Rockford’s greatest football players No. 20: Steve Stark paves way to Rose Bowl
Steve Stark doesn’t look like a pitcher.
But his fastball sure did.
“I could throw in the low 90s,” said Stark, an offensive lineman on Wisconsin’s first Rose Bowl championship team.
The former Hononegah pitcher weighed 225 pounds back then, not the 290 he played at when he started at right guard for the Badgers for three years.
“My best year was as a junior. I had a lot of elasticity in my arm still,” Stark said. “The bigger I got, the less control I had. I realized that was going to be a problem the more weight I put on. The stronger I got, the more I lost control. And if you can’t control it, it’s tough to be a good pitcher.”
Stark never weighed more than 245 pounds in high school but caught the eyes of Wisconsin and Michigan State coaches during agility drills at an Iowa football camp.
“They fell in love with him when they saw how good his footwork was,” former Hononegah coach Donn VanSchelven said. “Steve was athletic. He was on the basketball team with my son when they won the first NIC-10 championship in Hononegah history. He played on the baseball team. He wasn’t huge, but he had great feet. If I had to do it all over again, I would play him at tight end, because he could run and he had hands.”
That athleticism made Stark our pick as the 20th greatest football player in Rockford-area history.
“People couldn’t throw him off his feet,” VanSchelven said. “He kept a wide base and kept his legs running. Bigger guys, sometimes they can have their weight used against them to the defensive player’s advantage. You couldn’t do that with Steve.”
“I was never the biggest or the strongest lineman, but playing baseball and basketball my whole life from the time I was 7 helped,” Stark said. “The best advice I ever got from a recruiter is when I said I might give up basketball my senior year to lift and get better. He said, ‘You are an idiot. You are going to train your body and work on your foot agility in basketball better than you are ever going to do by just training.’ I tell kids I’ve coached: ‘Play as many sports as you can for as long as you can.’ There are things you learn in competition that you can never learn by lifting, running, cross-training or just working out.”
Basketball stars Ryan Hoover, who played pro ball in Europe for 18 seasons, and John Hemenway played on the football team with Stark, ranking first and third in the NIC-10 in receiving.
“He was crazy,” Stark said of Hoover. “I was just lucky to be underneath for the couple of times he missed a game. I’d grab the rebound and get it back to him or John Hemenway.
“I could dunk better than him. That’s the only thing I could do on a basketball court better than Ryan could do.”
Stark picked a college that everybody was doing better than at the time. Wisconsin had gone 4-29 the previous three seasons when Stark signed.
“There was just something about coach Alvarez that told you he was going to turn it around. He made you believe,” Stark said.
After going 1-10 in Barry Alvarez’s first season in 1990, the Badgers went 5-6 the next two seasons, then were 10-1-1 Rose Bowl champions in Stark’s sophomore season.
That was Wisconsin’s first-ever 10-win season. The Badgers now have a dozen 10-win seasons.
“It’s always amazing to be part of a turnaround,” Stark said.
And Wisconsin has continued to win the way it won with Stark. That 1994 Rose Bowl champion offensive line of Mike Verstegan at left tackle, Joe Rudolph at left guard, Cory Raymer at center, Stark at right guard and Joe Panos at right tackle might have been the best offensive line in the nation. Wisconsin has been known for powerful offensive lines and punishing rushing games ever since.
“I am very proud of that,” Stark said. “That was Barry’s style, to play great defense and control the football. You do that with a good run game.
“Bill Callahan was my offensive line coach and Brad Childress our offensive coordinator; they really, really believed in the zone run game. You saw it more in the NFL at the time, but we really became technicians of it. It’s a style of play where you can maul people with it, but also in zone schemes you can have players with more athletic ability who just cover people up.”
That line paved the way for Brent Moss to run for 158 yards in Wisconsin’s 21-16 Rose Bowl victory over UCLA.
Even though the Rose Bowl was UCLA’s home field, the crowd was dominated by Badgers fans.
“It was all red,” Stark said. “I was also the long snapper, so I got to go out early with the specialists. I might have been the first person on the field with our team. I remember walking out of the tunnel an hour and a half before the game started and seeing it almost all Wisconsin fans. It was an incredible experience to have an entire state behind you.”
The end of Stark’s football career was less exciting. He played only four games as a senior after injuring his ankle and needing surgery, then was cut in training camp after signing as an undrafted free agent with the New York Jets.
“I was a preseason all-Big Ten player, so that was disappointing, but it’s not an unusual story,” said Stark, who now owns a company, Trench Training, that teaches offensive and defensive linemen how to “live, train and play big.”
“There are guys that I played with who should have played in the NFL for many years that didn’t play much in college because of injury. Some of the best players I’ve ever seen in person. That’s part of our game. You have to be lucky, too.”
Matt Trowbridge: mtrowbridge@rrstar.com; @matttrowbridge
ABOUT THIS SERIES
The Rockford Register Star is running a daily retrospective on the greatest area athletes of the past 75 years in every IHSA sport fielded by local high schools.
We recently ran separate stories on the 10 greatest high school football games and girls and boys basketball games.
All of the greatest games and greatest athletes are chosen by Matt Trowbridge, who has covered area high school sports for 30 years, and NIC-10 History Book founder Alex Gary, with input from other area experts and fans.
