next came the Russians, who passed the puck back and forth with the ease of pro basketball players setting up a play. But Defenseman Mayasich and Captain John Kirrane felled attacking Russians in wind rows, slid to the ice time and again to block shots with their bodies. McCartan himself covered every corner of the cage with his big stick and big glove, bought time for hardy forwards like the Clearys and Minnesota's Bill Christian to wear down the Russians by sheer superior skating, swing the balance of the game in the third period. Final score: U.S. 3, Russia 2.

On the final day against Czechoslovakia, the exhausted U.S. team was trailing 4-3 when it got a surprise assist. Russian Captain Nikolai Sologubov, who speaks no English, approached Coach Riley, gestured as if he were gasping, then mimed putting on an oxygen mask. Riley got the hint. He procured an oxygen bottle, gave Bob Cleary and his weary-legged mates a whiff. They promptly rallied for six goals and a 9-4 victory, skated off with the first U.S. gold medal in hockey. When the game was done, the man they mobbed was Goalie Jack McCartan, the sub who had become a star when it counted.

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