This week, it’s personal.
As many regular Hawkeye Report readers know, I spent my formative years in America’s Dairlyland. I did not grow up in some random town like Manitowoc or Oshkosh, either.
Oh no, I was raised in the belly of the beast – Madison - where (and I swear I’m not making this up) you are indoctrinated into Badger culture via the public school system music program where you must memorize the words and music to the Wisconsin Fight Song, the UW Alma Mater and gems like “If You Want to be a Badger, Just Come Along With Me!”
In 1981, in 5th grade, I got a shiny, bright red satin jacket with a cursive Wisconsin embroidered on the back. I wore it with pride.
This was not a popular choice in my extended family. While little Torbee and his folks made their home in the beer-soaked north, everyone else still lived in the flatlands – mostly in the Quad Cities and Iowa City areas. These proud Iowegians had been fans of the black and gold since around the time Nile Kinnick was a Hawkeye.
I have always been a bit of a contrarian, and one must remember that at this time – the early-to-mid-1980s – the Hawkeyes were kicking butt and taking names and the Badgers were barely better than bottom-feeding Northwestern. The “highlight” of my years of Badger fandom was probably the 1982 Freedom Bowl in rainy Shreveport where the Randy Wright-Al Toon led Badgers nipped Kansas State 14-3 in the very first live football game broadcast by ESPN.
Fast forward three years and I am 14, still a Badger fan, and excited that fall to start my first-ever job – selling Coca-Cola at venerable Camp Randall. The Badgers were, once again, quite meh. They won the opener over Northern Illinois easily, then barely squeaked past UNLV 26-23 at Camp Randall. They weirdly traveled the next week to Laramie, Wyoming, where they beat down the Cowboys, but started off Big 10 season by getting shellacked 33-6 in Ann Arbor by Michigan.
Coming up next – the #1 ranked Iowa Hawkeyes, lead by Chuck Long, Ronnie Harmon and a bunch of other all-conference stalwarts. This was smack-dab in the middle of Iowa’s ridiculously long 18-year unbeaten streak against the Badgers. To this day I enjoy telling my Wisconsin fan friends that streak spanned the terms of four separate presidents.
In its 1985 home opener, Wisconsin drew just over 68,000 fans to 80,000-seat Camp Randall. When Iowa came to town, the official attendance figure was 79,023. And the extra 11,000 on hand were not Badger fans there to see yet another Hawkeye beatdown of Bucky. No, there were at least 11,000 Iowa fans packing the usually moribund (at that time) Camp Randall and probably another 5,000 to 10,000 outside tailgating.
14-year-old Torbee had his young mind blown by the cheering horde of Hawkeyes. I can’t stress this enough to people too young to remember when Wisconsin was awful at both football and basketball, but their “home field advantage” in the 1980s was about on par with Purdue’s today. Mild interest and some lingering pride in their school and their team, but not an exciting event.
Enter the bumblebees, all of them in some form of garish black and gold. All of them giving a young Badger fan selling soda $20 bills for mixers for their plentiful flasks and botas and telling him to “keep the change.” I made more in tips that day than I made in total through the other five home games I worked that season.
After the Hawks rolled to a 23-13 win that gray October afternoon, my folks took me to an after-tailgate rager my Uncle Bobby from Solon was hosting in a suite at the fancy Madison Concourse Hotel on the Capitol Square. It was a mix of pure unadulterated joy and debauchery, a booze-soaked celebration the likes of which my early teen eyes had never seen.
It was that day that I fell in love with Hawkeyedom.
Oh sure, I still liked the Badgers okay. They were my “hometown” team, but let’s be honest, they were bad and boring compared to those crazy Hawkeyes with the swaggering head coach from Texas, bad ass black uniforms, chucking the ball all over the place and managing to beat Michigan (something the Badgers certainly never did back then.) And their fans – SO MUCH fun, and such hard partiers. Remember, this was the 1980s and the Iowa Hawkeyes were like the David Lee Roth-led Van Halen to Wisconsin’s snoozy Night Ranger.
When I chose Iowa for college, liking the fact it was a Midwest mecca for great writing, the transformation to bleeding black and gold was complete.
But here’s the thing: I most likely wouldn’t have the level of antipathy toward Wisconsin that I do today had the Badgers continued on the path of mediocrity. In the entirety of my time living in Madison, the Badgers only managed to make three bowl games, one of which was actually played in New Jersey (what, you don’t remember the Garden State Bowl!?)
And Badger basketball was, somehow, even worse. UW did not earn a single NCAA berth the whole time I lived up there. In fact, Wisconsin went from 1947 to 1994 without a single trip to the tournament!
So, imagine my extreme irritation at the stupid stinkin’ Badgers giving me absolutely nothing worthwhile to cheer for my entire childhood, then, as soon as I convert to Hawkeyeism, suddenly winning Rose Bowls and making Final Fours, while my Hawks get oh-so-close, but not-good-enough at both.
So, if you want to know why I get all frothy and fired up this week every year, there you have it. I will once again be in Madison and I will be - as I typically do for road games against good opponents - expecting the worst.
But if somehow, someway, the Hawks and native son Nate Stanley win this one, the after-party is at my hotel and anyone in black and gold is invited. The password to get in is “Uncle Bobby.”
Follow me on Twitter @ToryBrecht and @12Saturdays
