Happy Badgers Arrive in Southland

A warm welcome banished the December chill when the Wisconsin Badgers piled out of their buses Friday and arrived at their Rose Bowl headquarters hotel. After receiving the traditional greeting of a bouquet of roses from the Rose Queen and her court, they settled in to prepare for a week they hope will be memorable in many ways.

“This is nice,” offensive lineman Chris McIntosh said. “It was 10 degrees in Madison. This is a heat wave.”

The ninth-ranked Badgers (10-1) will begin workouts at the Coliseum today. Players were given Christmas Eve off; those who couldn’t make it home went home with teammates or were invited for Christmas dinner by members of the coaching staff. They reconvened Friday for the charter flight.

“It’s a great honor to be here. I wouldn’t mind coming here on Christmas or my birthday or any day,” said junior linebacker and co-captain Donnel Thompson. “We’re here and we’re ready to work hard.”

It won’t be all work. “A bowl game is the reward for a good year,” Coach Barry Alvarez said. “If you don’t take it as such, it’s a punishment, and that’s not much incentive to go to a bowl game. We want them to experience everything. We’re not going to sequester them. When we practice and when we meet, we expect their full attention. You come here to play a football game, but there are other things they will remember the rest of their lives.”

His players endorse that philosophy. “There’s no way you can’t have some fun. You can’t even try to not have fun,” said fullback Cecil Martin, the team’s only four-year starter. “I can’t wait to be part of the festivities.

“We worked hard to get here. This is my senior year and being able to accomplish this is special. By no means do we feel like we’re done and can get some rest. We’re going to stay focused and eliminate distractions and keep our eyes on the prize.”

The real prize for UCLA was the Fiesta Bowl, making the Rose Bowl somewhat of a consolation for the Bruins. Alvarez, whose 3-1 bowl record with the Badgers includes a 21-16 victory over UCLA in the 1994 Rose Bowl, sympathizes with any letdown the Bruins might feel.

“They won 20 straight, they were ranked [No.] 1, 2 or 3 all year, and they played a difficult ballgame [against Miami], and they lose the game right at the wire that cost them the chance to play for the national championship. I can understand why they’d be disappointed,” he said. “But our goal all year was to play in the Rose Bowl. We’re excited. We had a good year and we did a lot of good things all year.”

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Wisconsin fans gobbled up the school’s initial allotment of 26,000 tickets and formed a waiting list of 17,000. Steve Malchow, the Badgers’ sports information director, said 5,000 of those requests were satisfied and he’s hopeful more will be met if the school can acquire some of the unsold tickets turned back by UCLA.

“The last time [in 1994] people said we had 70,000 fans, and I don’t think we’ll have that many this time,” Malchow said. “A lot of people didn’t think they could get tickets and made other plans. If we could have gotten all we wanted, we could have gotten 50,000 or so. I think we’ll have 40,000 or so.”

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UCLA (10-1) vs. Wisconsin (10-1)

Jan. 1, 1:30 p.m., Channel 7