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San Francisco Chronicle: Eruzione, Craig reflect on Miracle moment
“How many athletic events touch a nation?” asks Mike Eruzione (SED'77), former BU hockey player, member of the 1980 gold medal–winning U.S. Olympic hockey team, and now director of athletics development in the Office of Development and Alumni Relations. Eruzione scored the winning goal against the USSR, which enabled the team to skate against Finland in the gold-medal round. The win moved an ecstatic ABC announcer Al Michaels to proclaim, “Do you believe in miracles? YES!” These events are captured in the new Walt Disney Pictures movie Miracle, reports the February 9 San Francisco Chronicle. “It was a moment that was not only special to me and my teammates, but, over the years, we've found out it was special to a lot of people,” says Eruzione. “What I most enjoy and am proud of,” says U.S.A. goalkeeper Jim Craig (SED'79), “is that this has never been just about me and the 20 guys. It's about us and the country. Everybody has ownership of it, and that's a wonderful feeling.” Team coach Herb Brooks, who died last summer in a single-car accident, “slowly brought us together as a unit,” says Craig, “and made us believe we could achieve the impossible.” Other BU hockey teammates who were members of the U.S.A. team include Jack O'Callahan (CAS'79) and Dave Silk (CAS'80, MET'92, GSM'94). “Fame has changed our opportunities,” says Eruzione. “I get to do things I wouldn't have gotten to do if it hadn't been for that game. But I still live next door to my dad, and my mother-in-law lives around the corner. We were the kids next door, as Herb called us, a lunch-pail, hard-hat group of guys who grew up in families where our parents taught us about respect and being good kids, about doing the right thing and making the right decisions.”
CNN.com: Inspiration for Prothero's book on Jesus
“I kept running into Jesus when I was trying to study Hindus and Buddhists,” says Stephen Prothero, a CAS associate professor and chairman of the department of religion, in the February 15 edition of CNN.com. He says he was partly inspired to write his current book, American Jesus: How the Son of God Become a National Icon, after seeing a portrait of Jesus meditating during a visit to a Hindu temple in San Francisco. The range of American interpretations of Jesus says something interesting about America, Prothero says. “Jesus is on the agenda because of the public power of Christianity. The kind of Christianity that now dominates is Jesus-focused. But we have the First Amendment. We have a culture that highly values religious toleration and even, I think it's fair to say, diversity. In such a culture, Jesus won't become a national figure unless he can move outside Christianity.”
Boston Globe: Heart disease different for women
Cardiologists once thought the symptoms of heart disease were the same for women as for men. But now they concede that the number one killer of women in the United States — at a half-million deaths each year — cannot be compared to heart disease in men, reports the February 17 Boston Globe. The disease typically develops 10 to 15 years later in life for women than for men. While men most usually experience chest pain and sweating, women develop nausea, dizziness, and sometimes a twinge of discomfort. “Cardiovascular disease by and large is preventable, but there is an alarming lack of awareness in women about what their own risk of heart disease is,” says Alice Jacobs, a MED professor of clinical cardiology and president-elect of the American Heart Association. “There is a perception out there that cardiovascular disease is a disease of men.”
Yankee: Travis Roy on Travis Roy
In an article in the March issue of Yankee magazine, Travis Roy (COM'00) engages in a bittersweet reflection of his life before he was paralyzed 11 seconds after checking into his first BU hockey game, at Walter Brown Arena in 1995, and his life today. “I think it's pretty rare to feel the way I did,” he says. “Most people don't have passion like that. I was constantly thinking hockey. I didn't stop. Everything was somehow related. How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? How can I eat better? or Where can I practice? or Where can I lift weights? And that whole process has been completely replaced with, Have I taken my evening pills? Do I look all right in the chair? Do I look funny? Is my leg crooked? Is my body deteriorating?. . . Like I tell my friends, I feel like I'm breathing out of a straw. I never get to have a real good laugh. Life is good, but you're kind of limited. Everything is on a completely different scale. I used to have these highs and lows — actually, my lows weren't that big. But my highs were just on top of the world, and now my highs . . . Real emotion, real happiness, real excitement, there's not much of that. But I appreciate what I have. I'm grateful. I've got so much more than most of the world. I've got nice parents. I've got family. I've got friends. A lot of able-bodied people can't say that.”
20
February 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations