100 Things Wisconsin Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die
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100 Things Wisconsin Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781633196537 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Triumph Books |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2016 |
| Series: | 100 Things...Fans Should Know Series |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
100 Things Wisconsin Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die
By Jesse Temple
Triumph Books LLC
Copyright © 2016 Jesse TempleAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63319-653-7
CHAPTER 1
1. Barry Alvarez
Recent history suggested Barry Alvarez's bold statement was preposterous on the day he was hired to coach Wisconsin's crumbling football program. Call it bravado. Call it cockiness. Call it confidence. But whatever it was, even those closest to the team wondered whether his viewpoint aligned with reality.
Alvarez stood at a podium in Madison on January 2, 1990, and unleashed the kind of belief-building rhetoric that would rally Badgers supporters and become a staple of his tenure as coach. "Let me just say this," he began, addressing the fans in a moment of spontaneity. "They better get season tickets right now because before long, they probably won't be able to."
The line has become etched into lore over the years, played on the Camp Randall Stadium video board as part of pre-game montages thanks to the Badgers' remarkable turnaround since then. Yet to understand how outrageous Alvarez's comment appeared at the time was to know how far the football program had actually fallen.
The year before Alvarez arrived, in 1989, Wisconsin's home attendance plummeted to 41,734 fans per game — the lowest mark since 1945. During a three-year descent into the Big Ten basement from 1987 to '89 under previous coach Don Morton, UW won only six of 33 games overall. The lack of football success contributed significantly to the athletics department's $2.1 million debt. In other words, the Badgers were considered a national laughingstock.
In order for Alvarez's prediction to come true, Wisconsin would have to rebuild its entire team and lure in another 35,000 fans on Saturdays in the fall. The task required a broad uprooting of ingrained program beliefs that few coaches likely could have achieved.
"I thought, 'I wonder if he knows what he's getting into,' because it was a mess," longtime Badgers radio announcer Matt Lepay said.
Alvarez, of course, was ready for the challenge. And then some.
"That question was asked to me, about what do you tell your fans who are tired of losing and not coming," Alvarez said. "There were less than 20,000 people here for that last game of the season the year before we showed up. I had coaches going out, driving around the state, going to high school coaches in towns where we had players. We went to the Wisconsin ticket office and said, 'Give me some specials on tickets.' Then we told high school coaches, 'Bring a bus. Bring your players down, bring people down, we'll give you discounts on tickets.'
"We were doing anything. I'd buy 50 tickets a game myself and give them to Boys and Girls Clubs. I'd give them to youth groups just to put somebody in the stadium. We were working. We just weren't sitting around waiting for it to happen. I knew as soon as we were competitive that people would come back."
Come back they did, as Alvarez orchestrated one of the single greatest rebuilding projects in college football history. His offseason-conditioning program was notoriously difficult in 1990, which helped change the culture and run off more than 50 players from the previous team. Alvarez used his gift as a master motivator to maximize players' talent, galvanize the fan base, and raise expectations. His no-nonsense approach established a program based on toughness and an unrelenting desire to win. He did so by recruiting blue-collar players often overlooked at other programs and building a so-called fence around Wisconsin to secure in-state commitments.
The method gradually worked. Though Alvarez's first Wisconsin team finished an underwhelming 1–10 with mostly overmatched young players, home attendance increased by an average of nearly 10,000 people per game over the previous year. Following consecutive 5–6 seasons that saw Wisconsin just miss out on bowl game opportunities, Alvarez attained the breakthrough he recognized was possible from the start.
With a team stocked full of in-state products such as receiver J.C. Dawkins, outside linebacker Chris Hein, defensive back Jeff Messenger, running back Brent Moss, free safety Scott Nelson, right tackle Joe Panos, right guard Steve Stark, defensive tackle Mike Thompson, and left tackle Mike Verstegen, Wisconsin finished the regular season 9–1–1 to reach the 1994 Rose Bowl — the school's first appearance in the game in 31 years. Wisconsin ultimately defeated UCLA 21–16 for the Badgers' first-ever Rose Bowl victory.
Alvarez, ever the advantage seeker, pulled out every trick he could that season to motivate players. He famously convinced the team to wear sunglasses during the day and keep lights on at night to adjust body clocks to the time difference in the weeks before the team's regular season finale in Tokyo, Japan, against Michigan State. Multiple players said that, before another game that season, Alvarez told the team he would beat up an opposing coach who had spoken badly of his Badgers to prove Wisconsin would not back down from anyone.
"We all went crazy," Panos said. "Coach was one of us, man. We really, really thought that we truly, deeply knew that he believed in us and loved us very much. If you get a guy that does that, a guy that bleeds for you, has got your back, you'll do just about anything for him. I always said we would follow Coach through the gates of hell. That was the kind of guy he was."
That Alvarez constantly came armed with a plan to restore confidence was nothing new. He had developed his reputation as a team builder well before rising up the college coaching ranks. As a 29-year-old head coach at Mason City High School in Iowa in 1976, he renovated the school's training facilities, knocking out walls with a sledgehammer, rebuilding it by hand with the aid of assistant coaches and adding workout equipment. In 1978, he rallied the team by offering to shave his head as part of a fundraiser if his players avenged their only regular season loss — a 26-24 triple-overtime defeat to Fort Dodge — in the playoffs. Mason City won that semifinal rematch, he shaved his head, and the Mohawks went on to win the Class 4A state championship.
Those qualities carried forth when Alvarez joined Hayden Fry as a linebackers coach at Iowa in 1979 and steadily built his career. He eventually coached alongside Lou Holtz as defensive coordinator at Notre Dame in the late 1980s, where the pair helped the Fighting Irish win a national championship.
Dan McCarney, who worked with Alvarez at Iowa and served as his defensive coordinator at Wisconsin from 1990 to '94, said he recalled a conversation the two shared on Alvarez's first day at Wisconsin. Alvarez, a former linebacker at Nebraska under coach Bob Devaney, said he wanted the Badgers to mirror the Cornhuskers' success. He hoped to fill the football stadium, to have all of his senior classes experience a bowl game, and to someday become the school's athletics director.
"All those things happened, and it sure as hell didn't come easy," McCarney said. "You talk about a guy that had a vision and knew what he wanted and then went and got it."
At every step, Alvarez found ways to win, which proved no different at Wisconsin despite tremendous initial obstacles. He coached Wisconsin from 1990 to 2005 and left as the winningest coach in program history. Alvarez's teams won three Rose Bowls, in 1994, 1999, and 2000, and he possesses a career record at Wisconsin of 119–74–4. Camp Randall Stadium, meanwhile, has averaged at least 75,000 fans per game every year since 1993, and Wisconsin has become a perennial top-25 program.
Season tickets, as Alvarez once suggested, are hard to come by these days. And Alvarez, undeniably, is among the most significant reasons for the sustained success.
"I just have a strong belief [that] when you compete, I always want to give my guys the advantage," said Alvarez, who has served as Wisconsin's athletics director since 2004. "When I'm confident, they're confident. If you've got a little swagger, they get a little swagger."
2. Bob Johnson
The most remarkable collapse Wisconsin hockey fans had ever seen was only a few minutes old, and 8,662 people shuffled out of the Dane County Coliseum in disbelief. Just one day earlier, Wisconsin had blitzed Colorado College 8–2 in a Western Collegiate Hockey Association playoff game. All the Badgers had to do 24 hours later was not lose by seven goals, and the two-game, total-goal series belonged to them, keeping their NCAA tournament hopes alive.
Then it happened. Colorado College buzzed up the ice, swarmed the puck, scored in the first minute, and kept on coming. Three goals in the first six minutes of the second period narrowed the total margin further. Until, finally, Colorado College left with a stunning 11–4 victory to take the total-goal series 13–12. Wisconsin, at 23–14–1, was eliminated from the league tournament on March 8, 1981, and the season seemed doomed.
"It was like a nightmare out there," Wisconsin coach Bob Johnson said afterward.
But this is not a story about surrender. Johnson would never allow it. What made him one of the most effective coaches in Badgers sports history was his enthusiasm, determination to succeed, intensity, and attention to detail, and all those traits would be on display in the coming weeks.
Johnson already had two national titles under his belt at Wisconsin, and he was known for having plenty of influence and political clout in college hockey. The NCAA tournament had expanded to eight teams for the first time for the 1981 postseason, and Johnson lobbied hard to the NCAA selection committee for an at-large berth. Before there were computer rankings, decisions often were made based on financial considerations or fan support, and Johnson knew the Badgers could be in good position.
Still, nothing was guaranteed. Players weren't sure if they would ever play a game together as a team again. Johnson, however, kept the Badgers practicing for a full week despite the uncertainty, keeping them sharp just in case.
"There was a question in players' minds: Was this all worth it?" former UW winger Ron Vincent told the Milwaukee Journal.
Tournament bids were announced more than a week later over the phone to Johnson with 25 of his players looking on. There was good news: Wisconsin had secured an at-large berth. And 20 days after losing in the WCHA playoffs, Wisconsin captured its third national championship by crushing Minnesota 6–3. The game completed a magical run for a team that became known as the "Backdoor Badgers" for the manner in which they sneaked into the postseason.
"It was classic, vintage Bob Johnson," Thomas Osenton, a former administrative assistant, told the Journal. "It was almost as if he willed it to happen. We became a team of destiny. A lot of coaches would have collected the jerseys and called it a season."
Johnson embodied the spirit of Wisconsin hockey. His favorite expression was, "It's a great day for hockey," and with Johnson at the helm of the Badgers program, it usually was.
The son of a Swedish immigrant who changed his surname from Olars, Johnson played hockey at North Dakota and Minnesota and was good enough in baseball to sign professionally with the Chicago White Sox. His baseball career was interrupted by the Korean War and, married with two children, he accepted a high school coaching job in 1956. He moved to Colorado College in 1963, and three years later he came to Wisconsin, where he was 367–175–23 in 15 seasons.
"My early years there were more fun than the later years," he said in July 1991. "It was fun developing that program, getting into the WCHA, getting into the Dane County Coliseum, and seeing the people of Madison getting excited.
"The first year, we drew about 2,000 [per game], then 3,000, then 4,000, and all of a sudden the rink was sold out, and now it has been all these years. The timing was just right, and a lot of the fans were Badger fans, not hockey fans. They had just dropped boxing as a sport at Wisconsin, and the football team didn't win a game my first two years there. The fans were thirsting for something to latch onto, and hockey became it."
Wisconsin's hockey program was only three years old as an intercollegiate sport when Johnson arrived, and he turned the Badgers into a national power using his optimism and discipline. Jeff Sauer, a friend of Johnson's and his successor as Badgers hockey coach, once said Johnson's enthusiasm was contagious.
"He could lose a 12–2 game and after talking to him, you had the funny feeling the score was actually 13–12 and he won," Sauer said.
Johnson coached Wisconsin to national titles in 1973, 1977, and 1981 and was named NCAA coach of the year in 1977. He gained the enduring nickname "Badger Bob." He also coached the 1976 Winter Olympic hockey team and U.S. National teams from 1973 to '75 and in 1981.
During his time as a coach, he had a low tolerance for gloom. If a player didn't get caught up in his upbeat attitude, his relationship with Johnson was usually short and tense, the New York Times noted. The coach always encouraged players, prodding them to reach for a higher level.
"There are a lot of ways to coach," Johnson told the New York Times about his philosophy. "You can coach from fear, when it's, 'You do it this way or you're gone tomorrow,' or you can develop pride in performance."
Johnson left Wisconsin to coach the Calgary Flames from 1982 to '87 and led the team to its first Campbell Conference championship and the Stanley Cup finals. After supervising USA Hockey for three years, he returned to coaching and led the Pittsburgh Penguins to their first Stanley Cup championship in 1991, in what proved to be his only season in charge there.
"It's sort of like the frosting on the cake," Johnson said after the season. "When I returned to coaching last year, I never dreamed we'd win the Stanley Cup."
In August 1991, following hospitalization due to a brain aneurysm, Johnson was diagnosed with brain cancer. He died November 26, 1991, at age 60.
"He taught us how to win," Pittsburgh Penguins captain Mario Lemieux said. "We're a very tough team to coach, a team that was known for offense, but he taught us how to play defense. He was the main reason why we won the Stanley Cup."
The Penguins wore a memorial patch in honor of Johnson the following season that read 1931–1991 with the word BADGER underneath. Players at Wisconsin wore initials on their helmets. Pittsburgh paid tribute to Johnson in a 10-minute ceremony before a game against the New Jersey Devils one night after his passing.
Fans were given miniature battery-operated candles as they entered the Civic Arena. After the Pittsburgh players took the ice, the house lights were turned off and the building illuminated with candles held by the 16,164 fans. A soloist sang the Lord's Prayer, which was followed by Linda Ronstadt's "Goodbye, My Friend." During the second song, the Penguins revealed another tribute.
Painted outside each blue line was Johnson's favorite phrase: "It's a Great Day for Hockey — Badger Bob."
Johnson was inducted into the Wisconsin Hockey Hall of Fame in 1987, the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 1991, and the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1992. He was elected to the Wisconsin Athletics Hall of Fame in 1993. In 2012, Wisconsin's hockey playing surface in the Kohl Center was named Bob Johnson Rink.
"I don't think anyone has contributed more to national, international and professional hockey as a player, a coach and an administrator than he has," said John Mayasich, chairman of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame's selection committee.
Johnson remains the only coach to win NCAA and NHL championships.
3. Pat Richter
If Pat Richter had followed through on his initial college commitment, Wisconsin Badgers supporters would have lost the opportunity to cheer on a hometown hero — and perhaps later witness a remarkable turnaround of an entire athletics department. That's because Richter, a Madison native, originally picked the University of Kansas on a basketball scholarship.
Yes, Richter, one of the greatest all-around athletes in Wisconsin history, was nearly a Jayhawk. He committed on a visit to Lawrence, Kansas, even though he never even saw the famed Allen Fieldhouse gymnasium. He recalled watching a Kansas City Athletics baseball game and being awestruck on his only recruiting visit in the spring of 1959 that a program was so interested in his talents.
"It was just probably one of those youthful reactions and kind of quick judgments type of thing," Richter said.
Richter viewed his college choice, in part, through the prism of what school might help him play professional athletics. He thought that sport would be baseball and had not considered what a future in football might look like. When he returned home, however, a close friend and advisor named Gene Calhoun told him he'd be better off playing baseball in the Big Ten and that Kansas was not a very good baseball school. It was enough to convince Richter to switch allegiances, and a month later, he was a Badger. Opting out of a letter of intent those days, Richter said, was not nearly as difficult as in today's college landscape.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 100 Things Wisconsin Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die by Jesse Temple. Copyright © 2016 Jesse Temple. Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Barry Alvarez,Introduction,
1. Barry Alvarez,
2. Bob Johnson,
3. Pat Richter,
4. Ron Dayne,
5. Bo Ryan,
6. John J. Walsh and a Boxing Powerhouse,
7. Alan Ameche,
8. Frank Kaminsky,
9. Why Not Wisconsin?,
10. 1994 Rose Bowl: Darrell Bevell's Run,
11. 1941 National Champs,
12. Wisconsin Topples Unbeaten Kentucky,
13. Mark Johnson,
14. 1999 Rose Bowl: "We're at Least the Second Worst",
15. 2000 Rose Bowl: Dayne Goes Out with a Bang,
16. Bucky Badger,
17. Dick Bennett,
18. Melvin Gordon,
19. The 2000 Final Four Run,
20. Bo Honors Butch,
21. Recapping Six Men's Hockey Titles,
22. Ed Nuttycombe,
23. Stu Jackson and the NCAA Tournament,
24. Montee Ball,
25. Baseball Shuttered,
26. J.J. Watt,
27. Bo Schembechler and Bob Knight Could've Been Badgers,
28. After 28 Years, a Hockey Revival,
29. 408!,
30. Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch,
31. National Title Slips Away,
32. Walk-On Tradition,
33. Dave McClain,
34. Lee Kemp,
35. 1963 Rose Bowl: A (Near) Comeback for the Ages,
36. Hoops Takes Down No. 1, Part I: 1962,
37. Alando Tucker,
38. Jim Leonhard,
39. Hard Rocks Defense of 1951,
40. 1953 Rose Bowl Is Badgers' First,
41. Walter "Doc" Meanwell,
42. Wisconsin 21, No. 1 Michigan 14,
43. Michael Finley,
44. Dave Schreiner,
45. Camp Randall Stadium,
46. Hoops Takes Down No. 1, Part II: 2011,
47. Russell Wilson,
48. David Gilreath's "Footrace to the House",
49. UW Field House,
50. Don Rehfeldt,
51. 2012 Rose Bowl: Scores Galore,
52. Lee Evans,
53. Badgers Shuck Cornhuskers in '74,
54. Donna Shalala,
55. The Father of Wisconsin Basketball,
56. Ivy Williamson,
57. Joe Thomas,
58. Suzy Favor Hamilton,
59. 1960 Rose Bowl: "A Nightmare",
60. Badgers Break Coaching Color Barrier,
61. Kohl Center,
62. Devin Harris,
63. Camp Randall Crush,
64. Paul Bunyan's Axe,
65. Watch the Fifth Quarter,
66. Bud Foster,
67. A Short-Lived No. 1 Ranking,
68. Controversy Follows a Soccer National Title,
69. Al Toon and the Bounce Pass Play,
70. Rufus "Roadrunner" Ferguson,
71. Jolene Anderson,
72. "Jump Around",
73. Bret Bielema's Stunning Departure,
74. Triple-OT Classic in the Field House,
75. Fun-Loving Badgers Take Nation by Storm,
76. Matt Lepay: Voice of the Badgers,
77. The Shoe Box Scandal,
78. Jordan Taylor,
79. Formation of Women's Hockey,
80. Greg Gard,
81. Running Back U,
82. The Water Bottle Game,
83. Barry Un-Retires, Part I,
84. Freddie Owens Saves the Day,
85. Barry Un-etires, Part II,
86. Billy Marek,
87. Volleyball Returns to Title Match,
88. The Kangaroo Kicker,
89. Tim Krumrie,
90. Otto Puls, Official Scorekeeper,
91. Chris Solinsky,
92. An Incredible Olympics Rowing Streak,
93. Jamar Fletcher vs. Freddie Mitchell,
94. Paul Chryst Era Begins,
95. Kathy Butler,
96. Ben Brust's Half-Court Heave,
97. Run Elver Park Hill,
98. Sing the Bud Song,
99. Claude Gregory,
100. Take In the Beauty of the Terrace,
Acknowledgments,
Sources,