Nothing But Iron: Bird Poop on Our Parade by Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. October 22, 2009 It was a quandary.  A conundrum.  A dilemma.  A pickle.  Mom was just thinking out loud when she said she was torn between two teams who were to play each other at Camp Randall last Saturday.  I don’t think she really expected my advice.  For sure she didn’t expect me to tell her to cheer for the Hawkeyes.  But I did.   My mom is married to Ken, who has been an Iowa fan for most of his eighty-f’n-six years, as he often expresses the magnitude of his longevity.  It is a mixed marriage:  Badger and Hawkeye and Packer and Bear.  These days Mom has her own Iowa shirt, which she wears every week of the football season to her and Ken’s favorite Phoenix-area Iowa bar.  Every week she cheers for the Hawkeyes alongside her Hawkeye husband and the many Hawkeye faithful who have adopted her into the faith.  Not long ago Mom was a Badger, and she still dabbles in that when the Badgers are playing anyone but Iowa, but I think it’s time for her to admit the obvious:  She’s a Hawkeye now, just like her husband.  So I told her to go to the feathers and my brothers and I would stick to our fur.  During the game we would cheer vehemently against each other, and afterward we would talk about what a great game it was and how it was too bad someone had to lose.    Call me a turncoat, if you must, but I plead guilty only to pragmatism.  Ma and Ken are too damn  charming as a couple to be divided on anything, even four quarters of football.  I still bleed red and I bled a lot of red Saturday as my team hemorrhaged profusely from multiple talon wounds inflicted in the second half of a homecoming game that separated a contender from intender.   The first half was a blast.  John Clay blasting here.  John Clay blasting there.  That’s the half my Iowa friends diplomatically described as Wisconsin’s domination.  Halftime was fun too, as the nation’s most impressive college band high-stepped and swayed to whimsical renditions of On Wisconsin, as it might have been written by composers, like Scott Joplin, not known for marching music.  I don’t know enough about music to call it genius, but I suspect it might have been.  Unknown to me there was genius at work in the Iowa locker room too, as Kirk Ferentz and his staff composed an impressive march from dominated to dominating.  That’s what I imagine to have happened anyway. But of course it wasn’t Iowa’s intellect or physical superiority that brought about the pendulum swing, it was Wisconsin’s sudden ineptitude, lack of execution, ineffective coaching or any of a hundred soft-in-the-noggin excuses besides the obvious one, which is that any team that beats you by ten points in your stadium is at least ten points better than you.  I have heard the excuses before and even said most of them over the years:   It was our game to lose.  Our guys weren’t given a chance to win.  We gave it away. The other team was not that good.  The translation is consistent:  We hated losing just as much as they loved winning.         I will admit–and this is as close to second-guessing as the strong part of my mind will let the weak part get–that I thought the defining moment of the game, or maybe of the season was not the missed field goal after Iowa’s turnover, but an oddly haphazard offensive series with about five minutes left in the first half where Scott Tolzien was replaced by Curt Phillips.  When I see such things I can’t help but think of a desperate head coach who is not only coaching to avoid a loss, but coaching to avoid losing his job.  I believe deeply in the depths of my heart that I could not coach like that.  Then again, if my job depended on a report card filled with the W’s and L’s of a three-month span, would my bravado be quite so bravad?  You got me; bravad is not a word.  But why not?  The other possibility is that I am being a drama king and one series does not really determine a game’s outcome or define a season.  A third possibility is that I am just an unpaid sportswriter who doesn’t recognize excellent coaching when he sees it.  Could it be that I don’t really don’t know what my point is here? To those who would say that Iowa is not so good, I ask this: You sure? Maybe the Iowa that took a double miracle to beat Directional State University was not so good, but the Iowa that beat Penn State on the road, and the come-from-behind Iowa that ultimately manhandled our team in The Camp convinced me.  I don’t think we played the double-miracle Iowa.  The thing you have to respect about Ferentz-coached teams is that they often improve over the course of their seasons, and it appears that this one has too.   My Iowa friend Brent, who last owned the not-traveling-enough Corn Trophy back in 2007, said that the winner of Iowa-Wisconsin would be going to Pasadena.  He was not convinced that OSU could run the table, and he figured that Wisconsin’s post-Iowa schedule was highly conducive to winning out.  With OSU losing to Purdue later that afternoon, he could be right about his team’s fortunes.  I can picture Iowa as a legitimate Rose Bowl representative, and before Wisconsin’s loss at OSU, I had fleeting thoughts of a UW return to glory too.  Now I think the Badgers have a year to go before they can be considered a serious threat to Big Ten upper division teams, not to mention those of more-respected conferences, which is pretty much all the others these days.   So where does that leave us?  It leaves us with a weekend off, which is good because I have to be on call some time.  We Badgers fans can use the time to find ways to cope.  Some will look ahead, trying to calculate the magic number of wins that will take us to sunshine and 75 degrees in January.  Some will grow parsley.  Many will vent, lament, blame and wonder out loud what might have been or could have been or should have been, but most assuredly was not.  I am not immune to those traditional coping mechanisms, but for this loss I coped by imagining the wide smile on the face of a eighty-f’n-six year old man, whose back probably hurt just a little less this week, and by picturing the happy face of the not-quite-as-f’n-old wife who was smiling back at him. _____________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports column.  The issue is dedicated to the author’s favorite Hawkeyes:  Ma & Ken of Chandler, Arizona, and Brent & Ellen “Camp Randall El” Feller, of Cereal Rapids, Iowa.  The author is grateful for the chance to spend time with all four of them in the same week.  The author is 99% certain that his mother does not have a Bears shirt.  If he finds out otherwise, he will cut himself out of her will.  © 2009 DrTM Enterprises.  All rights reserved.