Mark Johnson ’94 didn’t exactly hang up his skates after securing the gold at the 1980 Olympics — because what would be the challenge in that?
As Emily Morris x’08 limbers up during pre-game skate-arounds in hockey arenas across the country, she sizes up the crowd. She can always tell.
Even though Morris and her Badger women’s hockey teammates have won back-to-back national titles and are eyeing a third, she can tell if the fans are there to see the home team, the Badgers, or the man standing behind Wisconsin’s bench.
A gesture or a look tells them what their even-tempered coach wants, say the players on Mark Johnson’s Badger women’s hockey team.
“At some away games, people don’t come to see us. They come to see Mark Johnson,” says Morris, a Badger defender and team captain. “That really made me realize the magnitude of the Miracle on Ice and what Coach has accomplished.”
Johnson’s life is marked by accomplishment. Son of the legendary former UW men’s hockey coach “Badger” Bob Johnson, he helped the Badgers to the 1977 national title as a freshman and was named the Western Collegiate Hockey Association’s Rookie of the Year. He went on to become the school’s second all-time leading scorer, and a two-time All-American. He scored two crucial goals in the “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics, a game tagged by Sports Illustrated as the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. And, after grabbing an improbable Olympic gold medal in Lake Placid, he went on to an eleven-year playing career in the National Hockey League and a successful coaching career.
“Coach expects us to win, and when we do, it’s just living up to his expectations. Sometimes after a big game, he gets real excited. You know that it’s a big game when he comes in and starts cheering. In other games, the message is: ‘Okay, another win. Let’s move forward to the next game.’”
At Wisconsin, Johnson has elevated a relatively obscure sport — hockey-crazed Madison aside — to an elite level nationally, providing the women’s program with solid recruiting, steady leadership, and a consistency that was lacking in the years before he took the job in 2002.
Given that fat resume, Johnson’s persona is marked by quiet intensity. He doesn’t scream and rant. He measures his words and weighs their impact. His players say Johnson can say more with a look or a gesture than many coaches can with a rink-melting locker-room harangue.
His coaching demeanor is similar to that of a couple of National Football League coaches he admires — Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears’ Lovie Smith, both of whom led their teams to Super Bowl XLI last January using an even-tempered dignity.
When Mark Johnson agreed to coach the Badger women’s team, he promised to provide the players with much-needed stability — and he’s been true to his word, turning down offers from other colleges and the NHL.
Johnson is also guided by his late father’s powerful style and approach to hockey and life. Bob Johnson, who led the Badgers to national titles in 1973, 1977, and 1981, became famous for his enthusiasm and his catchphrase, “It’s a great day for hockey.” The elder Johnson, who coached the Pittsburgh Penguins to a Stanley Cup championship in 1990, died the next year, a victim of brain cancer at age sixty.
“People who didn’t know him, they didn’t think he was genuine — that a guy could love hockey that much, or have that much excitement about what he did,” says Johnson. “The more you hung around him, the more you realized that he was like that 24/7.”
Mark Johnson has come to appreciate what his father discovered years ago: that if you can get off the emotional roller coaster and find a workable balancing point in life and in coaching, life and sports are far more enjoyable.
“Whether he was dealing with squirts at hockey schools or dealing with Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr with the Pittsburgh Penguins, his approach was similar: create a culture where people have the best chance of being successful. He got people to believe in what he was trying to do,” Johnson says of his father.
Under Johnson’s leadership, women’s hockey has gained unprecedented visibility and success. In 2006, the Badger women joined the men’s team in taking the national championship. A few weeks after winning the title, Johnson told his players to “enjoy the moment,” but then gave them fair warning that the next season would bring new challenges. They got the message, and won again in 2007.
Jinelle Zaugg, a senior forward from Eagle River, Wisconsin, says she chose to play for the Badgers largely because of Johnson’s reputation, his character, and the way he deals with players. “If he’s mad at you, he doesn’t have to say it. You know it. It’s the look on his face and the way he looks at you,” she says. “If he’s mad at our team, he won’t come to the locker room between periods. Then we all know he’s mad, and that says enough.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that Johnson is a calculating, bloodless coach. Zaugg, who scored the winning goal in a 127-minute marathon quarterfinal game against Harvard to advance the Badgers to the Frozen Four, says he often shows emotion, but in a positive way. “Coach expects us to win, and when we do, it’s just living up to his expectations,” she says. “Sometimes after a big game, he gets real excited. You know that it’s a big game when he comes in and starts cheering. In other games, the message is: ‘Okay, another win. Let’s move forward to the next game.’ ”
Former Badger men’s hockey coach Jeff Sauer, who played for Bob Johnson at Colorado College before succeeding him at Wisconsin, says Mark Johnson is a natural athlete, someone who can pick up a golf club, tennis racket, or hockey stick and do well. That same agility carries over to his coaching and the way he relates to players.
During the third period of the game against the Soviets, Johnson scored on a power play to tie the game at 3-3 ... “It wasn’t even fantasized about that beating the Soviets could even happen. I don’t think there was anybody on the planet who even thought about that happening.”
“He’s a professional athlete who knows how to handle situations. He knows when to come forward and when not to,” says Sauer, for whom Johnson served as assistant coach from 1996 to 2002. “[The players] feed off of his style. He doesn’t like being in the office. He likes being on the ice.”
During Johnson’s first year at the helm of the women’s team, Sauer says the players often wished Johnson was more open with them, but he adapted as the program picked up steam. “He enjoys one-on-one coaching, and he waits for the right time to use his influence on the team,” Sauer says.
In 2002, Johnson vied to become Sauer’s successor, a job that ultimately went to his former Badger teammate Mike Eaves. But two months later, then athletic director Pat Richter ’64, JD’71 named Johnson to lead the women’s team. The program had gone through two coaches in its first three seasons by the time he took over.
“What was missing was the stability that any young program needs to get itself on the path to success,” Johnson says. “I wanted to let people know it wasn’t a one- or two-year gig. Most people didn’t believe me.”
The time: February 1980. The player: Mark Johnson. The place: An exhibition game at Madison Square Garden between the Soviet Union and the United States. The outcome: A win for the Soviets — but the tables would turn just two weeks later during a miraculous matchup at the Olympics in Lake Placid.
Many thought that Johnson would bolt at the first opportunity for a more prestigious men’s program, coaching either in college or the pros. Many were dead wrong.
“There have been other opportunities, a few in the college ranks and a couple with the NHL,” he says. “As I like stability with my team, I like stability for my family, as well. My dad did that with our family. He didn’t get involved with the NHL or moving to that next position until everybody was out of the house.”
Johnson and his wife, Leslie, who trains horses to compete in polo matches, have five children — Doug, 23; Chris, 21; Patrick, 18; Mikayla, 13; and Megan, 10. All have played hockey; Chris plays for Division III Augsburg College while Patrick is a freshman on Eaves’s Badger squad.
“I’ve been in the NHL and have been traded a few times, and I understand what it would take to change lifestyles, and I wasn’t in favor of that,” Johnson says. “The stronger your roots are, the better chance you have of a quality life.”
The women’s job allowed Johnson a chance to stay in Madison and to lead his own program, which he hadn’t done since coaching the inaugural season for the minor-league Madison Monsters in 1995 – 96. The opportunity came as the quality of women’s hockey was on a dramatic upswing.
A jubilant Badger women’s hockey team celebrates after winning its second national championship in 2007. If this season plays out the way they hope, the Badgers will travel to Duluth, Minnesota, to compete for a third championship at the NCAA Frozen Four in March 2008.
These days the athletes are responding to better coaching. They are stronger players and improved skaters, and the gap between the top and bottom of the women’s hockey ranks has shrunk considerably. Johnson exploited that trend, using good recruiting and solid coaching that led the Badgers to a national title in 2006 as Wisconsin defeated top-ranked Minnesota 3-0 at Mariucci Arena in Minneapolis to put the program on the map for good.
For good measure, the men’s team also snared a national title. The resulting excitement brought unprecedented exposure to the women’s program. A few weeks after winning the title, Johnson called his team together for a year-end locker-room meeting.
“I challenged them,” he says. “Human nature says that when you do something real well, you start patting yourself on the back. I told them to enjoy the moment, and warned them that next season is a new challenge and they were coming into the next season with a bull’s-eye on their chests. They responded. They liked what happened that year, continued to push themselves, and didn’t get caught up in what people were writing about them.”
That message echoed into the 2006 – 07 season, as the Badgers broke or tied eighteen NCAA records on their way to a second national title. Using what may have been the greatest defense in women’s hockey history, the Badgers allowed just thirty-six goals in forty-one games, finishing the season with a 36-1-4 record.
That season also set up a thirty-two-game unbeaten streak for the Badgers, an NCAA record that wasn’t interrupted until mid-October of this year, when Wisconsin lost 2-1 at St. Cloud State.
The Badgers won the 2007 national title at Lake Placid’s Herb Brooks Arena, the very setting in which Johnson and his U.S. Olympic teammates had forged a historic Cold War triumph with what came to be called the Miracle on Ice. Competing there allowed Johnson to show his family where the world’s attention had once been focused through a prism of sports and politics.
On Friday, February 22, 1980, the Americans were set to play the favored Soviet hockey team, which had humiliated the U.S. team 10-3 in an exhibition just two weeks earlier at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. But this was a new day. Johnson scored a pair of crucial goals in the game, with one coming at the end of the first period as he wove between a pair of defenders to drill a rebound past legendary Soviet goaltender Vladislav Tretiak, tying the game 2-2. Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov pulled Tretiak and replaced him with Vladimir Myshkin, startling the hockey world.
Years later, when Johnson played for the New Jersey Devils, Slava Fetisov, one of the Soviet players in 1980, had become one of his teammates. One day Johnson took Fetisov aside and asked him why the Soviet coach pulled Tretiak in such a crucial game. Fetisov had a blunt answer: “Coach crazy.”
During the third period of the game against the Soviets, Johnson scored on a power play to tie the game at 3-3 and set the stage for Mike Eruzione’s game-winning goal about two minutes later. “It wasn’t even fantasized about that beating the Soviets could even happen. I don’t think there was anybody on the planet who even thought about that happening,” he says.
As Johnson was helping to make history, his father was getting ready to coach the Badgers against Jeff Sauer’s Colorado College team in Colorado Springs. As Sauer came into the rink that day, he saw Bob Johnson. “The Friday afternoon that they beat the Russians, Bob and I walked into the rink at the same time. I looked at him and said, ‘You shouldn’t be here. You should be in Lake Placid,’” Sauer recalls, smiling. “Truth is, I wanted him to leave so I wouldn’t have to coach against him.”
Bob Johnson did leave early Saturday morning, embarking on a trip that finally got him to the Olympics in time to see his son and the U.S. team win the gold by defeating Finland 4-2 on Sunday. Mark Johnson provided the assist on the game-winning goal.
For much of the run-up to the Olympics, Mark Johnson was uncertain about his status with the team because of his father’s rocky relationship with U.S. Olympic coach Herb Brooks, Bob Johnson’s archrival at Minnesota. But in the pre-Olympic tour, the volatile Brooks summoned Mark Johnson to his hotel room in Oslo, Norway, and told him that he was counting on him to be a team leader.
“That meeting with Herb eased my burden over where I would fit on the team, so I could just go play and not have to worry,” Johnson says.
Years later, he wonders what it must have been like for the Soviets to face a nation that demanded victory. “People didn’t realize the wrath they had to go through when they stepped off the plane at Moscow,” he says. “Gold medals and championships were important to their culture. If you’re going to lose, don’t lose to the Americans. It could be understood if you lost to the Czechs or to Sweden. To lose to American college players? They thought their players must have been drunk.”
America has not forgotten that icy run to gold. Johnson and his teammates were made the torchbearers for the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, and Disney chronicled the 1980 team’s magic in the 2004 movie Miracle, in which Johnson was played by Eric Peter-Kaiser and Brooks was portrayed by Kurt Russell. Although Johnson considers himself fortunate to have carved out such a treasured piece of hockey history, he won’t allow himself to be defined by it.
“It was part of my life, but it’s not who I am,” he says.
A challenge seems irresistible for Johnson. In 2005, he entered his first Ironman triathlon, along with his son Doug, inspired by watching his sister-in-law compete the year before. The competition is a grinding mix of a 2.4-mile swim in Lake Monona, a 112-mile bicycle ride, and a 26.2-mile marathon. This year, he competed again at age forty-nine — and he finished in fourteen hours, thirty-seven minutes, nearly two hours faster than his first outing. His best event? “I couldn’t swim too well, and I hate running, so I suppose that leaves biking,” he says.
“The one comment I hear from people is, ‘I could never do that,’ ” he adds. “In our business, that’s one thing you don’t say.”
Dozens of times during the event, he questioned whether it was worth it, whether he was crazy. In the end, though, it was about setting an example. “It sends a message to our players that, yeah, we may be getting gray, but we still have a little energy,” he says. “We can sit and talk about a lot of things, but if your lives don’t follow through, it’s not going to have much impact.”
While hockey fans can come to an arena to see a miracle maker firsthand, they don’t get to witness how Johnson quietly influences his players every day. Team member Emily Morris says that watching Johnson push himself through the torturous triathlon was a study in tenacity — and inspired her to sign up to compete in the 2008 Ironman.
As she shoulders her backpack and heads out of the Kohl Center after practice, Morris doesn’t hesitate when asked what she’ll tell people about Mark Johnson years from now.
“I’ll tell them that I’m lucky. I’ll tell them that I played for one of the best college coaches in the history of women’s hockey,” she says. “What he’s accomplished, you’d never know unless you’re a hockey fan, because he’ll never tell you.”
