From winning an NCAA title at Wisconsin to putting his name on the Stanley Cup with the Chicago Blackhawks, Adam Burish has a lifetime of memories from the ice.
But he doesn’t get on the ice much anymore. The skates are in a storage unit along with his hockey equipment, some autographed sticks and keepsakes from his career.
His focus now is on the business side of life with a restaurant partnership involving Rare steakhouses in Madison, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. It keeps him busy.
Burish and his wife, Jackie, have two children: Brooks, 5, and Blake, 3. Saturday will be a big day for Blake. He will be taking his first hockey skating lesson.
“My wife’s choice,” Burish said. “That’s how I started, too. It was my mom’s choice, not my dad’s. I guess we’re doing the same. I’m going to be in the background. I know that.
“Somebody else can do the coaching. Probably like my dad, it’ll be ‘Did you have fun? Did you work hard? Were you a good teammate?’ That was the feedback I always got.”
Saturday will also be a big day for Burish and his Badger teammates from the 2006 national championship team that collected 30 wins and the program’s sixth NCAA crown.
Wisconsin will celebrate its 20th anniversary by honoring the returning players during the finale of the Big Ten series between Penn State and the UW at the Kohl Center.
The first 800 students will receive a replica 2006 jersey T-shirt. Burish wore No. 16 on his Badger sweater that season with pride and still has moments of reflection.
Does it just mean more now? “It does more and more every year as I’ve gotten older,” conceded Burish, 43. “I think about it way more now than I ever have.”
Wisconsin was the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament and took advantage of a favorable path to the title, never having to leave the state for any of its four games.
The Badgers defeated Bemidji State and Cornell (triple overtime) at the Resch Center in Green Bay to advance to the Frozen Four at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee.
In the semifinals, Wisconsin beat Maine, 5-2. Burish scored the first goal, Ross Carlson scored shorthanded and Robbie Earl scored on the power play.
Brian Elliott had 32 saves, and the Badgers killed all seven Maine power plays to move into the NCAA finals for the first time since 1992.
Burish, a two-time team captain, assisted on both goals — by Earl and Tom Gilbert — in the UW’s 2-1 win over Boston College in the championship game.
Wisconsin’s Adam Burish holds up the 2006 national championship trophy after the Badgers defeated Boston College in Milwaukee.
YANA PASKOVA / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL ARCHIVES
When he thinks about it, the same thoughts come up for Burish, “Holy man, I can’t believe that happened. How did I do that? It’s more of an appreciation.
“I watch the Frozen Four now and I see the kids skate on the ice celebrating, and I get to remind myself, ‘I got to do that.’ Now I do think about it more.”
During his nine-year NHL career, spanning 378 games with Chicago, Dallas and San Jose, Burish admitted “you’re on to the next chapter in your life” and the past is the past.
“You can carry it inside. But you can’t talk about it. Nobody cares. You’re moving on to a new season, and your teammates don’t care what you did 10 or five years ago.
“But now, I think about it quite often.
“And I’m more proud of it now than I ever have been.”
Almost everyone from that 2006 team still takes part in a large group text. Burish sees about 10 or 12 guys weekly or monthly. There’s even some daily communication.
“It was a really competitive and determined bunch of guys and that probably came from the training that we did,” Burish said of the team’s personality during the title season.
“Every day was competitive. If it was in the gym, it was who could lift more weight? If we were running steps at Camp Randall, it was who could get to the top the fastest?”
Tying all the pieces together was head coach Mike Eaves, a former UW All-American skater who preached “confidence from preparation” popularized by Kobe Bryant.
“He pushed me and my teammates,” Burish said, “to levels of competitiveness and training that none of us would have gotten to on our own.”
The seniors, in particular, were motivated by the bad taste in their mouth from their freshman season when the Badgers struggled to a 13-23-4 record.
“We had the worst record in school history at the time,” Burish said. “The record has been broken since and I’m OK passing that one on.
“I remember us getting booed out there. We’d go for jogs after the game and fans were telling us we stunk. We were that bad that year.
“For the group of seniors that experienced that, we talked about it all the time. And we talked about winning the national championship all the time.
“Having a season like that kind of motivated us.”
Brother-sister champions
What motivated Burish more than anything was knowing that his younger sister Nikki was traveling the same road during the 2005-2006 season.
Nikki Burish (14 months younger than Adam) was a captain on the Wisconsin women’s hockey team that blanked Minnesota, 3-0, to win the national championship.
It was the first of coach Mark Johnson’s eight NCAA titles.
Adam and Nikki Burish hold up their teams’ NCAA national championship trophies during a 2006 celebration at the Kohl Center. The siblings grew up in Madison.
MICHELLE STOCKER / CAP TIMES ARCHIVES
“The highlight of my career was still winning national championships with my sister the same year,” said Adam, adding. “We played on the same teams growing up.”
Their youth hockey coach was Doak Holman with the Southwest Eagles. Adam Burish just texted him last week. He has tried to keep in touch with him.
“He pushed me, he motivated me, he brought something out of my sister and me on the competitive side,” he said. “I’ve talked to buddies professionally and at Wisconsin.
“And there’s always a coach that made a difference in your life in how you were going to compete and enjoy playing. At that youth level it was Doak Holman.
“I still think about things he used to say and his nicknames. He called my sister ‘Bulldog.’ He called me ‘Tank’ because I always used to have a little extra in the tank.
“When everybody was tired, you’ve got to dig down a little deeper and pull a little extra out of the tank. He’d say, I don’t care if you’re tired. You’ve got to have an extra gear.”
Adam and Nikki Burish pushed each other. It was no different at Madison Edgewood High School for the late Steve Rothering, who coached them both.
“When she got to high school, she stuck her neck out and said she wanted to play with the boys and she did,” Adam recalled. “We’d go to practice and games together.”
Achieving a Badgers dream
It was at Edgewood that Adam Burish thought “I could be a good player” and “I decided I really liked hockey and I wanted to be good at it.”
What followed was a dream come true.
“My goal in athletics was to play for the Badgers. That was it. It was never the NHL. Or the Stanley Cup. I got really hungry for that (hockey) when I was at Edgewood.”
Then with the Chicago Blackhawks, Adam Burish celebrates with the Stanley Cup after winning Game 6 of the NHL Stanley Cup hockey finals on June 9, 2010, in Philadelphia.
MATT SLOCUM / AP PHOTO
But he did win the Cup with the Blackhawks. And he has been often asked how his pro success has compared to winning it all at the collegiate level.
“I tell people they’re very different,” he said. “The Stanley Cup is really big and powerful and it’s a trophy that is recognized around the world.
“But I wouldn’t trade winning a national championship at Wisconsin and those teammates for anything in the world. That sure means a lot to me.”
In 2024, Burish was inducted into the UW Athletic Hall of Fame. In June, he will be enshrined into the Madison Sports Hall of Fame. Pretty heady stuff for the local kid. Tank.
In either case, Adam included Nikki and emphasized, “That’s a family award. Part of that is what she did, too. That’s what is pretty neat for me.
“Her and I did something that I don’t know will ever be done again. Winning national championships. Same sport. Same year. Both captains of our team.
“I’m proud of my sister … and that we got to live out our dreams.”
Surviving the Vegas concert shooting
At the end of the interview, Burish was asked for another reflection. A painful one from October 2017 and the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival on the Las Vegas Strip.
Burish was there with friends on the final day listening to Jason Aldean when gunfire erupted from the window of a nearby hotel on the assembled crowd below.
The shooter, who died by suicide, killed 60. Over 400 were injured. On the anniversary of the concert, Burish will text people who were involved.
“I think about it a few times a year,” he said. “It comes up. Or people ask questions about it. I was fortunate. I was lucky. That was a coin flip experience for me.
“I had a text message written to my parents and my sister. I didn’t want to scare them but I had a message written saying ‘goodbye and I love you’ to my family that day.
“People always say it can happen really quick. I thought I was staring at it (death) straight on that night.”
He never sent the text.