That is, except to Wisconsinites, who rewarded his earnestness by electing him to four terms from 1989 to 2013. He was, according to his famous campaign slogan, nobody’s senator but theirs.

Former colleagues of Kohl, fellow Democrats and rival Republicans alike, invariably describe him as gracious and honest, quiet but effective, and above all, dedicated to Wisconsin.

A decade after he left office, with Washington consumed by partisanship and gridlock, Kohl’s soft touch in the Senate seems almost archaic. But always an optimist, he continues to work behind the scenes to promote practical solutions to society’s problems. In 2019, he donated a record $10 million to the UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs. The gift has already proved transformative for the school, boosting its efforts to train future leaders and advance the public good.

“I think we are seeing all of our greatest fears right now. The chaos, the disregard for truth and facts, the unwillingness to listen and talk to each other,” Kohl says. “But my greatest hope is in the fact that we are still a democracy in the greatest country in the world. I think we can look to appeal to our better angels and come together if we make the effort.”

Kohl, 87, believes he still has a debt to pay off, despite decades of public service and hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropic gifts. It’s the debt he feels from having had such good fortune in his life. In his first stump speech in 1988, he noted that wealthy people have a “special responsibility to those who are not as comfortably well off” — those like his parents, European Jewish immigrants who came to America with nothing and built a business empire that set the stage for one of Wisconsin’s most beloved public servants.

The American Dream

The Kohl family’s American dream began 100 years ago. Kohl’s father, Max, emigrated from Poland, and his mother, Mary, from Russia. They left behind many family members in Europe who later lost their lives to the Holocaust.

Struggling to find their way in Milwaukee, the couple decided to open a corner food market beneath their southside apartment in 1927. Their English was so poor that customers had to point at the items they wanted to purchase.

Max and Mary Kohl often discussed social justice at the dinner table with their kids.

“They always looked forward to the future with optimism and determination,” Kohl says. “And they showed us that your life would be measured far more by what you contribute than by what you have.”

In 1946, at age 11, Kohl cut the ribbon at his family’s first supermarket, which would soon expand to multiple locations. In 1962, the family opened the first Kohl’s department store. It’s now the largest such chain in the United States with more than 1,000 stores. Kohl grew up with his sister and two brothers on 51st Boulevard in the Sherman Park neighborhood. A few hundred feet away on 52nd Street lived Bud Selig ’56, the future commissioner of Major League Baseball. They met in early grade school and have remained best friends for more than eight decades. They still meet for lunch almost every week, calling each other only by their last names.

“We have a lot of great memories, fun and funny stories, and maybe even a bit of a shtick,” Kohl says.

They bonded over sports from an early age, and Kohl delights in sharing the story of how the two faced each other as captains of their respective baseball teams in the sixth grade. In Kohl’s telling, Selig recruited a towering 6-foot-something stranger to pitch in the championship game. Kohl’s team struck out at every at-bat and lost 9–0.

“He has a wonderful imagination,” Selig says, laughing.

The two friends found their way to the UW for what Kohl calls the best four years of his life. Both he and Selig studied history and political science, roomed together, and joined the Jewish fraternity Pi Lambda Phi.

Kohl (right) with best friend Bud Selig in the 1955 Badger yearbook. He calls his UW experience the best four years of his life. UW Digitized Collections

At the UW, Selig became close friends with Charlie Thomas ’57, a Black football player, and encouraged him to join the otherwise all-white fraternity. It was a radical notion in the 1950s, but Kohl immediately offered his support.

Thomas’s pledging was controversial both inside and outside of the fraternity house. But on the night of the vote, which lasted until 2 a.m., Selig and Kohl deployed the persuasive skills that would later define their careers. They convinced their peers to integrate the fraternity. Thomas went on to a successful career as superintendent of North Chicago schools.

Kohl still holds dear the values his immigrant parents instilled in him: integrity, humility, determination, kindness, hard work, resilience. They’re the same ones that made him one of Wisconsin’s most respected employers and policymakers.

“He’s Unique”

After he graduated from the UW, Kohl earned an MBA from Harvard, joined the Army Reserve, and became president of the Kohl’s Corporation, which had expanded to 50 supermarkets and several department stores.

Taking after his father, Kohl continued to run the rapidly growing chain as if it were still a small mom-and-pop shop. He conducted many job interviews himself, believing that employees would be more loyal if they were hired by a Kohl family member. He made the rounds to every store, inspecting the tidiness of food displays and even bagging groceries for customers during busy times.

“With any store we walked into, he knew every employee by their first name, and he knew all their families,” Selig says. “You could tell his whole heart and soul was into it.”

Employees stayed for years, if not their entire careers. They had their own credit union and health insurance. They had five weeks of paid vacation. They received employee discounts and grocery coupons to buy Christmas dinner for their families.

“Our employees were extensions of our family,” Kohl says.

The family sold the business in 1979. Almost a decade later, when Kohl first ran for office, many former employees championed their former boss. Mary Carini, who worked for Kohl’s food stores for 10 years, was a registered Republican but volunteered for Kohl’s 1988 Democratic campaign, still touched by how he checked in on her during her divorce.

“He’s unique,” she told the Capital Times. “I never knew a businessman of his caliber of intelligence and drive, yet so compassionate toward people.” It didn’t hurt Kohl’s political prospects that he was the savior of the state’s professional basketball team. Milwaukee Bucks owner Jim Fitzgerald announced in 1985 that he was selling the franchise, lamenting that its arena had the lowest seating capacity in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Kohl feared a sale to out-of-town bidders.

“I knew I needed to step up and do what I could to keep the Bucks here,” says Kohl, who bought the team for nearly $20 million.

Kohl preserved the Bucks yet again in 2014. He sold the franchise with the contingency that the new owners make a long-term commitment to Milwaukee. He also donated $100 million to the construction of a new arena to help make that a reality.

And Kohl arguably deserves as much credit as anyone for the team’s 2021 NBA championship. It was under his ownership that the Bucks drafted league MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo and traded for all-star Khris Middleton. Before the championship parade, a TV reporter told Kohl that he made the moment possible by saving the team. Kohl, looking as always like he wanted to be anywhere but in the spotlight, responded simply: “Well, that’s nice to hear. I was one of many.”

Such implausible humility is familiar to anyone who knew him as a senator.

A Nonpolitical Aura

It’s one of the most effective and imitated slogans in recent political history: “Nobody’s senator but yours.”

“Voices of special interests were drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens,” Kohl says of his first Senate run in 1988. “And I made the pledge not to accept contributions from political action committees or other special interests.”

As he stated at his campaign kickoff event: “The important thing is that when the campaign is over, I will owe nothing to anybody but the people of Wisconsin.”

Crucially, Kohl’s everyman personality made it believable that he couldn’t be bought. He often wears the same navy-blue blazer with a faded Bucks cap. Even when he owned an NBA team, he sat with the crowd rather than at courtside. He’s lived in the same Milwaukee condo for 50 years. He prefers to dine at casual “paper napkin” restaurants like George Webb and Ma Fischer’s.

“I think in a lot of ways he was always seen as a guy with Wisconsin at the forefront and as a businessman at heart,” says Scott Klug MBA’90, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin who served with Kohl for eight years. “That gave him sort of a nonpolitical aura.”

Kohl was late to enter the crowded Democratic primary in 1988. At 53, he was a political outsider. He staked liberal-to-moderate positions on issues, overcame a few gaffes, and sailed through the primary, despite criticism about his heavy campaign spending. Kohl won the seat and held onto it with steadily increasing support. In his last Senate race, he carried all 72 Wisconsin counties. He did it by treating public office a lot like his business. But now, five million Wisconsin citizens were his customers.

A Workhorse Senator

He welcomed them all. The office hosted Wednesday morning breakfast for any Wisconsinites who happened to be visiting Washington, DC. The senator would stop by, take photos, and hand out Bucks pens. His aides were on hand to respond to the visitors’ policy concerns or assist them with their travel plans.

“It was mandatory,” says Ben Miller, who served as a legislative aide in Kohl’s office in the early 2000s and now oversees government affairs for UW–Madison. “Every week, we all had to be there with doughnuts and coffee.”

Kohl’s office earned the reputation as one of the best customer service operations in the Senate. If a constituent called about a missing Social Security check, his staff would promptly track it down. Every phone call was returned, and every letter answered.

Behind the scenes, Kohl was one of the Senate’s biggest (if quietest) players, sponsoring or cosponsoring more than 3,000 pieces of legislation over his career. With gun violence on the rise in the ’90s, he negotiated a series of bipartisan gun-control measures. He authored a bill banning guns in school zones. When the Supreme Court overturned it on a technicality, he rewrote the legislation to address the loophole and prohibit guns within 1,000 feet of schools. He also cosponsored the Brady Bill, which required an instant background check and a five-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns.

Such bipartisan compromises on a hot-button issue were anything but inevitable. In July 1998, Kohl wrote legislation mandating that manufacturers include child-safety locks with the sale of handguns. He allowed California senator Barbara Boxer to serve as the lead sponsor of the amendment, which the Senate rejected on a 39–61 vote. Less than a year later, Kohl introduced a nearly identical proposal. It passed 78–20.

“We used to call it the ‘Herb Kohl Vote Count’ in our office. There would always be more support than projected when Senator Kohl held a floor vote because his colleagues on both sides of the aisle trusted him,” says Jon Leibowitz ’80, a former chief counsel for Kohl who later became chair of the Federal Trade Commission. “Everyone knew he was doing it for the right reasons, and they would want to vote with him.”

With a soft voice, shy demeanor, and short stature, Kohl rarely commanded the room. But when he did talk, his colleagues knew to listen.

Republican senator Chuck Grassley told Milwaukee Magazine in 2010: “I’ll bet he never has done anything to harm or hurt anybody behind their back.” He added that he probably talked to Kohl less than to any other senator, and yet accomplished more with him than anyone else.

“Since I came from the world of running a business, politics to me has always been based on working hard, finding common ground, and getting things done,” Kohl says. “It often means being willing to meet in the middle.”

Over 24 years, he cast his fair share of controversial votes. He voted to prohibit same-sex marriage in 1996 but against a constitutional ban in 2006. In 2002, he supported the resolution to authorize the use of military force in Iraq.

“I had misgivings at the time but ended up voting in favor,” he says. “I was wrong.”

After his fourth term, Kohl retired from the Senate in 2013. His colleagues lined up to recognize his legislative achievements around public education, health care, child and senior care, consumer rights, and Wisconsin’s dairy industry. One called him “a classic workhorse senator, as opposed to a show horse senator.”

“He saw it as his job to give a voice to people who need to be heard in Washington — children, working families, and farmers,” says Tammy Baldwin JD’89, who won Kohl’s Senate seat after he retired. “I think when you ask people what they want public service to be, Herb’s legacy is a shining example of what it can and should be.”

Leading by Example

Kohl’s father once told him the old adage “Money is like manure; it’s not good unless you spread it around.” Kohl has made a habit of it.

In 1990, he started the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation, which has provided more than $30 million in grants and scholarships to Wisconsin students, teachers, and schools. His main charitable entity, Herb Kohl Philanthropies, has awarded thousands of grants to nonprofits that support educational and economic opportunity.

“My parents taught me the immeasurable value of a good education,” Kohl says. “Education is an investment with the greatest return. It is also the great equalizer.”

After the UW struggled for years to fund a new sports facility to augment the aging Field House, Kohl stepped forward with a $25 million lead gift in 1995 for the basketball and hockey center that still bears his name.

And now he has turned his attention back to policymaking. In 2016, he gave a $1.5 million gift to the UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs to establish the Herb Kohl Public Service Research Competition, which supports evidence-based policy and governance research by faculty members and students. Topics have ranged from childhood poverty and solar energy to water quality and opioid prescriptions.

Encouraged by its success, Kohl donated $10 million in 2019 to boost the school’s outreach, teaching, and research efforts.

“Our democracy is being threatened by bitter partisanship, and the La Follette School is poised to lead by example — fostering cooperation, respectful discourse, and service to others,” Kohl said at the time.

The school now hosts the annual La Follette Forum, convening hundreds of lawmakers and leaders to discuss timely policy topics and bridge partisan divides. It’s launched a poll to capture Wisconsin residents’ thoughts on policy issues. And it’s holding several community events across the state this fall to share policy research and enhance public discourse.

“At UW–Madison, we’re not just convening conversations,” says Professor Susan Webb Yackee, director of the La Follette School. “We’re creating the research that identifies major problems and connects them to solutions. We’re educating future leaders whose public policy skills will translate to government action.”

With Kohl’s support, the UW is becoming an incubator for practical solutions and a setting for common ground. To say he’s fighting an uphill battle may be the understatement of this political decade. Congress — and much of the country — has doubled down on partisanship and division.

Is it too late?

“I have to believe that there’s still room in today’s political environment for people like Senator Kohl,” says Miller, his former legislative aide. “Otherwise, I’m not sure how I would get through the day. I don’t want to lose hope. And part of that optimism is because of what he’s instilled in me.” •

UW Athletics

The Washington Wizards scooped up Badger basketball star Johnny Davis x’24 with the number 10 overall pick in the 2022 NBA draft, making him the first UW player drafted in the first round since 2015 and the 10th in history. The sophomore from La Crosse, Wisconsin, helped the team win a share of the Big Ten championship last spring and was named the conference’s Player of the Year. We’ll miss Davis’s competitive fire at the Kohl Center but can’t wait to see how far it takes him in the pros.

“When you slide over those 18 inches [on the bench] … all hell may break loose,” Gard half-joked during his introductory press conference.

It’s a saying that has proven true several times over during his seven-year tenure as head coach of the Badgers. Adversity has become a fact of life for Gard: his father’s death from brain cancer, an unimaginably tragic car accident involving an assistant coach, a confrontation with a rival coach that led to a slap heard ’round the basketball world, a pandemic, and a leaked locker room recording that threatened the program’s viability.

It’s ironic that drama follows Gard these days. His personality is measured and understated. He prefers a low profile. For more than two decades, he served quietly in the background for Ryan, following his mentor from UW–Platteville to UW–Milwaukee to Madison. Despite opportunities to seize the spotlight elsewhere, Gard stuck around as college basketball’s most loyal soldier. Loyalty runs in his DNA. So do his addiction to hard work and his close attention to detail, traits that trace back to his hog-farming childhood in rural Wisconsin.

Through it all, Gard’s ever-steady approach has helped the Badgers sustain nearly unmatched success in the NCAA under his leadership: five March Madness appearances, two conference championships, two Big Ten Coach of the Year awards, and a 144–78 record.

“I tell my players, ‘If you haven’t faced any adversity, you will,’ ” he says. “You can read all the books you want. You can have the greatest mentors. But the best lessons in life come from experience in adversity.”

And in that regard, Gard may be the most experienced coach in college basketball.

Feeling the Pressure

As I sit down with Gard in his Kohl Center office, he points to a large white pillar across from his desk. It’s peppered with decals chronicling the program’s achievements: a national title, four Final Four appearances, 20 conference championships. It also lists the school’s NCAA Tournament bids, with Wisconsin earning a spot 22 out of the last 23 occasions. Something of a perfectionist, Gard admits the missing year — 2018 — still bothers him.

“You talk about pressure on the job? I stare at this every day,” he says.

This past year, Big Ten media picked the team to finish 10th in the conference. But the underdog squad led by emerging star Johnny Davis x’24 and fifth-year guard Brad Davison ’21, MS’22 scrapped its way to a 25–8 record. They became Big Ten cochampions, earning a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

“We’ve embodied what Wisconsin is — blue collar, hard hat, lunch pail, put your best foot forward,” Gard says. “You don’t get bonus points for how a victory looks. I always told them, just keep that same fight, that grittiness, that togetherness, that will, that look in your eye. And it will serve them well for the rest of their lives.” Fans will remember an ugly incident from a February game, when Wisconsin and Michigan came to blows over a late time-out with the game already decided. With 15 seconds left and a 15-point lead, the Badgers’ bench players were struggling to break Michigan’s full-court press. They had just turned the ball over the previous possession, so Gard took a time-out to realign his untested players and reset the half-court clock. Michigan coach Juwan Howard was visibly upset with the move.

“Those guys deserve to be coached with my same intentions and effort as my starting five do,” Gard explains. “He has every right to coach his team. I felt my guys deserved that, too. That means they deserve to get every opportunity to have success. Success was getting the ball across half-court without another turnover.”

When Gard approached Howard in the handshake line, Howard pointed at him and said, “I won’t forget that.” A heated confrontation between coaches and players ensued. Howard swung and hit Wisconsin assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft ’09 in the face, which resulted in a five-game suspension and a $40,000 fine. Gard was fined $10,000 but not suspended.

When I ask Gard whether he’s spoken to Howard since, he offers a one-word response: “No.”

It’s little wonder that Gard’s players have bought into his hard-nosed style. Their coach, after all, has become living proof of the power of grit in the face of adversity.

A Maturity beyond His Years

The village of Cobb, Wisconsin, 60 miles west of Madison, has a population of 400. Growing up, Gard and his two younger brothers got their hands dirty at their grandparents’ farms, with humbling tasks such as scooping out hog manure from the stalls. Any job not done perfectly had to be repeated. Hard work and attention to detail were simply the ways of life in Cobb.

“You understand what it’s like to get up early in the morning before the sun and work until it’s dark. And then, hey, guess what, we’re doing it again tomorrow,” Gard says.

His parents also modeled loyalty. From the age of 18 to her retirement 44 years later, his mother, Connie, served as a secretary at the county high school. His father, Glen, worked for the same agricultural loan company for more than four decades, helping local farmers keep their operations running through increasingly difficult conditions.

It’s no coincidence, then, that their son has shown such loyalty to Bo Ryan and the UW. Gard first met Ryan as a college student at UW–Platteville, where he helped to run the coach’s summer basketball camps for extra cash. After Gard was cut from the college baseball team as a sophomore, he responded to a local newspaper ad seeking a junior high basketball coach.

“The teaching, the competitive nature of it, all those things came very natural to me,” he says.

Before long, Gard was recruited to help coach the varsity teams at Southwestern High School and Platteville High School. Still a college student, Gard made an outsized impression with a maturity beyond his years and a farmer’s work ethic. Observing him stay late at camps and take on increasing responsibilities with ease, Ryan asked Gard to join his college coaching staff as a student assistant. When Gard graduated in 1995, Ryan convinced him to stay on at Platteville despite opportunities elsewhere. He would stay with Ryan for 23 years, following him to Milwaukee in 1999 and Madison in 2001.

“His ideology of how to play the game aligned a lot with what I was learning and believed in,” Gard says. “He kept things simple, but you had to do it right.”

Gard’s reputation grew alongside the Badgers’ success. After Wisconsin upset previously undefeated Kentucky in the 2015 Final Four, Ryan told the media: “Greg Gard had an incredible scouting report. If he isn’t the best assistant in the country, I don’t know who is.”

Gard had plenty of chances to defect. He went deep into the head coaching interview process with several schools, but it never felt like the right time to leave. When he was recruited by Wayne State College in Nebraska, his now-wife, Michelle, told him: “If you go to Wayne State, you’re going alone.”

Family — both off the court and on it — always came first.

“Bo told me 100 times when I was working with him at Platteville, ‘Make the job you have the best one.’ And I’ve always been able to see the value of that,” Gard says. In July 2015, a few months after the Badgers lost the national championship game to Duke, Ryan announced that he was going to coach one more season and then retire. In his statement, he noted that he was doing so with the explicit “hope that my longtime assistant Greg Gard eventually becomes the head coach at Wisconsin.”

But on December 15, with a rebuilding Badgers team scuffling to a 7–5 record, the winningest coach in Wisconsin history decided to step down early and give Gard an extended job audition.

Ryan’s reciprocation of loyalty proved to be the ultimate validation for Gard, who’d lived out his favorite coaching and life mantra: Be where your feet are.

“I never worried about being a head coach by 35 or 40,” he says. “There were more things to enjoy as part of this journey than worrying about where I wasn’t. I tell our players all the time, ‘Enjoy your time here in college. If you’re thinking about what’s next all the time, you’re missing the best part.’ ”

For Gard, the best — and worst — was yet to come.

The Opportunity of a Lifetime

Before his first game as interim head coach against UW–Green Bay, Gard tucked a folded-up piece of paper into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. It was his father’s funeral program. Glen Gard, 72, had passed away six weeks earlier from brain cancer.

For six months, Gard had stayed up late poring through treatment literature and had accompanied his father on flights around the country in a desperate search for the best cancer treatments.

Still grieving the loss of his lifelong role model, Gard threw himself into the career opportunity of a lifetime. One of his first official moves as head coach was to fill his own vacancy. He convinced his old colleague Howard Moore ’95 to leave a broadcasting gig at the Big Ten Network and join him as an assistant. Moore’s familiarity with the program — having played for the Badgers from 1990 to 1995 and served as an assistant from 2005 to 2010 — proved to be a luxury for a midseason hire. After the Badgers stumbled to a 1–4 conference record, Gard made a key adjustment: getting back to the basics with an inexperienced roster. At practice, he drilled fundamentals. He also reintroduced core tenets of the swing offense, an equal-opportunity system that he and Ryan first perfected at Platteville.

“We gave the guys tracks to play on,” Gard says. “It gave them a plan. It gave them some absolutes.”

The changes worked, and the team won 11 of its last 13 games. As the No. 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament, the Badgers advanced to the Sweet 16 on a buzzer-beating Bronson Koenig ’17 three-pointer that remains one of the most memorable plays in Wisconsin sports history. Gard became the second rookie coach to win the Jim Phelan National Coach of the Year award.

“I’ve had an extra assistant coach all year — my guardian angel,” Gard told USA Today after the season, referring to his father and the funeral program in his jacket pocket. On March 7, 2016, Gard was named the permanent head coach of the Badgers. For the first time in his career, he received a multiyear contract. He promptly confirmed the wisdom of that decision by leading the Badgers to another Sweet 16 appearance in 2016–17.

But the good times did not roll forever. The 2017–18 team finished 15–18 and missed the NCAA Tournament. The following year, the Badgers bounced back to a 23–11 record but were upset by No. 12 seed Oregon in the first round of the Big Dance.

And in May 2019, tragedy struck the program.

The Worst Day

In the early morning of May 25, 2019, Howard Moore and his family were driving to the Detroit area to visit his in-laws. A wrong-way drunk driver collided with Moore’s vehicle at high speed. His nine-year-old daughter, Jaidyn, died at the scene. His wife, Jennifer, was in critical condition and taken off life support at the hospital later that day. Moore suffered severe burns on the left side of his body. His 13-year-old son, Jerell, escaped with minor injuries.

Gard still gets emotional discussing the incident. One of the hardest conversations of his life was telling his children that their friend Jaidyn was gone. He also had to console his players about an unspeakable tragedy.

“We cried together and prayed together,” says Davison, who had just finished his sophomore season. “It was a very dark and sad day.”

A month later, the situation went from bad to worse when Moore suffered a major heart attack. Still in recovery, he returned to his Madison home this past December from a long-term rehabilitation facility. During our conversation, Gard has his cell phone face up next to him. I notice him tap it periodically, checking notifications with an almost obsessive impulse.

“I tell my players all the time, I have an open-door policy,” Gard says. “You can come in here — this door never locks. And my cell phone never shuts off. I had my phone off the night of Howard’s accident. And then I vowed, it never goes off. So it’s by my bed, on, 24/7.”

The 2019–20 Badgers dedicated their season to Coach Moore and welcomed his son as an honorary member of the team. They won their final eight games and a share of the Big Ten regular season championship.

“Tragedy and adversity can either draw you apart or draw you together,” Davison says. “That was one of those cases where it really brought us together. We were playing for something bigger than ourselves.”

Coming Apart

But before one of the hottest teams in the nation could prove its mettle in March, COVID-19 shut down the country. The Big Ten and NCAA tournaments were canceled.

And the pandemic wasn’t done wreaking havoc on the program. After sending his players home, Gard didn’t see them in person for five months. The 2020–21 season eventually tipped off with strict pandemic protocols. Players had to eat meals alone in their rooms. There were no off-court team activities.

“Everything we did was anti-team,” Gard says. “You agree with the protocols to keep everyone safe, but looking back, you see the erosion that it created within a team.”

After starting the season ranked No. 7 in the nation, the Badgers had fallen to 9–7 in conference play by mid-February. The day after a blowout loss at home to Iowa, the team’s seven senior players asked for a closed-door meeting with the coaching staff. What followed was an emotional two-hour discussion. The players aired their grievances. The word “disconnect” came up often. They told Gard that they felt he didn’t care about them off the court and didn’t have their backs on the court.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever talk to you again after this [season],” one player said.

Gard listened to the players vent without interrupting and later addressed their concerns.

“It was a very healthy meeting, and it was beneficial for all parties,” Davison says. “Everyone got criticism, everyone got encouragement, everyone got coaching. And when we left that meeting, everyone was feeling good.”

The Badgers responded with some of their best basketball down the stretch, and it seemed that the meeting had achieved its purpose. The only problem was that someone had secretly recorded it.

Restoring Trust

On June 23, 2021, the Wisconsin State Journal published a story with excerpts from the previously private meeting. An anonymous email account had sent the reporter an audio recording that was edited down to 37 minutes, cutting almost everything but the criticisms of Gard. The source of the recording is still unconfirmed.

“I felt hurt and betrayed,” Davison says. “The locker room is supposed to be a safe place where you have tough conversations.”

Gard immediately worked to restore trust in the program, reaching out to all players and recruits individually and holding a team discussion about it. And he adapted, too, with an assist from his college-age children. He knows that students today seek more frequent communication and closer relationships with parental figures.

“I had a coach tell me a long time ago, ‘You’ll become a better coach the day you become a parent.’ He was right,” Gard says.

“I’m Here for You”

When I ask Gard how he’d like to be remembered, his mind goes back to Cobb and the core values that his parents passed down to him.

“That he was a guy who gave his best every day, and he tried to help a lot of people, and he made it better for the people coming behind him. He did it the right way. Didn’t take any shortcuts. Prepared people for what was going to be next. And they always knew they had somebody they can lean on.

“I tell our players all the time, ‘Hey, I’m here for you. Until they shovel dirt on me, I’ve got your back.’ ” •

YouDub Marketplace is helping players like Badger football’s Graham Mertz navigate the new landscape of college athletics after the NCAA adopted a policy to allow student-athletes to profit from their use of name, image, and likeness. Jeff Miller

Good news, Wisconsin sports fans: you can now book your favorite Badger.

In April, UW athletics launched the YouDub Marketplace, where businesses and Badger fans alike can pitch profitable opportunities to UW student-athletes. The online marketplace is helping players and the public navigate the new landscape of college athletics after the NCAA adopted a new policy to allow student-athletes to profit from their use of name, image, and likeness (NIL).

While companies can use the platform to arrange formal sponsorship and advertising deals, fans can pitch any concept — a social media shout-out, an autograph, a special appearance — at a starting rate of $30. The student-athlete then has seven days to review the pitch. UW athletics recently partnered with Altius Sports Partners, an NIL education firm, to provide guidance to student-athletes. The players also have access to free campus resources, including legal advice and contract review from the UW Law & Entrepreneurship Clinic and business coaching from the Wisconsin Small Business Development Center.

YouDub Marketplace visitors are greeted with a photo grid of Badger student-athletes, and clicking on each profile brings up a biography, links to social media accounts, and a list of personal interests. Quarterback Graham Mertz x’23’s profile displays his personal logo and his interest in food, gaming, and music. Volleyball star Devyn Robinson x’24’s profile notes she’s a pet owner.

The marketplace, developed by NIL technology company Opendorse, is one of the first of its kind in college athletics.

Fortunately, the former Badger football star and native of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, seems up to the task. Measured and even-keeled, McIntosh isn’t fazed by change. He welcomes it.

“I’m really proud of the way our staff and our administration have worked through this change,” says McIntosh, who returned to the UW in 2014 after a successful business career and quickly rose through the administrative ranks. “I’m even more proud of the way our student-athletes have dealt with it. They’re the ones who are the most inspiring out of this.”

What has been your approach to dealing with all the uncertainties?

Our focus is to embrace the change. Don’t resist it. Advocate for what we think is most important, which is education. And then seek opportunity to enhance our program in ways that we couldn’t have prior to this change.

The graduation rate of student-athletes is more than 90 percent. What is the department doing to maintain that level of academic success?

We talk about coming to the University of Wisconsin as a 40-year decision, not a four-year decision. The experience that our student-athletes have here within their sport and within the classroom are two major components of it. But then there’s this other dimension, which is the human being. And we’ve got an incredible team of people who help position our student-athletes to be successful in the long game, in their lives and in their careers.

Last year was a difficult one for men’s basketball coach Greg Gard, culminating in a leaked locker room recording of senior players criticizing him. You stuck by him in the aftermath. Why was that the right decision?

I’ve been on some successful teams that have had difficult conversations throughout the year. I think it’s a healthy thing when players feel comfortable having real conversations. Those are closed-door meetings, meant for the team and for the coaches. It was an incredible breach of trust that those conversations were shared. And I thought it was important to support Coach Gard through that. He’s done a great job turning that experience into something that has helped this team achieve their success.

In December, the women’s volleyball team won its first NCAA title. How did you feel watching that five-set championship match?

My short answer is that it was torture. I’m kidding, obviously, but there were very few moments of those games that were comfortable. And that’s because it was competition at its highest. It was everything you could have asked for in a volleyball match. I was so happy for the players and for the coaches and for our staff. There have been so many sacrifices made, so many decisions over the course of years and years that have led to the culmination in winning a national championship. And I was just moved to be there and to witness the joy they experienced.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Title IX legislation. What do you see as its lasting impact on college athletics?

It would have been impossible for me, a long time ago as a student-athlete, to appreciate the impact of Title IX. It’s not impossible for me now as a father of three, including two daughters. My oldest is going to go play college volleyball next year [at Colorado State]. My youngest daughter, who’s a sophomore, aspires to do so. And my wife, Deann [’99], was an athlete here in our rowing program. So it’s personal to me. I’ve talked a lot about what access to a world-class education did in terms of developing me as a person and what it meant for the trajectory of my life. And Title IX has made that opportunity available to tens of thousands of women athletes here who are just as deserving.

In your introductory press conference, Chancellor Rebecca Blank talked about the Wisconsin way and the charge to maintain that culture here. How do you define that phrase?

In its simplest form, it’s about being successful in the classroom and competitive in our sport programs. And it’s as much about doing it the right way. That means doing it with integrity as an extension of this university. It’s shepherding a program that has been here for a long time before I came along and will be here for a long time after I’m done.

How do you think the NCAA’s new NIL policy has played out here?

I think it’s been very healthy, and I’m really supportive of it. It’s been a great opportunity for our student-athletes to capitalize on these new flexibilities. It’s a great learning experience for them, one they can take with them once they leave here. We continue to enhance our programming so that they can both be successful and avoid some of the pitfalls that may exist.

You’ve helped to develop the new Department of Clinical and Sport Psychology. Why is supporting the mental health of student-athletes important to you?

Mental health is just as important as physical health. It’s only been relatively recently that it’s been treated that way. And it’s the right thing to do. I’ve been public about my own experience here as a student-athlete. It was taboo to admit [mental health issues]. If you were talking to somebody or seeking help, you didn’t want it to be found out. And I’m proud of the fact that’s not the case today.

Did you receive any advice from former Athletic Director Barry Alvarez that sticks with you today?

Barry has always been there for me, in different ways, in different roles. All I have to do is pick up the phone and give him a call. The first question that Barry would always ask in every decision is, “What’s best for the kids?” And I don’t think that asking that question will ever serve us wrong.

President Richard Nixon signed the bill into law on June 23, 1972. It was a momentous development for women’s college athletics that was not widely realized as such at the time. Other parts of the Education Amendments of 1972 — busing, financial assistance — received more attention. Title IX landed with a whisper.

Still, it was noted in Madison by Kit Saunders MS’66, PhD’77, who, as women’s sports coordinator for the UW club sports program, had been trying with scarce resources to get a women’s athletics program going.

“I can remember first hearing about Title IX being passed and thinking, ‘Oh, boy, somebody finally did something,’ ” Saunders recalled. “ ‘This is probably going to help us.’ ”

And Saunders needed help. She described the landscape for women’s athletics on campus, pre-Title IX, in a UW Oral History Program interview.

“We were not able to pay our coaches very much at all. … Students did have to pay some of their expenses if there were overnights. Male athletes even in non-income sports were getting their ways paid completely.

“We had no priority on facilities,” Saunders continued. “If a facility was available, wasn’t being scheduled for something else, including intramurals and in some cases open basketball shooting, then we could get it. We were practicing in Lathrop Hall, which had no regulation-size [basketball] courts. Our swimming practices — we had one evening a week in the Natatorium.

“We had very limited uniforms. We had about two dozen warmup suits, and with 11 teams going at once, we called it ‘musical warmups.’ We’d have to try to launder them quickly and get them to the next team. We didn’t have any kind of laundry service. The coaches frequently were doing the laundry, or the athletes were doing it themselves.”

As women’s sports coordinator, Saunders had to go in front of the intramural recreation board each year to request funding. The passage of Title IX in 1972 may have emboldened her — for 1972–73, the women’s program received $8,000, four times the previous year’s budget, if still a pittance in comparison to the men.

“These meetings were frequently harrowing experiences,” Saunders noted. “The women’s program was wearing out its welcome in the club sport program as it became more expensive and more closely resembled an intercollegiate program.”

For 1973–74, when Saunders requested $25,000 to run her growing program, she was allocated only $18,000.

“So I went to the chancellor [Edwin Young PhD’50] and told him I was short,” she recalled. “He came up with that for us.”

Presumably with Title IX on his radar, Chancellor Young, in July 1972, appointed a committee to study women’s athletics and make recommendations on how they might be better served on campus. But the committee included no UW women student-athletes. And Young seemingly erred in his choice of Athletic Director Elroy Hirsch x’45 as committee chair. Hirsch called only two meetings between July 1972 and March 1973, and the second meeting was canceled.

This so infuriated a member of the committee, Muriel Sloan PhD’58, chair of the women’s physical education department, that on March 2, 1973, she sent Hirsch a blistering letter, threatening to resign from the committee.

“For me to remain on this inactive committee,” Sloan wrote, “is to continue the illusion for women students and interested faculty groups that the problem of facilities for women is being seriously considered. … You can see, therefore, that my membership on this nonfunctioning committee and its nonfunctioning status is untenable. I would prefer that the committee begin to function rather than resigning from it. If, however, you as chairman and other committee members are not equally devoted to pursuing the committee charge, then all should disband. A new committee could then be appointed by the chancellor, or existing groups concerned with equal opportunity on campus can follow up on their expressed interest in the issue.”

A poster for a 1974 panel discussion that descended into boos, hisses, and angry shouts. UW Archives 2017S00257

Sloan was formidable, a New York native who came to Madison for graduate school and stayed. She also served as vice president of the International Association of Physical Education and Sport for Girls and Women. Equally formidable on the Madison campus in 1973 was Ruth Bleier, who joined the UW’s department of neurophysiology in 1967, embarking on a career that included a deep dive into gender biases in science. Bleier was a founding member of the Association of Faculty Women at UW–Madison, and it was in that role, two weeks after Sloan wrote her letter to Hirsch, that she followed with one of her own.

Bleier began her March 16 letter by noting the antidiscrimination law that now existed under Title IX, and then wrote:

“Consequently we demand immediate and equal use of all facilities: tracks, fields, courts and pools, locker rooms, and showers. This means that all facilities be available to women and women’s teams at times that are no more inconvenient for them than for men, such as dinner time for the tennis courts and after 5:30 p.m. for the track team, the periods currently allowed women.

“We demand adequate and equal (as needed) funding for all women’s sports teams,” Bleier continued, “including salaries for coaches with full-time academic appointments and expenses for training and competition. Anything less than this must be negotiated with us and other women in athletics and justified to our satisfaction. We do not want to hear again about inadequacy of facilities, space, and time. If they are inadequate, we will share equally with men in the inadequacy. The burden is no longer ours to wait. We have waited too long. The moral and, now, the legal burden is yours.”

Hard to mistake a gauntlet being thrown down there.

One can imagine Saunders finding herself in a somewhat delicate circumstance. While she no doubt sided with Sloan and Bleier, she was also operating inside the athletic administration umbrella. Vitriol would not serve her purpose and was not her style, in any case.

“I remember after [Title IX passed], trying to explain it to the athletic board. I’d really learned about it and what it stood for — what we were going to have to do,” Saunders recalled. “People had refused to act because they didn’t have enough information. The women who had become versed in it were trying to tell [various administrators] what it was. And they were saying, ‘This can’t be.’ ”

Bleier: “We do not want to hear again about the inadequacy of facilities, space, and time. … We have waited too long.” UW Archives S05706

On April 3, 1973, a complaint against the University of Wisconsin was filed with the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Office of Civil Rights.

“The University of Wisconsin, Madison campus, is in flagrant violation of Executive Order 11246 [a 1965 nondiscrimination order issued by President Lyndon Johnson] and of Title IX … in its continued provision of unequal facilities and funding for athletics programs for women students and employees and unequal compensation for the coaching of its women’s teams.” In Madison, Saunders and her colleagues were grateful for signals from Washington that Title IX would be enforced.

“The sort of sad thing about Title IX,” she said, “is that most schools began to comply not because it was the right thing to do and had gotten started anyway, but because they were worried about the teeth that were in it and what the federal government could do. Like take away their federal funding and lots of other types of programs.” On April 19, Chancellor Young stepped in and replaced Hirsch as chairman of the Committee on Women’s Athletic Programs and Facilities with Murray Fowler, from the Department of Linguistics. Young wrote a letter to Fowler stating his hopes.

“This committee,” he wrote, “is charged with advising me of the most appropriate ways to achieve equity in men’s and women’s recreational, intercollegiate, and intramural athletic and physical education programs and facilities on the Madison campus.”

Unlike Hirsch, Fowler moved quickly. By May, the committee had passed a recommendation requiring that “all physical recreation facilities administered by the University of Wisconsin should be made available for use by both men and women.”

The most likely home for an intercollegiate women’s program was inside the UW athletics department. The athletic board took a step in that direction in September 1973, during a meeting that the Wisconsin State Journal reported “opened the door to women’s intercollegiate athletic competition within the framework of the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics.”

“The board did not immediately invite the ladies inside,” wrote State Journal sports editor Glenn Miller in his inimitable way. “Still, it was a historic step.”

What the board did was insert the following into its policy book: “It is the policy of the athletic board to make intercollegiate athletic competition, facilities, finances, administrative resources, coaching, and ancillary personnel available to all qualified undergraduate students without regard to race, creed, religion, national origin, or sex.”

1974-75 women’s basketball. UW Athletics

The Fowler committee was meanwhile formulating its own recommendations. The women members — who included Saunders and Sloan — presented a proposal to the full committee in December 1973. The committee accepted the proposal in its entirety, with Fowler saying that it would be up to Chancellor Young to act on it. A highlight among the committee’s recommendations was this:

“We believe that combining athletic programs [men’s and women’s] will be beneficial from the outset for women’s athletics and in the long run also for men’s athletics in the educational setting of the university.”

And this:

“That a woman whose title shall be director of intercollegiate athletics for women shall be responsible directly to the director of intercollegiate athletics.”

Chancellor Young took the Fowler committee’s recommendations and handed them to the athletic board, telling board chairman Fred Haberman to develop a plan of action, which some saw as the chancellor punting the issue, to use a sports metaphor. Haberman responded by appointing a committee to study it.

Vitriol would not serve Saunders’s purpose and was not her style. UW Archives

It was contentious, and Saunders, as ever, was a voice of calm. She gave an interview to the State Journal, stressing how well she got along with Otto Breitenbach ’48, MS’55, Hirsch’s top assistant.

“Our philosophies are similar,” she said.

The uncertain status of Title IX nationally couldn’t have helped. It had taken months to wake up, but the male college sports establishment — exemplified by the executives who ran the National Collegiate Athletic Association — was sounding a five-alarm alert. In numerous interviews, these men predicted doom if the Title IX regulations were enforced.

On March 11, 1974, an extraordinary panel discussion took place at the UW’s Wisconsin Center. Its stated purpose was to review the progress of women’s athletics on campus.

Members of the panel included Saunders, Hirsch, Fowler, Sloan, assistant to the chancellor Cyrena Pondrom, and four women student-athletes.

That the evening would be lively was assured by the moderator: Ruth Bleier, whose letter to Hirsch a year earlier had demanded equity for women’s athletics.

Fred Milverstedt ’69, a young sports columnist for the Capital Times, didn’t mince words when it came to the reaction to Hirsch’s comments: “Most everything he said subsequently was greeted with hissing, boos, some subdued cursing, and occasional angry shouts.”

Somehow — quite possibly owing to Saunders’s unflappable, behind-the-scenes work — the campus went from that raucous affair to another, vastly different gathering less than two months later.

On May 3, 1974, a news conference was held in which Hirsch and Haberman announced the first director of women’s intercollegiate athletics at the University of Wisconsin.

It was Kit Saunders.

That it could hardly have been anyone else did not lessen the excitement.

Saunders told reporters that while there was “a great deal of work to be done,” women’s athletics at the UW had “an exciting future.”

As usual, Saunders wasn’t wrong. She started her new job on July 1, 1974. Within a year, she had a national championship in women’s rowing. •

At the Field House, the Bucks’ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar guards the Warriors’ Nate Thurmond during the 1971 NBA playoffs — a “ferocious display of basketball.” AP Photo/Paul Shane

Fifty years ago, the road to the NBA championship started on the UW–Madison campus.

In 1971, the Milwaukee Bucks relied on the UW Field House to host their first-round playoff series against the San Francisco Warriors. The fledgling basketball franchise found a home in Madison several times a year in the early 1970s because Milwaukee Arena treated it as a mere tenant, prioritizing prebooked circuses and expositions.

Locals often filled the stands to capacity, and for good reason: they could watch Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (né Lew Alcindor) throw skyhooks and Oscar Robertson drop dimes. In fact, Madison fans were some of the first to witness the legendary duo compete together, with the Field House hosting a 1970 preseason game shortly after the “Big O” arrived in Milwaukee. The UW had earned the right to host it by bailing out the Bucks the prior season, when they had a scheduling conflict for a first-round playoff game. Athletic Director Elroy Hirsch x’45 secured permission from the Big Ten to host a professional team on campus with a “dire emergency” clause.

Courtesy of Wisconsin State Journal

With tickets under $10, Madison fans got their money’s worth for the first Field House game on April 3, 1970. The Bucks clinched the playoff series against the Philadelphia 76ers in a rugged affair, with Kareem scoring 46 points and multiple players receiving technical fouls. At one point, fans threw items on the court in protest of the referees.

The next year, the Bucks won the first-round series against the Warriors at the Field House on their way to the championship. The UW hosted all three home games with sold-out crowds of more than 12,000.

“Never has the Old Gray Barn seen such a ferocious display of basketball, pro or amateur,” the Wisconsin State Journal reported after a 136–86 closeout victory.

Not everyone shared in the good cheer. Dane County officials were furious that the Bucks signed a lease with the Field House instead of the Coliseum, which typically took in the displaced team. With some $10,000 per game at stake, the county investigated the legality of the university’s contract with a private promoter. Its board of supervisors threatened to increase the UW hockey team’s rent at the Coliseum. Bucks president Ray Patterson ’45, MS’49 insisted the team had no choice, since the UW’s venue had fewer potential conflicts with a variable playoff schedule.

After decades away, the Bucks returned to Madison in 1999 for a preseason game at the new Kohl Center. They also held their training camp and a preseason game there in 2015 and 2016. Back then, Giannis Antetokounmpo was just a budding all-star on his way to leading the team to its second NBA title earlier this year. Perhaps he’ll come back to Madison one day, now as Finals MVP.

It was hours after the Badgers capped his fourth season as football coach by defeating Michigan State 41–20 in the Tokyo Dome in December 1993. The team had captured Wisconsin’s first Rose Bowl berth in 31 years.

“We’re going to the Rose Bowl,” a grinning Alvarez said. A belly laugh welled up as he shook his head in amazement. “It’s ridiculous.”

Alvarez and his team had just engineered a turnaround that propelled a college football laughingstock to long-lasting success. Twenty-seven years later, the view from his Kellner Hall office window is just as impressive. It offers Wisconsin’s athletic director a panoramic view of Camp Randall Stadium, today one of football’s iconic venues — thanks in large part to Alvarez’s leadership. His pride in 31 years of accomplishment at Wisconsin is palpable.

“I’m proud of the culture we’ve built,” says Alvarez. “That’s allowed us to be one of the country’s most consistent programs. You go from never going to a bowl game to going every year; from never being in the NCAA basketball tournament to doing it every year. That’s our culture.”

Alvarez’s coaching career spanned 16 seasons and produced three Rose Bowl victories. He transitioned to a remarkable run as athletic director, resulting in major facility improvements, 74 conference championships, 16 national team championships, and 25 individual titles.

In April, Alvarez announced that he would retire this summer, signaling the end of an era for Badger athletics. What are the highlights of his Wisconsin career? Fans will debate that question for years to come, but here are the top picks from the man himself.

An Era Dawns

After a disastrous three-year run that ended in a 6–27 record, former chancellor Donna Shalala and newly appointed athletic director Pat Richter ’64, JD’71 turned to Alvarez to return the luster to Wisconsin’s moribund football program.

Richter traveled to Miami, where Alvarez, Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator, was preparing for the 1990 Orange Bowl versus top-ranked Colorado. While Alvarez was in a pregame meeting, Richter called his hotel room and got his father.

“Pat told my dad he was going to offer me the job, and my dad broke down crying,” Alvarez recalls. “When we ended the staff meeting, dad pulled me over and was still crying. My dad never got very emotional.”

Notre Dame won the game, and celebrations lasted until 3 a.m. Alvarez got two hours of sleep, then boarded a plane bound for Madison and a McClain Center news conference announcing his hiring.

“I was running on fumes. Late in the press conference, I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m just fried.’ I was emotionally zapped, and the adrenaline just ran out,” Alvarez says. “Just an incredible day.”

Legitimacy at Last

After three years of methodically building a football program as coach, evangelist, and ticket-seller, Alvarez led his team to Pasadena in 1994. On a postcard-brilliant day, the Badgers achieved legitimacy with a 21–16 Rose Bowl victory over UCLA.

“We were on our way, and the fans finally had something to cheer for,” Alvarez says.

And there were plenty of fans — about 70,000 of the stadium’s 101,237 seats were filled with red and white.

As players stretched on the field before the game, Alvarez asked, “Doesn’t Camp Randall look lovely today?”

None of it would have been possible without Alvarez’s first recruiting class, assembled quickly and with an emphasis on in-state athletes. It included running back Brent Moss x’95, receiver J. C. Dawkins ’95, and defensive lineman Mike Thompson x’95.

A salesman visiting Alvarez’s uncle at his grocery store in Pennsylvania touted Joe Rudolph ’95, an offensive lineman who ended up on Alvarez’s roster — and who today is the Badgers’ associate head coach under Paul Chryst ’88.

“I told those guys that I’d always be indebted to them because they bought in,” says Alvarez, whose teams returned to Pasadena to score back-to-back victories in 1999 and 2000. “They had so much to do with what we’ve accomplished.”

A Life-and-Death Situation

At the north end zone of Camp Randall Stadium, giddy triumph turned to tragedy on the way to the 1994 Rose Bowl. Moments after Wisconsin defeated the Michigan Wolverines 13–10, a railing broke under the crush of students eager to storm the field.

The uncontrolled rush left dozens injured and the Astroturf strewn with helpless fans turning blue from a lack of oxygen. Many players, including Moss, Rudolph, and Joe Panos ’94, helped free people from the heap.

“It looked like a war zone. Our guys thought they were carrying dead students out of there,” Alvarez says. “I had gone up the tunnel when things started. I saw Joe Rudolph come up and he was crying. I said, ‘Rudy, you’re that happy?’ and he said, ‘Coach, there’s dead people out there.’ ”

Fortunately, no one died, but 69 people were hospitalized, four in critical condition.

Walk-on receiver Mike Brin ’96 saw an injured student bent over a fence. Brin grabbed her by the leg, hauled her into a stadium tunnel, and made sure she was breathing and conscious. Then he helped two other victims by administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Today, Brin is an emergency room doctor.

“When you see how your student-athletes respond in a life-and-death situation, it’s awfully impressive,” Alvarez says.

The Dayne Game

They called Ron Dayne ’17 the “reluctant hero.” Soft-spoken off the field and a battering-ram running back on it, Dayne was the center of attention as the Badgers played Iowa on November 13, 1999.

It was Senior Day at Camp Randall, and Dayne was 99 yards from becoming college football’s all-time leading rusher. The buildup for the game was unprecedented, and fans in the stadium waved white towels bearing Dayne’s name and number — 33.

“The atmosphere for that game was second to none,” Alvarez says.

With less than five minutes left in the first half, quarterback Brooks Bollinger ’03 handed the ball to Dayne on a play called “23 Zone.” Dayne cut back in the hole gashed open by the offensive line, juked defenders, and picked up 31 yards to break the record before a roaring crowd. He went on to amass 216 yards, help lock up a Big Ten title, win the Heisman Trophy, and embark on an NFL career.

“I don’t care where I go; when I run into a fan, they usually bring up the Rose Bowls or Ronnie’s game,” says Alvarez.

Eighteen years later, Dayne graduated from UW–Madison. He credits Alvarez for prodding him to get his degree. “When we recruit, we tell families that we want kids to walk out of here with a degree, a meaningful degree, from a world-class university,” Alvarez says.

A Special Way to Go Out

Few believed Wisconsin could prevail in Alvarez’s final game as coach in the 2006 Capital One Bowl in Orlando — except the Badgers. Alvarez’s friend Bob Davie, the former Notre Dame coach and TV broadcaster, warned him privately that number-seven Auburn was unbelievably talented. Boosters told Alvarez they felt sorry for him because his last game was against Auburn. Even his wife was doubtful.

“We finished a pregame news conference and Cindy said, ‘You did a great job. The media down here loves you, but you’re probably going to get beat,’ ” Alvarez recalls.

John Stocco at the 2006 Capital One Bowl. UW Athletics

With that negative feedback, Alvarez pointedly sold his players on the idea that it was a great matchup and that they could win. On the Badgers’ last full practice day — dreaded by players because of its intensity — Alvarez gave them the day off, something he’d never done.

Wisconsin defeated the Tigers 24–10, ending the game with a kneel-down at the Auburn one-yard line.

“They went in with a great attitude and the belief we could win,” Alvarez says. “The way the guys played was amazing — a pretty special way to go out.”

A Big Win for Women’s Hockey

The Badger women’s hockey team skated to a national championship in 2019 at the People’s United Center in Hamden, Connecticut, defeating border rival Minnesota 2–0 for the fifth NCAA title of coach Mark Johnson ’94’s career. The others came in 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2011, plus another this year.

Though Alvarez couldn’t attend the game, he took particular pride that day in how Johnson and his athletes forged success.

“He has such a nice manner, and it’s obvious that the women love playing for him,” Alvarez says. “That’s hard to do, year in and year out, without some complacency. They are so productive and successful and consistent.”

Badger women’s hockey skates to a national championship in 2019. UW Athletics

Johnson, a star on the USA’s “Miracle on Ice” team that won Olympic gold in 1980, was feted as part of the 40th anniversary of the achievement. “For all of us to be able to relive that moment and honor him was so exciting and meaningful,” Alvarez says.

Final Four Fever

For Alvarez, winning is meant to be savored. “I tell everyone: don’t ever take success for granted. Winning is hard.”

That’s one reason the 2015 men’s basketball season, in which Coach Bo Ryan’s Badgers went to the NCAA title game against Duke, stands out for Alvarez. “For a long time, we didn’t experience tournament games, let alone playing for a national championship,” he says. “When you’re part of that, and you’re there for the shoot-around and a part of the inner circle, that’s fun.”

The Badgers, who made it to the Final Four in 2014 but lost to previously unbeaten Kentucky 74–73 in the semifinal game, came back to defeat the Wildcats 71–64 to advance to the marquee game. But Duke proved too much for the Badgers at Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium, defeating Wisconsin 68–63. The game was a pinnacle for Wisconsin basketball, which under Stu Jackson went to the NCAA tournament in 1994 for the first time in 47 years. Alvarez notes that Dick Bennett followed up by fashioning a winning tradition that took Wisconsin to the Final Four in 2000. Ryan built on that foundation.

“There’s no better basketball coach than Bo,” says Alvarez. “The guys knew exactly what he wanted, and they delivered. He could play a lot of different ways, but his swing offense was effective. And they played good defense.”

Alvarez calls the 2015 squad a close-knit, fun-loving group. After the game, a downcast Frank Kaminsky ’15, the nation’s college player of the year, said: “These guys are my family. … It’s going to be hard to say goodbye.”

Some Real Coaching

Coach Kelly Sheffield’s volleyball team earned a berth at the national semifinals in Pittsburgh in December 2019, building on a record of excellence.

After the Badgers defeated top-ranked Baylor to advance to the NCAA title game, a jubilant Alvarez gave a brief, thunderous locker-room pep talk: “You made us all proud. And, man, did you COMPETE!”

Although the Badgers lost to Stanford in the title game, Alvarez greatly admires Sheffield’s coaching ability and drive for consistency. In 2013, Sheffield’s Badgers surprised the nation by advancing to the NCAA championship game, and Sheffield has been on a steady course since.

“That’s some real coaching,” Alvarez says. “That’s what it’s all about — developing kids and taking them to the highest level.”

Scoring a Hat Trick

In 2016, Alvarez was looking to hire a men’s hockey coach. He was intrigued by the idea of picking Tony Granato ’17, a former Badger and NHL star who was an assistant coach for the Detroit Red Wings.

“Every hockey guy I talked to said, ‘You can’t hire Tony. He’s an NHL guy,’ ” Alvarez says.

But he called Granato to ask about good candidates for the Badgers’ opening. Among others, Granato suggested his brother, Don ’93, along with Mark Osiecki ’94 — both former Badgers with strong résumés. Then Granato asked, “What about me?”

“He said, ‘If I come, I’m really close to Don and Oz,’ and those were the guys people were recommending,” Alvarez says. “We hit the trifecta when we hired Tony and got all three. That was exciting.”

Osiecki remains on Granato’s staff as associate head coach, while his brother moved on to the Chicago Blackhawks and Buffalo Sabres.

“Tony’s a guy who’s going to get it done,” Alvarez says of Granato’s quest to rebuild the program.

The Biggest Thrill

At the end of his career, Alvarez is also proud of the administrative team he’s built, including its response to the challenging landscape for college athletics brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

For him, the deepest fulfillment came not from the scoreboards or the record books. It came from his teaching role.

“The thing that gives me the biggest thrill is when former players come back and say, ‘Coach, I still use the principles that I learned from you in how I raised my family or how I run my business. Some of the things you taught us echo in my mind, and you had so much influence.’

“I always answer, ‘This is why I was in the business. This means more to me than anything.’ ” •

Jackson left a Fortune 100 company to return to the UW, “motivated by purpose and passion.”

For Mike Jackson ’04, MBA’13, the work is personal. Over three stints on campus, the UW’s new associate athletic director of development, inclusion, and engagement has heard the same commitments and seen the same shortcomings related to diversity. And he wants to break that cycle.

It’s why Jackson returned to the UW in January 2020, leaving his job in Houston, Texas, as chief development and marketing officer at Northwestern Mutual — a Fortune 100 company. “I was motivated by purpose and passion,” he says. A former two-sport student-athlete, he’s now overseeing all of the athletics department’s fundraising and diversity efforts during a transformative time.

It’s been “a transition for the ages,” Jackson admits. Just months after he arrived on campus, the pandemic hit and the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor prompted national outrage.

“For those in the Black community, this is not new,” Jackson says. “I’ve experienced police brutality. I’ve seen that it’s not necessarily about you doing the right thing. I’ve seen that it’s not necessarily about you being educated. I’ve seen that it’s not necessarily about you being a recognizable sports figure. … So this moment was more of a reminder. And it elicits the same anger. It elicits the same frustration. It elicits the same sense of hope [for change].”

The campus community mobilized in response, and former UW student-athletes wrote open letters calling on the athletics department to be part of the solution in ending systemic racism. In response, Athletic Director Barry Alvarez highlighted the department’s existing plans but acknowledged that they will need to be turned into measurable actions.

In 2016, UW athletics became one of the first NCAA programs to establish a director of diversity and inclusion, and there’s now a team dedicated to those efforts. The Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Strategic Plan, released in September and outlining some 30 initiatives, was years in the making.

The efforts include the creation of campus and community partnerships to better involve student-athletes, a hate and bias reporting procedure, a staff mentorship program, and a job-shadow and pipeline initiative. The department has been developing a series of diversity and equity trainings for players, coaches, and staff. It’s also established an Equity Diversity Council, which serves in a consulting capacity, and Badger Affinity Groups, which connect student-athletes of similar backgrounds and identities. These initiatives and others will be financially supported by the Raimey-Noland campaign, a new endowment fund for UW–Madison.

“We have to enhance the experiences of our student-athletes — in particular those who are underrepresented on campus,” Jackson says. He knows why it’s important.

Jackson earned track-and-field and Boys & Girls Club scholarships to the UW. He later walked on to the 2001 basketball team, which won the Big Ten championship in Bo Ryan’s first year as head coach. In the classroom, he rarely saw anyone who looked like him. In competition, his teams won multiple championships, but Jackson found less success individually, and a serious injury abruptly ended his playing career.

“Because I had such good relationships with our academics team and our coaching staff, I was able to have a great journey,” he says. “But I saw many others who didn’t necessarily have that opportunity.”

When Jackson returned to campus in 2010 to pursue his MBA, he noticed a new divide between student-athletes and the rest of the student body. “When I was here as a student-athlete, we found great refuge in the Red Gym [with its student services]. There was a lot more synergy across campus,” he says. “I was shocked to see that had changed.”

For that reason, he was particularly proud when a group of student-athletes approached the athletics department over the summer and asked to add a patch to team jerseys. They modified the UW’s academic logo, with the white W in the crest shaded to black, to symbolize their solidarity with underrepresented students across campus.

Grounded in business, Jackson will rely on metrics to hold the department — and university — accountable to its promises. “But ultimately,” he says, “success will be seeing student-athletes walk out of here speaking highly of their experiences across all areas.”

Did it really happen? The photos that follow prove that the UW’s pandemic year wasn’t just a hallucination.