From my perspective, this Illini basketball season began and ended with expletives.
Things got off to a bang — or as Eccentrica Gallumbits might say, a fuck — when I casually MF-bombed Illini recruit Mike LaTulip during a (football) halftime interview. It’s just how people talk. Neither of us paid much mind to it, but the internets got some mileage from the experience, so I got a few extra dollars from Google.
The season ended with a thud, basketball-wise. The final game was dull, except for the profanities. Graphic chants about pole-smoking livened the experience, mightily.
I speak of The Lewinsky.
At Madison’s Kohl Center, during Wisconsin’s 70–56 non-contest with Illinois, two things stood out to me: Brandon Paul drove more in the second half, and our northern neighbors sing choruses about blowjobs.
GRATEFULLY BLUE
I don’t like choosing favorites. Not in any category. What’s your favorite color? Favorite food? Favorite movie?
Stupid questions.
You rarely get much insight from the answers, and the answers rarely reflect the minds of the queried. Besides, favorites are confining. I like variety.
To the question “which B1G school has the best student cheering section?” It depends on what you want. If you want clearly audible profanity, Wisconsin’s The Grateful Red cannot be beat.
“N-I-T, N-I-T!” is damning enough, but predictable.
Bruce
get off
the floor!
Bruce
get off
the floor!
rolled in waves across the Illini bench. That’s effective. No elderly Presbyterian grandmothers clenched their jaws.
I liked their anti-Illini banners. Reds waved white cardboard placards — at appropriate moments, to avoid blocking anyone’s view — featuring digs which, to my mind, added great entertainment value, and demonstrated a unique, distinctly Madisonian mindset. “Bruce Weber has 17 cats!” was my favorite. It’s absurd and abstruse, but I completely got it.
The Reds went after Leonard Myers (sic) directly from the gutter.
Leon-ard
Swa-llows
clap, clap, clap-clap-clap
Leon-ard
Swa-llows
clap, clap, clap-clap-clap
and that was before they went after Meyers’ mother.
The loudest unison came during the lengthy officials’ timeout that followed Josh Gasser and Brandon Paul’s double foul. Forgetting themselves, and being obsessed with skating, The Reds chorused for a return to game action — metaphorically, from a more traditionally Wisconsin-y sport — with obligatory oral-sexual punctuation.
Drop-the-puck!
What-the-fuck?
Illini SUCK dick.
I’m sure we all obsess about fellatio for one reason or another. It doesn’t mean you can’t be a good person, President of the United States, even a man of the cloth. I guess I’m just surprised that the Reds spend so much time on blowjobs and so little on beer, or cheese. They don’t even chant about girls with doughy bottoms.
THE ANSWER MAN
The pathos of Bruce Weber nearly got to me on Sunday, especially as he was looking deep into my eyes, earnestly answering a serious question about simple basketball principles. “I know we’ve all asked this question before,” I said, “but why doesn’t Brandon drive to the basket in the first half?
The question appealed to Weber. He answered it for a long time, and brought it up again on his contractually obligatory Monday morning sleep killer. (He said this yesterday that he’s usually up at 3:30 in the morning — you know, if you want to send him a text — so maybe it’s no big deal for him to get up for the radio.)
It was a trick question, in that I already knew — and you already knew, and everyone already knows — that Bruce Weber does not have the answer. And that’s why he’ll be able to sleep in on Monday, March 19.
Don’t feel sorry for Bruce Weber. He veritably sweated pathos in his Kohl Center postgame, but you can’t empathize with him.
Empathy involves emotions that both counselor and counseled can feel (i.e. are capable of feeling). You and I cannot identify with the pain of being paid $4 million to go somewhere else, and do what we want.
Sympathy is a fake, or feigned response.
Yes, Weber spoke on behalf of others. The Price, Nottingham, McClain and Howard families will also find themselves in transition.
The good news for those families is that the guy who feels worst for them, Bruce Weber, has already earned a king’s ransom driving Illinois basketball to Nittany Lionesque irrelevance. He can pay his $4 million buyout to those four families. Problem solved.
If you still feel sorry for Bruce Weber … well, I’m of two minds. My benevolent side says, “good for you,” because everyone has problems, no matter how rich and privileged.
But then some arrogant Agony Aunt like “Betty” calls the News-Gazette Sports Page, hoping to shame us. (@ 27:17). Actually, “Agony Aunt” is not apt. In that model, you seek the cranky advice you get.
“Betty” is the preachy old crone who gets in your business, uninvited. She is literally holier than thou. “I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m an ordained minister.”
That cues you to listen, because her opinion is more important than yours. She continues, “I have a heaviness in my heart.” She points out how successful Bruce Weber has been, that Weber has 200 wins at Illinois and only a hundred losses. “Quite different from some of the other universities around this world.”
What a drag.
Now we have to feel penitent and remorseful because we don’t like watching bad basketball?
It’s a game, Betty. It’s entertainment. Shame on you for not buying more Jäger bombs at Red Star Liquors, lap dances at Ike Mapson’s Malibu Bay Lounge, or a simple lasagna at Buttitta’s. They went out of business, and didn’t even get a multi-million dollar parachute.
Boo-hoo.
I frequently see the younger Weber daughters, Emily and Christine, at games. They are lovely, and I feel bad seeing them in obvious distress. The eldest, Hannah, rarely comes these days. That’s good. She yells too much, just like her dad.
If you’re anxious or angry about people who say things about their dad, know this: most employees at Illinois don’t pay any attention to basketball. They labor as bi-lingual advisers, answering texts and voice-mails in ill-translating data, trying to help people acclimate to uncomfortable surroundings.
They’re “visiting” lecturers, teaching four classes a week. Under The New System, they’ll never get tenure.
Some of these people really like what they do. Some … well, it’s what they have, and no one offered anything better. They get by. They’d like to have kids, buy a car, or move out of the noisy apartment into a home of their own. They can’t afford it right now, but they get by.
I don’t know how they do it. I had it great, just like the Weber girls have it great.
My dad taught history at Illinois for 37 years. He earned two degrees from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Berkeley. I don’t know that that compares with assisting Purdue to three B1G Championships over 18 years, but I think it’s pretty admirable.
Due to prolific publishing, my dad made full professor when I was three years old. That’s almost as good as a Sweet Sixteen run at SIU.
When he retired, my dad had earned the same amount of money in constant dollars that Emily and Christine’s dad took home between last March — when Illinois lost its 14th game — and this March, when Illinois lost its 14th game. In actual dollars, the comparison becomes farcical.
My point, for the benefit of the Weber daughters, is twofold. Few people at this university are aware of sports, and so they bear no ill will toward your dad. But if your dad keeps crying into microphones about the tragedy of his staff, those people might learn about him, and about his salary. Then they’ll be angry.
There’s also no reason to hate Bruce Weber, except for his irritating habit of bemoaning his situation to roomfuls of journalists, a notoriously underpaid bunch whose entire profession is threatened with termination.