The drought is over

Sporting News, The, Dec 5, 1994 by Steve Buckley

Thanks to Lou Roe, my head is clear as I write these words. Thanks to Gary Trent, my life is laced with fervor. Thanks to Felipe Lopez, I believe in the future of America.

I guess what I'm saying is: Thanks, college basketball, I needed that.

Thank you, schedule maker, for seeing to it that Arkansas, the defending national champion and the top-ranked team in the land, had to play No. 5 Massachusetts (No. 3 in the AP poll), in the Tip-Off Classic in Springfield, Mass., last Friday night.

And thank you, UMass, for so thoroughly whupping the Razorbacks that hoop junkies throughout the country are still buzzing about it 'round the water cooler.

Thank you for the Maui Invitational, which gave us Michigan, Indiana, Maryland and Utah.

Thank you for the Great Alaska Shootout, which gave us Villanova, Louisville, Oklahoma State, Arizona and Minnesota. In fact, this year's Shootout was better than last year's, so I guess we should call it the Greater Alaska Shootout.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

For we have all been living in a void lately, stumbling through life, our weeknights devoid of the games that bring us so much pleasure. We needed games, desperately. The beginning of the college basketball season has brought us games, and just in time, too.

See, our sports impulses are powered by a pair of tiny generators deep inside our noggins, each of them sputtering and spitting and forever working overtime in their lifelong quest to keep us entertained. On the night Kirk Gibson hit his home run for the ages at Dodger Stadium, there was smoke coming out of my generators. Ditto the day Doug Flutie went to the air in Miami. When the Rangers won the Stanley Cup last spring -- you know, back when there was hockey -- the generators damn near exploded.

Alas, the machinery has turned old and rusty in recent months. The reason: no sports. The baseball players stopped playing baseball and the hockey players stopped playing hockey, and suddenly there was that terrible void in our lives. I'd turn on the TV in search of baseball players, and I would find them, only they were wearing suits and totin' brief cases. And there's something very sad about that. For one thing, all that baseball talent is wasted. For another, I happen to know most baseball players carry only C.D. players, discs and word-search puzzles in those fancy brief cases. (You were expecting maybe Dostoyevsky?)

Sorry, but the specter of whiny Rangers pitcher Kevin Brown in a business suit didn't cut it. And the National Football League season hasn't cut it. There hasn't been a true, you-might-be-missing-some-thing-great-if-you-don't-watch-the-game team in the NFL this season, and, though Drew Bledsoe's 70-pass game against the Vikings was pretty special, the fact is Drew's Patriots have been otherwise unspectacular. The NBA? Please. Great bodies, bad games. Karl Malone, Alonzo Mourning and Shaquille O'Neal are exciting as individuals, but the game itself -- that is, the NBA brand of basketball -- could use a boot in the rear.

No baseball. No hockey. Lackluster NFL season. NBA players who are pretty nifty when it comes to pumping up their high-tops and winning slam-dunk competitions but are a tad hazy on how to spell T-E-A-M. No, I needed more. Lots more.

I pulled up a chair and locked out the world last Friday night, because my television set was screaming at me to sit down and watch college basketball. Well, it wasn't my television, per se. Turns out it was a Mr. Dick Vitale, the loud, bald man from Sarasota who turns up on our sets just about this time every year to clue us in as to what is awesome, baby, and what is not.

Now I have to confess that I had always found Mr. Vitale to be about as entertaining as a train wreck, but this has all changed. His very presence on ESPN means college basketball season is here, so, yes, ol' Dick was a mighty welcome fellow at my place last week. If he wants to say UMass guard Derek Kellogg is "big on the perimeter handling the rock," that's OK with me. If he wants to say UMass wants to go into halftime with "Uncle Mo on their side," that's OK. And if Dick wants to make outlandish statements of the obvious, such as "Arkansas Coach Nolan richardson really knows how to win," and "UMass is a legitimate Top 10 team," that, too, is fine.

What counts is that he was there on the tube the other night, talking hoops with play-by-play man Sean McDonough. Talking college hoops. Talking Arkansas vs. UMass.

Awesome, baby.

Iguess this is as good a time as any to toss up a disclaimer from 3-point land: I am a graduate of the University of Massachusetts. Lived in Brown House. Hung out at the Bluewall. Wrote for the Collegian. But you must believe me when I tell you my near breathless expectation for this college basketball season is only partly due to the fact that, like Doctor J, Richard Gere and Natalie Cole, I went to UMass.

Again, it was the hunger for games. Real games. Team games. To prove my point, let's check out, say, St. John's. St. John's used to be called the Redmen, before the school changed the nickname to the Red Storm, and the hope is that the change will help turn things around for a team that went only 12-17 last season. Oh, and it won't hurt that the Redmen -- um, Red Wave ... I mean Red Storm -- landed the nation's mostly heavily recruited schoolboy in Felipe Lopez. Talk about pizzazz: Lopez is a lanky, downtown-shooting hotshot who looks as if he just stepped out of an MTV video; when he scored 12 points in his St. John's debut, a 93-63 stroll past Dartmouth in the Joe Lapchick Tournament, optimists quickly pointed out that once upon a time Chris Mullin also scored 12 in his St. John's debut. Pessimists, meanwhile, pointed out that Lopez shot only 3 for 13 from the floor, but they were bowled over by a Red Storm of criticism.