The following article is from the February 1994 ANN ARBOR
OBSERVER.  It's long, but has plenty of information on the
Michigan program under current head coach Red Berenson, and
on Berenson himself.  It also discusses some of the current
players near the end of the article, including Brian Wiseman's
413 goal season.  I found it enjoyable.  Any typos are most
likely my fault.
 
  John H
  U Mich
 
  ------
 
RED BERENSON'S AMAZING HOCKEY TEAM by Jay Forstner
 
THEY WEAR SHORT PANTS, GARTER BELTS, THIGH-HIGH STRIPED STOCKINGS,
AND BLADES ON THEIR FEET.  THEY CARRY STICKS AND SMASH OPPONENTS
INTO WALLS.  THEY'RE ALSO THE BEST IN THE COUNTRY AND WIN ALMOST
EVERY GAME.  IS IT ANY WONDER THE U-M HOCKEY TEAM IS SO ADORED BY
ITS FANS?
 
It's Friday, January 7.  The U-M hockey team, ranked number one in
the country, is hosting Lake Superior State, ranked number two, in
the first of a two-game series at Yost Ice Arena.
 
The 7,300 fans packing every nook and cranny in the old building
are transfixed.  Michigan took an early lead, only to see Lake
Superior fight back to a 3-3 tie, forcing the game into a five-
minute sudden death overtime.  [Btw, the new PC term used at
Michigan games is "sudden victory." -- JH]
 
Momentum is on the Lakers' side.  The usually raucous Michigan
crowd is subdued, doubtful their team can win.  But two minutes
into the overtime, Michigan's senior center Brian Wiseman, senior
right wing David Oliver, and freshman left wing Jason Botterill hop
over the boards onto the ice, and expectation jumps in with them.
These three have dominated play whenever they've been in action
during the game, scoring the second Wolverine goal and just missing
on several other good scoring chances.
 
Now they're chasing the puck into the Lake Superior zone.  Now
Botterill is body-checking a Laker defenseman in the corner.  Now
Oliver is picking up the loose puck and passing it to Wiseman,
alone in front of the net.  Now Wiseman, the born offensive player
that he is, is eyeing the goalie, picking his spot, and wristing
the puck over the goalie's glove into the top right corner of the
net.  [Strange, my mental image recalls Oliver keeping the puck in
and Botterill passing to Wiseman. -- JH]
 
The crowd erupts.  The building explodes with noise.  Time stops.
 
All season long, people have been saying that the Wolverines are
the best college hockey team in the country.  Wiseman's goal has
just proved them right.
 
After defeating Lake Superior the next night and Notre Dame the
following week, Michigan's record was 21-1-1.  There are four
different national college hockey polls, and they rarely agree on
which is the best team.  But at the beginning of January, all four
ranked Michigan number one.  Of the sixty first-place votes in the
four polls, Michigan got every one.
 
Ten years ago, records like this seemed gone forever.
Historically, Michigan has been a power on the ice: in the first
ten NCAA hockey tournaments played, the U-M went to the final four
every time.  But its last national title came in 1964.  Over the
next two decades, the team saw four coaches, eleven losing seasons,
and only one trip to the NCAA tournament.
 
Things hit bottom in the early 1980's.  In 1982-83, the team had
one losing streak of seven games and another of five.  That year
and the next, Michigan finished ninth in a weak eleven-team league.
 
Yost attendance plummeted to 3,000 fans a game.  Former coach Al
Renfrew, who led Michigan to its 1964 national championship, says
that by 1984, the U-M hockey program "was almost nonexistent."
 
By then, Renfrew was the athletic department's manager of tickets
and promotions.  In the spring of 1984, he says, athletic director
Don Canham told him that he was looking for a new hockey coach.
The same day, Red Berenson, the greatest hockey player in U-M
history, stopped by to say hello.
 
  ------
 
Renfrew first met Gordon "Red" Berenson in 1958, when Renfrew was
coaching the U-M team and Berenson was a teenage hockey player in
Regina, Saskatchewan.  Even then, Berenson knew he wanted to play
pro hockey--but he wanted to get a college education first.  With
the quiet, systematic determination that has been his hallmark ever
since, he set out to get one.
 
"There were five of us who were looking to go to school," Berenson
recalls.  "I'd already played junior hockey for two years, and I
was way ahead of myself in school.  I graduated from high school
when I was sixteen, and then went for another year just to wait for
my friends."  At the time, all the top U.S. collegiate hockey
players were Canadian, but very few were as talented as Berenson,
who had been offered a pro contract at age eighteen.
 
"We went to the library and looked at the best schools in the U.S.
that offered hockey," Berenson remembers.  "Harvard and Michigan
were the top two at that time.  So we wrote some of the schools,
and Al Renfrew responded."
 
Renfrew jumped at the opportunity.  "Berenson was the best junior
player in Canada at the time," Renfrew recalls.  "He could have
gone to just about any NHL team and started playing right away, but
he wanted an education.  We flew him down from the junior
championships to look at the campus.  It cost us about three
hundred and fifty dollars--that was our recruiting budget for two
years."
 
It was money well spent.  After the visit, Berenson recalls, "I
told the other four guys, 'This is where we're going to school.'"
All five played hockey for Michigan, but none did as well as the
man who arranged their education.  In his three years as a
Wolverine, Berenson was named team MVP twice.  In his senior year,
he was team captain, was named All-American, and scored forty-three
goals, a Michigan record that has been tied but never beaten.
 
Until quite recently, it was rare for a college hockey player to
play in the NHL.  Five former Wolverines either are on NHL teams
now or have played for them this year.  [Patrick Neaton, Jeff
Norton, Myles O'Connor, Cam Stewart and Aaron Ward. -- JH]  But in
the past six decades, only twenty-one other U-M players have made
it.  Of those, only ten played more than five years.  Only Red
Berenson played more than ten.
 
In fact, Berenson was the first college player to go directly into
the NHL.  His professional career began the day his college one
ended.  In 1962, Michigan lost in the NCAA semi-finals in Utica,
New York.  They played the consolation game the next afternoon.
Immediately afterward, Berenson boarded a train for Boston, where
he played his first NHL game, for the Montreal Canadiens, the same
night.
 
In his seventeen-season pro career, Berenson also played for the
New York Rangers, St. Louis Blues, and Detroit Red Wings.  In 1968,
playing for St. Louis against the Philadelphia Flyers, he scored
six goals in a road game, a record that still stands.  He retired
as a player in 1978, finishing with 261 goals in 987 games.
 
Never one to waste time--he graduated in 1962 with a B.B.A. and
earned his M.B.A. from U-M in 1966--Berenson started his coaching
career the year after his playing days ended.  After one year as an
assistant with the Blues, he coached St. Louis for three more
seasons and was named the NHL Coach of the Year for 1980-81; his
team had a 45-18-17 record, the best in franchise history.  Even
so, when the team struggled the next year, he was fired three-
quarters of the way through the season.
 
Berenson spent the next two years as an assistant coach of the
Buffalo Sabres, under Scotty Bowman.  Bowman, whose Montreal teams
won four straight Stanley Cups in the 1970's and who now coaches
the Red Wings, is considered to be one of the greatest hockey minds
of all time.
 
Twice during Berenson's NHL career, in 1973 and again in 1980, Don
Canham and Al Renfrew had tried to persuade him to leave the pros
and return to coach the U-M team.  But leaving the NHL for a
college team would mean a huge step down in both prestige and pay.
Both times, Berenson said No.  "I had no intention of being a
college coach," he recalls.
 
When he stopped into Renfrew's office in the spring of 1984,
Berenson was on an entirely different mission: his older son,
Gordie, was deciding where to go to college.  Berenson had driven
over from Buffalo with him to look at Ann Arbor.
 
"While I was here, Al Renfrew cornered me and eventually Don Canham
did, too," Berenson recalls.  "They said they were considering a
coaching change, that there was a real problem going on with the
program.  They made me feel like, 'Jeez, you gotta do this.  You
gotta come back and help this program.'"
 
The appeal came out of the blue, but it didn't take long for
Berenson to warm up to it.  Though Canham couldn't match Berenson's
pro salary, he could offer better job security than the fickle NHL-
 -as Berenson had learned in St. Louis--last year's hero may be
fired this year.  "I thought it would be a good challenge, it would
be stable, and a good opportunity for me to put something back into
college hockey," Berenson recalls.  "I believe in college hockey--
the education, the life after hockey part.
 
"I wasn't looking for a college job.  It just happened.  So on the
way back to Buffalo, I asked my son, 'What do you think about
Michigan?'  He said, 'I really like it.  I hope I can get in.'  I
said, 'What will you think if we come with you?'"
 
  ------
 
Coming to Ann Arbor meant a change in Berenson's lifestyle.  To a
man who had spent his adult life traveling half the year with an
NHL team, it meant settling down, planting roots.  And to a person
who had always been ahead of himself--finishing high school early,
playing junior hockey at sixteen, graduating from Michigan in three
and a half years, starting in the pros hours after his college
career ended, getting into coaching before his skates were dry--it
meant he could take the time, if he needed it, to make this college
coaching thing work.
 
He needed it.  Though he enjoyed Canham's total support--"I have
unlimited respect for him, in every aspect" Canham says--there were
doubters on the Board in Control of Intercollegiate Athletics.
According to Canham, they felt that after twenty years in the pros,
Berenson might not be able to readjust to the college game.  It's
typical of Berenson's self-discipline that by the time he moved
back to Ann Arbor, "he had just about memorized the NCAA rule
book," Canham says.  "He knew as much as any of my other coaches."
 
But Berenson's problems went beyond the rule book.  He inherited a
team with a 14-22-1 record.  "When I came back," Berenson admits,
"I had no idea the straits the program was in."
 
When Berenson played in the 1960's, every game at the old Coliseum
on Fifth and Hill was sold out.  Fans lined up outside for hours
before game time.  When he returned, he found Yost less than half
full.  "For some reason or another, the image of the program and
the results of the team were below par," he says.  "There wasn't a
lot of support.  There wasn't a lot of interest.  It was worse than
I anticipated.  I thought that being an NHL and former college
player and a somewhat experienced coach in the NHL, that I could
immediately resurrect the program.  It didn't work out that way."
 
Following back-to-back ninth place finishes before his arrival, the
team finished ninth again in his first year, eighth the next, and
seventh the year after that.  "It took time," Berenson says.  "It
took recruiting.  It took actually changing the image of the
program--that we were doing good, that our kids liked us, that they
were graduating, that their scholarships were being honored, that
we were doing things right."
 
"I wanted Michigan to be the kind of team it is now.  That was my
goal.  We wanted to be among the elite teams nationally, but it
didn't just happen.  It emerged.
 
"I'd have to say that a lot of the credit goes to the patience that
Al Renfrew and Don Canham showed in me and Mark Miller, who was my
assistant at the time, that we were doing the right thing for
Michigan hockey."
 
Renfrew says being patient wasn't hard.  "I went up to Lake
Superior with the team in one of his first years," the former coach
recalls, "and they lost both games.  But the kids were playing
their hearts out, really working.  You could see Berenson was going
about it the right way, and that takes time."
 
In his first few years, Berenson's main recruiting strength was the
school.  "The thing I was selling to them was the opportunity,
obviously, to graduate from a top college.  Those were the kinds of
kids I was looking for, that wanted to go to a top school.  Not
that just wanted to go to a school to play hockey.  I make that
very clear to all our recruits--even today--that if you just want
to go to a school to play hockey, then don't come to Michigan."
 
Berenson's recruiting breakthrough came in 1985, when he landed two
players from Calgary, Alberta: Myles O'Connor and Todd Brost.
"Myles O'Connor was the top student in his whole school and also
the top player," Berenson says, "and Brost was the top student on
his team and one of the top players.  They visited Harvard
together, and it looked like they might end up at the same school.
When we got those two, that seemed to give us the recognition and
respect among a lot of the young hockey people, saying, 'What's
Myles O'Connor doing?  He went to Michigan.'  He could have gone to
Wisconsin.  He could have gone anywhere he wanted.  But he came to
Michigan.  I think that helped."
 
Berenson's teams continued to improve.  In 1987-88, they were fifth
in the league.  The next two years, they were fourth.  Then, in
1990-1991, the U-M moved back onto the national map: they finished
second in their league and returned to the NCAA tournament for the
first time since 1977.  They lost in the second round, but not
before beating Cornell in a dramatic best-of-three series at Yost.
 
Suddenly, it was cool to go to Michigan hockey games.  "That
playoff series against Cornell seemed to bring in a lot of our
students and they took a real interest in it," Berenson says.
"Ever since then, I think the environment at Yost has been second
to none."
 
Yost's diehard fans are nearly as intimidating as Berenson's
players.  The crowd is a dynamic, breathing organism that feeds off
the team and lives and dies with its success.  Their cheers are as
good and nasty as anything the famous basketball fans at Duke can
dish up.  Every time an opposing goalie gives up a goal, he's met
with a chant of, "It's all your fault.  It's all your fault.
Sieve!  Sieve!  Sieve!"  That's just for starters.  If the press
box phone rings loud enough for the crowd to hear it, they'll turn
it against the goalie, saying, "Hey, [the goalie's name], your
mother just called.  She says you suck!"  And every opponent who is
sent to the penalty box hears a resounding, "Ohhhhhhh...See ya!"
 
The crowd "is really a driving force," U-M senior Brian Wiseman has
said.  "They really get into the game."
 
Berenson welcomes the support, which he explains with an M.B.A.'s
practicality.  "If they're Michigan supporters, so to speak--and I
see them at football and basketball games--what better spectator
sport is there at Michigan than hockey?  It's so personal.  You're
so close to the ice."  In addition, hockey tickets are a bargain,
just $6 and $8.  Finally, of course, there's the Wolverines'
extraordinary record.  The U-M basketball team attracted national
attention by reaching the NCAA Final Four two years running.
Without nearly as much fanfare, Berenson's hockey team has done the
same thing.
 
  ------
 
It took a decade for Berenson's teams to rise to the top.  But now
that they're there, it won't be easy to displace them.  "Eight
years ago, we wouldn't have won this game," Berenson commented
after the overtime victory against Lake Superior State.  "It's
taken us a long time to learn how to win games--what it takes to
win, expecting to win the big games."
 
The sixty hockey writers who gave Michigan their unanimous first-
place vote are betting that Michigan will continue to win the big
ones.  This year, the Wolverines are so strong that they won an
unprecedented sixth straight Great Lakes Invitational championship
despite the fact that four of their best players were in Vienna,
competing in the World Junior Championships.  [Actually, they were
in Ostrave and Frydek-Mistek, Czech Republic. -- JH]  Ryan Sittler,
Kevin Hilton, and Blake Sloan played in the championship for the
U.S., and Jason Botterill represented Canada.
 
After Notre Dame lost the GLI consolation game to Michigan Tech,
Notre Dame coach Ric Schafer was asked to compare the Huskies and
the Wolverines.  "Nobody compares to Michigan," he answered.
 
"They do everything at full speed.  Our kids obey the speed limit.
Michigan goes a hundred miles and hour.  I'm not sure if anybody in
college hockey is doing what they're doing right now.  Michigan
Tech is a fine team, but they don't compare to Michigan.  Nobody
does.  We certainly don't.  Someday we will--someday, but not now."
 
After Lake Superior's January series here, Lakers coach Jeff
Jackson called Michigan "the class of college hockey right now.
This is the best Michigan team I've seen.  Red's done a great job
of building this program back up to what it once was.  I think
they're here to stay."
 
  ------
 
Michigan's dominance this year is all the more remarkable because
Berenson lost eight players from the team that made last year's
NCAA Final Four.  "We lost our four top defensemen and four of our
top forwards," the coach laments.  "We're really playing with nine
freshmen.  Not every night, but at least seven every night."  In
games when all nine freshmen do play, they represent half of the
eighteen skaters who dress for games.
 
The most eye-catching of the Noteworthy Nine is Jason Botterill,
who came to the Wolverines from Winnipeg, Manitoba, by way of St.
Paul's prep school in New Hampshire.  It's a dirty secret of
college hockey that some freshmen are anything but kids.  Since
their eligibility clocks don't start ticking until they enroll in
college, players are free to play a year or two of junior hockey
after high school before entering the halls of academe.  Last
year's national champion, Maine, had several freshmen but only two
players under age twenty.  On this year's Lake Superior team, there
are four freshmen over twenty-one years old and five more over
twenty.  Michigan's freshmen, on the other hand, are almost all
eighteen.
 
Jason Botterill is only seventeen.  He's at Michigan in part
because few other schools knew that he was graduating from high
school a year early.  His father, Cal, is a psychologist who works
with the New York Rangers.  Rangers coach Mike Keenan called
Berenson to see if Michigan would be interested in Jason.
 
They were.  As Michigan's first-line left winger, playing alongside
Wiseman and Oliver, Botterill already ranks among the league's top
ten scorers.  He will most likely be chosen in the first round of
the NHL draft this spring.
 
In hockey, the top young players are often drafted at eighteen,
before they ever go to college.  Thirteen U-M players have been
drafted by NHL teams, seven before they even came here.  Unlike
baseball, where college enrollment ends a professional team's
rights to a player, those draft rights are binding.  A hockey
player belongs to the team that picked him until they release him.
 
Nearly all of Berenson's players will have a chance to play
professional hockey of some kind when they leave here.  For a
select few, that will mean the NHL.  For others, it might mean
seeing Europe while making a few dollars on a European team.  For
most, though, it will mean a few years in the minors in Peoria,
Halifax, or Utica.  "Of the eight kids we lost last year," Berenson
says, "except for one who had a bad back [Mark Ouimet. -- JH],
they're all either playing pro hockey or on one of the Olympic
teams."
 
But Berenson is just as quick to show the other side of that coin.
"I can say this, too," he says.  "The kids that graduated a few
years ago, they're all retiring now.  They've had their fling at
hockey and they can see they don't want to be career minor
leaguers.
 
"That's why I like to see them go through their bachelor program.
That way they can go out and get their feet wet in hockey and see
how that goes, and afterwards they can get serious about their
career after hockey.  I tell every player: there's no guarantees in
hockey.:
 
  ------
 
Of all the Michigan players, Botterill's opposite winger, David
Oliver, a senior from Courtenay, British Columbia, may have the
brightest pro future.  A seventh-round draft pick of the Edmonton
Oilers in 1991, Oliver was named the MVP of the Great Lakes
Invitational and leads the league in scoring.  Even his teammates
are in awe of his touch around the net.  Lake Superior State coach
Jeff Jackson, after the Lakers' January series with Michigan,
called Oliver the best college hockey player he's seen this year.
 
Michigan's goalie, Steve Shields, might also make it.  Shields is
a favorite of Berenson's who has overcome a reputation as the chink
in Michigan's armor to record more wins than any other collegiate
goalie in history.  "I'm proud that Steve Shields has developed
into the kind of goalie I thought he could be," Berenson said on
the night of Shield's record-setting win, a shutout against
Minnesota.  "There weren't too many people that thought I was doing
the right thing when I signed him."
 
Other Wolverines could make the NHL as well.  Mike Knuble, a junior
right wing, is a big, rangy scorer with a sniper's mentality and a
heavy shot.  Junior Rick Willis is a speedy, aggressive,
aggravating physical presence on the ice who often changes the tone
of a game with a big hit.  Freshman Brendan Morrison, who centers
the second line, has even more points than Botterill.  And Ryan
Sittler, son of NHL Hall of Famer Darryl, was a first-round choice
of the Philadelphia Flyers in 1992.
 
All of them could look to Brian Wiseman for a bit of inspiration--
and caution.  Wiseman was a legend in Chatham, Ontario, a little
city between Windsor and London.  When he was nine years old, he
was playing in a twelve-year-old league, and parents of opposing
players still campaigned to have him banned for being too good.  In
one year, he scored 413 goals, breaking Wayne Gretzky's record.
Brian "Tiger" Wiseman was a labeled a future NHL superstar before
he had finished grade school.
 
Wiseman set a junior league scoring record before coming to
Michigan.  He was name the Central Collegiate Hockey Association's
Freshman of the Year in 1991, has recorded over 225 points in his
career, and by the time he leaves will most likely set a new
Wolverine record for assists.  [Accomplished. -- JH]  Yet even
Wiseman will need a break to make it to the NHL.
 
"He's a very skilled player," Berenson says.  "He's just been a
great player all the way through.  But his size will be against
him."  Wiseman is only 5 feet 6, half a foot shorter than most NHL
players.  "He'll play somewhere," Berenson says, adding that "he's
going to be a teacher and he'll do well regardless of what happens
in hockey."
 
In the meantime, team captain Wiseman will lead Michigan into this
spring's NCAA tournament.  "We've done a lot of good things,"
Berenson says, "but there's a lot of things we haven't done."
Winning an NCAA championship is the biggest of those, but it
doesn't seem to be an obsession.
 
"I'm not sitting here just waiting for an NCAA championship,"
Berenson says.  "My goal was to change the image of the program.
We've been able to do that.  The other thing was that I wanted to
give the players that play at Michigan the chance to win
championships, so that the players feel that, year in and year out,
they have a chance to go all the way.  I think we've had that kind
of team the last two or three years.  Last year was great--we could
have gone all the way--but this year we could go all the way, too,
and next year.
 
"There are some good teams in college hockey," Berenson says,
naming Maine, Lake Superior, Wisconsin, Northern Michigan, New
Hampshire and Boston University.  "We're one of them.  We're trying
to be as good as we can be, as individuals and as a team, and I
think the rest will take care of itself.
 
"When the night is right, we'll win our championships," Berenson
continues with his trademark quiet confidence.  "It will happen."