"For the Love of Basketball" - Painting by Michael Macaulay
Kim and I were really pulling for Butler University in Monday night’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game against Connecticut. For a school the size of Butler to make it to the final game of the Big Dance two years in a row was simply remarkable. Though I expected Butler to have their hands full with UConn, I had hoped that they could keep the game close and perhaps come out on the winning side of a nail-biter like their one-point loss to Duke in last year’s final. What we watched instead was the ugliest first half of a basketball game that I have ever seen. Call it a defensive struggle if you want, it was a surreal comedy of errors on the part of both teams. Butler led 22-19 at halftime (yes, that’s a basketball score!), but UConn took control in the second half and managed a 53-41 victory.
Despite the disappointment that Butler’s players, coaching staff, and fans are feeling right now, I am fairly confident that the pain of the loss will gradually diminish and will be absorbed into the perspective of the larger issues of life. While there is much to criticize about the money-making machine that is the NCAA, I do appreciate the commercial in which it is pointed out that the vast majority of the organization’s 380,000 student-athletes will go pro in something other than sports. At its finest, discipline and commitment are learned, loyalty and team spirit are instilled, character and sportsmanship are developed, relationships are forged, memories are made, and life goes on. Wins and losses on the court fade in importance.
Just ask the young men who have played basketball at the California Institute of Technology over the last three decades. Do you remember what you were doing on January 23, 1985. I know; it was a long, long time ago. That night, Caltech, a Division III school in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, beat La Verne 48-47. Caltech would not win another basketball game against a conference opponent until six weeks ago. Their 46-45 victory over Occidental College on February 22 brought an end to a 310-game losing streak that lasted over 26 years.
Hoopsters at Caltech are probably way ahead of fellow student-athletes at other colleges and universities in figuring out that some things (many, actually) are bigger than basketball. Caltech is renowned for its training of scientists and engineers. The school is home to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Caltech boasts 31 Nobel Prize recipients among its faculty and alumni. Those kinds of honors and achievements tend to help you cope with a 26-year losing streak.
I still love my hoops. But, in the end, it’s just a game.
By the way, congratulations to the Lady Aggies for securing the women’s national championship for Texas A&M last night! Caltech’s women’s team? They went 0-25 this season. Oh well, there’s always next year, or maybe not. But, that’s okay! Seriously!
Thinking Out Loud 
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 6, 2011 at 7:49 am
Graham
Great………. I always wanted to be a coach……. But…. I just pretend now.
Is Butler one of “ours”……….??????
April 6, 2011 at 8:53 am
Lorey Lundy
My Dad (he coaches women basketball at Freed-Hardeman University) has a saying that he uses “It has nothing to do with eternity”. He had the opportunity to use this when they lost in the semi-finals of the NAIA Div I National Tourney this year 😦 But, he is soooo right!
April 6, 2011 at 9:24 am
Tim Pyles
Good to hear from you, “Coach” McKay! Interesting question! Yes, Butler has roots in the Restoration Movement and was originally named North Western Christian University. It was founded by Ovid Butler, an attorney and abolitionist, whose family had been influenced by the preaching and writing of Alexander Campbell. Butler thought that Campbell was much too “soft” on the question of slavery and founded a new school in Indiana that came to be somewhat of a rival to Campbell’s Bethany College. There are good articles on both Ovid Butler and Butler University in The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement.
April 6, 2011 at 9:27 am
Tim Pyles
Lorey, congratulations to your Dad and the Lady Lions on another great season! Beyond being an outstanding coach, he is a wise and godly Christian man who has influenced multitudes of young athletes for good and for eternity!
May 19, 2011 at 7:05 am
The Unforgettable Ort « Thinking Out Loud
[…] I first read about Roland Ortmayer nearly 22 years ago in a Sport’s Illustrated feature article by Douglas S. Looney entitled “A Most Unusual Man.” The article chronicled Ortmayer’s life and coaching career at the University of La Verned. Incidentally, La Verne competes in the same Division III conference as the California Institute of Technology which I wrote about in the recent post “Bigger Than Basketball.” […]