The University of Illinois basketball team is haunted by its traditions. In this, I refer not to any evil spirits conjured up by its mascot, Chief Illiniwek, a noble, graceful, and courageous image of American tribal tradition (even if he is a composite character and not purely Illini), but to its penchant for–how do I put this without offending the forces of political correctness?–for choking.
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Ever since coach Lou Henson revived the Fighting Illini basketball program in the late 70s with a team comprising Derek Holcomb, Mark Smith, and Eddie Johnson, Illinois has been famous for having great talents who were somehow soft in the head or, worse yet, in the heart. The Illini, plainly put, were known to crack under pressure, cower in the face of daunting odds, or, even more aggravatingly, shrink under their own expectations. The list of able players who went to Illinois and failed to fulfill their promise is lengthy, beginning with Efrem Winters and Marcus Liberty; it contains Bruce Douglas, the 1984 Big Ten Player of the Year who soon lost his shooting touch and offensive confidence, and Kiwane Garris, the Westinghouse product who never had a shooting touch to lose. The 1989 team that made the NCAA Final Four was an anomaly: that one year, Henson seemed to surrender his need to coach a constrained and cautious brand of basketball and just let the kids play, and Kenny Battle, Nick Anderson, and Kendall Gill responded by soaring to new heights. The good times didn’t last, and a few years ago Henson was replaced by Lon Kruger, a strong recruiter who hid many of Henson’s anal-retentive qualities behind a turtleneck sweater. At the end of last season, in which the Illini returned to respectability but fell victim to their usual faults, Kruger too departed, lured by the NBA, and was replaced by Bill Self, a drawling, determined, stern-jawed coach toughened by the hard winds of the western plains at Oral Roberts and Tulsa, where he’d taken sound programs and made them better. With Self–the name itself seemed to promise a new personality–the Illini were supposed to get tougher, mentally and physically, and throw off their old uncertain ways. And for most of the season they did just that.
The dark side of this versatile team was the lack of any real top game of its own; the Illini usually found themselves playing up or down to whatever level the opponent dictated. In Minnesota for that season finale, the Golden Gophers lulled the Illini to sleep, then came back, took a 31-30 lead at halftime, and led well into the second half. Harrington pulled Illinois even and then ahead with a pair of three-point shots, and then the Illini played their trump card, the single biggest difference between this year’s team and last year’s–in fact, between this year’s team and its entire disappointing tradition–Williams.
It wasn’t just the loss, it was how they lost. The NCAA powers that be, giving the Illini credit for their regular-season win over MSU, made Illinois the top seed in the Midwest regional of the tournament that began this Thursday, but suddenly all the old uncertainties were back in play. Was this a different Illinois team or the same? Williams was the enigma who held the answer: real thing or fraud, warrior or cigar-store Indian? Tradition dies hard, especially a tradition that involves the self-image of a people.
