BY MIKE LECKRONE and DOUG MOE 

COLLEGE ATHLETICS has always been about more than the players and coaches, and arguably no one has had more of an impact on the experience of a modern University of Wisconsin sports fan than Mike Leckrone.  

By the time he retired in 2019, he’d been director of UW’s bands for an astonishing 50 years. He authored beloved Badger traditions like the Fifth Quarter postgame show and forged countless memories with his showmanship and sequined outfits during the annual spring concert.

Leckrone collaborates with longtime Madison columnist and occasional Milwaukee Magazine contributor Doug Moe to reflect on a monumental career and countless UW memories in a recently published memoir. A portion of the book, Moments of Happiness: A Wisconsin Band Story, is excerpted here. 

When the routine becomes electrifying, you know it’s a moment to remember.  

On the afternoon I’m recalling now – Jan. 1, 1994 – I was standing outside a football stadium in my job as director of the University of Wisconsin Marching Band.  

It was the start of my 25th year with the UW band. I came to Madison from Butler University in Indiana with my wife, Phyllis, and our children, in 1969.  

Over the years I’d watched our Badger band members line up, four across, at stadiums in football hotbeds like Columbus and Ann Arbor. We did it at home games, too, marching from Union South into Camp Randall Stadium to take our positions in the tunnel. Entering the stadium was no big deal. The fun came later.  

But then, we’d never before positioned ourselves under the famous Rose Bowl sign in Pasadena, California. The football Badgers were about to play UCLA in the most storied postseason bowl game of them all.  

Already, the week – Wisconsin’s first trip to the Rose Bowl in three decades – had been memorable. The band, 279 strong, flew to California on a charter on Monday, Dec. 27. We stayed at the DoubleTree hotel in Santa Monica because it was located adjacent to Santa Monica High School, which meant we could walk out the door to a practice field, which we did, every morning. We’d rehearse from 8 a.m. to 9:30 or 10 a.m. and then get on a bus to go to a performance.  

Tuesday, we played at Knott’s Berry Farm; Wednesday was Disneyland (a performance taped for CBS Television); on Thursday, we soared in front of a huge pep rally – 20,000 crazed Badger fans! – at the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City; and Friday, we were at Universal Studios.  

Later I thought that, ordinarily, if we’d had just one of those experiences, we’d have said, “What a great trip.” During Rose Bowl week, the hits kept coming.  

The topper was marching in the Tournament of Roses Parade early on the morning of New Year’s Day. It was high visibility and high pressure. I’d sought the advice of other band directors, who told me to work on conditioning – the parade route is 5½ miles long – and to pay special attention to the difficult turn from Orange Grove Boulevard onto Colorado Boulevard, where it would be easy to get disoriented. Back in Madison, we spent probably 45 minutes of every rehearsal just working on the parade.  

We learned that the cameras are focused on the first 30 minutes of the parade. The organizers encouraged us to do our strongest material up front. We were told we’d see a sign that read “TV cameras end.” They didn’t suggest music for us but asked for a song list, not wanting any copyright issues. Most of our stuff – “On, Wisconsin!,” “If You Want to Be a Badger” – was in the public domain, though we wound up paying a royalty for playing “You’ve Said It All.”  

One parade official told me that once we passed the TV cameras, we could play whatever we wanted, or not play at all. “Maybe just play when you see patches of your fans in the stands,” he said. 

He didn’t realize that our fans were everywhere that week, including lining the entire parade route. Wisconsin had been waiting 30 years for the Badgers to go to the Rose Bowl, and when it happened, tens of thousands of state residents and UW alumni around the globe wanted in. They launched a full-out invasion of Southern California.  

Wisconsin had been waiting 30 years for the Badgers to go to the Rose Bowl, and when it happened, tens of thousands of state residents and UW alumni around the globe wanted in.

Standing outside the Rose Bowl Stadium that afternoon, I mentioned to the band members that they should be sure to store what was about to happen in their memory banks. But we really had no idea. It seemed as if everyone in the Rose Bowl was wearing red. When we came through the tunnel and the crowd had its first glimpse of the band, the sound was almost like an explosion.  

It was an exhilarating moment I’ll never forget.  

Even before the Rose Bowl, the 1993 fall season had been filled with remarkable events. Barry Alvarez was in his fourth year as head football coach at Wisconsin – still early in what would be a legendary career – and the Badgers opened with six straight wins. 

A disappointing loss at Minnesota followed, but then on Oct. 30, back home at Camp Randall, the Badgers beat mighty Michigan, 13–10, for the first time since 1981.

It should have been a joyous occasion, but as the game concluded and the end zone student section fans rushed down toward the field to celebrate, the first wave was pinned against the field’s guardrails by those pushing from behind. It was an ugly scene. There were numerous injuries, some serious.  

The band was never in real jeopardy. We’d just started to assemble under the north goalpost for our Fifth Quarter performance when Gary Moore, a UW-Madison police officer who served as liaison to the band, came up and told me to get the band out of there. Young fans were climbing on the goalpost; the crush had begun.

We made it into the tunnel and then marched out of the stadium across campus to the Humanities Building, where we dismissed on football Saturdays. Keeping the band members together was always an important part of our band protocol. We didn’t want any stragglers, though I heard later that a couple of band members helped pull some students out of the collapsed fencing.  

What I felt at first – before I knew the extent of the injuries at the stadium – was disappointment that we’d not been able to play our postgame show after such a tremendous win. It was the first time that had happened since the Fifth Quarter originated in 1978, after another stirring Badgers’ victory. 

ON THAT LATE SEPTEMBER SATURDAY, Wisconsin had fallen behind Oregon, 19–7, with just seven minutes left in the game. Many in the crowd of 64,000 fans at Camp Randall began to file out.  

But the Badgers, led by quarterback Mike Kalasmiki, stormed back, scoring twice in those final minutes, securing a 22–19 Wisconsin win.  

All three of the Badgers’ fourth-quarter touchdowns were preceded by the band playing “You’ve Said It All,” a polka-like song better known to those outside of Wisconsin as a popular theme song for Budweiser beer. When that Oregon game ended, Kalasmiki and many of his teammates stayed on the field. About 200 students joined them – safely. The band jumped into the act, too, playing a postgame “You’ve Said It All” and more. The Fifth Quarter was born.  

We’d been playing “You’ve Said It All” for seven years by then. It started at a Badger hockey game at the Dane County Coliseum. The year was 1972. College hockey had begun to catch on in Madison under a charismatic coach named Bob Johnson. The Coliseum’s plush red seats – and, not incidentally, the beer garden downstairs – were filled with fans cheering for the Badgers.  

The band had also begun to catch on. I’d been in Madison three years by then and felt having a varsity band – sometimes called a pep band, a term I never liked – presence at the Badger basketball and hockey games was important. It made friends for the band. The spirit was catching.  

“You can tell it,” Wisconsin State Journal sports editor Glenn Miller wrote in January 1971. “The fans – just like this sports editor – have noticed it. We have gone from last to first in the Big 10 in the field of pep bands.”  

The students came early to those hockey games, and the Coliseum was usually rocking by the time our varsity band arrived. It was when we were playing at one of the breaks between periods that a group of fans – I can still remember the section they were in, GG in the upper deck – started chanting, “We want a polka! We want a polka!”  

I was still fairly new to Wisconsin, or I would have already had us playing a polka. We had the Budweiser song in our repertoire, but the arrangement wasn’t really a polka. On the spot, I had them change the drum part a bit, so it sounded like a polka. The fans in GG clapped along and a few of them danced. Of course, at one point in the next game, they started yelling again.  

“We want a polka!”  

That time – or maybe it was a game or two later – the fans in GG, when we arrived at the end, sang, “When you say Bud-wei-ser, you’ve said it all.”  

When I heard that, I huddled with the band and told them the next time we played it, I wanted them to stand, turn and face section GG, and sing, “When you say WIS-CON-SIN, you’ve said it all.”  

For a game or two, it was a back-and-forth between section GG and the band. But before long, we won them over. The rest of the crowd joined in: “When you say WIS-CON-SIN, you’ve said it all.”  

Half a century later, it’s still one of the band’s signature songs.  

Funny, but when we played at Disneyland during Rose Bowl week, they asked us not to play “You’ve Said It All.” I was never certain whether it was the commercial association or because it was specifically associated with a beer, but we agreed not to play it at Disneyland. 

ON JAN. 1, THE END OF THE GAME – a 21-16 win for the good guys – didn’t culminate things for us. We’d secured permission to play a Fifth Quarter performance. We were running on adrenaline – a rocking halftime performance that included songs made famous by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, followed by the Badgers’ victory. The police cautioned me that if any fans tried to get onto the field, the band would be shut down. I assured them that wouldn’t happen, and it didn’t.  

An interesting thing did happen around the Rose Bowl Fifth Quarter. Earlier, when we were just about to enter the stadium, one of my field assistants, Jim Tanner, was approached by an acquaintance of his from Wisconsin. Holding a package, he said, “My uncle’s last request was that if Wisconsin ever made it to the Rose Bowl, I should try to have his ashes scattered on the field.”  

He handed the package to Jim, who was also an ordained minister, and walked away.  

“I have it in my pocket,” Jim told me a short time later. We were about to make that unforgettable entrance into the Rose Bowl. “Jim,” I said, “just hold on to it. We’ll see what happens.”  

I really didn’t think about it again. But later that night, Jim told me that during the Fifth Quarter, he remembered the ashes. When we were done playing, he and a couple of band members went into the Rose Bowl end zone, quietly said a few words, and dispersed the ashes.  

They allowed us to use only half the field for the Fifth Quarter at the Rose Bowl. It hardly mattered. Badger fans who were surprised when we didn’t play “Varsity” during halftime were weeping as we played it to begin the Fifth Quarter. A photo of me conducting with my hat on backward must have been taken right around that time. My smile reaches my eyes. It was one of a precious handful of what I came to call “moments of happiness” that occurred in Pasadena.

Badger fans who were surprised when we didn’t play “Varsity” during halftime were weeping as we played it to begin the Fifth Quarter.

Entering the stadium to the roar and the sea of red was another. From that time on, I spoke often about moments of happiness and urged my band members to recognize them as they were happening and to hold such moments close and never lose them.  

I’ve been lucky in life, but like everyone, I’ve known disappointment and heartache. It’s inescapable, and one reason why it’s so important to preserve the good memories. The moments of happiness.

From Moments of Happiness: A Wisconsin Band Story by Mike Leckrone and Doug Moe. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2024 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.