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"I was in my brother-in-law's house," recalls the 52-year-old actor, who plays Herb Brooks, the coach of the 1980 edition of Team U.S.A., in the upcoming movie Miracle. "I was getting a day off from being at the hospital. My son Boston had just been born and was in intensive care (in L.A.). But I got to see the Russian game. And it was great."
In fact, Russell, a genuine hockey fan, had been busy telling everyone who would listen that the American squad -- a ragtag collection of college kids -- didn't have a chance of beating the big, bad Russians, then considered the supreme power in the hockey world.
"I was the one saying people have no idea how badly the Russians are going to crush this American team," Russell admits a little ruefully. "They're just not aware this is going to be a horror show."
Whoops. Instead, what happened next was what would commonly become known as the "Miracle on Ice." The feisty American upstarts managed to defeat the prohibitively favoured Soviets, 4-3. The win put the Americans in a position to win the gold medal -- and they dispatched the Finnish team to take the top Olympic prize. But the victory over the Soviets is the one everybody remembers, especially because of the uncertain political and economic times -- the Iran hostage crisis, inflation, skyrocketing unemployment, etc. -- the United States found itself in just after the end of the 1970s.
"It was enormous. You really do have to understand that the feeling in this country was universally different," Russell says. "Because of the times, we just couldn't seem to get anything or do anything right. We just lost any hope that we could do something great or just good. And along came this team that started playing so well at the Olympics and nobody had even heard of them.
"No one really knew much about hockey necessarily outside the Northeast corridor, but we all knew that the Russians were great at hockey and we knew they were coming here to kick our asses. And ... because of the way everything else was going, we were going to once again have reality slap us in the face and say, 'No, not gonna happen.' And they pulled it off. And I think what's fun is to go back and learn how it was pulled off."
Indeed, Miracle focuses on how the fiery Brooks moulded his players into a team that could have a hope of beating the Soviet juggernaut. Russell shot the film in Vancouver -- he and his companion Goldie Hawn live there for part of the year to support the burgeoning hockey career of their son Wyatt, 17, a goaltender -- and says he and the filmmakers worked hard to nail the details as accurately as possible. He spent time with several U.S. players and the late Brooks, who died last summer in a traffic accident in Minnesota.
"Once we started working with Herb on it, it got better and better, in terms of our understanding of who Herb was and who the players were," Russell says.
And who was Herb Brooks? By Miracle's account, he was quite the checkered-pants, bad sportscoat-wearing martinet who drove his young charges as far as they could go -- and beyond. Russell says the players considered Brooks "public enemy No. 1. They still have mixed feelings about Herb. They love him, and there's nobody who doesn't totally respect him. But he was hard to like."
He says team captain Mike Eruzione described how the players all hated practice, but when they played the games, Brooks backed off. "That was, of course, his intent," Russell says. "He wanted them to be so thankful that game day had arrived. And Herb was also very positive during the games. So it was a day off from Herb's wrath when it was game time."
Russell says it was difficult to become Brooks because their personalities were so different. But he understood that if he was going to do this, he needed to know exactly what made Brooks tick.
"Anytime you play someone, I think you're obligated to try to capture their essence and find out as much about them as you can," he says."When you're inventing a character, you're free to roam. But when you're playing someone, I think you're obligated to roam the edges of who they are but not go over those edges because then you're creating somebody who didn't exist."
Russell even employed one of Brooks' coaching tactics during the making of Miracle. The majority of the young men who portray the players are not professional actors but hockey players. And making this film was, for most of them, their first experience on a movie set.
"I just said the best thing for me to do here is to stay away from them, so that I can remain an enigma to them, much as Herb was to his players," says Russell, who felt the neophyte actors already had a lot to deal with in terms of acting and being in front of the camera. He says they thanked him later, but they were still in shock -- especially after a gruelling day of shooting that required them to skate for up to 16 hours to get a scene just right.
Laughing, Russell says he told them he could relate. "I told them I did this when I did Backdraft," he says. "I came out of the first fire and I couldn't even breathe because it was a particular kind of smoke they were using. And my character wasn't using a mask. So I went to (director) Ronnie Howard and said, 'We've gotta do something.' And the fire chief there said, 'Well, this is the way it really is.' And I said, 'Hey buddy, how long do you fight these things for?' He said, 'Sometimes all day.' And I said, 'Well, try fighting this motherf---er for four months, you're not gonna make it!' "
Oddly enough, Miracle is what Russell considers his first sports film -- all the more unusual because of his keen interest and background in sports (he pursued a baseball career before an injury dashed those hopes).
"I generally don't like them very much," he says. "I don't think they're done very well. They're always shot from the fan's point of view or they're written from the fan's point of view." In fact, he may have been robbed of a role of a lifetime: Ron Shelton reportedly created the character of Crash Davis for Russell in the 1988 baseball flick Bull Durham, but Kevin Costner was cast instead.
Still, Russell may have done more for hockey films than just recreating the events of Lake Placid -- he says a baseball team he and his father once owned partially inspired the 1977 classic Slap Shot. "A lot of that was drawn from the locker room of that club and it was translated into hockey," he says.
But with Miracle in the can, Russell says he's looking forward to being a regular hockey dad watching his son play for the Richmond Sockeyes of the Pacific International Junior Hockey League. "It's a blast, it's really fun -- they charge seven bucks for admission, and I'll tell you what, you get your money's worth," he says.
But if Russell has one regret, it's that Herb Brooks never got a chance to see the movie.
"I have to be satisfied with what his players have said, since they've seen the movie, and his son Danny," Russell says. Chuckling a little, he adds, "I will always wish that I could have had the opportunity to sit down with Herb afterward and say, 'Go ahead Herb, slug it out! Get the shovel out and just hit me over the head, tell me what you think!' "