If this Saturday’s 2019 edition of the Paul Bunyan’s Axe game between the Wisconsin Badgers and the Minnesota Golden Gophers can be compared to any game in UW-U of M history, it would be the 1962 game between the two teams. The game was for the Big Ten championship. Minnesota had just made consecutive Rose Bowls under head coach Murray Warmath, the last great coach in Minnesota history. Wisconsin was gunning for its second Rose Bowl in four seasons.
Heading into the 1962 edition of Badgers-Gophers, the two schools had made the last three Rose Bowls: Wisconsin under coach Milt Bruhn in 1959, Minnesota in 1960 and 1961. Moreover, if you look into these schools’ histories, some fascinating “crossover” details emerge. When you read this Sports Illustrated account of the 1962 game, you will note that Bruhn — a legitimately great coach at Wisconsin — played for Minnesota in the mid-1930s, when the Gophers became a national power under then-coach Bernie Bierman.
When Bierman was coaching Minnesota to prominence in the mid-1930s, Clarence Spears coached Wisconsin. This is the same Clarence Spears who coached at Minnesota in the late 1920s and guided a man you might have heard of: Bronko Nagurski, one of the greatest football players of all time. The Bierman era at Minnesota carried all the way through 1950. After three brief years of mediocrity, Warmath took over in 1954 and began another storied chapter of Minnesota history.
Bruhn began his tenure at Wisconsin in 1956. He won only one game his first season. In Year 2, he won six games. In Year 3, he went 7-1-1. In Year 4, he reached the Rose Bowl and began that glorious four-year period in which either Wisconsin or Minnesota represented the Big Ten in Pasadena. The 1962 game wasn’t just the height of a special season for Wisconsin and Minnesota, who both ended that regular season in the Associated Press Top 10; it was the last year in which Warmath and Bruhn both fielded great teams in the same season.
Warmath and Minnesota shared the Big Ten title in 1967 with Indiana and Purdue. (Indiana went to the Rose Bowl.) That was Warmath’s last hurrah. Bruhn never got back to the Granddaddy. No one could have known in 1962 that the flame would flicker and then die for Wisconsin football after the unforgettable 1963 Rose Bowl against USC.
Wisconsin won that 1962 game, 14-9, on a late 80-yard touchdown drive marked by a roughing-the-passer call which kept alive the Badgers’ march and wiped out a Minnesota interception. Minnesota fumed about the call, but the Golden Gophers failed to observe a longstanding principle about sports: Always be significantly better than your opponent, to the extent that one call can’t ruin your day. Minnesota failed to put away Wisconsin at earlier points in the game; it paid a price for its inefficiency against Ron Vander Kelen, Pat Richter, and the other great players on the 1962 Wisconsin team.
As the scene shifts to Saturday and the new “mountaintop” moment in the history of Wisconsin-Minnesota football, the Badgers and Gophers need to heed that advice: Be up by nine points, not two, so that if a bad call happens in the final minutes of the fourth quarter, it will have relevance only in relationship to Las Vegas… and not Pasadena.