Wolverines Don’t See Any Need To Recover

As a Michigan alumnus who’s lived in Spokane for the past 20 years, I’ve had friends ask, in all seriousness, who I’ll be rooting for in the Rose Bowl.

After all, they reason, isn’t my allegiance divided between my native turf and my adopted home?

They just don’t get it. Loyalty to the Wolverines - with their unusual mascot, even more unusual helmets, massive stadium, infectious fight song and proud tradition - isn’t something you lose over time, like a Midwestern accent. Once a maize-and-blue-blood, always a maize-and-blue-blood.

But there’s something more important that people probably don’t realize out here - just how much Michigan has to prove in this final Rose Bowl as we know it.

Sure, the top-ranked Wolverines are the winningest football team in major-college history (775 wins and counting). Sure, they’ve been to bowl games for the past 22 years. Sure, they’ve made 16 trips to Pasadena, including four out of five between 1989 and 1993, their most recent visit, when they whipped the Washington Huskies.

But what’s happened since then, until this season, was almost enough to make me want to pack away my Michigan sweats, socks, stocking caps, slippers, windbreaker, buttons, blanket, musical key chain holder, license plate, windshield scraper, windsock and soap dispenser.

There were not one, not two, not three, but four consecutive four-loss seasons - very un-Michigan.

There was the messy 1995 incident in which head coach Gary Moeller (successor to the legendary Glenn E. “Bo” Schembechler) got drunk at a restaurant and scuffled with police, leading to his replacement by the even lesser-known Lloyd Carr - very un-Michigan.

Every other week, it seemed, the Wolverines were finding new ways to lose to teams that had no business beating them. In short, they were “Couging it,” in the traditional sense of the term.

Even when they were winning big, the Maize and Blue developed a bad habit of “Couging it” in bowl games (including a 3-9 Rose Bowl record since 1970). That’s why, despite all those victories, they haven’t won a national championship since 1948 - a stretch that nearly rivals Washington State’s 67-year Rose Bowl drought.

Now the Wolverines are just one win away from again claiming that crown. Perhaps it’s fitting that they’re playing the Cougars, who wear the same scarlet (OK, crimson) and gray colors as Ohio State, Michigan’s neighboring nemesis. Most years, beating the Buckeyes defines a successful season, with a bowl victory almost an afterthought.

It was probably the heat from the Ohio State rivalry that first drew my attention to Bo’s boys during my childhood in northeastern Michigan. Later, as a pudgy freshman cornet player, I set foot inside 100,000-plus-seat Michigan Stadium for the first time on high school band day - and knew I’d be back.

I returned to Ann Arbor a few years later to study political science and journalism, and, more importantly, write sports for the campus newspaper, the Michigan Daily. When I moved out of the dorm, I found an apartment a few blocks from the stadium.

On a golden autumn afternoon, the Big House was ripe with memorable moments - watching each player leap to touch the “M Club” banner on his way out of the tunnel, listening to the band blare “The Victors” after a home-team touchdown, screaming “Go!” at the top of your lungs while another section of the stands spontaneously boomed back “Blue!”

In later years, in my new life in Spokane, seeing that stadium on national television took me back home more vividly than any letter from Mom or phone call from an old friend.

A few times, the Cougars were even in the picture. My brother-in-law, a Wazzu alum, and I watched and joked about how great it would be if our teams ever met in the Rose Bowl, a prospect that then seemed about as likely as Lyle Lovett getting a date with Julia Roberts.

Now, in the last year that the Big 10 and Pac-10 are guaranteed to play in Pasadena, the gridiron gods have granted our wish - and made it one of the most important games in Michigan history to boot.

Come New Year’s Day, I’ll be in my brother-in-law’s basement, watching on his big-screen television as his “team of destiny” meets mine.

Whatever happens, we’ll both remember it for the rest of our lives.

Spokesman-Review food editor Rick Bonino, a 1977 University of Michigan graduate, covered that year’s Rose Bowl as associate sports editor of The Michigan Daily and watched the Wolverines lose to USC, 14-6.

, DataTimes