Herb Brooks and "USA!"

As delegates, media members, bloggers, employees filed past the security checkpoint and walked into the doors of the Xcel Center, the were greeted by a Herb Brooks statue.

Of course Brooks, a native of St. Paul, is best known at the head coach of the 1980 Gold Medal Olympic hockey team, the "Miracle on Ice," but before then he was already a hockey legend in Minnesota. In 1955 he played on a high school hockey team, he was a member of two US Olympic hockey squads in the 1960s, and he coached the Minnesota Golden Gophers to threee NCAA championships in the 1970s.

While watching the legendary game at a friend's house in Palos Park Illinois when the underdog US team defeated the mighty Soviets; I remember the loud chants of "U.S.A, U.S.A!" I hadn't heard it before then.

It was a new decade, the unhappy 1970s (Watergate, the fall of Saigon) were over. America was back.

I heard quite a few "U.S.A" chants during the Republican National Convention.