Excerpt from No Bed of Roses: My Sideline View of the Badgers’ Return to Greatness
Wisconsin may not get much credit for being a football-crazy state, like, say, Texas, but it is. I know because I was born and bred in Waunakee, Wisconsin, ten minutes outside of Madison. In Wisconsin, weddings and funerals are scheduled around Badger football Saturdays and Packer football Sundays. Badgers and Packers logo shirts are worn as long as they have a collar. I was at a wedding where the groomsmen wore bow ties and cummerbunds insignia’d with Packer helmets. And I heard of a funeral where a man was buried in a Green Bay Packer casket.
Wisconsin football fans truly live and die with their teams. My father was a twenty-one-year-old junior at the University of Wisconsin when I was born. So when I say I was born to play football for the Wisconsin Badgers, I mean it literally.
On Friday nights, high school football rules, certainly in my small town of Waunakee. Waunakee High has only had three head coaches since it first started playing football back in the 1950s: Dick Trotta, Gayle Quinn, and Pat Rice. Quinn and Trotta are in the Wisconsin High School Coaches hall of fame and Rice is on his way. I’m proud that my dad, four of his brothers, my cousins, and I all played for the Waunakee program. We’re part of the rich tradition that has put Warrior football among the fifty winningest programs in the entire nation and the second winningest team in the state. (Schofield DC Everest is first.)
I was fortunate to grow up in a working class neighborhood filled with many boys my age. We played every sport under the sun, but football was a favorite. My friends and I would often play in the Smiths’ backyard because their father volunteered to be the all-time quarterback for our games. “Make a hard right at the tree and I’ll get you the ball before you get to the bushes,” he would whisper, as he drew up patterns on the palm of his big hand. Our imaginations were as active as our bodies.
Other times, my dad and I would play catch until it was too dark to see the ball. If Dad wasn’t available, I’d improvise by throwing the ball up onto the roof and attempting to catch it in its unpredictable descent off the rain gutter.
If we weren’t playing football, we were watching it. The fall weekends of my youth were booked. My dad and I watched Waunakee High School games on Friday night, Badger games on Saturday, and Packer games on Sunday. My mom watched a lot of the games as well and is sort of a football expert by proxy. While she may not know the intricacies of a play, she has no problem screaming at the opponent’s quarterback, “Get him!”
I recall my dad taking a couple of my friends and me to a football game when we were in elementary school. My young eyes had never seen such an electrifying event. It seemed the whole town was there and their stirring created a magnetic buzz in the dark, crisp air. Four light towers shed a hard, clear illumination on the freshly painted field and the area just outside of it. The marching band provided a heart-thumping soundtrack. The public address announcer’s voice reverberated through my head and extended out past the cornfields into the night sky. I knew something important was happening. The carnival was in town.
I stood as close as I could to the field, which was laid out as reverently and pristinely as an altar. I got as close as the ropes would allow me to worship accordingly. The players ran by to take the field, only inches from where I stood. They looked like gladiator giants, heroic warriors going off to battle. It almost didn’t seem right that I could stand so close to these guys who were like superheroes to me. It felt like I was standing inside the bat cave while Batman and Robin were readying for a mission. I didn’t fully understand the game, nor comprehend what it took to play it, but I knew, without a doubt, that I wanted to be on that field.
