Hoosiers

I was born in New York City, but lived most of my youth and my entire 17 years of practicing law in Wisconsin.

We lived in La Crosse, a town of 45,000 people on the shores of the Mississippi River about 140 miles South of Saint Paul. Though us kids, knowing La Crosse was the sixth largest city in state, thought we lived in a big city, the facts proved otherwise.

I knew there as a city called Milwaukee because the Packers played half their games there. Wisconsin had no professional baseball, the Braves had left for Atlanta and the Brewers had yet to arrive.

Madison was 135 miles to the South and East and all I really knew of it was that you could see the capitol from the Interstate when you drove by on family trips back to the East Coast.

It was not until I was ten or eleven that I got to visit Camp Randall, home of the Wisconsin Badgers. A proud Wisconsin alumni took my Dad, my best friend and I  to a football game. It was my first time to a college football game and my last until I visited Notre Dame my senior year of high school.

I met my wife, Jill, the summer before I headed to Notre Dame. She headed to the University of Wisconsin in Madison with quite a few of my friends from high school.

I visited Jill regularly in Madison and got to attend at least one Badger football game a year. Wisconsin football was awful. Passing was out of the question, we were lucky if we could complete a lateral. The only teams we could compete against in the Big Ten were Indiana and Northwestern. A winning score, either way, was 9-6 or 6-3. Forty years before Russell Wilson touchdowns were a rarity in Wisconsin football.

Wisconsin basketball was played in the old Field House, opened in 1930, that made up the south wall of the football stadium. Tge The red Wisconsin seal emblazoned near the top. No one went.

I only saw one basketball game in the Field House. It was 1978 and we sat in the upper level and every seat was an obstructed view because of the wood beams running from the floor to hold up the roof and the seats in the second and third level.

The snow was melting so the water leaked through the roof and fell on us as we watched Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s last regular season game before he and Michigan State won the national championship. We lost badly.

From 1956, when I was born, to 1995, the Badgers had only eight winning seasons. They notched only two winning records in Big Ten play in these four decades and only finished as high as fourth four times. We went to the NIT tournament three times. In 1993, we made it to the NCAA tournament for the first time in almost fifty years.

Beyond our wildest expectations, the Badgers made the final four in 2000 and then again last year. We lost in the semifinals each time.

Monday night we play in the National Championship game against perennial powerhouse and four time national champion, Duke. We’ll be trying to win our first national championship since 1941 – three quarters of a century ago.

We’ll be coached by Bo Ryan who coached Wisconsin-Plattville in Wisconsin-La Crosse’s Division III conference from 1994 to 1999. Bo’s teams achieved a .906 winning percentage, highest in the country at any level.

Rather than recruiting blue-chippers, Bo recruits mostly Wisconsin and Midwestern kids and teaches strong basketball fundamentals to players who graduate after their senior year.

Monday night in Indianapolis, we’ll be starting four kids who played their high school ball within 150 miles of Madison, including Sam Dekker of Sheboygan, Josh Gasser of Port Washington, Bronson Koenig of La Crosse Aquinas (my high school), and Frank Kaminsky of Lisle, Illinois.

Bo went 4-0 in NCAA Division III championship games when he was coaching at Wisconsin-Platteville. And after trailing in the second half in only five of its regular-season games, the Badgers have faced a second-half deficit in six of its eight postseason games this year, wining all six.

Duke has played in two national championships in the last 15 years in Indianapolis winning both. The team has plenty of blue-chippers, including a couple freshman who could be in the NBA next year.

Even though the bookies have the game as even, to me the game feels like Hickory High versus South Bend Central of Hoosiers fame. After all, they played in Indianapolis too.

More than one tear will be shed in this house if Bo and the boys can beat Goliath Monday night.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Joshua Mayer