Winning Only Adds to Wisconsin Fun : College football: Even in lean times, Badger fans enjoyed the party at Camp Randall Stadium.

For the first time in 31 years, my alma mater, Wisconsin, is playing in the Rose Bowl, and I will never again be able to use the phrase, “Stranger things have happened.”

It was certainly not supposed to happen like this. It was not supposed to happen at all, quite frankly. Until college hockey sweeps through this great land of ours to become the new national sports craze of the year 2019, most Badger fans did not figure to see the school name sucking up much newspaper space or dominating the highlight reels of sportscasters with bad toupees.

Modest football success would take a miracle, the Rose Bowl a scenario so bizarre Tom Clancy would say, “Now, run that by me again.” Something like this, Tom: Iowa Coach Hayden Fry is deported for Nazi war crimes, Michigan is forced to forfeit six victories because of a wrong jersey number, David Copperfield’s halftime show at Ohio State goes haywire and the Buckeye defensive backs disappear, Kenny G inexplicably becomes chancellor at Michigan State and cuts out “all un-mellow activity.” And mind you, this is the pre-Penn State scenario.

Now we have to add this: On their first trip to Madison, Wis., the Nittany Lions take a 90-mile wrong turn, mistakenly play and beat the Division III Wisconsin Whitewater Warhawks, 163-4, and are then charged and convicted of third-degree assault.

The reality is far more difficult to accept: The Wisconsin Badgers are a good football team, with a balanced offense, a gutty defense, and a coach named Barry Alvarez. Alvarez is the only man who has ever measured up on the Lombardi Scale, the simple, impossible litmus test by which the citizens of Wisconsin judge all their coaches. “Is he like Vince Lombardi? Would Lombardi like this guy?” “Yeah, and yeah.”

It’s such a Capra-esque twist, that a state settled mostly by German and Scandinavian immigrants would have fought to the death for a guy named Lombardi. Thirty years later, that same intense Mediterranean blood runs through Alvarez’ veins, and Badger fans love the guy, and I mean the “If-you-say-one-bad-thing-about-him-I’ll-jam-a-bowling-ball-up-your-nose” kind of love.

And so, unbelievable as it may seem, the first phrase to come from the mouths of many Badger fans this fine new year will be, “Honey, it’s almost game time--have you seen my cheese-wedge hat?”

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If the FBI is still after any 1960s radicals, putting Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl should smoke them out. The only better scenario for the Feds would have the Badgers playing Cal.

In the 1960s, the Madison campus was one of the hotbeds of political and anti-war activity. When the movement escalated to large-scale violence, the government clamped down, public opinion turned, and by the early ‘70s, the Radical Left was doused.

But even in the average Wisconsin student, small embers of subversiveness survived, and some of that heat went to an odd new activity: football. The chaotic, addictive interweaving of mass demonstration and mass partying found a new venue--Camp Randall, the Badgers’ football stadium.

The die-hard, cowboy-hatted, drive-in-from-the-farm Badger fans were suddenly joined by scruff-beards with flannel shirts, headbands and roach clips, a crowd that made Nirvana look like frat boys. When a soda was needed, the call went forth to the vendor: “Mix!” Dazed and confused, but determined.

They were there for the party, and there en masse. In the ‘70s, while the football team was experiencing nine losing seasons, Wisconsin finished in the top 10 in the country in attendance eight times. Wisconsin is still the only institution to accomplish this feat. The fans wanted entertainment, even if they had to create it from thin, cold air. And get your stupid, moronic “Wave” out of here, these people had imaginations.

Badger fans invented “body passing,” in which an inebriated, nicely relaxed human from a low row was selected by other, less inebriated fans, raised above head level, and then passed up 30 or so rows with the smoothness of a good canoe portage. Blind trust never failed. Naturally, after four games, the university outlawed body passing. The next week a stuffed dummy, a stunning, Muppet-like replica of a human, was passed up, up, up . . . and clean over the top rim. It was fine theater.

Badger fans did not have the opportunity to celebrate many kickoffs back then, and there swelled a collective urge to make the occasion as special as possible. One week, without so much as a meeting or even a flyer handed out by kids in earth shoes, the fans stopped mundanely “oooohhing” before every kickoff and instead began, inexplicably, jangling their keys. This produced an eerie, metallic Rod Serling tribute, and it was absolutely as loud as quiet can get.

One Badger fan, a pudgy plumber from Portage, Wis., took it upon himself to “de-Greek” the cheerleading squad with a stroke of populism. He dressed himself and his starter-kit pot belly in a homemade Badger cheerleading outfit topped by a fuzzy, cardinal-colored earmuff hat, ran onto the field, and joined the pompon girls for their line dance. And the thing of it was, he knew the routine, all three minutes of it, every seductive hip thrust and saucy chest push and teasing ankle kick of it. This was way before home video, too, this took memory and detailed notes and dedication. The fans went psychotic. To their credit, the pompon girls recognized a good thing and let him run down from the stands every third quarter of every home game to join them.

Badger fans invented stadium rowing. When a little brandy wasn’t enough to take away the chill in the bones, certain people would start the physical act of rowing. Get the blood moving, you know. Within seconds, entire sections of fans--thousands upon thousands of people--would be rowing in unison. If there was a 70,000-man skull in Olympic rowing, Wisconsin would win going away.

The Wisconsin Badger Marching Band under the secretly insane Mike Leckrone found whole new ways to entertain. The tubas, all of them, would march around the stadium at will, playing funk tunes and fight songs, all the while swaying their tubas from side to side as if signaling aircraft.

The band flat-out pilfered the popular “Um-pa” Budweiser jingle and turned it into a new fight song, so rabidly successful that the Budweiser folks actually decided not to sue.

The drummers convinced several pompon squad members to wear as little clothing as the windchill would allow, then prance around the stadium to a sleazy, sultry, slow drum beat that would’ve made Prince blush. It was, in retrospect, soft porn. Even while sitting in their assigned seats during game action (and I use that term loosely), the band developed a set of verbal cheers that weren’t curses, but sure sounded like it and that blistered opposing players, coaches and referees like the business end of a curling iron.

But the band’s crowning achievement was the postgame, Las Vegas Extravaganza. To salve the melancholy feeling of a loss and, more importantly, the end of a good party, the band began marching back on the field after the game was over and playing a few tunes. More and more people stayed and sang along.

The band played longer, played wilder. The musicians danced, playing the “Budweiser” jingle, polkas, funk tunes.

Trumpet players ran to the far corner of the field and dropped to their knees. Drummers would plop flat on their backs and keep pounding. Leckrone himself would turn to the crowd, Cab Calloway style, and start a call and response that built to a genuine plea from the crowd for more. Fans went ape and stayed in droves, upwards of 40,000, for a floor show that could stretch to 45 minutes. It was pure Vegas. Except it was outdoors and in bitingly cold weather. Nobody noticed.

And all this time, the team was in the bottom half of the Big Ten. It just could not get untracked. This anecdote best summarizes the frustration: One of the Badgers’ star running backs was fingered while trying to shoplift. He made a run for it. He was caught--from behind--by a store security guard. A key-jangling, dopey-capped, lead shoe-wearing, shirt-stained, eyeglasses-like-a-shower-door security guard.

That, folks, was Badger football.

And, finally, after more than a decade, as the country moved into the Reagan era and college sports went super-big time, it was not enough. The idealism wore thin, and the take at the gate started to drop. Success on the field was needed, and it seemed in the early ‘80s that new Coach Dave McClain had the program turned around and headed in the right direction.

They Badgers even got invited to a couple of minor bowls--what other program could guarantee 20,000 fans at New Jersey’s ill-fated Garden State Bowl? The windchill in New Jersey was positively balmy compared to Madison’s deep freeze. But in typical Badger fashion, Wisconsin also became the first team to beat Ohio State and Michigan in the same season and not go to the Rose Bowl.

Then McClain died suddenly from a heart attack, and the program slid into oblivion, and debt. Not only did new Coach Don Morton’s teams lose, they committed the graver sin of not being entertaining in any way, shape or form. The band could no longer save them. Attendance dropped to an average of 40,000, and most Badger fans came to peace with the notion that the bittersweet, crazy past was gone forever and they would wait patiently for hockey season to start.

But then-new Chancellor Donna Shalala, all four feet of her, woke the sleeping giant. She accepted as undeniable fact what most Badger fans felt in their hearts: More than any other major college program in the doldrums, Wisconsin had absolutely no excuse. It was a world-acclaimed university on a great campus in a great city and state. It should be able to put together a great football team. Shalala hired former Badger hero Pat Richter as athletic director, and together they hired the feisty, confident Alvarez away from Lou Holtz and Notre Dame. Shalala has now moved on to lesser challenges in the Clinton Cabinet.

Alvarez went 1-10, 5-6 and 5-6 his first three seasons. Badger fans were happy just to have entertaining football back. But the future? Well, fans simply couldn’t break the old patterns, not just yet. Several New York City-area Wisconsin fans will not be at this year’s Rose Bowl because one of them planned to get married this Jan. 1, which is perfect Wisconsin logic.

But Alvarez, his coaching staff and this team have performed like no other in the history of the school. They have continued to improve and have stunned Badger fans into a happy trance by actually playing well under pressure. They’ve climbed out of the snakepit one foot at a time, overcoming the heartache of their own mistakes, overcoming the many long-standing losing traditions stacked against them, even overcoming the near tragic crowd-crushing incident after their victory against Michigan. They’re going to play their tails off in the Rose Bowl. And Badger fans will bask in the sun and have all sorts of crazy fun.

Barry Alvarez will stay at Wisconsin and build a national power. He will not leave because he doesn’t want to and because there is already a secret, hand-picked group of 1,000 Wisconsin duck hunters who, invoking the name of Lombardi, will hunt down Alvarez if he tries to leave, capture him and bring him back. Hey, stranger things have happened.

OK, on second thought, no. Stranger things have not happened.