Dater: My Dad's Memories Of Filming The "Lost Footage" Of 1980 USA-Russia Miracle On Ice Game
A unique mystery of a story
My father, Alan, has done some crazy well-known things in his career as a filmmaker. He was in the studio with Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash as they cut a track on Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album. He was doing sound for a 1969 documentary on Cash called “Johnny Cash! The Man, His World, His Music”, so he was in that studio when the two legends cut the track, and he also went out to dinner with them once in New York.
He did the sound and some filming of a 1972 Johnny Cash-financed film called “The Gospel Road”, filmed on location in Israel. He even played the role of Nicodemus in the film.
He used to work for NHL Films, shooting games that would be shown, believe it or not, mostly only on airplanes. But he was there for all four games of the 1975 Stanley Cup Finals between Philadelphia and Buffalo. He filmed much of the action, and that film of the finals is sometimes still shown on the NHL Network.
None of this stuff did I know at the time. My dad and mom divorced when I was very young, and while I visited him pretty regularly, I was just a kid when he did that stuff. He just said he would be away sometimes for “work.”
Well, until about 10-12 years ago, I also did not know this: He was in the arena in Lake Placid, filming the game that would later be called the “Miracle on Ice”, the game between the Americans and the heavily favored Russians.
“Wh-wh-whaaaaaat?” was my reaction when I first learned of this. You filmed the USA-Russia game and I never knew this????
But that’s my dad for you. He doesn’t think much of anything is too big a deal. Just a day’s work.
Well, where’s the film, I asked? Let’s watch it! After all, the only action I’d ever seen - that anybody had ever seen - was the grainy ABC footage of the game, with Al Michaels and Ken Dryden on the call.
It had everything, of course, but my dad said he shot some of the game on 16 mm color film. He was working on a film that was to feature the … arts of the Olympics. Here, for the first time ever, is my dad’s account of what he was there for, and how he just happened to shoot arguably the most famous sporting event in U.S. history, which was thought to be lost forever but was finally found in a Texas warehouse 45 or so years later. That film has been featured in the highly acclaimed Netflix doc “Miracle: The Boys of ‘80.”
