Volume 5, Issue 12: Meadowlands

"I use the technique of positive visualization."

Here is a button where you can subscribe to this newsletter now, if you have not previously done so. I do hope that you enjoy it.

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

The man on that shirt, signalling “Illinois, No. 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 No. 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, No. 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. This meant that every family within a 100-mile radius of Champaign watched every Illini single Illini game, from Kankakee to Peoria to Decatur to Sullivan to Stonington to Mattoon and everywhere in between. You planned your entire night around the Illini game. Chores had to be finished by tipoff; dinner plates had to be put away; clothes had to be laid out for the next day. The whole world stopped when the Illini played. They were our Yankees, our Lakers, our Man United, our “60 Minutes,” our church. And now they were the Flying Illini. Now they were No. 1, baby.

A rack of those shirts showed up at the IGA, the local grocery store in Mattoon, within days of that win over Georgia Tech; they must have cost about a quarter to produce and retailed at about 15 bucks. Every single kid in town had to have one; I remember going to Mrs. Gardner’s english class and seeing six other kids wearing it. We followed that team, immortalized as the Flying Illini then and forever, all the way to the Final Four that season. My father woke me up a Saturday morning in March that year and let me know that if I got all my chores done for the day, he had two tickets for us to go see Illinois play Ball State (coached by a young Rick Majerus) in the second round of the NCAA Tournament in Indianapolis. We sat in the student section and screamed for two hours. There was never any doubt after that where I was going to college.

The Illini lost in the Final Four that year to eventual champion Michigan, thanks to a rebound putback by Sean Higgins that I continue to routinely see in my nightmares. I was 13 years old, just starting to hit puberty and all that comes with it, and I cried myself to sleep that night like a little baby. Four years later, I was a freshman at Illinois, covering the team for the Daily Illini (the proudest my family has ever been of me was when I got to have dinner at Lou Henson’s house), and four years after that, I was living in Los Angeles, waking up and walking straight to the sports bar at the Third Street Promenade to catch every early weekend game. Four years after that, I was living in New York City, nursing a beer for two hours I’d paid for with scrounged-up quarters so I could watch their NCAA Tournament run to the Elite Eight. Four years after that, from the “offices” of The Black Table, the online publication I founded with three of my best friends that changed all of our lives, I called my father back in Illinois with three minutes left and Illinois trailing Arizona by 15 in their dream Dee Brown/Deron Williams/Luther Head season. I tried not to break down. He told me to have faith. “Just get us to overtime,” he said. And then they did, my god they did.

It has been 19 years since that game. It has been 39 years since I saw that T-shirt on the rack at IGA. My life is so different than it was then. I’ve changed, the world has changed, everything has changed.

But Illini basketball, it’s still there. And I never miss it. I still finish my chores before every game, make sure all the dinner plates are put away, put my clothes out for the next day. The men who play for that team today are children, young enough to be my own; in some cases, my fandom of the team they play for is older than their parents are. And I still care just as much as I did when I was 13. Sometimes, when they lose, I want to cry myself to sleep just like that 13-year-old kid. There is almost nothing in my life at 48 years old that connects to my life at 13 years old. But Illini basketball does. I’ve watched their games on airplanes, in other countries, in important meetings, at the Super Bowl. I still live and die with them just like I always have. It still means so much.

And goddammit, I still have that shirt.

******************

Tonight, at approximately 8:40 Eastern Time, my Illini will play the Duquesne Dukes in the NCAA Tournament for the right to reach the Sweet Sixteen. If Illinois wins, it will be its first Sweet Sixteen appearance since that 2005 Brown/Williams/Head season—too long. I have watched many disappointing teams in those 19 years, yelled at many underperforming players, yelled (much more) at failed Illinois coaches who let the program fall from its peak, what I and every Illini fan feels like it should be. I am not particularly sane about this. I do not know how I will die, but if you were to ever watch me watch an Illini game, you will have a good guess: I pace and scream and sweat and pull at my hair and kick the couch and curse constantly, looking for all the world like a deranged lunatic who is going to have a heart attack any second. That’s to say: I’m acting like a sports fan.

But I’ll get to do it with these people:

The best part of having Illinois basketball games be clear-out-the-schedule events now, just like they were for WCIA and generations of Central Illinoisians, is that they are an excuse to get together with my parents, who gave me this love, and my sons, who I hope will have it. (The older son screams at the television alongside me; the younger one just plays with the dog.) To sit and watch the games with my dad, just like I did in 1989, is another connection—something that stays stable and secure as everything else swirls into chaos around us. He still talks me down off the edge just like he did 19 years ago. He always believes they’ve just gotta get it to overtime.

This year’s Illinois team is particularly good, which always helps. As William and I saw at the Big Ten Tournament last week, they are incredibly skilled offensively, the best since that Dee/Deron/Luther team, and they play a up-tempo, exciting style. They’re well-coached, they’re full of likable players, they clearly enjoy playing alongside each other—they’re a very easy team to cheer for. With one glaring, awkward exception.

If I ever needed a reminder that no one but me and my family pays attention to college basketball until the tournament, I got it this week when I received literal dozens of texts asking me about Terrence Shannon Jr., Illinois’ best player. The Shannon situation is a complex one. The University of Illinois, because of a policy put in by athletic director Josh Whitman years earlier, immediately suspended Shannon in December when he was charged with rape by authorities in Lawrence, Kansas, for an alleged incident at a bar last September the weekend Illinois traveled to play Kansas in football. Anyone involved with Illinois sports has been over the endless twists and turns of this case for months, but for everyone who just arrived, well, the details of the incident (which I encourage everyone to read before they comment on it, really from any angle) are both disturbing and maddeningly vague. But rather than turn this into a Reddit thread, I think it’s worth focusing on two things: 1. Should Illinois be playing Shannon? and 2. Are you doing something morally wrong by still cheering for Illinois?

The first question is much easier than the second. The answer to the first one is: They had no choice. The University of Illinois did not lift Shannon’s suspension; in fact, they went to federal court to try to uphold it. Shannon and his lawyers actually filed a restraining order against the university in January, arguing that the school did not provide him due process and that, because he would not face a hearing on the charges until the season (and the NBA Draft) was over, the suspension had the effect of “ruining his career as if he were already convicted.” The University actively fought this in court, and it went to a federal judge who, surprisingly (and to my non-legal eyes, curiously) ruled 10 days later that the school had to lift the suspension because it denied him NIL money he was using to support his family and destroyed his NBA Draft stock before he could ever answer the charges. The judge wrote that, “the court concludes that the irreparable harm to [Shannon] by application of the DIA Policy outweighs the harm to Illinois” and thus that he should be allowed to play immediately. (There was also an implication in the ruling that the case was unlikely to end in a conviction, which also struck me as odd.) Now, you can argue that this ruling was just or unjust, but the notion that the University (which, again, went to court to defend the suspension) should directly disobey a federal court order and refuse to play Shannon strikes me as a bit absurd. Illinois suspended him. A judge said the school had to lift the suspension. So now he’s playing. That part’s easy.

The second question is considerably harder. This is something every sports fan (or music fan, or movie fan, or fan of anything) has dealt with in one way or another, and one that is inconsistently applied, to say the least. (That David Ortiz failed a steroid test and Kobe Bryant went to trial for rape are factoids that have been conveniently scrubbed from history.) I wrote years ago that it’s literally impossible to be an ethical sports fan; no matter who you root for, there’s someone or something involved that you’d never want to be associated with in your everyday life. “To successfully remain a sports fan, I’d argue a certain emotional alchemy is required,” I wrote. “You have to separate you from them, or you’ll go mad.” Putting aside the specifics of Shannon’s case the best as one can, I find it instructive to remember that when I am cheering for a sports team, I am not cheering for its players, or its owners, or its coaches, or even the organization itself—not really. I am cheering for my own history with the team, for the collective experience of watching them day after day, game after game, year after year, for the people who I’ve been able to share that experiences with, for all the memories that will stick with us for the rest of our lives. Those belong to me, to us, not them. They belong to all of us. One of my fundamental sports principles is that when we are cheering for a sports team, we are not cheering for other people; we are cheering for ourselves. Their story ends when they leave the team. Our story goes on forever. The connective tissue is us. Without us, they have no reason to exist.

That may be a rationalization, and it’s totally reasonable if it means nothing to anyone not an Illinois fan in this particular case. The NCAA Tournament is a casual fan event in which people are encouraged to pick and choose their feel-good stories, and if Shannon’s presence on the roster is enough to make someone root against Illinois, there’s no real argument against that.

But being a sports fan is an inherently irrational activity. Should we need an excuse to get families and friends together, or at least a better one than screaming for a bunch of strangers in their pajamas with whom we have little-to-nothing in common and are unlikely to ever meet? Of course. But in lieu of that: We have sports.

All I know is that twice a week, in the midst of everything that’s always going on, the pressures, the packed schedules, the stresses, the worries, the pure exhaustion of being a human being on this planet, I get to take a step away from it all and go watch an Illini game with people I love, people who care about that team as much as I do, people who share that history with me. I’m grateful for it. I know it’s not important, that it doesn’t really matter. Which is of course why it is, and why it does.

So know that at 8:40 ET tonight, I will be screaming my head off for this team to reach its first Sweet Sixteen in 19 years, to survive to play another game, to give us all an opportunity to gather together once more. We will yell together, and be together, as we always have, and we always will. Someday, decades from now, my kids will remember watching these games with their dad, and their Baba, and their G-Ma, and the dog, and they will revel in the victories and lament the losses. They will have their own histories. Tonight is just another chapter in them. I’ve got the shirt washed and ready. Flying Illini, No. 1, Baby.

OHTANI

I don’t have much to add yet to the Shohei Ohtani story, something that feels like people are trying to will into being a massive scandal without quite being one just yet. Right now, it just looks Ohtani has a shockingly incompetent public relations team, which is actually a pretty interesting story in itself but not as earth-shattering as the worst-case scenario of this story would be. One thing is clear: What the truth is in this situation, we will all eventually find out. I’m willing to wait until then.

But here is your reminder that I have been writing about how a huge sports gambling scandal is inevitable for a long, long time:

• Sports Gambling Is Bad For The Soul, The Will Leitch Newsletter, December 2018.

• Sports Gambling Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen, The Atlantic, September 2021.

• Gambling Ads Are Ruining the Sports Viewing Experience, New York, April 2023.

• The Big Sports Betting Scandal Has Probably Already Happened, New York, June 2023.

  
  This is going to get worse before it gets better.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. “Charlie Hustle,” Reviewed, The Wall Street Journal. My review of the excellent new Keith O’Brien biography.

2. My Division Champion Predictions, MLB.com. I went ambitious in the AL Central.

3. The Guy Who Is Trying to Kill the NCAA Tournament, New York. That would be SEC commissioner Greg Sankey.

4. My First Power Rankings of the Year, MLB.com. I’ll be writing these weekly throughout the season, so that’ll be fun.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I debated the Oliver Marmol extension.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers,” Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker. This piece is extremely well-written and has been echoing in my head all week.

Also, I definitely liked this short bit too.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Rats & Clowns,” Black Crowes. Very pleasantly surprised by the new Black Crowes album: These guys still sound really good!

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Here are your current leaders in our men’s tournament bracket, which included a newsletter-record 1,193 entries:

And here are the women’s bracket leaders:

Have a great weekend, all. And enjoy Opening Day next week. My Cardinals start at Dodger Stadium, of all places. Should be quite a scene!

Best,
Will