by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Somewhere I heard that our current president is not a film devotee. But if he has watched even a few movies in the last few decades, I would bet that he has seen Miracle, the cinematic telling of the story of the US Olympic Hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union in 1980 to win the gold medal. As far as I know, Trump has never claimed to have been a top prospect for the NHL. Curious! He must not think that hockey has a broad enough demographic.

On the surface this film seems to highlight everything that Trump believes about himself. It shows Coach Brooks as a singular figure, bucking every convention and resisting everyone’s advice. He knows better, and he will do as he sees fit.

But there are more than a few differences that he likely overlooks:

• Coach Brooks won the job of coaching the Olympic team after devoting decades of hard work to coaching hockey.
• Coach Brooks had a seriously impressive record as a winning coach before he coached the Olympic team.
• Though he dabbled in related businesses during the remainder of his career, be always returned to coaching; clearly his north star.
• Brooks obviously cared a lot about real outcomes, and very little about public approbation.

I could go on, but you get the point. Coaching was his vocation. He didn’t assume he had a right to do it. He worked at it, and he earned that right.

The most important truth in this film was delivered just shy of ¾ of the way through as the plucky American amateurs prepared for the medal round and their Olympic game against the Soviets. In an unguarded moment, the movie Brooks says to his wife, “The important thing [is] that in twenty years those twenty boys know they didn’t leave anything on the table; that they played their hearts out. That’s the important thing.” And here is what our president…tragically…has never and will never understand. True victory can only be won within one’s self. It is not measured against someone else. Moreover, means are more important than ends.

The American dream, indeed, the very idea of the United States of America, is about the individual giving her absolute best for the benefit of herself and her team—her community. And in pursuing good citizenship, she becomes a better version of herself.

The story of the “Miracle” team is a call to all of us who would claim citizenship in this great nation to be more than that to which we are born. It is a call to our better angels, to a sense that we can transcend our own selfish interests and become part of a community. The founders of this country turned away from the old world where an accident of birth could destine one either to privilege or deprivation. They got a lot wrong at the time, but they counted on us, their successors to perfect this community, and not to fall into old patterns of predetermined stations.

In the film, before the medal-round game with the Soviets. Coach Brooks tells his athletes that they were born to be hockey players. What he doesn’t say to them in that moment, but what he had demonstrated to them over and over again during the months leading up to that game, was that they earned their places on that American team. He told them that they would have to be extraordinary men to achieve the goal in front of them, and that too would have to be earned. Naturally they were all motivated by the prospect of beating the Soviets. But had they lost, which Brooks knew was probably more likely than what actually happened, the twenty young men on that team, the coaches, and everyone else who was involved with the effort would be better than they were when they began.

Of course, Coach Brooks wanted to win that game. But had it gone the other way, I am confident that he would have stepped off the ice knowing that he had done something great. Perhaps few others would have recognized it. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to watch a movie about it. But he would have known that tireless preparation, study, decades of hard-earned experience, and the hard work of a whole team had allowed those twenty young men to skate sixty minutes with the greatest hockey team in history. He would have held his head high, and he would not have demanded applause.