Pletsch: Berenson and Anastos discuss their in-state rivalry
By Fred Pletsch –
The best sports rivalries are personal in nature.
The current head coaches in the Michigan/Michigan state hockey rivalry have tremendous professional respect for one another but their combined 87 years of involvement in a school-fueled feud mean fans should make sure this weekend’s games are prominently highlighted on the calendar.
Red Berenson received his playing introduction to the Michigan/Michigan State feud on the road at Dem Hall on Feb. 9, 1960 and scored twice in a 4-3 overtime loss. “Coming from a small town in Saskatchewan, I really didn’t know a lot about the rivalry,” says the college hockey icon who is now fourth on the all-time coaching wins list. “But I can tell you that I learned pretty quickly it was like borderline war as a player.”
Berenson returned to coach at his alma mater in 1984 and, while the ferocity of the rivalry hadn’t diminished, the fortunes of the hockey team were another story. As a senior, Berenson captained a team that finished third in the NCAA Tournament and had swept the Spartans in a four-game, regular-season series, outscoring them 24-8 along the way. Twenty-two years later, he inherited a team coming off back-to-back ninth-place finishes that had dropped eight of the previous nine meetings with the Spartans, including a 12-1 shellacking in the Wolverines last trip to East Lansing.
The Spartans had evolved into the CCHA’s benchmark program in the early 1980’s and current coach Tom Anastos was part of a Michigan State juggernaut that captured four straight league playoff titles and three consecutives crowns at the Great Lakes Invitational. He knows there are a lot of great rivalries in college hockey but considers the Spartans and Wolverines to be the best of the bunch.
“The rivalry is personal to me,” says Anastos, now in his third season and the head coach charged with ushering in the Spartans’ Big Ten Hockey era. “I do talk about it to my team. The points are the same but the games mean way more.”
To illustrate his point, Anastos says while attending this year’s Rose Bowl, he was congratulated countless times by Spartan fans he’d never met before on his hockey team’s victory over Michigan outdoors at Comerica Park.
Like his coach in Ann Arbor, the 84th captain in Michigan hockey history, Mac Bennett, was an outsider to the rivalry when he arrived on campus but terms his first exposure to it, a football game at the Michigan Stadium in the fall of 2010, as ‘insanity’. Two months and two days later, the Narragansett, Rhode Island, native was on the same field, in front of a world record crowd of 104,173 fans, for his playing debut against his school’s arch rivals in The Big Chill at the Big House.
Bennett says a direct message was delivered with authority by the seniors on the team every time the Spartans were next up on the schedule. “Guys like Matt Rust, Chad Langlais and Carl Hagelin, made it clear that this isn’t just another game or series!” The Montreal Canadiens draft pick believes the intensity, emotion and physicality involved in encounters with MSU are as close as you can get to playoff hockey and serve as primal preparation for what a team encounters once the regular season is over.
The most infamous incident in the rivalry’s annals occurred at Joe Louis Arena on February 16, 1991 and, to this day, still stokes the ire of former Spartan bench boss Ron Mason. A benches-clearing brawl at the end of the first period was lowlighted by goalies Steve Shields (U-M) and Jason Muzatti (MSU) feeding one another knuckle sandwiches. The administrative aftermath saw Mason and Berenson both suspended for one game.
“We lost our next game against Illinois-Chicago, the ninth-place team in our league that season and Michigan played an exhibition game that counted as Red’s suspension,” according Mason, the long-lingering resentment still dripping from every word. “We wound up finishing in fifth place, lost at Western Michigan in the first round of the playoffs and it was the only time in my 23 seasons we didn’t make it to Joe Louis Arena for the CCHA Championship.”
Involved in a see-saw battle a few years ago that was coming down to the wire for a regular-season championship and the other contender playing Michigan State, Berenson was once asked in a pre-game interview if there was a little bit of him cheering for the Spartans that night.
“We cheer for Michigan,” was the icy response, accompanied by a look that meant ‘next question’.
It’s an anecdote that Anastos can fully appreciate.
For when it comes to the Michigan/Michigan state hockey rivalry, if you ask a personal question you get a personal answer.
Fred Pletsch, the former CCHA and NAHL commissioner, is a ‘Frozen Friday’broadcaster with the Big Ten Network. Follow him on Twitter at @PletscHockey.