College Basketball and the Connective Tissue of Sports

It’s about fans, not them.

If you will indulge me, I would like to talk today about this shirt:

The man on that shirt, signaling “Illinois, №1, Baby!” is Dick Vitale, captured in caricature there at the age of 49, back when he (and the sport he became the public face of for decades) was entering the peak of his ubiquity and influence. On January 22, 1989, the №2-ranked Illinois Fighting Illini men’s basketball team, led by Nick Anderson, Kendall Gill and Kenny Battle, overcame a 16-point deficit against Georgia Tech to defeat the Yellow Jackets in an overtime Sunday afternoon game on national network television. Vitale was the broadcaster on that telecast, and after a typically thunderous late Battle dunk that clinched the game, he screamed “The Flying Illini, №1, baby!” into the microphone.

I was 13 years old, obsessed with Illinois basketball and bouncing myself off every wall in every room. The game, and that call, instantly electrified everyone in my life. It was as if we had all gone national.

The primary reason Illinois basketball remains today so much more popular than Illinois football is because of places like my hometown, Mattoon, Illinois, located 45 miles south of Champaign on I-57. In the ’80s and ’90s, WCIA Channel 3, to this day one on the highest rated local affiliates in the country — viewers were so loyal to it that it was one of two CBS stations nationwide that delayed “Late Show With David Letterman” half an hour when it debuted because viewers demanded they be able to continue to watch their “M*A*S*H” reruns after the 10 p.m. local news — carried every Illinois basketball game, using its local sportscasters as the announcers and its own in-house equipment, pre-empting any and all scheduled programming for each game. Want to watch “Dallas” or “Murder, She Wrote?” Not if the Illini are on…