CSJ expert Billy Reed
Long sports day reveals athletic roller coaster
My Saturday got off to an uplifting start when I interviewed Bob Beatty, the Trinity High football coach, on my radio show, which begins at 11 a.m. on WGTK-970AM in Louisville. Unlike a lot of football coaches, Beatty tempers his passion for coaching with a wry, self-deprecating sense of humor. It was fun to talk with him about Trinity’s dream season – a 14-0 record in which the Shamrocks ranked No. 1 not only in Kentucky but in six national polls, including Catholic Sports Network.
When a team has been as dominant as Trinity was this fall, it’s tough for the coach to find the right balance of pride and humility. Beatty does a good job of it. He doesn’t’ discourage talk about polls and historical comparisons – the Rocks may well have been the best team ever in Kentucky – but he doesn’t take them very seriously, either.
After that pleasant hour, I met my friends Dan and Betsy Farley for the two-hour trip to Bloomington, Ind., where Coach Tom Crean’s unbeaten Hoosiers were playing host to Kentucky in a nationally televised battle of unbeatens. Once the best non-conference rivalry in the nation, the IU-UK series went into decline after Bob Knight was fired at IU in 2001.
Oh, every now and then the teams played a game worthy of their tradition. By and large however. But none of Knight’s successor – Mike Davis, Kelvin Sampson, and Crean — could arouse UK fans the way Knight did. And when Sampson was fired in 2008 due to NCAA recruiting violations, leaving the program in shambles, Crean’s first three Hoosier teams simply weren’t talented enough to compete with UK, especially after John Calipari brought “Worldwide Wes” and his other recruiting connections to Lexington.
Unlike Calipari, who has exploited the one-and-done rule more effectively than any coach in the nation, Crean rejected a quick fix in favor a slower, more traditional building process. But he finally got a major recruiting break-through last spring when 7-foot Cody Zeller decided to stay home and play for the Hoosiers. His older brothers, equally tall and talented, picked Notre Dame and North Carolina.
As both teams got off to promising starts, this UK-IU game became the most anticipated in maybe 20 years. Students lined up outside Assembly Hall in the hope of getting tickets. Scalpers were getting huge dollars for seats near the court. The presence of Dick Vitale certified it as the place to be in college basketball.
Happily, the game lived up to the hype. From long before the opening tip until the students stormed the floor after IU’s 73-72 victory, the atmosphere was big-time college basketball at its best. Hitting three-pointers to offset UK’s superior athleticism, the Hoosiers had a small lead at halftime, pushed it out to 10 midway in the second half, and then withstood a furious UK comeback to seal the win when Christian Watford hit a 25-footer at the buzzer.
The better team didn’t win the game, but so what? It was almost as if the basketball gods had decided that after enduring so much disappointment for so long, the Hoosiers deserved to have something really good happen to them. While Crean refused to claim that the Hoosiers were “back” from their long exile, he understood that the win over UK represented a major milestone on his program’s march back to the NCAA tournament, which it has missed for three years.
All told, it was a feel-good kind of day until I got home late Saturday evening and turned on ESPN, which was showing repeated replays of the ugly brawl that erupted near the end of the Xavier-Cincinnati game. Almost as ugly were the post-game comments of the Xavier players. Instead of showing remorse, they sounded like the Bloods talking about the Crips.
The street-gang mentality has no place in college basketball, as UC Coach Mick Cronin, a former Rick Pitino assistant at Louisville, emphasized forcefully in his post-game remarks. Obviously angry and embarrassed, Cronin said he literally ripped the jerseys off some of his players in the locker room and told them they were a disgrace to the university and to themselves.
So, of course, were the Xavier players. I’ve always believed that the programs from the Catholic universities were a cut above the majority because of the church’s emphasis on self-discipline, integrity, and honor. Well, silly me. The Musketeer program now has a stain that will not quickly be erased.
Unfortunately, the Xavier-Cincinnati brawl cut into the airtime given to the day’s good news. So did the startling revelation that Ryan Braun, the Milwaukee Brewers outfielder who had recently been named the National League’s Most Valuable Player, had tested positive for a performance-enhancing substance. This shattering news came just when major-league baseball thought it had finally put the steroid scandal behind in its rear-view mirror.
As a Cincinnati Reds fan, I had watched Braun lead the Brewers to the championship of the Reds’ division. He and Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals were the two hitters that you absolutely dreaded seeing come to the plate. Now Braun’s career season must be viewed differently. He made the pro forma claim of innocence, but no player has ever tested positive and beat the rap.
The speculation about Braun was juxtaposed against the uplifting news that the Heisman Trophy had been awarded to Baylor quarterback Robert Griffin III, a major P.R. coup for the world’s largest Baptist institution.
Throughout the season, the Heisman front-runner was Andrew Luck, the brilliant Stanford quarterback who almost surely will be the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft. But after Griffin played brilliant in Baylor’s lop-sided win over Texas in the Big 12 championship game, a lot of voters jumped off the Luck truck and onto the Griffin bandwagon.
Like Tim Tebow, Griffin has off-the-field credentials that are just as impressive as his football stats. He has a 3.7 grade-point average and already has completed the requirements for his bachelor’s degree. He also does a lot of work for charities and participates in campus organizations. Heck, he’s even not shy about professing his love of God.
When he eventually goes to the NFL – he has a year of college eligibility remaining should he decide to use it – Griffin surely will join Tebow in giving the nation’s youth an old-fashioned hero who can be trusted to do the right thing. I doubt seriously that Griffin ever will test positive for drugs. I doubt he ever will get caught up in the gangster/hip-hop/ bling mentality that’s driven by selfishness, ego, and avarice.
But who knows? In today’s trouble sports world, all we can do is hope for the best, support the good guys, and continue to deplore the dark forces that work to destroy all that’s inherently good about athletes and the games they play.
