Illinois, the entire state, not just the big university, is 0 for the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament this year. What in the name of George Mikan is going on? A state that prides itself on being the Fertile Crescent of basketball talent — from Cazzie Russell and Isiah Thomas to Dwyane Wade — is shut out of the college game’s showcase event? What are the odds that every one of Illinois’s 12 Division I basketball schools would sit out this year’s tournament? Texas, where basketball is a time-killing diversion between football and spring football, has seven schools playing. Hoops hotbeds New Mexico and Utah have two apiece. Our neighbor to the east, with half our population, has three teams playing, and the fabled Indiana Hoosiers aren’t one of them.
Oh, wait: Illinois had three N.I.T. entries, so get those “We’re No. 66” foam fingers ready for waving, just in case.
It’s not accurate to say the entire state is enduring a silent March: Sherron Collins (Kansas), Jon Scheyer (Duke), Evan Turner (Ohio State), Jacob Pullen (Kansas State), Jerome Randle (Cal) and Maurice Acker (Marquette) are eager N.C.A.A. participants. Add one decent big man to that flashy lineup of Chicago-area guards and you’d have a team capable of a deep tournament run.
So it is not like the state is bereft of talent. It’s good teams we’re lacking. Memo to the new DePaul coach: Seal the borders when you start recruiting. Chicago-area players helped make the Blue Demons a tournament perennial through the 1970s and ’80s, most notably the Mark Aguirre-led 1979 Final Four team. It came within one errant jump shot of derailing Indiana State and spoiling the Larry Bird-Magic Johnson matchup that transformed the N.C.A.A. tournament into a mega-event.
That wasn’t the case with Loyola in 1963. Guard Johnny Egan was the Ramblers’ only Chicago-bred starter when they delivered the state’s only national championship. The title game — Loyola 60, Cincinnati 58 on Vic Rouse’s put-back basket in overtime — was of such magnitude that it was broadcast on tape delay locally, after Lawrence Welk and opposite “Gunsmoke.” And it vied for attention with one of the great state championship games in Illinois high school history: Carver 53, Centralia 52 on Anthony Smedley’s last-second buzzer-beater, the only bucket of the game for the Carver bench-warmer.
Quite a night for Chicago basketball. Thanks mostly to Red Rush’s inimitably imaginative radio calls of those Loyola games, I’ve been a college basketball guy ever since. Attending Marquette University in the Al McGuire era hardly curbed the craving.
Marquette’s thumping of the arrogant Adolph Rupp and Kentucky in the 1969 Mideast Regional offered proof that I’d come to the right place, but Purdue’s Rick Mount cut our hearts out with an overtime deep-corner jumper two days later. The loss was the first of many crushing tournament setbacks for McGuire, who probably had three or four better teams than the one that won it all for him in 1977, in the last game he would ever coach.
Was I excited by Marquette’s title? A little. My wife had to take the car keys to keep me from going to meet the team plane that night. We lived in Reno at the time.
A few years later, my friend Bones showed up on our San Francisco doorstep at tournament time, hoping to lie low while some dicey developments in his sports-investment business sorted themselves out back home. By the end of the weekend, my daughter had eaten more pizza and knew more about point spreads, over-unders and teasers than was healthy for a 6-year-old. Since then, she has shared my tournament fixation — her bracket in the family pool is always named after Harold (The Show) Arceneaux, the Weber State flyer who scored 36 points and sent mighty North Carolina home in a first-round shocker in 1999.
My son’s bracket will honor St. Joseph’s Marvin O’Connor, the streets-of-Philadelphia artisan who lighted up Stanford for 29 second-half points and drew a standing ovation from a normally blasé San Diego crowd for an electrifying shooting display against the top-seeded Cardinal in 2001.
If I could remember his name, I’d salute the Austin Peay guard whose explanation of the Governors’ back-court cohesiveness broke up a television interviewer 20 years earlier. “It’s like we’ve got ESPN or something,” the player said.
I covered the Bird-Magic game (overrated), and I watched the Michael Jordan legend come to life in 1982 when as a Carolina freshman he knocked down the jumper that beat Georgetown and gave Dean Smith his first national title. I have wondered how good Len Bias would have been ever since he threw down an emphatic series of game-sealing dunks against Pepperdine in 1986, and I think Christian Laettner/Bobby Hurley/Grant Hill and Duke over unbeaten U.N.L.V. in a 1991 semifinal was as good a basketball game as I’ve ever seen.
But it’s the emergence of a Harold Arceneaux or a Marvin O’Connor or a Bryce Drew miracle shot against Ole Miss that gives the N.C.A.A. tournament its matchless appeal as a sports event, even if — or maybe especially if — we never hear from the hero again. I hope we get one this year.
And my daughter and I hope our friend Bones has all winners. Or at least a few more than our state had.