According to Jim Craig, goalie for the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, he and his teammates had no doubt they would win the gold medal. They did, of course, almost exactly 40 years ago, in a story that has now become legend. February’s milestone anniversary prompted Craig to write his new book, We Win! Lessons on Life, Business & Building Your Own Miracle Team. In his preface, he had this to say: “[Coach] Herb Brooks had begun planning this victory when he was cut from the 1960 Olympic team. He turned my teammates and me into a relentless, poised, red-white-and-blue-collar machine that earned a victory. The planets aligned and, with Herb as our North Star, we shocked the world. But we didn’t shock ourselves.”

Just why that was the case is the subject of Craig’s book, and along the way he tells us what we ordinary mortals can learn from what the Miracle Team accomplished. Craig’s decades of subsequent experience in the business world make it all tie together very well.

For the anniversary in February of the win over the Soviets and the subsequent gold-medal-clinching victory over Finland, I watched both full games on YouTube. Between the commentary and street interviews and side stories, it became very clear to me that a good many of the team members came from almost nothing money-wise. It was a rough economic time. All that comes through loud and clear in the book from Craig himself, as he tells his story of growing up as one of eight kids in his family on the edge of Boston. (When he “went away” to college at Boston University, it was the first time he’d ever been downtown, despite growing up just 29 miles south in North Easton.) His dad tended bar at night to earn extra money (and as I learned in one of those aforementioned Olympics coverage street interviews, so did the father of team captain Mike Eruzione). Those humble origins were a crucible that forged a unique hunger for sports success in Craig and the other boys like him. I certainly didn’t grow up rich, but for me the contrast between their circumstances and mine certainly helped with my gratitude.

So did the story about Craig’s mom (I was blessed to have my own mother with me until just a few years ago). It became one of the popular TV backdrop stories back in ’80 about how he’d lost her to cancer before the Games. We learn from him here that she became ill right as he was headed off to college; in fact, one benefit of his going to school downtown was being able to visit her in the hospital there. (If you can get through his story of how she saved her hospital meals for him without tears, you’re a hell of a lot flintier than I – and I feel sorry for you.) She became a key motivation for him, though also a potential stumbling block, as we soon learn.

Craig tells how his coach Herb Brooks grew up too. His recounting of the story of Brooks’s mentoring a young cousin early in life teaches us just what kind of man he was, and sets the stage for what’s to come. Of course, another thread of the coverage in 1980 was how Brooks was the last man cut from the 1960 Olympic hockey team, which went on to win its own gold medals. Craig tells us everything in between – how Brooks committed himself to another shot at the gold that he’d missed, and how he made it happen.

A lot of what he shares when he gets to telling about the other characters involved, and their preparation for the Games, many of us learned about in the marvelous movie Miracle. (But one salutary lesson from Craig’s book is just how faithful that movie was to the true story. It’s remarkable.) We see in the movie that Brooks didn’t make friends with his team members. In fact, he’s portrayed as playing a good cop – bad cop act with his assistant coach, Craig Patrick. There’s doubtless a lot of truth to that. Yet Craig shares about how Brooks got to know him well enough to learn that for a while there, he was trying to get himself kicked off the team, because he felt guilty about leaving his family for preparation for the Games right after his mother passed away. The five pages in the heart of the book sharing that story, and what Herb Brooks did about it, are another tear-jerker that – for those of you wanting the leadership lessons here – are worth a hundred times the book’s purchase price.

We Win! is a fairly short book, and a quick read. But the rest of it is jam-packed with other illuminating parts of the story you won’t get anywhere else – about the rest of the characters involved, about the team’s Soviet nemeses, and about exactly how the team prepared and executed their plan to take the world’s previous best hockey team off their game and beat them. “Tonight we are the greatest hockey team in the world,” exclaimed Coach Brooks in his now-famous pre-game pep talk, reenacted word-for-word in one of the most marvelous scenes in the movie. He was right.

In the end, after telling what all the coaches and staff and teammates have done for the past 40 years, Craig distills the whole thing into his 13 Principles for Leadership. Those, too, make the book well worth its price. Pick it up. You won’t be sorry you did.

PS – Jim Craig, I watched the Finland game right to its very end again in February, for the first time in 40 years. And I saw another way the movie, in one of its closing scenes, was wonderfully true to the real-life story. Exactly as you recounted in your book, at the end of that game, your wildest dream had come true and you had clinched that gold medal you and Coach Brooks and all the rest had worked so tirelessly for. And the very first thing you did after you got free of the crush – American flag draped famously around your shoulders – was search the crowd and ask the girl next to you, “Where’s my father?” That tells me a hell of a lot about exactly what kind of man you are.