Being Johnny on the spot and not even really thinking about it very much, I replied back with this tweet, "You're not going to win a lot of friends with that tweet."
After thinking about it for minute – I typed "Herb Brooks told Zach Parise to go to UND” and then I did a search on Google.com – the article below written by John Gilbert was one of the results that came up during my search.
After thinking about it for a while – I decided that this was pretty much how I remembered the story. I would be willing to bet that others probably remember the same story from back in the day when Zach Parise was deciding on going to the University of North Dakota to play for the Fighting Sioux.
To be honest it's been a long time since Zach Parise played his collegiate hockey at UND, so time might have blurred the story line just a bit.
John Gilbert, Duluth Reader --- With them sitting up on the stage, I couldn’t resist asking them: “Have you two thought about the irony that right here, in the backyard of Gopher hockey, it’s taken a Fighting Sioux and a Badger to create the biggest press conference in Minnesota Wild history?”None of this really matters any more because Zach Parise is back in the "State of Hockey" and ready to start his career with the Minnesota Wild – but at least for Sioux fans we can beam with pride because we know that Parise was one of us – for two seasons.
They got a good laugh out of that. “Hopefully everyone can forget both of us didn’t go to play for the Gophers,” Parise said. “That was about 10 years ago...I’ve moved on, obviously; hopefully everybody else can.” A decade ago, in their college days, Parise was a star center for North Dakota, and Sutor was a defensive stalwart for the University of Wisconsin.
There was a bit of a Twin Cities controversy about Parise, who played for a prep-school program run by his dad, J.P. Parise, at Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Faribault, and was pursued by all sorts of colleges. The word out of Grand Forks was that Herb Brooks had recommended Parise go to North Dakota. Brooks thought that was a bit of Sioux-boosterism, and told me that he discussed the matter with J.P., the popular former North Star who served as Herbie’s coach for that one long and injury-filled season with the North Stars. Brooks was less than thrilled that the Gophers had veered away from the all-Minnesota solidarity he had helped generate, but he said he advised the Parises that there were a lot of good colleges out there. Brooks told me he added something to the effect that, “if you want to go into business, go to Harvard; if you want to be a hockey player, go to North Dakota...”
