Sweet Sixteen Hype

Paducah native Irvin S. Cobb once wrote, "Until you go to Kentucky and with your own eyes behold a Derby, you ain't been nowhere and you ain't seen nothing." I tend to agree with Mr. Cobb, but I think the same applies to the Kentucky Boys' Sweet Sixteen. "You ain't been nowhere and you ain't seen nothing" until with your "own eyes behold" a Sweet Sixteen.

On Pick and Roll I've posted that March is Kentucky's Mardis Gras. I'm only half joking about that. I do think that the Commonwealth's passion for basketball culminates in a winter/spring celebration of a cultural phenomena that sets us apart from many parts of the nation. I also think it makes us brothers to several parts of the nation that share our love for basketball. I'm not joking about that.

Kentuckians are basketball mad. I'm not a native of the state. I was born in Miami, Florida, and I cut my teeth on Miami Dolphins football and University of Alabama football (my parents lived in Dothan, Alabama, for a long time before moving to Miami). I really didn't know of any sports outside of football and baseball. I often dreamed of playing football for Bear Bryant and then Don Shula, and my brother and I spent endless hours playing football on the rough bermuda grass in our backyard in Hialeah.

In 1972, my father, who is a native Kentuckian, moved my family to Louisville. We moved up in the middle of March Madness, and Denny Crum's Cardinals made their first run to the Final Four. I have no recollection of the sport before we moved to Louisville, but I can remember thinking that Kentuckians were insane. And, maybe they are between October and the first week of April.

The following season, my father started taking me to Kentucky Colonels games in Freedom Hall. Louie Dampier, Dan Issel, Artis Gilmore were all on that team. I had favorites, too, like Ron "The Plumber" Thomas and Wendell Laettner, who was also a favorite with many women in Louisville. Those games in Freedom Hall were as if my father handed me some powerful drug that was instantly addictive. I was hopelessly hooked and have been since one of those winter nights so long ago in Louisville.

I never quit liking football, but a metal hoop and a red, white, and blue basketball joined the posters of Mercury Morris, Bob Griese, and Paul Warfield in my bedroom. My brother and I put that metal hoop on the top of our closet door, and we played all the big rivals of our favorite basketball teams right there in our room. We played the Tennessee Volunteers, Memphis State, and the hated Indiana Pacers. My parents wasted many footsteps coming in to our room and telling us to be quiet.

I don't even remember which year it was, but a neighbor two doors down from us put a basketball goal on the front of his garage. His name was Bill Venenman, and he was crippled from a severe bout with polio from his childhood. We called him "Mr. V." Mr. V had an endless enthusiasm for the game of basketball, and he had two favorite teams: the Kentucky Wildcats and the Western Kentucky University Hilltoppers. He had gone to Western when Ed Diddle had some of his best teams. There were times when he would sit in his wheelchair and regale us kids with stories of the Wildcats and the Hilltoppers and some of the great high school basketball teams he remembered from his childhood.

Mr. V. knew what he was doing when he erected a basketball goal. He knew that every kid in our neighborhood would adopt the driveway in front of his garage their local basketball court. I don't know how many hours I spent in their driveway, but the Venemans never tired of us kids playing basketball there. If it got too late in the evening, they shooed us away.

After two or three years in Kentucky, basketball was as much a part of me as the blood that coursed through my young veins. Once, when I brought home a bad report card, my parents banned me from playing or watching basketball for nearly a month. I thought I was going to die. They wouldn't even let me shoot baskets at the metal hoop on my closet door. I would've taken a thousand whippings to avoid that February without basketball.

I still think that punishment kept me from ever making the basketball team at Male High School, which kept me from a college scholarship and kept me out of the NBA (Pick and Roll has deadpan humor even when I'm talking, so please realize that the previous statement is written in jest).

What does this have to do with the Sweet Sixteen? I'll tell you. It has a lot to do with it. See, I'm not unique. There are probably more than a million other Kentuckians who have had the exact same experience. There's probably several thousand that had the same experience, but they made their high school basketball team and lived a dream whether they appreciated it at the time or not.

When my brother got married in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1983, his bride's brother and friends challenged us to a game of three-on-three in their backyard. I was on my second year of coming within a hair's breadth of making Male High's basketball team, so I could play fairly well. My brother and his best friend, Ralph, were just out of college. We went out to their backyard and discovered that they had an eight foot goal.

We beat those guys like rented mules. They wouldn't switch up teams so we just kept pounding them. I bruised my wrists from dunking the ball so many times. Our friend was wearing a WKU sweatshirt, and one of them asked, "Do you play for WKU?" We fell about laughing because by Kentucky standards we were terrible.

We went inside and watched Louisville and Houston play in the Final Four. One of my sister-in-law's brothers said to the other, "these Kentuckians sure are crazy about basketball."

Yep. He nailed it.

So, imagine an arena -- a very large arena -- filled with 20,000 fans cheering on a high school basketball game, and you've got the Sweet Sixteen. It is a celebration. It's as if we've built up to the tournament with three or four months of celebration, and the Sweet Sixteen is a Fat Tuesday spread over the course of four days.

The beauty of the Sweet Sixteen is that the road map for getting there has been marked for generations. It's possible for a team with no regular season victories to get hot in late February and play their way into Sweet Sixteen. There's no RPI. There's no selection committee. There's no Billy Packer or Dick Vitale touting a conference or a particular team located in central North Carolina. There's no seeding. There's no "power conferences."

When a team straps on their shoes at the start of the district tournament, they know the road to the state tournament. They know they have to get by a couple of teams that they've faced twice already during the regular season. They know that if they get into the regional tournament, they're going to have to knock off three teams that are likely rivals and likely have played one or two or three times during the season.

When a team wins the regional championship, their reward is a slot in what I think is the most difficult basketball tournament on the planet. The NCAA tournament is hard, but they play two games a week with a day off in between. In the Sweet Sixteen, a team either has to win four games in four days or four games in three days, depending on where they are seeded. They have to play a semifinal in the morning and a championship game in the evening.

No one is in the Sweet Sixteen because they are a mediocre team from the middlings of a powerful football conference. So, every game is tough, and every player is playing not just for a championship but for a dream.

Those dreams are created when a father hands a son the game of basketball, be it in the form of bounce pass in the living room floor or by taking his boy to a long ago basketball game. The dream is run and rerun thousands of times on an empty court in a neighbor's driveway or in a church parking lot or on a dirt court in front of a tobacco barn. It is a hand off of a culture buffed into the polish of this great Commonwealth. For those fortunate few who play in the Sweet Sixteen there is so much more than banners and trophies. They are fulfilling a dream that is almost instinct.

As I write this, I can almost see that goofy gangly kid of my long ago in the neighbor's driveway counting down the clock -- five...four...three...two...one -- and winning another Sweet Sixteen or NCAA championship for one of his beloved teams.

You ain't been nowhere and you ain't seen nothing.