Welcome to my corner of illininews.com. While there will certainly be the time and place to break down what’s happening on the court, I would like to use this opportunity to tell you a little bit about myself, and why you should care at all what I think about Illini basketball…
While I currently live and work in St. Louis, MO, I grew up and went to high school in Collinsville, IL, living and dying with the Illini basketball program. Like every young man in Collinsville in the 80’s and 90’s, I dreamed of one day wearing the purple and white, and playing for what was briefly during my high school years, the winningest program in America. Alas, yours truly was a bit too short, a bit too slow, and had (has) a broken jumper. That didn’t stop me from becoming the basketball nerd that I am to this day. While I sit and write this, there are several memories that lead directly to the passion I still maintain for the program today:
I’m 34 years old, and while I have faint memories of watching the Illini in the mid eighties, the formative season for most any Illini fan my age was obviously the 1988-89 campaign. On January 16th, 1989, shortly after watching the Flyin’ Illini beat Georgia Tech and briefly take over the #1 spot in the polls, I went to my first game at Assembly Hall.* On this day they beat Michigan for the first time that season. They would sweep the regular season meetings, but I’m sure we all know how that third meeting turned out…
*Since 1989, I have attended at least one game at Assembly Hall almost every year, and am a regular at the Braggin Rights game against those evil Missouri Tigers.
April 1st, 1989 was the date. My mom had bought two tickets at an auction for a St. Louis Blues hockey game that afternoon, which was going to be my first NHL game. After a rugged contest in the Elite Eight victory over Syracuse, which, if memory serves, left Steve Bardo with a bloody jersey, there was absolutely no way my dad Rich and I were going to that hockey game. Instead, we took to the recliners and watched the gut wrenching loss to a Michigan team that was coached by a newly promoted Steve Fisher. As painful as 2005 was, 1989 was truly the one that got away.
After those Flyin’ Illini moved on, the program was hit with probation over the Deon Thomas recruiting scandal. Let’s just say there were no tears shed here when Bruce Pearl lost his job… This led to my next monumental Illini memory, an underrated score for the program that hit very close to my Collinsville home. In the fall of 1991, the McDonald’s All American guard Richard Keene* had narrowed his college choices down to three schools: Duke, Indiana and Illinois. I watched Rich play almost every game in his high school and college careers; he was by any measure my hero growing up. I wore #24 all through grade school, and was the king of the no look pass that rarely found its target. While it seems quaint in the year 2012, in 1991 my dad called down to the Collinsville athletic office on decision day to find out where Rich was going to college. I’ll never forget him, with Collinsville athletic director Frank Pitol on the other end of the phone, saying “he’s going to Illinois!” We were going to get to watch our hometown hero play for the Illini.
*The Peoria guys get a lot of well deserved credit for bringing the program back from probation, but Richard Keene is an underappreciated piece of Illini history. After the recruiting scandal, a guy who started the McDonald’s game in the same backcourt as Jason Kidd spurned the advances of Coach K and Bobby Knight, stayed home, and paved the way for other major recruits to do the same.
If you’re taking the time to read this, you have lived through the near greatness of the Peoria Manual guys, the travesty of watching Bill Self walk away, and the absolute thrill of the 2005 title game. I’ll put my X’s and O’s up against any other guy who is past his prime but still loves the game, and will be here for analysis after the games this season. Along with that, we’ll dip into some history of the program on those slow weeks, and most of all, I will do my best to give the perspective of this loyal and lifelong fan. Here’s to what is hopefully a nice final season for a deserving group of seniors, and the start of something special with Coach Groce.
Feel free to email me at jeffreyrthomason@gmail.com. Twitter: @jefft24