Slap shot, anyone? As part of the transformation from basketball court to hockey rink at the Kohl Center, workers install one of 142 Plexiglas panels that will border the ice.

There’s a lot of muscle behind the magic that transforms the Kohl Center from a basketball arena to a hockey venue.

When the Wisconsin men’s or women’s hockey team skates onto the ice at the Kohl Center, they’re just picking up where another team left off.

As the primary playing facility for four Badger varsity sports (men’s and women’s basketball and hockey), the center is a beehive of activity from October through March. Compared to many campus sports venues, switching from one event to another at the Kohl Center is more complicated and time-consuming. It takes several dozen workers to transform the facility from a basketball court to a hockey rink — and back again.

Opened in 1998 and named for Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl ’56, who donated $25 million to the project, the center’s two overhanging balconies guarantee that fans have excellent sight lines for watching both basketball and hockey action.

After a football game or tennis match, Camp Randall Stadium and Nielsen Tennis Stadium need only a routine cleaning and trash collection and they’re ready to go. The Kohl Center conversion, on the other hand, takes about three hours and a forty-person crew. And it isn’t a once-and-done situation: the ritual happens forty-five to fifty times per playing season.

Apparently practice makes perfect. Dan Wyatt, the Kohl Center’s building and grounds superintendent, says that everything runs pretty smoothly, as long as enough time is scheduled between games so the workers aren’t scrambling to finish.

“I’ve been doing it for nine years, and a lot of the people have been with me for the past eight or nine years,” he says. “As long as everybody stays in the routine and does everything in the proper order, it’s not too bad.”

So far, they have a perfect record: the conversion process has never delayed the start of a game.

From wood to ice …

When the Badger women’s team or the men’s team play basketball at the Kohl Center, fans may have no idea what happens after the final buzzer sounds. As one of the first steps of the transformation, a crew quickly gets to work stacking courtside chairs.

Dan Wyatt, the center’s building and grounds superintendent (foreground) and lead worker Brian Dodge take down the basketball hoop. In all, it takes about 120 person-hours, or 40 employees working three-hour shifts, to convert the center from a basketball venue to a hockey facility.

Essentially deconstructing a giant jigsaw puzzle, a worker uses a socket wrench to begin removing the basketball court’s 218 floorboards, which each weigh 123 pounds.

With the clock ticking, workers remove some of the bleachers. When shifting from the basketball court to the significantly larger hockey rink, seating for fans drops from 17,230 to 15,325.

… and back

Excess ice needs to be scraped off by hand (above) to allow installation of the panels that surround the hockey rink.

Polar floorboards are sandwiched between the basketball court’s hardwood boards and the hockey rink’s ice. Constructed of high-density polyethylene and foam, these floorboards weigh 33 pounds each, and are much easier for workers to lift and carry away than the hardwood sections.

With many hands making light work, crew members have revealed the Motion W that sits beneath the ice rink’s surface.

A novel variable-rise system lifts seats at the Kohl Center’s north and south ends, changing the facility’s seating arrangement in about six minutes. When a Badger hockey match gets under way (top), little do fans know that just hours before the face-off, a different sport altogether had been played above center ice.

Illustration: Earl J. Madden

As China gains prominence on the world stage, the university strengthens its connections.

Gilles Bousquet has a goal that he knows won’t make him popular among colleagues who teach French culture and literature: make China the number-one study-abroad destination for UW–Madison students.

“We want to prepare our students to be relevant, to be employable,” says Bousquet, the UW’s dean of international studies and vice provost for globalization.

The UW has China on the brain, as the country surges toward becoming the world’s largest economy. The university is seeking to boost the number of students who study Chinese language and are knowledgeable about Chinese culture by hiring more faculty with expertise in those areas. So far, about three hundred students are enrolled in Chinese language classes, and one professor specializes in Chinese history.

“All major American universities have some sort of presence here or are trying,” says Ed Gargan ’74, MA ’77, who has lived and worked in China for fifteen years as a book author and as a correspondent for the New York Times and Newsday. Harvard opened a center in a Shanghai skyscraper last year, and Stanford’s center at Peking University is under construction.

“English is taught to every urban Chinese pupil. [But] how many high schools, far less primary schools, in the U.S. teach Chinese? For the UW to be part of this rapidly changing world, it must engage China across a broad range of programs, departments, and schools,” Gargan says.

In coming years, the UW plans to explore ways to collaborate with a handful of top Chinese universities and is working on a proposal that would give the university a unique presence in the Shanghai area. This move comes as China makes massive investments in research and development, and in higher education — building world-class research facilities and wooing talent from around the globe.

“Do we see this as competition? Absolutely,” Bousquet says. “It’s also an incredible opportunity to partner. Right now, these institutions are in need of partners of the kind that Wisconsin is.”

UW delegations have made three trips to China in less than two years, and they are planning return trips every six months. Meanwhile, on campus, the UW has hosted a coach from Beijing Sport University and Chinese student-athletes who are Olympic- and world-champion medalists. The students study English, kinesiology, and sports management, and earn certificates through the Division of International Studies. They’ve been welcomed by Chinese families in Madison, played Ping-Pong with the Milwaukee Brewers, and — with eighty thousand people watching — have walked onto the field at Camp Randall Stadium at a Badger football game.

This Chinese Champions Program started when a Beijing Sport official asked Li-Li Ji MS’82, PhD’85, then a UW professor of kinesiology, for help with finding overseas experience for students pursuing master’s degrees in coaching, administration, and management. Ji, a native of China who is now at the University of Minnesota, recognized that bringing some of the country’s national heroes to the UW would be a “great gesture” toward expanding its relationship with China and attracting Chinese students.

And sports can be the best way to break down barriers, Ji says. “You are rivals on the field, and you’re friends off field. I think that the program symbolizes that relationship and provides some hope for both sides to see that our relationship could be as good as our athletes’ program.”

Graphics by Barry Roal Carlsen

China: An Expert’s View

What kind of relationship does the United States have with China? The short answer: it’s complicated. Ed Friedman, a UW–Madison political science professor, was among the first researchers to enter China in 1978, as then-premier Deng Xiaoping began to open the country to the world. Friedman has returned dozens of times since then, and he is an expert on China’s politics and its people, including some who have become lasting friends. He recently sat down with On Wisconsin to share his perspectives on U.S.-China relations.

Cold War Allies

With the Soviet Union as a common enemy, the U.S. and China formed a cooperative relationship during the Cold War. The alliance helped then-President Richard Nixon win re-election, and it also restored some credibility for Chinese Communist party leader Mao Zedong in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Friedman says.

Since the end of the Cold War, the two nations have shifted from allies to rival superpowers. “You lose the glue of a common enemy,” Friedman says. The Chinese government’s slaughter of hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators on June 4, 1989, cast a pall on the relationship, and China’s authoritarian government came to see America as its biggest threat.

“America was the only country in the world, as China saw it, that stood up for democracy,” he says. “The thing the government fears the most is democratization.”

Rivals

The United States didn’t begin to see China as a true rival until the 1990s, when its economy exploded and the nation began its meteoric rise to becoming the world’s largest exporter. Today, Friedman says China is increasingly assertive — and at times, anti-American — as it continues on a path to becoming the largest economy in the world.

While some politicians urge a tougher foreign-policy approach with China, the U.S. government has opted to hedge against worst-case scenarios. “One doesn’t want to act in a way where it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Friedman says. “That is, because you assume the worst-case things will occur, you act as if they must occur, and then you help make them inevitable.”

Although the Chinese government has continued to challenge President Barack Obama as he has reached out to the nation, his administration established a program to increase by 100,000 the number of Americans learning Chinese.

“You hope that you create mutual interests, so these bad things don’t occur, so people in Beijing will see that they don’t want worse to come to worst,” Friedman says.

Ship Building

China is aiming to be a superpower in every sense of the word. “They’re going to have a global military. They intend to be second to none,” Friedman says. “They are building aircraft carriers.”

China imports much of its energy, increasingly from the Middle East and Africa, and wants a blue-water navy to protect those resources and challenge what it sees as U.S. Navy dominance of international waters. “Once you build these kinds of capacities, they can be used for many different kinds of things,” Friedman says. “There’s every reason to think that as time goes on, you will see a Chinese military capable of challenging the American military all around the world.”

Graphics by Barry Roal Carlsen

Different Treatment

China is not the only authoritarian government in the world — Friedman says North Korea, Sudan, and Syria are worse — but the United States treats it differently because of its economic might and military ambitions.

“The usual line from realists is, ‘The strong do what they will, the weak do what they must,’ ” Friedman says. That means the United States can’t pressure China on human rights and democracy as it would Cuba. If the U.S. government cuts off economic relations with China, it would ultimately hurt American employees working for major companies such as Airbus, Boeing, Motorola, Nokia, and Toyota.

“China is very conscious of that — it can play one against the other,” he says. “It has this huge economy in which it can do things like that. Other countries can’t do those kinds of things.”

Economic Realities

China has more than 1.3 billion people and has amassed more than $3 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves — money it can spend around the world to buy influence and support, Friedman says. Because bringing that money home would increase the price of its exports, China instead pours money into the U.S. economy, the source of the seemingly endless cheap capital that contributed to the current U.S. financial crisis. China’s currency manipulation — the yuan is considered to be undervalued by as much as 40 percent — maximizes jobs at home and keeps exports cheap, making it harder for the U.S. to increase exports and jobs.

“China is a major factor limiting our getting out of this great recession,” Friedman says. So why doesn’t the United States confront China on the issue and officially brand the country as a currency manipulator? To avoid triggering a trade war that could result in “something worse than the great recession,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean the question is settled.

“China doesn’t change its policies, and we are hurt, and unemployment remains at 9 percent,” Friedman says. “And at a certain point, unless you take on the Chinese on this manipulation of the currency, there’s a limit on what you can do for your own people. So how that plays out is a potentially extraordinarily explosive issue.”

Graphics by Barry Roal Carlsen

No Democracy Now

Although protests against government corruption and cruelty take place daily throughout China, they are brutally suppressed or co-opted, and there’s no sign of the Communist regime losing power.

“I think this is the most dangerous illusion that Americans have — that somehow because it’s a dictatorship, it can’t survive,” Friedman says. “Most people in China, they may not love the regime, but they’re terrified that if they would try to change things, they’d get it worse.”

Britain was a world power in the nineteenth century while brutally exploiting workers, and the United States experienced rapid economic growth in the era of Jim Crow and a violent anti-labor movement. “You can have all sorts of horrors going on in society, and the state can still be stable and successful,” Friedman says.

China: An Economist’s Perspective

Yang Yao PhD’96, director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, considers Madison his second hometown. The economist, published widely in international journals including Foreign Affairs, returned to campus this semester as a visiting professor at the Wisconsin School of Business. “China is still a myth for many Americans,” he says. “I will inform the students, some of whom will become American business leaders, [about] the reality of the Chinese institutional setting, its success, and its problems. … I will present a real China to the students.”

He recently provided context about China to On Wisconsin.

On China’s rate of economic growth: “China’s economic growth has heavily relied on investment created by domestic savings. This growth model will reach its limit — not just because it overlooks the role of innovation, but also because it ignores the welfare improvement of ordinary people. This has two consequences to future growth of the Chinese economy. One is that the growth of domestic demand is sluggish and will ultimately slow down the economy; the other is that ordinary people’s education and health are improved slowly and will become an impediment to future growth.”

On China implementing a $585 billion stimulus package in 2008: “The stimulus plan has helped China avoid a major downturn in the financial crisis, but it has also created problems. In the short run, it has contributed to China’s inflation; in the long run, it has increased the indebtedness of local governments. So there is no free lunch.”

On the role the U.S. will play in China’s future: “The U.S. will continue to be China’s most important trade partner, not just as a large market for Chinese consumer products, but also as a provider of technologies and consumer goods to China. … My prediction is that China will overtake the U.S. to become the world’s largest economy by 2021. The two nations have to find common ground in the international arenas to lead the world together and to avoid major conflicts.”

Graphics by Barry Roal Carsen

China: The Student Experience

Twenty-two College of Engineering students spent six weeks in Hangzhou, China, in summer 2011, taking classes at Zhejiang University and touring the country. These excerpts represent blog entries they wrote about their experiences.

The Chinese students decided that we could make [dumplings] right in one of the dorm rooms, so we cleared off some space and got to work. I worked on mixing and kneading flour and water to make the dough, while others peeled and cleaned the celery, minced the pork, and chopped the celery. … It took quite some coaching from the Chinese students to teach us how to make the proper size piece of dough and the technique of how to fill the dumpling.

The dumplings were delicious, and their taste was only enhanced by that sense of pride you get after accomplishing a new and difficult task.

Mike Gionet x’13, nuclear engineering major from Mayville, Wisconsin

Making friends in China is as easy as snapping your fingers. Everyone seems eager to practice their English and take pictures. … I have become friends with two students from Zhejiang Sports College. Neither of them knows English and I have very limited skills in Chinese. To communicate, we rely on phone translators and hand gestures. It seems that the language barrier would make this relationship impossible, but surprisingly, few things are actually lost in translation.

Daniel Farley x’13, mechanical engineering major from Elkhorn, Wisconsin

The trip to Huangshan was a nice break from our class work and busy city life of Hangzhou. The natural beauty of the scenery makes it no surprise that every year millions of people travel here to vacation. None of this would be possible without the hard work of the porters who carry everything from food and water to building materials and fuel up the mountain.

These men use bamboo supports to hoist their loads before ascending the thousands of stairs to get to the top.

Graphics by Barry Roal Carlsen

For all of their hard work, these men make very little money. … This is the first time in China I have been exposed to work conditions that shocked me.

Shawn Spannbauer x’12, mechanical engineering major from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

Graphics by Barry roal Carlsen

Shana Martin (left) competes against log roller Taylor Duffy at the 2011 Lumberjack World Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin. Duffy defeated Martin in the finals to take top honors this year. Photo: Darlene Prois

With the threat of Huntington’s disease hanging over her, Shana Martin lives life out on a limb – or at least a log.

If you want to take up the ancient and noble sport of log rolling, here are two tips to keep in mind: 1) never look down at your feet.

“The key to log rolling, right away, is eyes on the end of the log,” says Shana (pronounced shawna) Martin ’02, instructor for Madison Log Rolling and three-time world champion in the sport. “You want to be looking off to the right or left. You don’t want to be looking at your feet, because where you look is where you go.”

And 2) keep your feet in motion.

“It’s like stomping ants, that’s what we tell kids,” Martin says. “You’ve got to move your feet as fast as you can up and down, not trying to spin the log or anything else. If you stop your feet, and the log starts to spin, your brain can’t catch on fast enough to keep you up there.”

Martin gives this advice to the log rolling students — aspiring lumberjacks and lumberjills — who gather for lessons on the western shore of Madison’s Lake Wingra on summer afternoons when the weather is fine. She teaches them to climb up, and to stay up, on floating cedar logs — actually retired telephone poles that have been planed into more perfect cylinders to give them a truer roll. The logs the students use are carpeted, to provide slightly better traction and a modicum of padding. Pros, such as Martin, use uncarpeted logs, relying on spiked shoes for grip and taking their lumps.

Eyes on the end; fast feet. It’s good advice, Martin knows, because these two principles are the ones she rolls by, in sport and in life. For the last quarter century, since she was five years old, she’s been in almost constant motion, always aware of what may be waiting not too far in the distance: a 50 percent chance of darkness, pain, and crippling illness.

Martin’s mother, Deborah, was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease twenty-six years ago. An incurable genetic disorder, Huntington’s travels along a dominant gene. If Shana inherited that gene, she will, inevitably, lose control of her muscles, the capacity to communicate, and, ultimately, her life.

“It’s always been a part of my life,” Martin says. “It’s always been in the back of my mind, but it’s never changed how I’ve done anything. Basically you have to live as if you’re never going to get it. And that’s what I’ve done. I’ve just lived my life.”

Eyes on the End

One day in 1985, Shana Martin learned that her life would turn on a penny.

When Shana was five years old, she and her parents drove to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Deborah had been acting odd for some time. She would shake or jerk her arms and legs, as though dancing to unheard music. She would become angry with little provocation. Her symptoms mystified her doctors and baffled her family until that trip to Mayo, which brought the devastating — and stunning — diagnosis of Huntington’s.

“My mother was adopted,” Shana says. “We didn’t know her parents. Basically [the doctors] were finally able to determine that it was Huntington’s disease because she was showing enough neurological symptoms by then.”

The Martins returned home to Madison, and Shana’s father, George MS’74, PhD’78, took her to her room and spelled out the situation for her. George was a UW professor of forestry, the instructor for Forest Biometrics — “the class the students hated to have to take,” he says. A lifelong teacher, he explained the situation to Shana in terms a five-year-old could understand.

Deborah was going to get worse — much worse. She would lose the ability to walk, to speak, and to eat. Shana would have to help take care of her mother. And then George took out a penny and flipped it on the bed. These are your odds of getting Huntington’s, he told Shana. Heads, and you’re in the clear; tails, and you’ll be sick like your mother: a 50-50 chance.

“I remember asking him if it’s heads or tails, and he said I can’t tell you,” she says. “He was very honest about it.”

At the time, there was no test to determine whether a child had interited Huntington’s. That test came along in March 1993, when the Huntington’s Disease Gene Collaborative Research Group announced that it had isolated the defective gene, called Huntingtin, a string of repeated DNA located on chromosome 4. But Shana has decided not to be tested.

That response is fairly common, according to Laura Buyan Dent MD’98, a neurologist with the UW’s Movement Disorders Clinic. “It’s a very individual decision,” she says. “At this point, there’s no treatment for [Huntington’s], so some people think, why bother to find out? And for those who do learn they have it, there’s a high rate of suicide within a few years of the initial diagnosis.”

About 30,000 Americans — one in every 10,000 — have developed Huntington’s disease; another 200,000 are the children of parents with Huntington’s, and so are at risk of inheriting it. The condition has a vicious effect on sufferers and their families. It affects several regions of the brain, but most particularly the basal ganglia, an area near the center of the brain that’s associated with motor control and procedural learning. Huntington’s patients lose a large number of cells in the basal ganglia, leading to an inability to control movement. For many years, the disease was called Huntington’s chorea — from the Greek word for dance — due to the way that sufferers appeared to dance uncontrollably.

Development of the disease can be unpredictable, Dent says. The first symptoms to appear are often psychological or cognitive — that is, related to mood or to memory — but the disease’s signal characteristic is that hopeless dance. Over the course of up to twenty years, patients suffer jerking and flailing limbs, until, in the disease’s final stages, they become rigid.

For Deborah Martin, the first signs had been physical and psychological. “She had balance issues, tripping, falling, contortion,” Shana says. “And the psychological was basically anger outbursts. It was almost like bipolar disorder — she’d be really happy, and then very angry.”

Twelve years ago, Deborah lost the ability to swallow, and had a feeding tube inserted. Ten years ago she lost the ability to speak. For the last six years, she’s been completely non-responsive.

Shana and George go to visit her at least once a week, to talk to her, watch a video of one of Shana’s competitions, or watch a movie. “She’s still fully there, totally,” Shana says. “We believe that completely. And that’s very frustrating when that person is there, they just — they definitely can’t express themselves. Imagine being trapped inside your body.”

To help distract Shana from those imaginings, George and Deborah encouraged her to take up sports. The same day that George flipped that penny and told Shana about her odds, he gave her a guidebook for the local YMCA.

“My parents were adamant that I shouldn’t just be a caretaker,” Shana says. “They wanted me to be involved in as many things outside of the home as possible. And they said, ‘Pick whatever [activities] you want.’ And I picked gymnastics and log rolling, swimming and ballet.”

Not all of those sports took. “I told my ballet instructor that ballet was just like gymnastics, only boring,” Shana admits. But physical exertion came to be her refuge from the demands of taking care of her mother. And log rolling helped her find a community of people devoted to a goal that fit Shana’s personality: the pursuit of excellence in a field that most people consider an anachronism.

Martin sprints down a series of connected logs during a boom run event at the 2011 Lumberjack World Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin. Boom-running can be dangerous, as each log is free to spin independently of the others. Photo: Darlene Prois

Rise and Fall

We are, today, about seven years removed from the golden age of lumberjack sports. Their popularity followed a course that is typical of a log roller’s first lesson: getting up isn’t too much trouble, but staying up is nearly impossible. After all, falling off a log is axiomatically easy.

That golden age came courtesy of ESPN. From 2000 to 2005, the cable network tried to build a fad around lumberjack sports with the creation of its Great Outdoor Games.

“It was bigger than the world championships,” Martin says. “That was, like, our big event — we got to be famous for a few years, and be in ESPN magazine. Today, sometimes, ESPN features one or two of our lumberjack athletes, but not to the extent that the Great Outdoor Games did. It was to the point that we were recognized in public.”

Fame and fortune have generally been rare commodities among these athletes.

Log rolling — also called birling, from a Scottish word meaning spinning — has its origins in the activities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lumber camps. Logs were moved from forest to lumber mill by river, and so lumberjacks had to be adept at walking across the floating logs.

“We’re athletes who represent things that happened a hundred years ago,” Martin says. “What we’re doing is living history.”

But what she and other professional birlers are also doing is creating an athletic league with its own rules and culture.

In theory, a log rolling match is simple enough: two competitors stand on a floating log and each tries to make the other fall off. They may spin the log, rock it up and down, or splash water at their opponent, but may not touch their opponent and must keep one foot in contact with the log at all times. The birler who wins the best of five rolls wins the match.

Competitive birlers climb the ranks from junior (up to seventeen) to semi-pro to professional (or elite, in the terms of the U.S. Log Rolling Association). And elite log rollers are ranked by how they finish at sanctioned tournaments held throughout the summer at a variety of locations — most in the upper Midwest — that have historical links to the lumber industry: La Crosse, Madison, Onalaska, and Lake Namekagon in Wisconsin; Grand Marais in Minnesota; Kaslo in British Columbia; and the Lumberjack World Championships, held every July since 1960 in Hayward, Wisconsin.

Martin began competing as an amateur log roller at the age of nine.

“I stank at it,” she says of her first attempts to stay upright on wood. “I was absolutely terrible. But I had so much fun, and I made great friends.”

As she worked her way up the amateur and professional ranks of log-rollers, Martin also explored other sports, often working against the grain. As a student at Madison’s Memorial High School, she joined the track team and became its first female to compete at pole-vaulting, a sport she tried out for mainly, she says, “because they told me girls couldn’t do it.” The decision helped create new opportunities for her.

“Just my luck, my first year at UW–Madison, the Big Ten opened up pole-vaulting for women,” she says. “It was kind of cool. I held all the records at the UW, because I was the first one.”

She became a scholarship athlete in her sophomore year, but even then continued as a professional lumberjill — a situation that would complicate her status as a Badger athlete.

“This was back in the days of the Shoe Box scandal,” she says. In 2001, more than 100 UW athletes violated NCAA rules by accepting benefits from the Shoe Box footwear store in Black Earth, Wisconsin, earning the university a $150,000 fine and probation. The fallout made the university nervous about any scholarship athlete receiving income from an outside source, and Martin had to convince the athletic department that birling wouldn’t create additional complications with the NCAA.

At the time, the money to be made in log rolling was just beginning to rise, though Martin wasn’t yet a top earner. ESPN’s Great Outdoor Games was flourishing, and athletes could win as much as $10,000 with a first-place finish. But Martin was still climbing the ranks. It wasn’t until 2004, after her Badger days were over, that she won her only Great Outdoor Games gold medal, taking top honors in the mixed-doubles boom run.

Like birling, boom-running is also based on floating logs. Competitors race each other in a sprint from one end of a boom — a series of six to twelve logs, linked end to end so that they each spin independently — to another and back again. The fastest time wins the race. Runners may fall (and often do) once or even twice and remount to continue the race, but three falls leads to disqualification.

“It’s quite a different event than just sprinting,” Martin says, “because the logs are moving and spinning, and you’ve got to balance, and people are falling in. It’s a lot more dangerous than log rolling.”

Martin’s gold in the 2004 Great Outdoors Games boom run capped a banner year for her and for lumberjack sports in general. That year’s games were held in Madison, and so Martin took her prize before a hometown crowd. The games in general attracted some 70,000 spectators to attend the events live, and 22 million viewers watched them on television.

But this was the peak of the Great Outdoor Games’ popularity — and their fall wasn’t far off. ESPN and Madison squabbled over money, and the network decided to take its show to Orlando, Florida, for 2005. Low attendance — hampered by the threat of Hurricane Dennis — made that year’s games a failure. In 2006, ESPN canceled the event altogether.

Five years later, the popularity of lumberjack sports has drifted back to historical norms. The legends of the sport — J.R. Salzman, who lost an arm in Iraq, or the Hoeschler sisters, whose sibling rivalry gives an edge to their sense of competition — are no longer public celebrities. But as the sport declined, Martin’s standing in it rose. She won the world championship in log rolling in 2006, 2007, and 2008; in boom-running, she won championships in 2008 and 2009. She narrowly lost the log rolling championship in 2010, to Lizzie Hoeschler (“my nemesis,” Martin calls her).

With the chance for fame and fortune waning, birling did not attract large numbers of athletes. Today, Martin is the president of the U.S. Log Rolling Association, and she says that there are currently about a hundred professional birlers, among about a thousand pro lumberjack athletes. Prizes, even at the highest levels, are hardly enough to make anyone rich. The top birler at the 2011 Lumberjack World Championships took home $1,425. Martin, who finished second for the second year in a row, received $1,000.

“Sponsorships are hard to come by,” Martin says. “For the really small tournaments, first place might be like a hundred bucks — basically, to cover travel.”

As one of the top athletes in her sport, Martin has managed to land sponsors from time to time — the Duluth Trading Company, Lumberjack’s Restaurant chain, Lululemon activewear, even a company called GoGirl. “It’s a feminine urination device,” Martin says. “I actually used it while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. It was quite the lifesaver.”

But she also sees that her time at the top of her game is limited, and she’s trying to prepare for life after she’s fallen from her last log. “This is a young-woman’s sport,” she says.

Shana Martin and her father, George, sit on logs that George has just delivered to Madison’s Lake Wingra. Though George is a former forestry professor, Shana says his academic interests did not push her toward log rolling as a sport. Photo: Jeff Miller

Fast Feet

If Huntington’s disease is going to catch up with Shana Martin, it will have to move fast, because she seldom slows down. She can’t afford to. The disease’s typical age of onset is between 35 and 45. Martin is 31.

In any given week, she might be submitting herself for testing by Huntington’s disease researchers, or meeting with the Huntington’s Disease Society of America, or speaking on its behalf to a Kiwanis Club or an Elks Lodge or a YMCA.

“The way I cope is by speaking,” she says. “Some people pull in. Some are in denial. I started to get involved when I was sixteen years old.”

In fact, her involvement goes back several years earlier, to when her mother’s deterioration was a cause of ostracism in the harsh social world of elementary school. Martin’s classmates were often confused by her mother’s odd behavior or terrified by the thought that they might catch whatever it was Deborah had. Shana was the weird kid with the weird mom. “I had a pretty rough childhood,” she says. “I got picked on a lot.”

But in sixth grade, Martin’s teacher at Madison’s Jefferson Middle School asked her to give a speech on any topic of her choosing. Martin chose to explain Huntington’s to her classmates: her first experience in using communication as a coping mechanism.

“I remember being so scared I cried beforehand, and before the speech, I even asked the kids — I begged them — I said please don’t make fun of me,” Martin says. “I stood in front of these kids, and I gave this talk about my mom’s life. And my whole world turned around. All those kids who used to make fun of me, they just asked questions for the rest of the school day. None of them really understood until I gave that speech, and that’s when it dawned on me how important it was for people to learn what this mysterious disease is.”

But speaking is just a small part of Martin’s life — and hardly remunerative. Like most professional log rollers, she can’t make a living solely from the prizes won at tournaments. Some lumberjack athletes supplement that income by performing at shows — exhibitions at which athletes show off their timber talents while talking about lumberjack history and entertaining spectators with mock competitions and physical comedy.

“Shows are cheesy,” she says. “You wear flannel, have bad jokes, and all that. A lot of log rolling competitors do them for a living. They travel to different fairs and do demonstrations. Every so often they’ll call me up and say, ‘Hey, we need a log roller for a show,’ and I’ll go and do it, but I don’t do shows for a living.”

Instead, Martin keeps a day job as the fitness director at Madison’s Supreme Health and Fitness, a career she says had been in her plans since she was a teen. A kinesiology major at the UW, she has always pursued exercise and education. She’s coached track at Wesleyan University in New England, and she’s “lived the dream of a Beverly Hills personal trainer,” in her words. But her eyes were always back on Madison.

“It’s been my main job, my home base, my passion since I was in high school,” she says. “When I lived in Connecticut, when I lived in L.A., I knew I was going to come back when a fitness director position opened up. I don’t make a lot of money, but it’s [like] family there.”

Martin supplements her income by traveling to certify other fitness professionals for a company called TRX, which created a suspension training system — a set of nylon straps that act as a sort of portable gymnasium. The variety and physical intensity of her engagements keep her almost constantly on the road.

“A lot of people say I wanted to be physically active because it will help take care of my body, that it will put off the onset of Huntington’s disease,” Martin says. “That’s one possibility, but I actually don’t think that. My parents got me physically active at a young age, and I loved it. I loved everything about it. I saw how much fun everybody had, at every ability level, and knew this is what I wanted to do.”

But as she promotes lumberjack sports or fitness or support for Huntington’s patients and research, she does so with the understanding that her life could change drastically tomorrow.

Shana Martin sits with her mother, Deborah. A victim of Huntington’s disease, Deborah has been on a feeding tube for twelve years and non-responsive for the last six. Shana and her father, George, visit Deborah every week. Courtesy of Shana Martin.

“I’m adamant about not learning whether [I have the gene],” Martin says. “If I found out I had it — or that I didn’t — I don’t know how my life would change. Basically, you have to prepare as if you’re going to get [Huntington’s], but live as if you’re never going to get it.”

John Allen is not only senior editor of On Wisconsin Magazine; he’s also the publication’s most experienced log roller.

Grand Marshall Abigail Conley. Photo: Jeff Miller.

Abigail Conley of Madison, age seven, won the Homecoming coloring contest and thus won herself a spot as grand marshal of the 2011 parade. Homecoming celebrated its centennial this year; it was first held in November 1911 as a special event to bring alumni back to campus. The Homecoming Parade, however, didn’t come along until 1913. To learn more Homecoming history, visit uwalumni.com/150. Photo: Jeff Miller.

Being an official Badger is about more than just what you learn in the classroom. To earn your red and white stripes, you need to know a few things about Wisconsin traditions and rituals, past and present. Here’s a refresher course in the basics of being a Badger.

Illustration: Barry Roal Carlsen

“Varsity”

Badgers have sung this sentimental closer for more than a century. The tune’s staying power can be found in its easy-to-remember lyrics and arm-swinging motion, introduced by former UW Marching Band Director Ray Dvorak in 1934. To do the Varsity wave like a loyal Badger, you have to remember to use your right arm and start your swing from right to left during the song’s last line:

Varsity! Varsity!
U-rah-rah! Wisconsin,
Praise to thee we sing!
Praise to thee, our Alma Mater,
[Get ready. Get set. Wave!]
U-rah-rah! Wisconsin!

Paul Bunyan’s Axe

All Badger fans worth their salt know about the legendary battle for Paul Bunyan’s axe, the trophy passed between football rivals Wisconsin and Minnesota. Badgers should also know that before Paul Bunyan’s axe, the trophy was the Slab of Bacon. It was passed between the Badgers and Gophers from 1930 to 1943, when the trophy was “lost” and neither school claimed to know its whereabouts. The slab was a piece of wood that had hooks on both ends so the trophy would display either a W or M, with game scores engraved on its back. After the slab disappeared, Paul Bunyan’s axe replaced it in 1948. The slab wouldn’t be seen again until 1994, when it was happened upon in a storage room during a renovation of Camp Randall Stadium. It currently resides in the Wisconsin football office. Oddly enough, when the slab was discovered, the scores of the games from 1943 to 1970 were found to be engraved on its back.

Illustration: Earl J. Madden

Honest Abe

Though students today might think of him (or more intimately, his lap) as a commencement photo op, learned Badgers know that Abraham Lincoln is memorialized on Bascom Hill because he signed the Morrill Act in 1862 to provide federal aid to land-grant colleges such as the University of Wisconsin. The act was hailed as the “Education Bill of Rights” and proved to be instrumental in giving more students from all economic walks of life access to a college education.

Fifth Quarter

The UW Marching Band is nationally famous for its Fifth Quarter, a celebration that takes place after UW football games. Win or lose, Badger fans sing, dance, and cheer while the band plays traditional favorites such as “On, Wisconsin,” “Varsity,” and “You’ve Said It All” (the Bud song). Originally designed to give fans something to listen to on their way out of Camp Randall Stadium, the postgame concert has grown into a Wisconsin tradition with ever-evolving band antics and audience participation. How does Wisconsin convince thousands of fans to stick around for thirty minutes after every home game? In 1978, when it was announced that the band would delay playing until ten minutes after the game had ended — to enable the weak-of-heart to exit the upper deck before the “swaying” began — interest in the post-game festivities exploded, and a tradition was born. As every true Badger knows, “When you say ‘WIS-CON-SIN,’ you’ve said it all!”

School Colors

When it comes to UW–Madison’s official school colors, there is no gray area. They are cardinal and white, and have been since before the Daily Cardinal, the UW’s first student newspaper, was established in 1892. That’s not to say red is wrong, however. Cardinal is obviously a shade of red. That’s why alumni and students wear The Red Shirt, cheer “Go, Big Red!” during Badger football games, and gather as the Grateful Red in the student section at the Kohl Center. Badgers like to rally around red.

Wisconsin Idea

One of the university’s longest and deepest traditions, the Wisconsin Idea is the principle that education should influence and improve people’s lives beyond the university classroom. Former UW President Charles Van Hise 1879, 1880, MS1882, PhD1892 (who clearly spent a lot of time in the classroom) is most often credited for articulating the philosophy in 1904, and its definition has evolved throughout the university’s history, creating a living, breathing expression for Badgers of all generations. The Wisconsin Idea is now understood to mean that the university benefits not just those in the state, but around the world. In 2011–12, the UW is celebrating the Wisconsin Idea throughout the entire academic year.

Camp Randall

Built in 1917, Camp Randall Stadium is the fourth-oldest college-owned football complex in the nation. Badgers marching into Camp Randall for a football game should know that the athletic field was a Civil War training post named after Governor Alexander Randall. Seventy thousand Wisconsin troops, representing nearly all of the state’s military might, were trained at the camp before being sent to battlefields in the South. In 1862, 1,400 Confederate soldiers were captured — most of them taken in an action along the Mississippi called the Battle of Island Number 10. They were taken north and held at Camp Randall. Many of these soldiers died of their wounds and are buried in a cemetery on Madison’s west side in an area known as “soldiers’ rest,” the northernmost Confederate cemetery in the United States.

Illustration: Earl J. Madden

Bucky Badger

To be a Badger, you have to dig into the origins of our beloved mascot. In the early 1800s, when settlers came to the Midwest in droves to mine for lead, badgers were abundant in southwestern Wisconsin’s prairie habitat. The settlers who worked in Wisconsin’s lead mines were nicknamed “badgers” for their digging ways, and because many of them lived in burrow-like dwellings through the winter, much like badgers in hibernation. The lead industry was so important in Wisconsin’s early days that the badger was honored in 1851 with a place atop the state seal, along with a miner holding a pick. Shortly after football became an official sport at the UW in 1889, the badger was adopted as an athletic mascot, and so began Wisconsin’s love affair with the mighty mustelid. The name Bucky — short for Buckingham U. Badger — came along in 1949, chosen by student vote.

Babcock Ice Cream

Though widely divided on favorite flavor, Badgers are united when it comes to picking a sweet treat on campus. The UW’s dairy building has been making and selling ice cream for nearly a century, but the name Babcock ice cream did not arise until after Babcock Hall, the third dairy building, was built in 1951. Specializing in gourmet ice cream, the Babcock Dairy Store creates special, limited-edition flavors such as Mad Grad Medley (named in honor of the Wisconsin Alumni Association’s 150th anniversary) and Berry Alvarez (named for Athletic Director Barry Alvarez) in addition to longtime favorites such as Blue Moon, Butter Pecan, and Orange Custard Chocolate Chip.

“Jump Around”

A hit single by the band House of Pain, “Jump Around” made its Camp Randall debut in 1998. The song is now played between the third and fourth quarters of all Badger home football games, accompanied by the entire student section (fifteen thousand strong) jumping up and down in the bleachers. Badgers in the know — even those without the endurance to jump around for three-plus minutes — understand why it’s on credit cards and T-shirts spotted around the country.

Statue of Liberty

Even Badgers who weren’t students in the late 1970s know about the university’s most famous prank. Led by James Mallon ’79 and Leon Varjian x’83, the Pail and Shovel Party was elected to lead the Wisconsin Student Association in 1978, vowing to give campus issues “the seriousness they deserve.” The following winter, they erected a gigantic replica of the Statue of Liberty’s head and torch on frozen Lake Mendota. After the first version of the statue fell victim to arson, a second Lady Liberty was built, and she has been resurrected several more times in recent years.

Sifting and Winnowing

The board of regents introduced this concept for academic freedom in 1894, when it stated that the university should never censor or limit faculty or students in the quest for knowledge. A plaque that hangs on Bascom Hall reads: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continued and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.” Generations of Badgers have benefited from this credo.

Hoofers

Any Badger who has survived a Wisconsin winter should be able to name the university’s largest outdoor recreation program. When establishing the group in 1931, students chose the name Hoofers to evoke a sense of “getting there under your own power.” The group is credited with introducing skiing at UW–Madison and reviving the ski jump on Muir Knoll. Over the years, Hoofers has added thousands of active members and various clubs, including six that are still offered today — outing, riding, mountaineering, scuba, ski and snowboarding, and sailing.

Illustration: Earl J. Madden

Terrace Chairs

If you’re a Badger of true colors, you should be able to list the signature hues of the Terrace chairs: sunshine yellow, “John Deere” green, and “Allis-Chalmers” orange, which also represent the site’s most popular seasons of summer and fall. (Allis Chalmers is a company that used to manufacture bright orange tractors at its home plant in West Allis, Wisconsin.) The Memorial Union introduced the sunburst Terrace chairs in the 1960s, and they quickly became an iconic campus symbol. They almost became extinct in the late 1970s, when their manufacturer went out of business. Thankfully, the Memorial Union Building Association purchased the tool-and-die equipment to keep the beloved chairs in production. n

With this primer under your belt, test your Badger IQ at uwalumni.com/150.

Karen Graf Roach ’82 formerly wrote the “Ask Abe” column in WAA’s e-newsletter ONline Wisconsin, which invites readers to write in with questions about campus.

UW–Madison grads and friends strutted their stuff on the red carpet (Badger red, naturally) at the Wisconsin Alumni Association’s Red Tie Gala. Held October 14, the night before the Homecoming game, the gala marked the culmination of WAA’s 150th anniversary celebration.

Attendees gathered in the Town Center at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, which opened in December 2010. In addition to giving Badgers a chance to dress up and to check out the space, the gala also served as a fundraiser, with nearly 800 guests helping to generate $150,000 for the UW’s Great People Scholarship, which provides need-based aid to students.

The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery Town Center was decorated in an alumni theme, with lots of Badger red and a video wall (lower center, right, photo by Wendy Hathaway) showing historical images of campus. Other highlights included a performance by the MadHatters a cappella group (top) and plenty of WAA’s commemorative ice cream flavor, Mad Grad Medley. Attendees enjoyed a red-carpet welcome from Bucky Badger and the UW Marching Band (upper center, right), and Chancellor David Ward MS’62, PhD’63 and his spouse, Judith ’64 (lower right), led a conga line.

WAA president and CEO Paula Bonner MS’78, (center right), led a toast (top & center left) and spoke about the theme for the gala: celebrating a legacy of 150 years of alumni accomplishments. No Badger gathering, no matter how elegant, is complete without singing “Varsity” (bottom right). In addition, a band played dance tunes from many different eras (bottom left), and guests sampled a special cocktail — the “sesquitini” — and festive hors d’oeuvres created for the occasion.

Not mentioned was any instruction on organic sausage making and curing. I do hope this is covered in your course, as it is desperately needed. The current situation is that nearly all sausage makers throw standard mixes with MSG, artificial flavors, and preservatives into the meat we deliver to them. This is not acceptable for organic folks like me. I’m not interested in fast production. Our ancestors’ sausages relied on the natural flavor of their pasture-grazed livestock and old- fashioned methods like real smoke.

I hope the UW is providing leadership to ensure that this type of sausage making is not relegated to the compost heap of “lost arts.”

Linda Derrickson ’69 Blanchardville, Wisconsin

UW geologist Anders Carlson surveys an outlet glacier in southwest Greenland. Carlson and his colleagues are working to improve models for predicting changes in sea level due to climate change by studying how ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland have melted in the past. Photo: Anders Carlson

Ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are melting, but no one can say for certain how much, how fast, or where all of that water is going.

“Estimates of just how much the ice will melt and contribute to sea-level rise by the end of this century are highly varied, ranging from a few centimeters to meters,” says Anders Carlson, a UW geoscience assistant professor.

The way massive ice sheets behave is one of the most uncertain aspects for scientists predicting changes in sea level due to climate change. Carlson’s goal is to remove some of the question marks with his work in Greenland, where he’s looking to the past to learn how the ice sheet melted before and to find clues about how it might melt again.

The last time Northern Hemisphere summers were warmer than current ones, the oceans were as much as twenty feet higher than they are now, a factor scientists, including Carlson, initially thought was due to Greenland’s melting ice sheet. But Carlson, along with colleagues from the UW and Oregon State University, found surprising patterns of melting that suggest Greenland’s ice may be more stable — and Antarctica’s less stable — than many surmised. The prospect is “scary,” Carlson says.

“In one person’s lifetime, you could see a significant amount of that sheet disappear, and that could have major societal impact,” he says. Rising sea levels will erode coasts and cause more frequent coastal flooding; some island nations will disappear entirely.

Carlson and his colleagues analyzed silt from cores they collected from the ocean floor off the southern tip of Greenland, where water from the melting ice sheet deposits sediments, and traced it back to one of three regions.

The sedimentation patterns showed all of the regions still had some ice cover throughout the last warm period, which was around 125,000 years ago.

The research team applied those results to existing ice sheet models and found melting Greenland ice was responsible for less than half of the total increase in sea level at that time. That means, Carlson says, that the remainder must have come from a melting ice sheet in Antarctica that was likely much smaller than it is today.

And the results also do not bode well for the future of Greenland’s ice sheet. Temperatures during that time period were similar to those expected by the end of this century, and present-day temperatures have already reached a point that Greenland’s glaciers are melting.

“Greenland still retreated during this period, and it definitely raised sea level at an amount that would destroy the lives of many, many people,” Carlson says.

Carlson and his colleagues are working to establish a half-million-year record of Greenland, up to the present day, to see how the ice has responded to warmer-than-current summers in the past. They plan to drill new cores from more locations and try to gather even better information on the evolution of Greenland’s ice sheet to aid future projections.

“All models are wrong. Some models are more wrong than others. They always have some missing pieces,” he says. “This is a way to see which ones do a better job.”

Anna Marie Stubenrauch Mulvihill MS’59 Vienna, Virginia

Photo: Jeff Miller

When Daniel Lester x’13 first jumped into a pool, he was just doing what the doctor ordered. He picked up swimming at ten years old as a way to cope with asthma, and he hasn’t looked back since.

The Brisbane, Australia, native entered his junior season at the UW with three school records under his belt (he holds top times in the 100- and 200-yard butterfly and in the 200-yard individual medley) and an ultimate goal on the horizon: qualifying for the Olympics. After finishing as a semi-finalist in Australia’s 2008 Olympic trials, Lester now hopes to improve on that performance and qualify for London 2012 at the Australian Championships in March.

“Swimming is like the NBA in Australia. It’s definitely the big Olympic sport,” says Lester, whose biggest personal accomplishment came when he competed for his country this summer at the World University Games in China, finishing ninth in the 100-meter butterfly. “Personally, the Australia swimming arena is what I really train for. The NCAA and the American stuff [are] kind of a bonus on top of that.”

But competing stateside brings its own challenges. Lester may rest comfortably at the top of the rankings Down Under, but he says he now has to work harder to put up the same numbers. “I came in fourth at the Australian Championships this year, and that would probably get me eighth here if I was lucky,” he says. “So the depth [of competition] is definitely a lot greater.”

Luckily, Lester — who hasn’t declared a major, but is applying to the Wisconsin School of Business — is no stranger to hard work. The two-time All-American spends at least twenty hours in the pool each week, training his body for the physical competition. On the blocks, however, it’s all about the mental game. “I love racing,” he says. “Once you’re there, you’ve done all the hard work — it’s just a matter of focusing and being in the right frame of mind. This is what you came here to do.”