ROSE BOWL / UCLA Bruins vs. Wisconsin Badgers : Ring of Fire : In His Fourth Season, Badger Coach Barry Alvarez Provides the Spark That Has Ignited Wisconsin’s Long-Dormant Hopes for the Rose Bowl

Barry Alvarez was sitting at a conference table with his Wisconsin coaching staff before their first recruiting mission four years ago when he looked down at his hands.

He was wearing a national championship ring from Notre Dame, where he had been defensive coordinator in 1988.

“I looked around the table, and all the guys were wearing rings,” Alvarez said. Dan McCarney and Bernie Wyatt had Rose Bowl rings from Iowa. Bill Callahan and Kevin Cosgrove had Illinois Rose Bowl rings. Another guy had an Auburn Sugar Bowl ring.

“I knew (high school) kids look at your rings, they want to see the hardware you’re wearing, and I realized we were giving out bad signals with our rings. They were from everywhere but Wisconsin, so I sat down and designed a UW ring for the staff.”

When the Big Ten Conference champion Badgers begin practice today at Citrus College to prepare for the New Year’s Day Rose Bowl game against UCLA, Alvarez and all his staff will be wearing UW rings.

“This might be the last time we wear them,” he said with a smile. “The next time we go out talking with kids, we’ll be wearing our own Rose Bowl rings, ones we really earned instead of ones we bought.”

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Alvarez, 47, coached as an assistant in nine bowl games with Iowa and Notre Dame, played in the Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl as a Nebraska linebacker, was Lou Holtz’s defensive coordinator when Notre Dame went 12-0 and beat West Virginia for the national championship in the Fiesta Bowl. But he says nothing in college football compares with running out of the tunnel onto the field at the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.

“I get chills and goose bumps just thinking about it,” Alvarez said. “I was out here twice with Iowa and we got beat pretty good, but the emotions I had when I was there on the sideline with the sun setting and dusk settling over the Rose Bowl was something I’ve never felt anywhere else. You start thinking about all the tradition of it being the granddaddy of all the bowls and how it all started right there in Pasadena and you’re a part of it, there’s nothing compares with it.

“I called Lou (Holtz) the day we got home from Tokyo (after beating Michigan State to clinch the Rose Bowl bid), and he said he knew how I felt, that he felt the same way even though he’s been to all the other bowls as a head coach. He was in Pasadena in ’68 (for the ’69 game) with Woody Hayes (as an Ohio State assistant).”

Alvarez is drawing on his experiences with Iowa in Pasadena, where the Hawkeyes lost to Washington, 28-0, in 1982 and to UCLA, 45-28, in 1986, as well as his other bowl appearances in preparing the Badgers for Saturday’s game.

“The first time we went, with Iowa, we were in a very similar situation to ours this year,” he said. “Iowa had gone 19 straight seasons without a winning record, so we had gone from no bowl to the Rose Bowl.

“Wisconsin hasn’t been here in 31 years, but the difference between now and the Iowa days is that no one, from (Coach) Hayden Fry on down, had any bowl experience in our first year. We had no idea how to prepare, how to handle what was coming. We got to Pasadena on the 17th (of December), and by the time we played the game, the coaches were tired, the players were tired and the results showed it. What I learned from that game was how not to do things.

“The next time, we knew better and we prepared better. The team just didn’t play well.

“Wisconsin may not have been out here, but the coaching staff has. Seven of the nine guys have been to Pasadena and coached in the Rose Bowl.”

Holtz--with whom Alvarez worked three seasons, first as linebacker coach, then defensive coordinator and in 1989 as assistant coach--has been the most influential in the Badger coach’s postseason planning.

“I got a lot of my current philosophy from Lou,” Alvarez said. “I’ve taken things from all of the people I have worked with and I’ve worked with some great ones, but Lou gave me the most.

“I was a graduate assistant (at Nebraska) with Bob Devaney during my formative years when I was deciding I wanted to be a coach. He showed me how you need to intermingle with people. He had a special manner about him. I watched how he worked in the community. He could be at home with the mayor and influential people at downtown clubs and be just as comfortable when he came to my hometown (Burgettstown, Pa., a drab mining community near the West Virginia and Ohio borders) and sat around drinking beer with the boys.

“Hayden (Fry) hired me as a high school coach in Iowa and gave me a sense of organization. He was an old Marine and set up a chain of command like a military unit. Everything was organized, as tight as if he was planning an invasion.

“Football-wise, though, I got more from Lou than anyone. I talk to him probably once a week. I ask him about everything. I used to be impulsive and did things on the spur of the moment, often without thinking them through. Lou taught me the importance of putting things down on paper.

“The day I took the (Wisconsin) job, we (Notre Dame) were in Miami and had just beaten Colorado in the Orange Bowl. I went to Lou’s room at midnight and we sat down and talked. Actually, he talked and I wrote. I keep that (notebook) and I look back at it every now and then. It was just some basic things about being a head coach, how to treat the kids, how to deal with the administration, how to do different things.”

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Lou Holtz is Barry Alvarez’s football motivator, but long before the Wisconsin coach came under Holtz’s influence, his blue-collar work ethic and principled lifestyle was instilled by his maternal grandmother, Elvira.

“She was a tough old gal who had great pride and believed in discipline,” Alvarez said. “She came from Spain and lived with us. My brother (Woody) and I couldn’t get away with a thing. She stayed right on top of us.

“I remember, many a time, I’d try to sneak in the house and she’d wake up and come flying out of her bedroom and hit me with a shoe. She was also my biggest booster.”

Grandma Alvarez was always in the stands when Barry started playing midget football for the Burgettstown Lions at 9 and later on when he played football, baseball and basketball in high school.

“Both of my folks worked, so I had everything I needed,” he said. “But I didn’t need much. I was playing ball all year, whatever season it was. By the time I was in high school, I was looking for a way to get away from western Pennsylvania. I looked at those guys carrying lunch pails to work and I knew I didn’t want to be like that.”

But he is like that. The teams that Alvarez puts on the field reflect the lunch-pail work ethic he learned as a teen-ager. He is a football coach, but he is still a blue-collar guy.

That was borne out in his early experiences as a head coach. In his first year at Wisconsin, 52 players dropped out of the program when they learned what was expected of them by the intense man from Notre Dame.

“From my first day with the team, when I talked about commitment, I knew we were in trouble,” Alvarez said. “They weren’t ready to make the commitment. One by one, they knocked on the door.

“ ‘Coach, can I talk to you for a minute? Hey, we know you can get the job done, but, well, we don’t think we want to make that kind of commitment.’ Good. See ya. So they would be gone. It was like a swinging door for a while. And then we started conditioning and it got worse. They thought it was some type of a boot camp or something. It’s no big deal now that we have our own kids, ones we recruited ourselves and not leftovers from a losing era.”

Wisconsin finished 1-10, beating only Ball State, in 1990, Alvarez’s first season.

“We were just ridiculous,” he said. “We even lost to Northwestern. We started eight freshmen on offense. That’s how bad we were. We knew the first item was to get some players.

“The Rose Bowl was the farthest thought in my mind back then. I knew it was too far out of reach to be concerned about it. All I wanted was to take one step at a time and just try to get to the point where we could compete with the Big Ten schools. I kept telling myself to be patient. I knew when I took the job it would be like that at the start, but I had to be patient.

“That’s another place where Lou (Holtz) helped me. He had been through a similar situation at Minnesota and he knew what I was up against, but he was also the one who helped convince me that Wisconsin was where I should go.”

Alvarez had interviewed for head coaching jobs at Pittsburgh and Rutgers, as well as Wisconsin, and turned down several other offers while at Notre Dame.

“The year before I left, after we’d won the national championship, I had been contacted by some schools. But I made it known that I was going to stay because my daughter was a senior in high school,” he said.

“I was ready the next season. My old coach, Bob Devaney, told me just before I moved to Notre Dame in 1987 that I should set a goal for myself to take a head coaching job by the time I was 42. I don’t know why he set that date. I missed it by a day (his birthday is Dec. 30). It was pretty exciting. My father was there with my family and me in Miami when I got the call from (Athletic Director) Pat Richter.

“Having Richter at Wisconsin along with a new chancellor who was committed to restoring the school’s glory was a big factor in my going to Madison instead of the other places. Friends had warned me not to go to Wisconsin, where no one had been able to get the job done, but there was a new administration.

“Donna Shalala, who is now with the President’s cabinet, had been there maybe a year and made a decision she wanted to clean house. She described it to me: ‘The athletic department is a multimillion-dollar business and it was being run like a Ma and Pa grocery store.’ That hit it right on the head. It was in a shambles . . . and the football program was worse.

“So, her first move was to get Richter to lead the department. Richter was the good guy on the white horse with the white hat. He grew up there (in Madison). He was the All-American boy, a three-sport star at the university. He played pro ball for 10 years, has a law degree and was vice president of Oscar Mayer. He had it all.

“He was actually probably crazy to take the job. But he came back, I think, because of a loyalty to the university. And so, the two most important people that obviously were committed were he and Donna, and their first order was to go out and hire a football coach. They offered me the job when I was at the Orange Bowl. I didn’t take long to get to Madison and get going.”

Bud Lea of the Milwaukee Sentinel remembers that next day, Jan. 2, 1990:

“Operating on one hour of sleep, Alvarez managed to fly in from Miami, met with Shalala and Richter, agreed to a $110,000-a-year, four-year contract to become Wisconsin’s head football coach, introduced Dan McCarney as his defensive coordinator, arranged a meeting with the holdover staff and planned a meeting with the state’s high school coaches.”

Alvarez showed no lack of confidence. He warned university boosters that day that “people better get season tickets right now because before long they probably won’t be able to.”

Then he went out and posted a 1-10 season, followed by 5-6 seasons in 1991 and 1992 before the 9-1-1 of 1993 that put the Badgers, who had been projected for no better than fourth place in preseason polls, into the Rose Bowl.

“We have achieved all of our goals this year but one: Winning a Jan. 1 bowl game,” the coach said. “The others included starting fast, beating Indiana, having a winning road record, winning at least five Big Ten games, finishing among the top four in the conference to get a bowl bid, averaging 70,000 fans at Camp Randall Stadium, showing that the victory last year over Ohio State wasn’t a fluke and making the Michigan game one of national prominence.”

It was Wisconsin’s 13-10 upset of Michigan, the defending Rose Bowl champion, that gave the Badgers a national ranking.

“We still can’t lose sight of that last objective, though, which is to win a Jan. 1 bowl game,” Alvarez said. “That’s a lesson I learned at Iowa. Our main goal was to get there, but when we got there we weren’t ready and we got our butt kicked.

“That’s not going to happen this year. We’ll be ready, you can be sure of that.”

Times staff writer Wendy Witherspoon contributed to this story.

Barry Alvarez’s Coaching Record YEAR-BY-YEAR

Year W L T Ranking 1990 1 10 0 Unranked 1991 5 6 0 Unranked 1992 5 6 0 Unranked 1993 9 1 1 ? Total 20 23 1 .471