DETROIT – It takes less than two hours to fly from Boston to the Motor City, and there are dozens of daily non-stops between the two airports. That meant Brock Faber and Matt Boldy re-joining the Wild from their stint with Team USA at the 4 Nations Face-Off in time for their Saturday matinee at Little Caesars Arena was no real trouble.
For Faber, getting back together with his team after an international competition is something he’s proven adept at, even if it means traveling from – literally – the other side of the Earth.
Canada’s Mason McTavish (32) and United States’ Brock Faber (14) skate behind the net during a preliminary round men’s hockey game at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Saturday, Feb. 12, 2022, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Three years ago, almost to the day, Faber and Minnesota Gophers teammates Matthew Knies and Ben Meyers skated for the Americans at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China. Their team was eliminated on a Wednesday night, and immediately the question became whether they would get back to the U.S. in time for that weekend’s Gophers games at Penn State.
Their coach thought rest would be a better idea, but gave them the option.
“We said, ‘If you guys just want to go home (to Minnesota), go home. We’ve got this.’ That was a tough trip home,” Gophers head coach Bob Motzko recalled in a 2022 interview with The Rink Live. “The text 20 minutes later said, ‘We’re coming.’ I just gave them a thumbs-up.”
The long journey home began with a bus ride from the Olympic Village, which dropped them off at Beijing Airport several hours before their flight. That turned out to be fortunate, as a notable amount of paperwork was required for them to exit the country. The first flight took off after dark, and landed in Tokyo in the middle of the night, where they had a five-hour layover in an airport where nearly nothing was open.
“Every time we were at the airport, it was too early for anything to be open, so lots of Snickers, lots of chips, just trying to get by,” Faber said. “As soon as we got back to the states we really loaded up.”
From Tokyo, the next flight was nearly 12 hours, and landed in Dallas, where they were able to find McDonalds and a diner, to begin the process of adjusting back to an American diet. The Gophers split up in Texas. Faber went to Boston. Knies and Meyers went to Charlotte, N.C. They met up again in Harrisburg, Pa., a few hours later then took a two-hour car ride to State College, arriving at the team hotel after 11 p.m. Friday, a few hours after a shorthanded Gophers team had won the series opener.
With all of the flights and layovers and changing time zones, the details are fuzzy, but they estimate the trip from China to small-town Pennsylvania took somewhere between 34 and 40 hours.
And after all of that effort, Knies couldn’t play versus the Nittany Lions, due in part to bumps and bruises from the Olympics, and a sore back from all of those plane rides. Meyers and Faber looked dead in the first period as Penn State built a 3-0 lead. At the first intermission, Motzko told his team to either start the plane and head home, or start playing hockey. Faber and Meyers were in no hurry to get back on a flight.
Their games, and the Gophers, roared back in the final 40 minutes, scoring six of the next seven goals – three of them assisted by Meyers, who would be named Big Ten most valuable player a month later – as the Gophers won 6-4.
And on the two-hour charter back to MSP, all three Olympians got some sleep.
Leave a Reply