I was up early last Sunday to watch the men’s ice hockey gold medal game from Milan. I exchanged a few celebratory Instagram memes with my 20-something nephew right after the first U.S. victory since 1980 in Lake Placid, but the luster was coming off the gold medal even as Hughes’ slap shot hung in the back of the Canadian net.

I forwarded my nephew an ad for a Team USA ballcap embroidered with the slogan “Play Free Bird,” which I admired but just knew I couldn’t buy or wear, not in this moment, anyway.

“Let’s just fast forward to the press conference where they all express support for MAGA,” I messaged him. “I’m waiting for Trump to demand his own medal.”

But things got even cringier than I’d feared.

First, FBI Director Kash Patel chugged beers in the postgame locker room with jubilant players. Then, we saw the team’s rendition of that Toby Keith song about a sucker punch. Finally, President Donald Trump called, inviting the team to the State of the Union address and acknowledging that he would have to invite the women’s team, too, or face impeachment. (The women later declined the invitation.)

Would anyone be able to distinguish between that “Play Free Bird” ballcap and a red MAGA one anymore?

I know about locker rooms. They're better without politics

I recognized the team’s bro-ish, frat boy laughter during the call with Trump. Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about returning to semipro football locker rooms after years as a professor in the ivory tower. The publisher sold "Dream Season" as the story of recapturing lost gridiron glory, but it was much more an exploration of the tension between my unease with that sort of laughter — and all other expressions of sexism, misogyny and toxic masculinity one encounters in a men’s team sport locker room — and my pure, lifelong love of the game. The contest in Milan was “manifestly a hockey game,” after all, as Al Michaels famously said of the 1980 U.S.-USSR game in Lake Placid. Not politics, or combat. I love sports, but I try to keep them in perspective.

My disgust with Trump and Patel can’t be purely partisan, can it? Would I feel the same if Bernie Sanders had suddenly appeared in that locker room wearing ski goggles, spraying champagne? I’m not a “shut up and dribble” guy. I respect every athlete’s right to express their opinion on the issues of the day. The Olympics in particular have long been politicized — consider Hitler and Jesse Owens in Berlin 1936, the Black Power fist in Mexico City in 1968, the Russian boycott of the summer games in Los Angeles in 1984. Was Patel’s appearance different from skier Hunter Hess’ remarks on American politics earlier in the fortnight?

The low-hanging fruit here is to point out Patel’s hypocrisy. He was critical of his predecessor Christopher Wray’s use of a government jet to go on vacation. A video is circulating on social media of Patel suggesting "maybe we ground that plane." Patel's staff on Sunday claimed he was in Europe on “official business.” Or I could ask, as many critics have, why Patel, who made so much of the Epstein files during the Biden presidency, was not at home in the United States sorting carefully through them and making arrests, as he had vowed to do during his previous incarnation as a podcaster (and as authorities in the United Kingdom were doing even as I typed this). Or why he is not on point in the search for Savannah Guthrie’s poor mother, or keeping a wary eye on the cartel chaos unfolding in neighboring Mexico. Federal law enforcement at the highest levels is very hard work, as Patel and his comrade Dan Bongino, who has already quit and returned to podcasting, quickly learned. Cosplay and grandstanding public appearances are far easier. Either this administration doesn’t understand the difference between fantasy and reality (a very real possibility) and Patel (like Bongino) didn’t realize what he was getting himself into, or — and this would be truly cynical — MAGA elites consider such locker room appearances “official business,” realizing they can score more points with their base that way than with any real accomplishments. In any case, we can add Patel’s chugging to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sad pull-ups and the Kid Rock-RFK Jr. workout video as another example of bellicose, performative masculinity — further evidence of the panic that accompanies a patriarchy’s collapse. It surprised me to learn that former Vice President Walter Mondale — whose daughter, Eleanor, was a graduate of St. Lawrence University, the particular ivory tower that has been my home since 1998 — joined the 1980 men’s team in the Lake Placid locker room after its victory over the Russians. This kind of thing is not unprecedented, in other words. Mondale said he knew that U.S. Coach Herb Brooks and many of his players were Minnesotans (when did Minneapolis become the center of the universe, by the way?) and he thought it would be nice to meet them.

Of course, there is no footage of Mondale chugging beers. When former President Jimmy Carter called that locker room to congratulate Brooks, he told him he and his team were trying to conduct business “but nobody could do it — we were watching the TV with one eye and Iran and the economy with the other.” I guess Patel was confident that his staff had matters under control.

This was not Lake Placid 2.0

Many in the media have tried to equate the 2026 men’s hockey gold medal victory with the Lake Placid win in 1980, and no doubt had tuned in hoping to feel that surge of national pride again, too. I was 9 years old in 1980, living north of Memphis, and can still hear the iconic Michaels call — “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" We made the Soviet team the enemy, fair or not, and it united us as Americans.

But last Sunday proved to be, like so much else these days, a divisive event, another litmus test of how far we’ve fallen, even from those post-Watergate, post-Vietnam days. In 1987, Reagan brought the U.S. men's hockey team, bound to compete in the 1988 Olympic Winter Games in Calgary, to the now-defunct Rose Garden — I can hardly believe I’m typing that — and led them in a prayer his football coaches had taught him. It was a prayer not for victory but for sportsmanship and good health, because both teams, he said, belonged to God. You hardly got the feeling that Trump felt the Canadian players belonged to God — he posted an AI-generated video to Truth Social in which his hockey-playing avatar punches Canadian players in the face. The president sees enemies everywhere — he’s on record hating political opponents in his own country.

So, no USA hat for me, thank you. No “USA” chants or miracles on Milanese ice. No share in this sullied victory.

Bob Cowser is a professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.

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