Blast from the past... Parise's college choice

Today started out a little rough for me – it seemed like everything that could go wrong – did go wrong. So after sitting down for a few moments to collect my thoughts and while I was sitting on my couch monitoring twitter  this tweet (that is posted below) came across my twitter feed. Just for disclosure, the tweet in question was from a person that happens to be a Gopher hockey that I follow on twiter.com.

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?”

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...”

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.  

Parise tight lipped about where he's going

This is one of those stories that aren’t going to go away, until we know where former Fighting Sioux All-American forward Zach Parise is headed. Zach Parise hasn’t tipped his hat where he is going either, only to say that he wants to re-sign with the New Jersey Devils. You can rest assured that Parise and his agent are going to get a bunch of offers from a lot of teams.

Joan Niesen, FSN.COM --- Parise said he treats his impending free agency as something he can take advantage of, but it would seem that balancing his sanity with the desire to get the most out of this summer is something he's grappling with daily. Talk to Parise for five minutes and who knows how many times he'll say he wants to minimize the stress of the process. However, coming home to Minneapolis this offseason, though a natural move, is unlikely to mitigate the constant scrutiny.

Parise grew up in Bloomington, Minn. His father, J.P., played for the North Stars, and Parise still keeps a house in the Twin Cities, which he returned to last Friday from New Jersey. That's why he made an appearance Wednesday at the Defending the Blue Line game on the University of Minnesota campus, where he signed autographs and watched from the bench. As an unsigned player, Parise did not compete with the local hockey stars who took the ice. Instead, he subjected himself to the barrage of questions he's mostly unable to answer.

On Tuesday morning Paul Allen had Michael Russo beat writer of the Minnesota Wild from the Minneapolis Star and Tribune on the KFAN 100.3 and the two of them discussed the Parise free agency story and where they think that Zach might go. Russo seems to think that if the Wild get Parise that they might have a good chance to get Predators’ defenseman Ryan Sutter. You can listen to P.A.’s interview of Russo from the podcast that is embedded below in the blog post.

Parise's press conference

Check this out, former Fighting Sioux and current New Jersey Devils forward Zach Parise is a hot commodity off the ice as well as two reporters almost end up slugging it out over positioning at the press conference.

Here is a great description of the incident from via Jill Painter of Inside the Kings,

There was a big scrum around Devils winger Zach Parise, and Parise almost had to break up a fight between reporters. The two men were jockeying for position with their tape recorder and microphone, respectively, when one yelled ``Stop it!’’ while Parise was talking.

The reporter smacked his notebook against the microphone, then used the spirals to run it down the microphone to impair the sound. Eventually, Parise was hit in the face by the microphone.

``Do we need to start this over?’’ Parise asked the men.

If they were wearing gloves, they would’ve dropped them right there.

Related articles

• CSN: Parise mum on his impending free agency

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