Lucas at 50: Border Battles never short on drama
November 29, 2019 | Football, Mike Lucas
Remembering two epic games against Minnesota in the Alvarez era
UWBadgers.com Senior Writer Mike Lucas is celebrating 50 years of covering the Badgers in 2019. Join us throughout the season as we take a look back at some of the most memorable moments from his career in Madison.
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BY MIKE LUCAS
UWBadgers.com Senior Writer
MADISON, Wis. — Barry Alvarez has many fond memories from his coaching days in the Border Battle. None more indelible than his first win in the longest uninterrupted rivalry in major college football.
After a promising start to the 1991 season — three straight non-conference victories — the Badgers had reverted to their losing ways in dropping six consecutive Big Ten games.
Having inherited a moribund program from Don Morton (whose three-year record of 6-27 got him fired), Alvarez had to deal with severe growing pains. The Badgers went 1-10 in 1990.
Alvarez didn't handle the losing well.
"But I kept telling myself, 'I can't flinch. I can't show any sign of weakness and I can't let anybody know that I'm in the tank,' even though I was," he confided in his autobiography, "Don't Flinch."
At staff meetings, he tried to come off really strong and positive with his assistants.
"After the meeting," he said, "I'd go back into my office at Camp Randall Stadium, close both doors and curl up on the couch in the fetal position. I was miserable.
"But I couldn't let anyone see the emotional toll it was taking on me … From the time we took over the program, we were trying to get the players to feel good about themselves."
One such feel-good moment was on Nov. 16, 1991 at the Metrodome in Minneapolis. And it all came down to one play, one defensive stop in the red zone with 10 seconds remaining.
Trailing 19-16, Minnesota head coach John Gutekunst (whose son Brian is the general manager of the Green Bay Packers) could have opted to kick a game-tying field goal, a pretty sure thing.
"But you don't play to tie," he stressed, "in that kind of game."
It was not just any game, mind you. It was Gophers-Badgers, it was the Border Battle. And the pressure was palpable, resulting perhaps in Minnesota not having the right personnel on the field.
That forced Gophers quarterback Marquel Fleetwood to deliberately take a delay of game penalty. Gutekunst contended moving the ball from the UW 6 to the 11 didn't make a difference. At least not in the play call. Running was not an option. Fleetwood was going to target his sure-handed tight end Patt Evans in the end zone just like he had on a third-down incompletion.
The Badgers called a timeout during which backup safety Melvin Tucker, who was subbing for an injured Scott Nelson, was thinking only one thing, "I figured they would try to get it to Evans again."
As the play unfolded, Alvarez said, "I saw the tight end (Evans) clear and there was no linebacker under him. I knew the only way to get the ball out was for someone to blow him up."
Tucker's cue.
"I saw him (Evans) coming from the left, I saw the ball thrown and I took a beeline toward him," said Tucker, now the 47-year-old head coach at the University of Colorado.
"All I knew was that he was there, the ball was there, and I had to run through his chest to get it out. I hit him as hard as I could. I didn't know if I had broken up the pass or not.
"I just heard a scream and the fans were about 50-50 in the Metrodome, I didn't know who they were screaming for. Duer Sharp finally came up and said, 'You won the game, you won the game.'"
It was Alvarez's first Big Ten victory, snapping Wisconsin's 19-game losing streak in the conference. It was also the Badgers' first road win after 23 consecutive losses outside of Madison.
"That day," Alvarez said, "I felt good about the future of our team and program."
It still ranks as one of his favorite coaching highlights from the ancient rivalry. Ranking right up there with a game that he didn't coach in the Border Battle because he was hospitalized.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of that game.
• • • •
Barry Alvarez acknowledged that the pain was excruciating.
"I was really in bad shape," Alvarez recalled. "I didn't realize how sick I was with my knee infection. But I could hardly put my pants on and I was white as a ghost. I had to get it done."
He was referring to unavoidable knee replacement surgery. And he had to get it done even at the expense of leaving his 1999 team to check into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
On the heels of a stunning upset at Ohio State, Alvarez met with his players the following Monday to make sure everybody was on the same page regarding his absence.
Defensive line assistant John Palermo would be the acting head coach leading up to and during the Oct. 9 road game against Glen Mason's undefeated Gophers (4-0).
"I thought they were a hell of a team," Alvarez said. "I knew it would be a hell of a game."
The original plan called for the 52-year-old Alvarez to have his knee replaced that Tuesday at the Mayo Clinic, 80 miles from the Metrodome, the site of the upcoming battle for the Axe.
But after the medical team opened up his right knee, they came across the infection. What ensued was a 2 1/2 hour surgery to clean out the spurs and cysts. Alvarez was left with a 10-inch incision above and below his knee and the actual replacement surgery was delayed until the end of the regular season.
Restricted to his hospital room in Rochester, Alvarez could barely get out of bed without help. The reality hit him. In knowing he would not coach against the Gophers, he said, "I felt helpless."
The week of the Ohio State game, Alvarez taped a video message to his players that would be shown to them at the team hotel on the Friday night before playing Minnesota.
"I didn't want to be too emotional with them because those kids had gone through enough already," he explained. "I just wanted to lay it all out for them."
Starting center Casey Rabach had heard the words before. Like every week before every game.
"Coach Alvarez wanted us to go out there and play our brand of football and play like we know how to play," said Rabach, conceding, "A lot of guys wanted to win it for him."
During the week, Wisconsin and Minnesota officials conferred with the Big Ten on what arrangements could be made for Alvarez to have some telephone contact with his team.
The conference does not allow off-site communications during games.
"I'm in my hospital room and Glen Mason calls and he says he didn't think it was right that I'd have any communications," Alvarez recounted. "He thought it would be an unfair advantage."
Alvarez suggested that Mason get the room next to him at Mayo and he'd pop for beer and pizza. Mason eventually came around to allowing a phone link between Alvarez and his coaches.
But it was contingent on the Gophers having the same TV feed. So be it. Alvarez wore a headset which connected him to the UW sideline and the visiting coaches box.
"If I needed to talk to somebody, I could get to them," Alvarez said. "But you can't see the defensive schemes on TV, and you don't know where the camera angle is coming from next.
"It was really frustrating. I wasn't much help to them, either, other than trying to help with some decisions. More than anything, it helped my morale."
Barry and his wife Cindy wound up watching the game on a 22-inch television screen in a small hospital room at the end of a hallway. How small was it?
"The room was so small," Cindy said, laughing, "that a friend who was visiting Barry had to leave because he's claustrophobic."
Together, they watched as the Gophers held senior tailback Ron Dayne to 80 yards on 25 carries after he had rushed for 297, 183 and 133 yards in three previous years against them.
(Dayne was playing with an enflamed shoulder — a stinger. He wore a neck roll in the second half. On this day, Minnesota's Thomas Hamner outdueled Dayne by running for 144 yards on 27 rushes.)
They watched as quarterback Brooks Bollinger connected on an 81-yard touchdown pass to flanker Nick Davis in the second quarter featuring tailback Michael Bennett split wide as a decoy.
They watched as the Badgers overcame deficits of 7-0, 14-7 and 17-14. Vitaly Pisetsky's game-tying 36-yard field goal with 2 minutes and 59 seconds to play in regulation sent the game into overtime.
They watched as Wisconsin won the OT coin toss and went on defense. And they hooted and holler as the Gophers self-destructed, capped by Jamar Fletcher's interception on a fourth-down pass.
"They had to quiet me down a couple of times," Alvarez said. "I'm on the telephone and I'm screaming and yelling, and I was disrupting the whole floor in Mayo."
They watched as Dayne ran for 11 yards on the first play of Wisconsin's possession. A face-masking penalty on Minnesota put the ball on the 9-yard line.
Alvarez was in direct communication with Palermo during the overtime since it was the first time the Badgers had been exposed to the new OT format, which had been adopted in 1997.
"We were trying to help each other," Palermo said, "to get through the final minutes."
But as the camera focused on Pisetsky lining up a 31-yard field goal to retain Paul Bunyan's Axe for a fifth-straight year, Alvarez turned away from the TV screen. He couldn't watch.
"He watched me," Cindy said, "to see if Vitaly made it."
With Mike Solwold snapping and Tim Rosga holding, Pisetsky didn't hit the ball cleanly but he still kicked the clutch field goal, tucking it just inside the left upright.
Everybody on that wing of the Mayo Clinic knew it was good, too.
"They banged on our door and asked us, 'Could you please quiet down?'" Alvarez said. "Ten minutes after the game, they took my blood pressure and it was still off the charts."
Alvarez spoke with Bollinger, Dayne and Chris McIntosh, among other players.
"And I talked with every one of my assistant coaches," he said. "I'm finishing up with Bernie Wyatt and he says, 'OK, see ya, bye.' And he hung up on me.
"Fortunately, they had my number, so they could re-dial me."
Pisetsky's kick was his first game-winner at any level of competition in any sport, football or soccer (Pisetsky moved from Moscow to the United States when he was 14).
"I spoke to Coach Alvarez afterwards and he wanted to congratulate me in Russian," said Pisetsky. "It almost brings tears to my eyes knowing what he has been going through."
Alvarez and Palermo did shed a tear when they talked.
Minutes later during Palermo's postgame press conference, he fielded a question on the character of "his" team whereupon he quickly corrected the inquisitor.
"It's the character of Barry Alvarez's team, it's not my team," Palermo said. "I'm just one of the assistants who have followed the plan that he set for us.
"This was characteristic of an Alvarez-coached team.
"The kids fought and fought, and they never gave up."
They never flinched.
