Tear the Scab Off and Heal, Hoosier Basketball Fans

    IU has a new basketball coach hired a couple days ago in the 63 year-old former super player Mike Woodson, acquired for a hefty price in the ending week of March Madness 2021.  The entire Division I tourney this end of winter into spring is being played in Indiana for reasons of Covid-19 protocols. Meanwhile, the Hoosiers finished poorly and are not there! Guys are transferring after the latest unsuccessful coach is fired in Bloomington, my dear home town of sports and nostalgia. However, I recognize the curses of such nostalgia, and now we must exercise those gods and demons of the past, while resurrecting others... 

 

    We, the Hoosier faithful, have had other promising new coaches since the departure of legendary Bob Knight's forced  replacement Mike Davis, three times in the last decade plus, in Kelvin Sampson, Tom Crean, and Archie Miller. They all tried. Of course they did. Paid good money. Sampson got caught for cheating, and he learned from it, while now his mighty good Houston Cougars will face another former Indiana connection in the well coached Scott Drew's Baylor Bears. Two Texas teams vying for college basketball greatness, a place us Indiana fans use to know and revel in. We loved it. But again, this love for the past helps us torment ourselves in the present and since, since we have had the joys and delights of being the best, the last team standing

    Then there is Gonzaga and UCLA on the other side of the brackets of the Final of this spring, as all of us are surviving the pandemic; the bracketology that I have failed miserably in predicting in our family brackets challenge, because I guessed heavily on Big-Ten teams, highly rated but all failed pretty spectacularly, which lead to my ruin . Gonzaga is the best of the present, and UCLA has been the best of the past. They go head to head, a rare match up from the West Coast.

Ghosts. Those are the ones that haunt us, tantalize us, drive some of us to be less family-oriented than we should be, less committed to church or other good causes than we ought to be, mesmerizing me with the hopes of a great victory over some ranked team, or a good old fashioned beat down of a marginal one.

   Indiana is supposed to be both the giant and the giant killer, as it was in the past. Fun to watch, like living out the fantasies of Bible and adventure stories, all wrapped into one.

   The Indiana tradition of excellence in roundball in Bloomington started long before my parents moved there in 1967. The second year of the NCAA tourney, in 1940, back in the Great Depression, those old time Hoosiers won the crown, a good year plus before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in the Pacific. They followed up with another championship banner at the end of the Korean War in 1953. But then enter the former Army coach Robert Montgomery Knight, and the really good times were in session.

   The heralded 1976 undefeated team, followed by the "Celebrate Good Times" Isaih Thomas-led Hurry'n Hoosiers of '81, and then finally the poised and unruffled overachieving Steve Alford champions of 1987, Knight's last of three. We struggled to see Knight not get back to much success, Duke overwhelming a very talented 1992 Final Four squad, and then fading off into ignominy. The new century brought the zero-tolerance policy, the firing, and the litany of coaches since, to include short lived assistant and former player Dan Dakich.

  Ghosts, goblins, demons, and witches have haunted us since. Players from Indiana who avoid coming. Others that do but leave early, or play injured, or just end up being not good enough.

   It has been too long since any March success. We are haunted. We need to excise the ghosts and phantasms of seasons past.

   Perhaps Gonzaga going undefeated in a few days will allow us stalwart hangers-on of former greatness of the 70s team to excise the mystical power of that era, to move on and let us open up our souls to a future team without the pressure of those past expectations.

   Mike Woodson had to deal with those hopes all four years in Bloomington, and he never met them as a player. 

   Now he is here in the twilight of his career as a coach, doing the same thing as the others attempted for the last twenty one years. A life time of no banners.

    The quest for number six. 

    Since the fifth banner in 1987 when I was in high school, Kentucky has added three, North Carolina four, and Duke five. Even UCLA added another, to top out at eleven total.

   UConn and Villanova had added multiple rings, and other schools have done well: Florida, Kansas.

   Let's see what the next six years bring with Woodson and those that he can convince to play in B-town. Six is the key to making the miracle and the mystery unfurl.

   The wound of recent decades will be healed, in time.

   We hope.

  Go, Hoosiers. C'mom Mike, bring us home.