Back many years ago, I was newly married and living in Indiana. It was the dead of winter and I was home watching TV. For lack of anything else to watch, I tuned into the Winter Olympics and they were about to start a hockey game between the U.S. and the USSR (still in existence at the time). Hockey’s not my favorite sport, but I thought what the heck, let’s watch it. As it turns out, it was a big deal and, as the game went on, I could feel something special was happening. This game became the famous “Miracle on Ice”, in which the U.S. team went on to beat the Soviets by a score of 4-3 and moved on to win the gold medal in their very next game against Finland. The U.S.-Soviet game became one of the biggest upsets in sports history, and I was happy to have seen the whole game including the famous call by TV announcer Al Michaels in the last seconds of the game (“Do you believe in miracles?! YES!”).
Without going into too much detail, suffice it say that these same Soviets had crushed the U.S. team 10-3 in an exhibition match just a couple of weeks earlier. The Soviet hockey team was an invincible machine, and was heavily favored to win the Olympic gold medal. I could write the whole article about this and all the background involved, but I won’t. Let’s just say there were a lot of politics going on at the time which served to make the game even bigger than it was.
The thrill of having seen that momentous upset live, as it was happening, was huge to me… almost beyond description. It is an event that makes you remember where you were at the time it happened. Unfortunately, the same goes for hugely tragic events, like the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. Everybody remembers exactly where they were while that tragedy was unfolding. In the case of the hockey game, I still remember clearly sitting alone in my living room, seeing the snow falling outside, deciding on a whim to watch a hockey game because there was nothing else to watch. As it happens, I accidentally watched one of the greatest upsets in all of sports, if not the greatest. So great an event that they made a movie out of it, released in 2004 by Walt Disney Pictures. The video clip below is from the actual game, not the movie.
Of course, the perspective of a huge upset changes depending on which side you are viewing it from. I’m pretty sure the Soviets view that game in a whole different light. However, the Soviets had already had its own huge upset against the U.S. in the 1972 Olympic men’s basketball final, in which they dealt the U.S. its first loss ever in Olympics men’s basketball. So one could say that game was to the Soviets what the “Miracle on Ice” was to the U.S. in 1980.
On the local front, I vividly remember two occasions on which Puerto Rico provided an upset on a grand scale. The first was that famous upset of the U.S. “Dream Team” by the P.R. basketball team in the 2004 Athens Olympics. The picture of Carlos Arroyo doing his jersey thing is still burned into my mind. A humongous upset for sure. Only the third defeat in Olympic play for the U.S. at the time, and the first since the pros were allowed to participate in 1992.
The second and most recent of course was the female tennis gold medal obtained by Monica Puig in the Rio de Janeiro Olympics of 2016. I distinctly remember being part of a family gathering at my brother’s house on the day of the gold medal game. We were all sitting on the edge of our seats, cheering every point. Monica was ranked 35th in the world at that time, and was unseeded for the Olympic tournament. In the gold medal game, she beat Angelique Kerber, ranked 2nd in the world at the time and seeded second (behind Serena Williams) in the tournament. So basically this was an upset of epic proportions. In the end there were high-fives and fist bumps all around, and we yelled and screamed like every Puerto Rican watching at the time.
Many of us love the underdog in a contest, and when the underdog wins it’s normally considered an upset. But upsets of epic proportions are few and far between. As a boxing fan, I also remember the huge upset when Buster Douglas shocked the boxing world by knocking out the invincible Mike Tyson in 1990. This made sports headlines all around the world, and is still considered one of the biggest upsets in sports history.
I wasn’t yet following pro football at the time, but in 1969 the New York Jets upset the heavily favored Baltimore Colts (before the Colts were moved to Indianapolis) in Super Bowl III. This was the game that cemented “Broadway” Joe Namath’s legendary career, not just because of the upset but because the New York quarterback had actually “guaranteed” a victory before the game. This is the stuff of which legends are made.