It’s funny, isn’t it, how college athletic teams tend to maintain a consistent character from year to year, despite the steady turnover of players, and more often than not despite even a change of head coach. Under Mike Krzyzewski, Duke’s basketball team always seems capably confident. Michigan is, in all its sports, ever uppity, winning just enough championships to sustain its fans’ false pride. (The attitude of Michigan alumni toward the rest of the Big Ten seems to be “At least we’ve won a few.”) Even when Ohio State strayed from Woody Hayes’s blunderbuss three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense to welcome a series of quarterbacks who could actually throw the football, it remained, for the most part, the big, dumb brute of the Big Ten.
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When Bill Self came to Illinois a couple years ago from Tulsa, a smaller program with a tradition of exceeding expectations in the NCAA tournament, he seemed a self-possessed, tenacious young coach who’d be the perfect antidote for what ailed the Illinois hoops program. For 20 years coach Lou Henson, best known for his “Lou-do” comb-over, had projected his defensiveness and insecurity onto generations of Illinois basketball players, always recruiting well but always managing to undermine whatever natural talent came his way. Efrem Winters, Marcus Liberty, Bruce Douglas, Kiwane Garris: all came to Illinois projected for future stardom in the NBA and all ended their college careers with a tentative shooting touch and a lack of self-confidence. After Henson left, Illinois continued to underachieve during the brief Lon Kruger era, but Self was supposed to change that.
And through the 2001 NCAA tournament, change it he did. Last season the Illini finally developed the toughness they’d lacked. Huge European imports Robert Archibald from Scotland and Damir Krupalija from Bosnia gave the team muscle at center between homegrown forwards Brian Cook and Sergio McClain. Illinois’ new aggressiveness was so uncharacteristic that Lucas Johnson found himself labeled a dirty player for excelling at many of the tactics–clawing under the boards, pulling players down on himself–usually associated with “winners.” Unfortunately, just as the Illini seemed about to advance to the Final Four, their toughness proved to be their undoing. They ran into foul trouble against Arizona and lost in the regional final despite the heroic efforts of Archibald and shooting guard Cory Bradford, who briefly regained the scalding shooting touch he’d shown as a sophomore.
The next game just didn’t augur well. For one thing, the Illini were playing Kansas, whom they’d beaten in the NCAAs a year ago, when they were the top seed and Kansas was fourth. But now the roles were reversed. What’s more, the Illini had never been the sort to keep a team down from one year to the next, not like the Jordan-era Bulls. They would need a killer instinct to deal with a Kansas team out for revenge. Finally, when the game was played Boom-Boom was stuck in the suburbs and I found myself at home nursing a sore throat–not to mention the dread of all psychosomatic Illini fans.
