The miracle of achievement.(My Turn)(Column)

When I first met Herb Brooks, as I was preparing to shoot the movie Miracle, he asked, "Do you have a son who's a goaltender playing in Vancouver?' I told him I did, and he said, "I'm coming to watch him this year." For the first couple of hours after we met, he didn't want to discuss movies or Hollywood or his own life. He wanted to talk about my son, Wyatt, the junior hockey player.

Herb--whom the world lost last summer in a tragic car crash, shortly after we finished filming the movie--had a tremendous impact on his players. That's where Miracle--the story of the 1980 U.S. men's hockey team's Miracle on Ice--becomes very special to me. There was someone in my life who had that kind of influence on me, and he died while the movie was being made. I was actually on the ice when I got the call from my sister that my dad had died.

My dad was very successful in baseball. When I was young, I played for him. I realized during the making of the movie that he was incredibly like Herb. He had a great eye for players. He had tremendous skill and an acute ability to read a player's talent and see what that player could do. And he had an equal ability to get that player to see it in himself. He was very tough, very manipulative, but really fun to play for. I was really proud of my dad. In terms of playing Herb, most of the instinctual knowledge of how to handle and coach young men came from my dad. I had watched him all my life.

There have been great upsets in sports. But I'm 52, and I've never seen the Miracle on Ice topped in my years of watching sporting events. It was so exciting to me. I suppose, at the end of the day, it's your country. Those players were representing a culture. They were representing their family, their teammates, their neighbors and people they didn't even know. That's who they were out there playing for. That is a special thing.

In team sports, it is literally the camaraderie of man that's at play. With this hockey team, there wasn't a given camaraderie. These players truly disliked each other. Nobody else could understand the coach's ...