Bottled Lightning : Badger Fever Is Coming to a Head in Madison, Where Wisconsin Football Has Regained Glory

Here is one key to understanding Wisconsin football fans: The Budweiser theme is their fight song.

When it plays in local bars, they pound on tables and dance in the aisles.

And when the bouncy jingle reaches its chorus, they stop and yell: “When you’ve said Wis- consin, you’ve said it all!”

Until recently, that song served a purpose--it gave fans a way of entertaining themselves during games when the product on the field was anything but good theater. At least, it gave them something to toast.

When Barry Alvarez was hired as coach in 1989 and began to turn the program around, the fans--called Bleacher Creatures--looked past the bottoms of their tilted cups and noticed that something interesting was happening on the field in Camp Randall Stadium.

With the Badgers’ improvement, the fans let themselves imagine the improbable--that their team might go to a bowl game--and they toasted even more boisterously.

Finally, when the impossible happened this season, when Wisconsin defeated Michigan State in Tokyo to earn its first trip to the Rose Bowl in 31 years, the fans poured out onto Madison’s State Street by the thousands to celebrate.

They virtually rioted in their euphoria. They climbed the small trees that line the main drag. They jumped atop cars and hugged strangers.

This town has not been the same since.

Most Madison businesses have incorporated the Rose Bowl into their marketing strategies. There has been a major run on Wisconsin Rose Bowl paraphernalia. And there were nearly three times as many requests as available tickets.

“I don’t think anybody has ever experienced anything like this,” said Terry Murawski, executive director of the National W Club, an alumni organization of former Wisconsin athletes. “I think, had we been in another bowl, there would have been a high degree of enthusiasm, but because it is the Rose Bowl, it put us off the Richter scale.”

Fitting, since Pat Richter is the Badger athletic director who turned the program around.

*

This is a city where the citizens know their Badger football.

About one minute before tip-off at an early season basketball game in the Wisconsin Field House, two Badger football players strolled in front of the stands, looking for their seats.

Someone in the stands noticed them and began to clap. Soon, the applause grew into a standing ovation.

What’s more, the football players who received this ovation were not exactly the high-profile type. It was not quarterback Darrell Bevell or tailback Brent Moss.

The stunned players were Joe Panos and Joe Rudolph, two offensive linemen.

Panos, for one, is overwhelmed by the attention. He was not recruited by any NCAA Division I university before attending Wisconsin Whitewater, a Division III school, in 1989. The next season, he transferred to Wisconsin and became a walk-on football player.

This season, Panos is a first-team all-Big Ten Conference selection who has frequently been stopped on the street by fans wanting his autograph, and nearly everyone in town knows his nickname--”the Greek.”

“I’m a big, sloppy old lineman,” said Panos, who came to the aid of injured students when fans swarmed onto the field after Wisconsin’s victory over Michigan on Oct. 30. “I’m not used to all that. I don’t know how to react.”

There is no limit to the enthusiasm here.

Consider Jim Borth, 50, who lives in the nearby town of Oregon. Borth was a student at Wisconsin the last time the Badgers went to the Rose Bowl, in 1963. He is not only a die-hard Badger fan, but also an entrepreneurial one.

When the artificial turf in Camp Randall Stadium was torn up and replaced in 1990, Borth persuaded the hauling company to drop off the old stuff at his house.

He put a small portion of it on his deck, but the rest of the 3,000 square feet has been sitting around since then. When Wisconsin made it to the Rose Bowl, Borth saw his chance.

He has been cutting the turf into novelties--coasters, doormats, putting greens and the like--and selling them as souvenirs. Moreover, Borth said he has a plan to benefit the Badgers.

“The fans each take one (piece) out there (to Pasadena), and then right before the game they’re going to put it back together again so we can have a home-field advantage,” Borth said.

Clearly, this is a town where all other news has been relegated to insignificance.

Bill Brophy, veteran sports editor at the Madison State Journal, said the Rose Bowl is the top story every day, even though the Wisconsin basketball team has broken into the top 25 in the Associated Press rankings for the first time since 1974.

“That’s the amazing thing: They are ranked in basketball and nobody’s talking about it,” Brophy said. “Normally, that would be like, ‘Stop the presses!’ ”

*

“The best kept secret in America,” is how Alvarez refers to Madison.

Sitting at a table in his paneled office, the Badger coach praised the city.

“If you go behind our (Student) Union and you didn’t know where you were, you would think you were in San Diego,” Alvarez said, pointing to a picture on his wall that shows the Wisconsin campus, nestled on the edge of Lake Mendota, during the summer. “If we could recruit in the summer or the spring, we would get them all.”

Unfortunately, Alvarez brings in recruits during the winter, when they look out over the frozen lake and see hardy folks ice fishing.

Alvarez has had to find other selling points for the town.

“You talk about a great social life,” he said. “I bring a guy in here on a Friday or Saturday and put him with one of my players and send him downtown, and if he doesn’t have a good time, I don’t want him. There’s something wrong with that kid.”

Similarly, if a Wisconsin native is not a Badger football fan, he is almost a social outcast.

When the team is good, it is the only game in town--and in fact, Wisconsin has the only NCAA Division I football team in the state.

But the last time the Badgers enjoyed moderate success was under Coach Dave McClain, who led them to four consecutive seven-victory seasons in 1981-84 that included appearances in the now-defunct Garden State Bowl, the Independence Bowl and the Hall of Fame Bowl.

McClain died of a heart attack in 1988, and the Wisconsin athletic department named its new indoor football practice facility after him.

With Alvarez’s accomplishments, they might rename the entire city.

His success has been so stunning because it has come so quickly.

From 1987, when Don Morton became coach, through 1990, Alvarez’s first season, the Badgers won a total of seven games.

That rut, combined with a new state law that increased the drinking age from 18 to 21 and a tougher policy restricting carry-in alcohol at Camp Randall Stadium, led to a decline in attendance at Wisconsin games.

Essentially, they were no longer parties.

“Basically, you had a lot of sober people watching the game, and they found out the football (was bad), so why go?” Brophy said.

After two 5-6 seasons, however, Wisconsin is 9-1-1, and the fans are back.

“They were good football fans, they were just kind of fed up,” Alvarez said. “I knew you could get the stadium cranked up again.”

But Alvarez, who played at Nebraska before serving as an assistant coach at Iowa and Notre Dame, has high expectations. Wisconsin fans, he said, could stand some improvement.

“People here have an inferiority complex about their athletics because they were so bad in football and basketball for so long,” Alvarez said, “and they still don’t really know how to enjoy winning. . . . They know how to enjoy life and they know how to go and enjoy a game, but they still have to be educated on some things.”

He leaned back in his chair, rested his hands on top of his head, smiled and added: “They need to get a little cocky, you know what I mean?”

*

If Wisconsin fans are not arrogant, they definitely are excited, and that has meant profits for some townspeople.

What everyone has come to refer to as “The Hat” has become a local legend.

It is the official Big Ten Championship cap, which Wisconsin players wore on national television after defeating Michigan State in Tokyo.

By 7 a.m. each day since that victory, a hundred or more fans have lined up outside Bucky’s Locker Room, which opens at 10 a.m., for a chance to buy “The Hat.” Customers are limited to two apiece.

Within hours, the store has sold out that day’s shipment.

What’s more, if Wisconsin wins the Rose Bowl, there will be a new official cap.

“That will probably start this whole madhouse all over again,” the alumni club’s Murawski said. Such a situation is good for local merchants, who are ecstatic.

Bill Geist, president of the Greater Madison Convention and Visitors Bureau, said exact figures are not available yet, but estimated that local merchants selling Rose Bowl paraphernalia have done as much business in the past month as they would normally have done in a year.

“It’s almost as if there’s this fear that it has taken us 31 years and it might take us 31 again, so we better get it now,” he said.

Marsh Shapiro, owner of a restaurant called The Nitty Gritty, said: “The economics of it are, it makes a hell of a lot of difference to the businesses in Madison if there are 75,000 people in the stadium rather than 40,000.”

Business owners were initially disgruntled upon discovering that in the first year in recent memory that Wisconsin has a good team, it would play only five home games.

But when fans packed local bars for hours to watch the Wisconsin-Michigan State game on television, barkeepers were beaming.

Nearly every restaurant and watering hole in town has planned a party for Saturday’s Rose Bowl telecast.

The Concourse Hotel will fill its ballroom with couches, set up big-screen televisions and sell popcorn, hotdogs, sausages and pretzels.

The hotel is billing the party, which is open to the public, as “Madison’s Largest Living Room.”

*

For those lucky enough to be going to Pasadena, “California, here we come” is the rallying cry.

Getting a ticket for the game is a more difficult matter.

The Big Ten champion traditionally receives 18,000 tickets to the Rose Bowl. This allotment was more than enough last season to satisfy Michigan, which returned 8,000 unused tickets.

But the demand from Wisconsin fans was much higher because the Badgers have been absent from the Rose Bowl for so long.

By the time tickets were doled out to players, coaches, administrators, government officials and season ticket-holders, there were only 3,000 remaining for Wisconsin students.

Thousands of students stayed in lines overnight in freezing weather to get a shot at buying a ticket.

“It was like Woodstock all over again, where people were camped out for five days straight,” said Tim Van Alstine, Wisconsin’s director of tickets.

Although many left empty-handed, where there’s a will, there’s always a way.

Murawski would not be surprised if there were as many as 50,000 Wisconsin fans in the Rose Bowl for the game.

“Those Badger fans will find a way of getting there and getting in the stadium,” he said.

And for those who get to California and can’t get a ticket, Murawski said they will enjoy themselves, anyway.

“I don’t think people really have a frame of reference for what is going to happen out there,” he said. “I guarantee you that everywhere you go, there are going to be red-and-white-clad Wisconsin people, and they will all be having a good time.”

Dancing on the tables, no doubt.