40th Anniversary of the Wisconsin Water Bottle Brawl with North Dakota

[Ignatius L Hoops]

They mentioned this on Beyond the Pond. It's a good, late winter, look at old time hockey and the excitement that was the Dane County Coliseum.

Witnesses to the Wisconsin-North Dakota 'Water Bottle Game' 40 years ago relive the mayhem

A bench-clearing brawl became a symbol of a tense rivalry in 1982. Here are the recollections of those who watched it or tried to intervene when a water bottle led

madison.com

The Dane County Coliseum in its heyday was one of the cathedrals of college hockey, known for its atmosphere and a home-ice advantage for the University of Wisconsin.
Even a palace can have imperfections. Team benches at the Coliseum 40 years ago were separated by nothing more than the racks holding backup sticks. Right behind them was the exit to the beer garden, protected by only a curtain. The teams left the ice through the same door and had locker rooms not far from each other.
Hindsight offers the wisdom to see why all of those things could have caused trouble. They all came into play in one of the wildest nights that the building ever saw, so peculiar that the 165-foot goal scored late in the second period became only a footnote by the end.

It takes only three words for memories to come flowing back for a generation of fans of both the Badgers and North Dakota: “Water Bottle Game.”
It was 40 years ago Sunday that a squirt from a bottle held by Badgers forward John Newberry set off a four-minute brawl of multiple acts split by interludes.

 

[BTChamp]

I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out..............

 

[TRF Guy]

That’s when UND had all those 25 year old Canucks on their team. They were downright mean and they thrived on it

 

[Spaulding!No!]

The hawk always left his stool in the box. Anyone could use it.