Feb. 25-29 Blog
February 26, 2008 04:13 PM | General
We’re changing things up a little bit. For the past four years Campus Connection has kind of been like a weekly blog full of tidbits, notes, commentary, quasi-opinion and weak stabs at humor that have sometimes hit the mark and at other times completely missed. Well, to keep up with the Jones', we’ve decided to turn Campus Connection into a daily blog. If we miss a day then you know we’re struggling.
Hope you enjoy it ...
Punching His Ticket
Posted By John Antonik: March 2, 2008 (12:16 pm)
West Virginia hasn’t punched its ticket to the NCAA tournament but one assistant coach with WVU ties already has. Zach Spiker, son of longtime West Virginia athletic trainer John Spiker and once an administrative assistant on John Beilein’s WVU basketball staff, will join his Cornell team in the Big Dance.
Cornell defeated Harvard Saturday night to finish the regular season 20-5 and 12-0 in the Ivy League. The Ivy League doesn’t have a postseason basketball tournament.
It marks Cornell’s first NCAA tournament appearance since 1988.
Congratulations to Zach Spiker and the Big Red basketball team!
Average Attendance
Posted By John Antonik: February 29, 2008 (5:36 pm)
West Virginia ranks eighth in the Big East in average attendance with one more men’s basketball home date remaining on Monday night against Pitt.
The Mountaineers are averaging 9,957 per game in Coach Bob Huggins’ first season back in Morgantown, just behind Villanova’s announced average of 10,076.
Syracuse once again leads the Big East in average attendance pulling in 20,709 per game. Louisville is averaging 19,446 while Marquette is drawing 16,187 fans per game.
Other Big East schools averaging more than 10,000 per game this year include Georgetown (12,545), Connecticut (11,708) and Pitt (10,906).
At the bottom of the conference in average attendance are St. John’s (5,806), Rutgers (5,136) and South Florida (4,926).
Despite erratic student turnout, West Virginia is actually 537 fans per game ahead of last year’s season average of 9,420. The Mountaineers last averaged more than 10,000 in 2006 (10,402) and have only topped the 10,000 mark in average attendance two other times in 1982 (11,384) and 1983 (10,486).
West Virginia averaged just 6,936 during former Coach John Beilein’s first year in 2003. WVU averaged 8,132 during Gale Catlett’s first season in 1979 and 8,485 during Joedy Gardner’s first year in 1975.
Sonny Moran opened the Coliseum in 1970 and the Mountaineers that year averaged 7,153 fans per game.
A Myron Cope Story
Posted By John Antonik: February 27, 2008 (12:54 pm)
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| Jack Fleming gets a close up look at Myron Cope's terrible Towel.
WVU Sports Communciations photo |
If you are from this area, everyone either knows of or has a Myron Cope story to tell. Mine is a second-person version once relayed to me from The Voice himself, Jack Fleming.
The two longtime sidekicks on the Pittsburgh Steelers radio network were getting prepared to announce the Steelers Super Bowl game against the Los Angeles Rams at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.
By then the game was becoming much more of an event with people beyond the normal sportswriters and reporters occupying an overcrowded press box. Consequently, the Steelers radio crew was positioned in a makeshift wooden press box attached to the permanent press facility.
Making things even more difficult was the fact that the temporary broadcast booth was partitioned off to provide room for a somewhat large group of Japanese tourists that were going to share the space with them. Fleming arrived before Cope, saw all of the commotion, and he knew right away that there was going to be a problem.
Sure enough, when Cope arrived and took one look at the sight before him he yelled, “Everyone get out! What do you think this is, Pearl Harbor?”
Myron Cope always had a way with people and his unvarnished and zany approach endeared him to generations of Pittsburgh fans.
Cope once later conceded that Fleming tolerated his on-air antics but never warmed to the Terrible Towel. Anytime Cope wanted to raise Fleming’s blood pressure he would simply begin swinging his Terrible Towel outside the radio booth to incite the masses.
Seven years ago when Fleming passed away in 2001, Cope shared many of those stories during a touching Morgantown memorial service in honor of his longtime sidekick.
Today Cope died at age 79 due to respiratory failure.
I’m sure the two are getting reacquainted right now someplace up above and having a few laughs. And I suspect Cope already has a drink in his hand.
ESPN Top 25 College Basketball Players
Posted By John Antonik: February 26, 2008 (4:14 pm)
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| Hot Rod Hundley was one of college basketball's biggest draws in the mid-1950s.
AP photo |
ESPN.com is in the process of ranking the 25 best players in college basketball. Most recently it revealed Ohio State forward Jerry Lucas at No. 11.
The Top 10 will probably include players like Indiana State’s Larry Bird, Princeton’s Bill Bradley, Kansas’ Wilt Chamberlain, Cincinnati’s Oscar Robertson, LSU’s Pete Maravich, San Francisco’s Bill Russell, UCLA’s Bill Walton and Lew Alcindor, and West Virginia’s Jerry West.
At last summer’s WVU Classic I was listening to WVU assistant coach Billy Hahn describe in detail what a great player David Thompson was at North Carolina State. Hahn has played and coached against some of the very best the ACC has to offer when he was at Maryland and he says without hesitation that Thompson was the best player he ever saw in person.
Jerry West is a West Virginia favorite for obvious reasons. He led the Mountaineers to the NCAA championship game in 1959 as a junior and finished his career averaging a double-double: 24.3 ppg. and 13.3 rpg.
Those are absolutely astonishing numbers.
Preceding West at West Virginia was guard Hot Rod Hundley, who won’t make the ESPN Top 25 list but a strong argument could be made that he should be. Remember, Hundley came right after the devastating gambling scandals at CCNY and Kentucky that nearly brought college basketball to its knees and Hot Rod was one of the game’s most recognizable players in the mid-1950s.
Beyond West Virginia, Hundley may have been better known for his clowning instead of his basketball prowess but he packed gyms all over the country and he absolutely owned New York City. The Big Apple writers loved his quick-witted humor and his ability to deliver a great quote on the spot.
Wrote a young Jimmy Breslin in 1956: “Hundley is the hottest thing the Mountaineers have come up with in some time and this precocious sophomore with the Globetrotter style has been setting them on their ears. (Hundley) is a bundle of nervous antics, and when he stops fooling around, the owner of a fine shooting eye.”
Hundley was the No. 1 overall player taken in the 1957 NBA draft in a league that has always craved big men. The main reason Minneapolis owner Bob Short traded for Hundley’s rights for the top pick was because his franchise was broke and he needed a gate attraction and Hundley was then the game’s No. 1 draw.
Hundley would often later joke that Virginia center Ralph Sampson was the NBA’s biggest bust since he was drafted in ’57.
“Hot Rod knew how to control a game,” WVU teammate Clayce Kishbaugh once recalled. “Not only did he control the game, but he controlled who took the shots.”
Kishbaugh remembers playing a freshman game in Clarksburg near his hometown of Nutter Fort and he was the team’s leading scorer at halftime. Hundley came into the locker room and told Kishbaugh he was done scoring.
“I never touched the ball once in the second half,” Kishbaugh laughed.
Hundley wasn’t a big winner at West Virginia, the Mountaineers losing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in each of his three varsity seasons in Morgantown. Pete Maravich wasn’t a big winner at LSU either. And Pistol Pete easily averaged twice as many shots as his teams won games.
But both packed them in, Maravich at LSU and Hundley at the old Field House on Beechurst. In fact, Hundley made West Virginia appealing enough to keep Jerry West home.
That alone puts him in the Top 25 in my book.
