During World War II, the fortunes of a college hockey team didn’t amount to a hill of beans. The able-bodied were fighting in Europe and Asia, so Michigan’s roster shrunk. So did the schedule, from 20 games to eight.

From 1940 to 1943, the Wolverines won exactly five games – total. The next year, a local newspaper warned, “Michigan May Remove Hockey From Athletic Program.”

Enter Vic Heyliger, a dashing young coach from Massachusetts, and two vital players.

Wally Grant grew up in northern Minnesota, on the frozen Iron Range. He quarterbacked the Eveleth high school football team, starred on its track team and scored the winning goal in the first Minnesota high school state tournament. But when he saw the University of Minnesota hockey coach, Larry Armstrong, at the state track meet, Armstrong “wouldn’t give us the time of day. A few months later he bent over backwards trying to get me and a couple other Eveleth kids to play for him, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with him.”

So the day after Grant graduated, he and a teammate traveled to Duluth to see if his teammate’s brother could get them work on the docks. The brother told them they didn’t have any jobs, but he gave them twenty bucks each, enough for one-way train tickets to Ann Arbor and a sandwich along the way, and told them to call Coach Heyliger when they got there. It would be Grant’s first train trip, but not his last.

The two boys arrived in Ann Arbor with no money, no place to stay, no clothes, and not even a toothbrush. No one in town knew they were coming – because no one knew who they were. They found a pay phone, called athletic director Fritz Crisler at his home, and got in touch with Coach Heyliger. He got them a room in a fraternity basement, and a job mowing Fielding Yost’s lawn. When the boys called their surprised parents a few days later, the families sent some money for room, board, tuition and clothes, and the boys didn’t return home until Christmas.

And that’s how the Michigan hockey team “recruited” its first three-time All-American, and opened a pipeline of players from Minnesota to Michigan. Fully a quarter of Michigan’s 1945-46 team came from tiny Eveleth High. Over the next ten years, ten Minnesota school-boy stars turned down the Gophers for the Wolverines – and it made all the difference.

Six of them are now in Michigan hockey’s Hall of Fame; five became All-Americans; and three were inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. Every one of the ten players earned at least one NCAA championship ring, with that first wave of Minnesotans winning a combined fifteen among them.

Simply put, it is inconceivable that Michigan could have won any NCAA titles in the tournament’s early years, let alone six in a decade, without the infusion of the Iron Range stars. But they never would have come to Ann Arbor were it not for an arrogant old coach named Larry Armstrong, and a gutsy young kid named Wally Grant, who decided he deserved a little respect.

Al Renfrew, grew up in Toronto, and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force before joining Wally Grant in Ann Arbor, sight unseen. He slept above the locker room in the old Coliseum, on a cot next to a wood stove he would fill with a few sticks of wood from Fingerle Lumber across the street before going to bed.

When Coach Heyliger stepped down in 1957, Renfrew took his place. Renfrew managed to lure 14 players from Sasketchewan, including their leader, Red Berenson, arguably the greatest player in Michigan history, and perhaps Michigan’s greatest coach. In 1964, Renfrew’s Wolverines won the national title.

Al and his wife Marjorie also started a famed tradition. In 1962, to give the demoralized football players a little boost, Marjorie sewed the first “M Go Blue” banner out of a bedsheet. When the team upset Illinois, the banner stuck.

Gordon Wilkie, captain of the 1964 NCAA title team, said, “Rennie would give you the shirt off his back. ‘Course, a lot of his shirts weren’t worth much. He wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest dresser.”

The players’ affection for their coach was obvious when the team played Colorado College at the Broadmoor, a few days beforeAl’s birthday. The dirt-poor players chipped in to buy him a new overcoat for Christmas. Al wore that coat for twelve years, long after the buttons had fallen off.

“That was a great coat,” Renfrew told me. “I tell ya, we haven’t had too many bad guys playing hockey at Michigan.”

No, they haven’t – and that list includes Wally Grant and Al Renfrew.

Last Friday, Wally Grant passed away, at 86. On Monday, Al Renfrew died at 89.

When people praise the Greatest Generation, this is who they’re talking about.

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