Friday's email brought interesting marketing news from the Big Ten Network about their since- initiated schedule of 36 Big Ten basketball games they're labeling "THE BIG TEN'S GREATEST GAMES."
Having gone thru the list of ballgames from their press release, http://www.bigtennetwork.com/corporate/PR110607.asp a few things stood out immediately to me, and perhaps you'll agree.
Not so surprisingly, ten of the 36 featured ballgames involve IU basketball teams from 1985-2003, including the famous 1985 game against Purdue that featured the chair Coach Knight threw across the court -and around the world according to some websites I've seen over the years, which showed it as a satellite orbitting the earth.
Some of the games make sense but there are plenty that I'd have preferred seeing and can't help but wonder why they're not here, given the caliber of players involved.
For instance, there are none of the 1980's classics against Michigan featuring Steve Alford and or Glenn Rice that made CBS-TV so gleeful for the compelling nature of the games.
If ESPN Classic had existed back then, they'd have been in heavy rotation.
And what about the great game where Georgetown came into Assembly Hall in 1980 or '82 and shot crazy, crazy 'lights out' basketball in the first half to the astonishment of the packed arena, something like 66%, but IU still found a way to crawl out of a hole and come back to win? That's one I'd like to see.
(A propos of nothing, I can't help but wonder once the NCAA football season is over, will ESPN Classic re-air the best of the ABC/ESPN Saturday basketball games on Sunday mornings at 9 a.m. like they do for their football broadcasts, which have featured some great games, including that great UK vs. Louisville match that I watched from beginning to end when it was LIVE, as well as the encore broadcast. For my money, that's the best college football game of the year, though I hold out hopes that the U-M will surprise me and do something noteworthy in their last three games of the year:
tonight against UVA in their last game at the Orange Bowl -where my nephew Mario, a U-M junior will be tonight, and where in 1971, I saw my very first U-M game, the famous "Fifth Down" game against Tulane when I was ten years old-
next week against Virginia Tech in the land of the rabid Hokie fans, Blacksburg,
and then up in Chestnut Hill to close the year out against Boston College and Matt Ryan as they seek to go to a BCS Bowl game on a Saturday night game.
SouthBeachHoosier trivia: Boston College was my #3 college choice, after U.S.C., ie. Southern Cal and IU. )
I'll have to write the folks at ESPN a note about this good idea and if I hear back, I'll post it here.
Below are the ten IU ballgames to be broadcast.
____________________________________
excerpted from
http://www.bigtennetwork.com/corporate/PR110607.asp
November 6, 2007
Network to Televise 36 Classic Big Ten Basketball Contests
Fans can re-live some of the 'Greatest Games' in college basketball history
CHICAGO - Intense rivalries, improbable buzzer-beaters and impossible comebacks. These are the ingredients of some of the most exciting moments in Big Ten history.Throughout the winter, basketball fans will have the opportunity to re-live 36 epic match-ups on the Big Ten Network series, "THE BIG TEN'S GREATEST GAMES."
The series will highlight some of the best moments in the rich histories of all 11 Big Ten basketball programs.
Series producers have interviewed many legendary players and coaches from those games along with those who were on hand to cover the event. Their insight and memories will be integrated into each episode.
Big Ten Network President Mark Silverman said the "Greatest Games" series honors the legacy of the conference's past, and will be a consistent presence year-round.
"As a fan, you never forget your team's most emotional wins or heartbreaking losses. We know fans will enjoy watching these games," Silverman said.
Tuesday, December 4th Kentucky at Indiana - 12/18/1990
Indiana coach Bob Knight used a little tough love to motivate Calbert Cheaney, who scored a dismal four points in the first half, and apparently the tactic worked. Cheaney scored 19 in the second half as the Hoosiers rallied from a halftime deficit. A three-pointer by Kentucky's Jamal Mashburn tied the game at 82 with 55 seconds to go, but foul trouble plagued Kentucky and gave Indiana the edge, as 10 of the Hoosier's final 18 points came from the foul line. Indiana eventually hung on to defeat the Wildcats 87-84.
December 18th Indiana at Northwestern - 1/11/1988
Playing without three of its starters, Northwestern ended a six-game losing streak with an upset of defending national champion Indiana, 66-64. The Wildcats shot a perfect 21-for-21 from the free-throw line. Shon Morris led the Wildcats, scoring 10 points, grabbing seven rebounds, dishing out four assists and making many other key plays that didn't show up in the boxscore. Morris and his teammates seemingly dove after every loose ball, leading Bobby Knight to comment, "they just completely outplayed us."
Wednesday, January 2nd Iowa at Indiana - 3/1/2003
Playing through injury and sickness, Iowa took Indiana into overtime before eventually falling 91-88. Bracey Wright scored 21 points and sank the game-winning 3-pointer for IU. Jared Reiner had a career-high 25 points and 17 rebounds for Iowa.
Tuesday, January 8th Indiana at Purdue - 1/18/1994
Having been swept the previous year by their intrastate rival, Purdue looked to make a statement, and did just that. Down the stretch the lead changed hands several times, and when regulation came to an end, the game was all knotted up. In the end, the Boilermakers hung on to defeat eighth-ranked Indiana 83-76 and move into a four-way tie for first in the Big Ten.
Indiana at Illinois - 3/1/1987
On Senior Night, Illinois led by as many as 10 in the second before Indiana rallied and had an opportunity to win on the final possession. Following a timeout, the Hoosiers worked the clock down to seven seconds when Steve Alford missed what would have been a game-winning three-pointer. After a missed free throw by the Illini's Steve Bardo, Alford heaved a desperation shot from mid-court that just missed, giving Illinois the 69-67 victory.
Indiana at Ohio State - 2/17/1991
In a game that saw the lead change hands 16 times in the second half, neither team could manage a lead of more than six points. Indiana freshman phenom Damon Bailey scored 32 points without committing a single turnover while Ohio State forward and current Big Ten Network analyst Jim Jackson racked up 30 points, 11 rebounds and a game-winning assist. However, it was Treg Lee who sank the winning shot for the Buckeyes, lifting them to a 97-95 victory.
Indiana at Wisconsin - 2/16/1987
The Badgers took the second-ranked Hoosiers to triple-overtime before finally falling 86-85. Although Indiana's Steve Alford broke the school's all-time scoring record (2,192 points), he missed some opportunities to win the game in the first two overtimes. Instead, it was the Hoosiers' Dean Garrett who scored the game-winning basket with just four seconds left.
Purdue at Indiana - 2/23/1985
In what some believed to be an attempt to energize his struggling team, Indiana coach Bob Knight received three technical fouls, including one for throwing a chair across the court. Knight's frustration was sparked by consecutive foul calls against his players just five minutes into the game with Indiana trailing 11-6. Despite Knight and the Hoosiers' efforts, however, they still fell to the Boilermakers, 72-63.
Indiana at Minnesota - 2/9/2000
When Minnesota star John-Blair Bickerstaff was carried from the court on a stretcher after a foul by Indiana's A.J. Guyton, sophomore Joe Przybilla stepped in and scored a career-high 33 points, including the game-winner with only four seconds left, leading Minnesota to a 77-75 victory.
Tuesday, March 11th Illinois at Indiana - 3/5/1989
The two Big Ten powerhouses went back and forth for most of the game before some last-second heroics turned this game into one for the ages. Indiana's Jay Edwards hit an unthinkable shot tying the game at 67 with two seconds left. Illinois quickly called a time out to set up the final play. Nick Anderson came off a pair of screens, caught a perfect pass and drilled a 30-footer as the buzzer sounded, giving the Illini a 70-67 victory.
For more information regarding the Big Ten Network, visit www.BigTenNetwork.com.
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In the Heart of a Great Country, Beats the Soul of Hoosier Nation
The South Florida I Grew Up In
Excerpts from Joan Didion's Miami, 1987, Simon & Schuster:
In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country, el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...
"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the Floridas, thought I," John James Audobon wrote to the editor of The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administations now have found South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly.
At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accomodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...
In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accomodated...
Hallandale Beach Blog
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change. http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.
Sadly for its residents, Hallandale Beach is where even the easily-solved or entirely predictable quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and the unsatisfactory management and coordination of resources and personnel.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change. http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hollywood in Cartoons, The New Yorker
Hollywood in Cartoons, The New Yorker
Hollywood in cartoons, 10-21-06 Non-Sequitur by Wiley, www-NON-SEQUITUR.COM
Miami Dolphins
Sebastian the Ibis, the Spirited Mascot of the University of Miami Hurricanes
Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders, April 28, 2007
Of cheerleaders past and present
Given South Florida's unique version of the melting pot -con salsa- demographics and mindset, these women in the photo above are surely what most South Floridians would consider attractive women. But for this observer, who's spent hours & hours at IU cheerleader tryouts and who has known dozens of cheerleaders -and wannabes- in North Miami Beach, Bloomington, Evanston and Washington, D.C., the whole time I was watching these members of the Dolphins' squad perform, I couldn't help but compare them and their routines to those of some IU friends of mine who ALWAYS showed true Hoosier spirit & enthusiasm.
Sitting at my table right near the stage and still later, while watching the long lines of Dolphin fans of all ages waiting to snap photos of themselves with the cheerleaders, I couldn't help but think about those friends who always left me and other Hoosier fans feeling positive & optimistic.
Was there anyone I saw in Davie who possessed these valuable intangibles: the dancing precision of IU Red Stepper -and Captain- Gail Amster, my talented and spirited Phi Beta Kappa pal from Deerfield (IL), who always sat next to me in our Telecom. classes as we took turns entertaining the other; the ebullient spirit & energy of two Hoosier cheerleaders -and captains- from Bloomington, Wendy (Mulholland) Moyle & Sara Cox; the hypnotic, Midwestern, girl-next-door sexiness of Hoosier cheerleader Julie Bymaster, from Brownsburg; or, the adorable Southern girl-next-door appeal of former Hoosier Pom squader Jennifer Grimes, of Louisville, always such a clear distraction while sitting underneath the basket?
Nope, not that I could see. But then they were VERY tough acts to follow!!!
And that's not to mention my talented & spirited friends like Denise Andrews of Portage, Jody Kosanovich of Hammond & Linda Ahlbrand of Chesterton, all of whom were dynamic cheerleaders -and captains- at very large Hoosier high schools that were always in the championship mix, with Denise's team winning the Ind. football championship her senior year when she was captain -just like in a movie. That Denise, Jody & Linda all lived on the same dorm floor, just three stories above me at Briscoe Quad our freshman year, was one of the greatest coincidences -and strokes of luck for me!- that I could've ever hoped for.
You could hardly ask for better ambassadors of IU than THESE very smart, sweet and talented women. In a future SBH post, I'll tell the story of one of the greatest Hoosiers I ever met, the aforementioned Wendy Mulholland, the Bloomington-born captain and emotional heart of the great early '80's IU cheerleading squads, and the daughter of Jack Mulholland, IU's former longtime Treasurer. The acorn doesn't fall far from a tree built on a foundation of integrity & community service!
(After he retired, Mr. Mulholland was the first executive director of the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County. I used to joke with Wendy that her dad's name was the one that was permanently affixed to the bottom of my work-study checks for years, while I worked at the Dept. of Political Science's Library, first, at the Student Building in the old part of campus, and then later, after it was refurbished, in magnificent Woodburn Hall, my favorite building on campus.)
In that future post, I'll share some reflections on Wendy's great strength of character and personality; my intentions of returning to Bloomington a few weeks before Fall '82 classes started, so I could help Wendy train and work-out to rehab her knee, so she'd feel confident in trying-out for the squad again, following a bad knee injury that'd left her physically-unable to try-out for the squad the previous spring, a big disappointment to those of us who cared about both Wendy and the team; my incredulity at, quite literally, running into Wendy while walking down a sidewalk one afternoon a few years later in Evanston, IL, when we were astonished to discover we were both living there, with me trying to hook on with a Windy City advertising agency, and Wendy then-attending Kellogg (KGSM) at Northwestern, right when the WSJ had named Kellogg the #1 Business School in the country.
I'll also share a story about Wendy performing a true act of kindness towards me in 1982, when I was having a real emergency, and she went above-and-beyond what I had any logical reason to expect. Yet, Wendy, along with her very helpful dad, Jack, came through for me when I was in a very bad time crunch. I've never forgotten Wendy's kindness towards me, and her true Hoosier spirit.
There's NOTHING I wouldn't do for Wendy Mulholland.
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