Date: Fri 02-Apr-1999

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

commentary-powell-basketball

Full Text:

COMMENTARY: The Boys Of Winter Bring Connecticut An Early Spring

By Chris Powell

Duke had just been beaten by one of his patented floaters in the lane and by

his two free throws, the clutchest ever sunk by a UConn basketball player, but

Khalid El-Amin was still the circus performer seeking to stamp out subtlety

when he ran to the television camera at courtside in St Petersburg and

shouted, "We shocked the world!"

As if the college basketball world -- which includes half the people in the

snow zones of North America, glued to their TV sets to stay out of the cold --

hadn't already noticed.

But maybe it shouldn't have been such a shock. For apart from El-Amin's

increasingly pardonable boisterousness, UConn's national basketball

championship is, after all, only vindication of the old virtues.

Foremost of these are simply hard work and persistence. As with the national

championship won a few years ago by UConn's women's basketball team, this one

didn't happen overnight. Coach Jim Calhoun has put 27 years into it, half of

those at UConn, where he brought the men's program into the highest rank.

But having reached the mountaintop, Calhoun was quick to credit the players of

past years who built the program with him and made it a national contender

even as they never got to the last four games of the NCAA tournament. Their

work, driven by their coach's, had made a championship a possible dream for

their successors.

Under Calhoun, UConn has played a different and more satisfying sort of game

-- not big and hulking and thuggish and smashing and threatening but

audacious, quick, and precise, often with a light touch and even intellect.

Calhoun's teams have had their breakdowns in the tournament, but only practice

makes perfect; Monday night UConn's celebrated depth shown through as it

played what was probably its best game of the season as a team.

Teamwork is another old virtue, and everybody had a piece of this one.

Since Connecticut's new heroes are nearly all young men of color, there may be

a lesson or two in that as well.

Having been too full lately of prattle about "diversity," Connecticut has just

seen what happens when individual merit is the only consideration. Would the

case of Sheff vs. Calhoun survive summary judgment even with Justice Ellen A.

Peters presiding? Certainly it would not with Judge Aaron Ment on the bench.

While "diversity" is nice, only the worst ideologues would let it mess with

anything that really counted. Yet the work of the kids who learned much of

their basketball on city streets and who are now national champions also

raises the old difficult questions about the neglect of so much other human

potential in the city, potential that goes far beyond athletics.

Basketball, especially college basketball, is more intimate than other sports

and more exhilarating for its imperfections, but this championship has to make

Connecticut wonder whether UConn isn't the better part of the Hartford

football stadium plan, a part lately almost forgotten in the furor over

corporate welfare and the complications of moving the downtown steam plant.

"Build it and they will come," the famous sports movie whispered as what would

become Gampel Pavilion was being conceived at Storrs, but the first reaction

to the basketball arena's blueprint was that it was grandiose, way too big.

Just a few years later Gampel was discovered to be way too small, for with a

little help from its university, Connecticut had discovered its only possible

statewide rooting interest -- the only thing that will ever have "Connecticut"

indelibly in its name and never leave, the only thing that might persuade

Darien and Wilton and exclusive places thereabouts near the metropolis that

they really are of a piece with places like Norwich, Enfield, and Torrington.

Having just been smacked in the face by basketball history, who in Connecticut

today can be certain that, 10 or 15 years from now, a football dream might not

be realized too?

Once again the boys (and girls) of winter have brought Connecticut through to

spring in what now seems like a flash. The pussy willows and crocuses are

peeking out; the temperature will be in the 60s this week. In just a few weeks

ago it was going to be the most beautiful place in the world again, and

suddenly it already is.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)