Alan Ameche: The Story of "The Horse"

8. The Year of the Horse

 Luckily for Alan Ameche, his reputation as a program-changing running back preceded him. Otherwise people in Madison might have gotten the wrong idea about the young man. Maybe it was a case of youthful exuberance, or the thrill of being away from home for the first time in his life. Or perhaps it was a celebration of the brilliant future that he knew awaited him in Madison. Whatever possessed him isn’t known. What is known is that Alan Ameche arrived in Madison in the late summer of  for the opening of the University of Wisconsin football camp sporting a hideous shock of orange hair. As a lark while they prepared for the annual Wisconsin North-South High School All-Star game a few weeks earlier, he, Braatz, and Mario Bonofiglio, as well as future Badger captain and former Madison East rival, Gary Messner, had dyed their hair what they thought would be a shade of red. Something went wrong, very wrong, and Ameche in particular was left with a tonsorial conversation piece that defied explanation. “His most spectacular stunt as a teenager was dyeing his hair bright orange—‘the color of an overripe cheddar cheese’—by way of celebrating his appearance in an all-star game in high school,” stated the Furlong article. The Wisconsin Sports News Service called the color of his botched bleaching a “sickening orange hue,” that eventually morphed into a “taffy-brown shade.” “We were up in Green Bay for the all-star game and we were just monkeying around,” Bonofiglio said. “You know, just kid stuff. It didn’t turn out too good but it grew out after a while.” Their future Badger teammate Jim Temp, from La Crosse, Wisconsin,  TheYear of the Horse  played on the North Squad while all the hair dyers were on the South team, but he remembers the incident well. “Alan and Bonofiglio and a couple other nutballs, and all I can tell you was that it was not good,” said Temp, who would go on to play four seasons for the Green Bay Packers after a fine career in Madison. “They were a bunch of characters just having fun, but they really looked terrible. “The important thing is the country hicks from up north beat the city boys pretty good. It seemed like half their team was from Kenosha and the other half was Milwaukee Washington.” If the hair caper wasn’t enough to catch the collective eye of the Badgers’ coaching staff, Ameche’s freshman publicity questionnaire for the university ’s sports news service might have raised an eyebrow or two. From the looks of it, Ameche didn’t take a lot of time filling it out, but what he had to say was revealing. Ameche’s most detailed answer was in response to high school honors received. He wrote that he was “captain, all-state, all-conference, most. Val. Player and high scorer.” But he saved his two shortest answers for later. In a fifty-one-word question asking him to “give full details,” Ameche was asked to describe the greatest obstacle he faced in achieving success in sports. His answer: “Financial difficulties.” But his shortest answer, and the one that probably got the biggest laugh in the football office, was to the question “What is your hobby?” His answer: “Yvonne.” That’s it, just Yvonne. Apparently he felt no further embellishment was necessary. If the coaching staff needed more proof that they had a certified free spirit on their hands, not exactly a cherished quality in a sport that requires almost military-like discipline, it was provided early in the team’s training camp. Bobby Hinds loves to tell the story of their first training camp in Madison. “I actually came to Madison a week prior to football starting and I bought myself a Victrola,” Hinds related. “God only knows where I came up with the money for a Victrola, but I got it. “Alan and I both loved classical music. When I lived at his house, we didn’t have any money, so we’d go over to Simmons Library and rent out some LP albums, then go over to Allendale where we knew a girl who would let us use her Victrola. “So we’re at camp, it was -some degrees out, a real heat wave. I told Alan I had a Victrola and some music so come down to my room and listen before bedcheck. the year of...