A college basketball man was lured south, out of the fertile crescent of his sport smack into the gizzard of football country.
There followed certain changes that amazed and amused Ron Hunter.
“I had never seen a SEC football team play on television and last year that’s all I watched,” said the second-year coach at Georgia State, whose previous gig was a long run at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. “When you’re in Indiana and October hits, you don’t watch football any more. It’s a basketball culture.
“But I actually get excited on Saturdays about college football, which I’ve never done in my life.”
Hunter would ask for a little reciprocation from his new neighbors at the start of this college basketball season. For however Atlanta is wired, whatever its leisure preferences may be, it finds itself at the core of Dr. Naismith’s game. We should at least pretend to care.
The fever of this season’s March Madness breaks at the Georgia Dome. It will be Atlanta’s fourth Final Four, falling on the 75th anniversary of the event. In 1977, Marquette’s Al McGuire got his championship here, one step ahead of beginning his second career as a charming precursor to Dick Vitale. Gary Williams almost smiled here when Maryland won it all in 2002. The Florida Gators cranked out a second straight NCAA title here in 2007, greatly interfering with the school’s ability to properly publicize football’s spring game.
This will be the third Final Four in Atlanta in the 2000s, more than any other site save Indianapolis so far this young century.
College basketball loves us.
“When you talk to other coaches they love having their convention here (always connected to the Final Four). Coaches love coming to recruit here,” Hunter said.
Are we capable of loving it back, fully and truly?
It’s not as if we need to wait for the Final Four to activate those basketball glands.
Georgia Tech opens its remade arena this very night. A meeting of ranked teams follows two days later when the Tech women host Tennessee. All that game represents, says Yellow Jackets coach MaChelle Joseph, is “a pivotal moment in the history of our program.”
Come Tuesday night, there is a little warm-up at the Georgia Dome. Call it the Fibrillation Four, or Flirtation Four — a little something to get the heart started. The actual name is the State Farm Champions Classic, two games featuring defending champion Kentucky and three others of some renown – Duke, Kansas and Michigan State.
“College basketball does a very good job matching some very appealing, very strong schools in these early-season tournaments,” said Barry Goheen, chairman of the Atlanta Tip-Off Club. “I’m really excited about the one here.”
The chances to witness two ranked teams on the court at the same time are few in these parts – once more there are no Georgia schools among the men’s Top 25. When a cast such as the one at the Champions Classic passes through, there is at least the opportunity to get a contact high off them.
The current preseason rankings have sparked great nostalgic pangs among the traditionalists. Indiana has returned from years in the wilderness, and the Hoosiers, Louisville and Kentucky are ranked 1-2-3. They come from neighboring states and a slice of America that has long held basketball to be a rite of personal devotion.
Granted, a preseason poll is as flimsy an indicator as any presidential one. No one is guaranteed to reach Atlanta and the Final Four. In the last decade, 14 of the 40 teams ranked top four in November (35 percent) made it to the last four in March. Ah, but imagine the odes to Gene Hackman, Adolph Rupp and the hot brown sandwich should the Indiana/Kentucky bunch make it here.
Granted, those Hoosiers, Cardinals and Wildcats do come from a place we can’t fully understand.
The only argument among them concerns who can place basketball on a higher altar.
“There’s no doubt that if you grow up in Indiana, basketball is a religion,” said Joseph. She grew up in northwest Indiana, shoveling snow from the church court next door in the winter just to clear out a place to practice. She conquered both the mechanics of shooting and frostbite well enough to star at Purdue.
“For a boy growing up in Kentucky, it is almost impossible not to be swept up in the fervor of college basketball,” Goheen said. He went from Calvert City, Ky., to Vanderbilt, where he forged a reputation in the 1980s as a clutch guard. His two 3s in the final 12 seconds sent Vandy into overtime and an eventual victory over Pitt in a NCAA tournament game. His 45-footer at the buzzer beat No. 13 Louisville in 1988.
When Goheen went on to law school, there was little doubt about his specialty. He’d be a litigator. “It suited the competitive drive I grew up with,” he said.
Hunter, who was born in Ohio and spent 17 seasons coaching IUPUI before coming to Georgia State, is something of an expert on the sporting anthropology of those two locales.
“Kids here play basketball because they can’t play football any more. In the Midwest, only when you can’t play basketball any more do you play football.
“I had 90-year-old grandmothers try to teach me how to coach when I first got to Indiana. You run motion (offense). If you don’t run motion, they kick you out of the state because Bobby Knight said that’s what you do. It’s cultural.”
On the difference between our players and theirs, Hunter opined, “The kids in the southeast are more athletic, they’re bigger, they’re specimens. They’re more trained in the Midwest. They’re not as big. I go into high schools in Atlanta and there are kids 6-9 walking around who don’t even play.”
Hunter has plotted his own splashy introduction to the new season with a trip to Cameron Indoor Stadium and a date with Duke this evening. All he has to do is win that one and his battle against anonymity certainly will turn.
“The first two months I was here, when I’d walk into a high school I never felt relevant in Atlanta,” he said. “I don’t want that to happen. I want basketball to be relevant in this city.”
There may be places who profess a greater passion for the college basketball season to come, places that have produced many of the circuit riders who have come south to spread the game. But only one place — Atlanta — shall have the final word.
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