Joe Cure, a Bloomington kid who landed a role playing a Minnesota hockey standout in the 2004 movie "Miracle," died over the weekend while driving in his adopted home state of Montana.
Cure, 31, portrayed Mike Ramsey in the movie about Team USA's victory over the Soviet Union on the way to the 1980 gold medal in the Lake Placid Winter Olympics.
Cure, who was living in Bozeman, Mont., and attending Montana State University as a graduate student in neuroscience, was driving Sunday in the high elevations of southwestern Montana when his vehicle slid on a slick highway and rolled over several times. Madison County Sheriff Roger Thompson said Cure was dead at the scene. A woman with Cure, fellow MSU student Hannah Wolf, 21, was initially treated where she works, Bozeman Health Deaconess Hospital, for critical injuries and has since been flown to Seattle for surgery.
One of three siblings who grew up playing hockey, Cure started at age 5 and made the top bantam team before entering high school. The pinnacle of his playing career came in 2002, when he and the rest of the Academy of Holy Angels team won the Class AA state hockey tournament.
From there, he played junior hockey in Texas. Hollywood was next, and he auditioned for a role in "Miracle" on his home ice in Bloomington. Like nearly all of those seeking a part as a skater, Cure had no acting experience.
"I'm out in L.A., auditioning and pretending to be an actor, hoping somebody buys it," Cure said in a 2004 interview with the student newspaper at Baylor University, where he attended before shooting for the movie began.
The biggest of scenes, understandably, centered on team captain Mike Eruzione, goalie Jim Craig and head coach Herb Brooks. Cure's most memorable line — and the movie's shortest — came when Brooks (portrayed by Kurt Russell) stormed into the locker room between periods in a preliminary game at the Olympics:
Brooks: "This is unbelievable. You guys are playing like this is some throwaway game up in Rochester. Who we playing, Rammer?"
