To the left is Mike Eruzione, captain of the 1980 US gold-medal olympic hockey team, a BU grad, a member of the BU Sports Hall of Fame. I’ll get to him in a minute. But first, a bit about the first week of the MBA…
I’d characterize the first week at BU as mild hazing. They want to induce some stress to make you perform with your new team. So there are classes until 9 at night, assignments every day, class all day Saturday, etc. I refuse to freak out about such things, but some of my classmates are buying it.
I’m starting to realize what a difference the age gap (I’m about 10 years older than most there) is going to make. On Saturday we saw a documentary film about the 1980 US olympic hockey team to analyze the leadership style of its coach, Herb Brooks. Brooks is a deity in Minnesota, the other hockey powerhouse in the US (BU is, of course, the first).
The film showed the US team’s win over the Soviets and the effect it had on the morale of the country given the political climate at the time (Carter, hostage crisis, gas lines, etc). Eruzione had scored the winning goal and was the emotional magnet, accepting the medal. I had been 14 when this happened and remembered it well.
It was a bit of a culture shock to realize that only a few other people in the class remembered this event. We’re talking GRAD students here, not college undergrads. That means they also don’t generally remember Reagan or the Columbia space shuttle disaster.