The Olympics are on in Bill Reichart’s house on this sunny afternoon, the Sandhills sun shimmering on the golf-course lake behind it. It’s speed skating, not his sport. Reichart’s sport was hockey, 54 years ago, when the naturalized American captained the U.S. team to a fifth-place finish in Innsbruck, Austria.
There’s always something about the Olympics, especially this one without NHL players, that brings back memories for Reichart. He was the 28-year-old leader of a bunch of college kids from Minnesota and Massachusetts and Michigan at a time when the U.S. and Canada were still sending amateur teams to face de facto pros from the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries.