2B — February 17, 2020
SportsMonday
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

In 2017, just after Mel Pearson was 
hired as the Michigan hockey coach, he 
went to Red Berenson’s house and had 
what he called the best conversation of 
his life. 
The two sat on the deck in Beren-
son’s backyard and talked for two 
hours, about anything and 
everything. It was a beauti-
ful night, Pearson recalled, 
and they sipped drinks. 
A weight appeared to be 
lifted off Berenson’s shoul-
ders. “After all those years 
of hockey, I think he just 
finally relaxed,” Pearson 
said this Wednesday.
For years, when Pear-
son worked under Beren-
son as an assistant coach, 
he had seen him in the 
crucible, up close. They had 
coached Michigan to 10 Fro-
zen Fours and two national 
titles together before Pearson 
left in 2011 to coach Michigan 
Tech. Berenson would stay in 
his job until he was 77 years 
old, finishing his career with a 
13-19-1 season, his worst since 
his first year behind the bench, 
back in 1985.
There’s always a conflict in 
coaching. Be it recruiting, on-ice 
performance, an off-ice issue 
or something else entirely — it 
always comes back to the head 
coach. For 33 years, it always came 
back to Berenson.
All that was over now.
A few hours before Pearson 
recalled that conversation, Beren-
son sat at a desk in his Weiden-
bach Hall office, talking about a 
packed schedule.
The night before, he’d played 
hockey with the Michigan 
alumni team at Yost Ice Arena, 
on the rink with his name 
inscribed on it, like he does 
every Tuesday. On Wednesday 
night, he planned to go to a 
high school hockey game to 
see one of his grandkids. On 
Saturday, he’d play another 
game in Howell, with the Red 
Wing alumni team. On Mon-
day night, he’ll be in Detroit to 
watch Michigan play Michigan 
State.
Michigan didn’t play at Yost 
this weekend, but at home games, 
Berenson sits in the athletic 
director’s box now, entertaining 
donors or merely spending time 
with his wife, Joy. He still feels 
pulled toward the ice.
He was asked if it was nice to 
have the stress off him without 
coaching — without being in con-
stant conflict.
“Well, it was fine and I have no 
regrets,” Berenson said. “So it was 
good.” Then he moved into talking 
about how he still feels invested in 
the team. Really, the question went 
unanswered.
He holds a job in the ath-
letic department, helping endow 
scholarships in the hockey 
program — a project he started 
back in the late-1990s when 
Tom Goss was the athletic 
director. He’s close to finishing. 
To some extent, he’s relaxed 
more, but the Berenson who 
Pearson saw that night three 
years ago, after officially 
handing off a job synony-
mous with his name for three 
decades, hasn’t moved away 
from everything, at least not com-
pletely. Pearson notices the com-
petitiveness simmering beneath 
the surface, calm but clear.
“I don’t feel like I’m not in hock-
ey anymore,” Berenson said.
***
For years when Berenson 
coached, he preached the idea 
of a life after hockey. He was 
born in 1939, near the end of the 

Great Depression and he says his parents’ 
culture “was just survival.” Berenson 
inherited that. And wanted to get away 
from it.
In an age where education was 
frowned upon in some hockey circles, 
Berenson went to college, choosing 
Michigan over Denver because, he said, 
“some of the guys that went to Denver, I 
just didn’t have a lot of respect for them 
as students.” Years later, he completed an 
MBA, driving back to Ann Arbor for class 
the day after the Canadiens’ Stanley Cup 
celebration parade in 1965. While hockey 
players drank in the locker rooms, Beren-
son quit an offseason office job at Molson 
Breweries because there was too much 
drinking. He wore a helmet when doing 
so carried a stigma.
Berenson played for 17 seasons, 
coached in the NHL for six, then in col-
lege for 33. The last three years have been 
the closest thing to a life after hockey 
he’s had, yet last week he found himself 
at a hockey rink nearly every day, eating 
popcorn and watching Michigan practice 
from a seat in the corner of Yost.
“I came back here and I had no idea 
I’d be here 30-something years, but it 
just worked out that way,” Berenson said. 
“While I’ve been here, I’ve been able 
to digest that feeling that this life after 
hockey has already started, but I’m right 
in the middle of hockey.”
This year, Berenson plans to get away 
from everything the same way he has 
for the last 50 years. He’ll get a group 
of friends together, pack up the car and 
drive north. They’ll spend 7-10 days in 
canoes, portaging rapids they can’t make 
it through and camping at night, isolated 
from the rest of the world.
In an office filled with reminders of 
his hockey achievements, Berenson’s 
favorite photo is of himself, shirtless 
and bearded, wearing sunglasses and 
standing in a canoe on the Missinaibi 
River. He picked up the hobby while he 
played, discovering he had an interest in 
the outdoors and, during the offseason, 
real time on his hands to explore it. The 
physicality of it appeals to him. So does 
the remoteness.
He did it with the same group of three 
or four friends for years, and as a coach, 
he used to invite graduating seniors as 
well, using it as a bonding event. 
One year, when current Michigan 
assistant Bill Muckalt went, his canoe 
partner, Deke, tore his Achilles. There 
was no discussion of cutting the trip 
short. On the last day, Muckalt recalled, 
Berenson paddled off into the Lake 
Superior sunset. “I’m with Deke like, ‘If 
we dump this canoe, we’re dead.’ Cause 
the water’s freezing,” Muckalt said. Still, 
they made it through each day, setting 
up camp and listening to the Stanley Cup 
Finals on the radio at night.
“That’s the worst real injury that 
we’ve had,” Berenson said. “And yet it 
wasn’t life-threatening. It was just, it was 
inconvenient.”
He’s not looking for overly tough trips 
anymore. Last year, the wind was in his 
face the whole time and there were too 
many portages. Some of the mainstays 
who did the trips for years have dropped 
off. Last year, Kent Brothers, an ex-player 
who went on a trip nearly three decades 
ago after graduating, called Berenson 
out of the blue and asked to go again. 
They loved having him. Berenson doesn’t 
reach out to players each year anymore, 
though. At some point, they didn’t seem 
interested in something like that. “They 
know that I go and if they want to go, 
they can call,” Berenson said.
Two Saturdays ago, Luke Glenden-
ing came back to Yost to visit. His career 
embodies the traits Berenson values, 
the ones he saw less and less of as time 
passed by.
Glendening came to Michigan in 
2008, recruited as a walk-on. He played 
four years, earning a degree and getting 
good enough to earn an NHL spot as an 
undrafted free agent. He’s in his seventh 
year with the Detroit Red Wings now, 
but when his career ends, he’ll have a 
degree to fall back on.
Berenson paints Glendening in con-
trast with Josh Norris, another former 
Michigan player who left after last sea-
son, as a sophomore. He’s with the AHL’s 

Belleville Senators now, a minor-league 
affiliate of Ottawa. Berenson doesn’t 
understand why.
“Now, he’s probably happy in the 
minors,” Berenson said. “But as an advi-
sor and his coach, I would’ve said, you’ll 
get to the NHL just as fast by staying in 
school. ... You don’t know how long you’re 
gonna play hockey.”
Norris never played for Berenson, 
though he was recruited by him. But the 
old coach sees him as a part of a trend, 
ever-growing, that started in the mid-
2000s, when certain players started to 
come to Michigan thinking they had it 
figured out. A recruit named Steve Guolla 
once asked Berenson if he could wait on 
a decision after being offered. Berenson 
rescinded the offer, making the decision 
for him. He wanted a group of four-year 
players who wanted nothing more than 
to be in Ann Arbor, lining up behind 
each other for playing time. Things were 
regimented, just the way Berenson, an 
old-school coach who comes from an old-
school background, wanted them.
Unmistakably, Berenson is a man of 
his age, both in how he handled his pro-
gram and in his personal life. He keeps 
things to himself. 
When Pearson’s father passed away, 
he found a photo of him and Berenson 
together, on an All-Star team in Hum-
boldt, Saskatchewan in the late-1950s. 
Berenson had told Pearson he knew his 
father. Neither man had said anything to 
Pearson about having played together.
***
The current senior class is Berenson’s 
last. 
Once they graduate, there will be no 
one left on Michigan’s roster who played 
for him, only those he recruited and 
called after the 2017 season, telling them 
he wouldn’t be there.
He’ll lose something in that — it’s easy 
to pick up on the way Berenson speaks 
about his former players. He watches the 
NHL constantly, and it’s hard to believe 
he isn’t doing that to keep an eye on 
them. Last week, he came into the Yost 
offices and asked Pearson if he knew 
Andrew Cogliano would play his 1,000th 
NHL game on Thursday. Pearson had no 
idea. But Berenson keeps up with these 
things.
The last players with ties to his reign 
leaving won’t end the connection Beren-
son feels with the program. Pearson, 
Muckalt, volunteer assistant Matt Hun-
wick and player development coach Steve 
Shields all played or coached under him. 
When Pearson brings recruits in now, he 
tries to make sure they meet Berenson.
He still comes into the offices to talk 
a couple times a week, meeting with the 
coaches or just with Pearson in an unof-
ficial advisoral capacity. Once in a long 
while, he’ll talk to Pearson after a game. 
No one feels he’s stepping on toes — the 
staff values any advice he has, and he 
doesn’t want to overstep. When Pearson 
took over, he made sure there was still a 
stall for him in the coach’s locker room.
“He’s got such a good way about him,” 
Pearson said. “Not forcing or telling you 
anything to do. You just start talking 
about something and then you get into 
some coaching or maybe a player, or if 
you have a discipline issue, or maybe a 
player isn’t playing up to their potential 
or whatnot, how you deal with it.”
As for his current role, Berenson is 
unsure when he’ll leave it.
“Year to year, I don’t have a plan,” 
Berenson said. “As long as I’m healthy 
and fit and alert, if it works for Warde, 
and if it doesn’t work for him, I’m fine. I’ll 
be fine without this. But I’ll still be a fan.”
Even though his passion for hockey 
is as strong as ever, Berenson relishes 
having more time to spend with his fam-
ily now. He and Joy have always done 
trips in their AirStream, driving across 
Canada to visit family, and that hasn’t 
changed. Last summer, to celebrate their 
60th anniversary, the family got together 
and stayed at the Grand Hotel on Macki-
nac Island.
The island is remote and isolated, the 
way Berenson likes it. There are no cars 
— just bikes and horses to get around — 
and the whole family was there, as far 
removed from the hockey world as could 
be.

ETHAN SEARS
Managing Sports Editor

RED BERENSON’S