Some may say that I am not the ultimate basketball fan. Tis true. Nowadays I much prefer a baseball game to any other sporting event, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love the game of hoops. Somewhere around eight years ago, the New York Knicks slowly started to deterioriate my passion for watching a game of full court five on five. Isaiah Thomas began to epitmoize what everyone thought the league was, a full squad of ball-hogging babies who got paid $20 million a year to average 20 points, seven assists, 13 turnovers and cause 5.2 million headaches per night. See: Starbury, Steve Francis, Anfernee Hardaway, Eddie Curry etc …
What does this have to do with now? Well, my friends sometimes you have faith rewarded, and othertimes you have faith restored.
About mid-February I started to take my yearly gaze into how Radford University sports were doing. The usual Beer Pong Champs banner still stood proud, and I’m pretty sure we still hold the record for longest keg stand, but this year something different popped out, our basketball team was doing well. This was new ground for me given the starting five were suspended three out of four years of my attendance(could be more or less, let’s just say academic reasons were involved, go figure). Our team ended up doing so well this year, in fact, they ended up beating the high-flying VMI Keydets and landing our second NCAA Tournament berth ever. Enter UNC.
Now, because the Big East and the ACC combined for almost one fourth of the total bids, Radford got screwed out of getting anything higher than a 16 seed in the tourney. Not wanting to waist anyones time by having RU upset an obviously flawed two or three seeded team, we were pitted against tournament regulars UNC, obviously. This is where I’m going to begin to rant.
I get it UNC, you’re a rich and proud basketball school, you have names like Michael Jordan, Jerry Stackhouse and Eric Montross written throughout your school history. You think of Radford history you think of STDs (by the way, do some research, we’ve been number two in total state STDs to JMU since 2000, HA!) and you think of “man that weekend I got wasted, my liver still is messed up.” But for one moment we got to pull for our school to try and pull off the greatest upset in NCAA history.
We got close when we pulled to within two at 11-13, then the inevitable ####storm followed. UNC made it rain like Barack Obama doing a stand-up routine at the Special Olympics. The end result being a 43-point drubbing at the hands of North Carolina.
But this is where RU has it so much better than schools like UNC and Duke. See, for them, making the NCAA Tournament is something that is expected. It has become so commonplace, it’s almost written in the school calendar like spring break. But for those of us that have to wait over a decade to even see our team get the chance to be someone’s first asss-kicking, the game is so much sweeter. We never get to see this stuff. You mention March athletics to a RU student and they’ll ask where the sign-up sheet for the beer pong tournament at the rugby house is. Fact remains, even though we got the crap beat out of us, every single RU student and alum united for the experience of just getting to watch our team in the NCAA Tournament. Sure we didn’t come out victorious, but I can firmly state that everyone connected with RU will remmber our 2008-2009 season far longer than any Tar Heel will remember theirs.