Archive for June, 2008

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The crowd of 18,000 – the largest in college women’s basketball – that saw the Lady Cards challenge UConn last season was just a preview of things to come for University of Louisville women’s basketball.

Jeff Walz has a dynamite class of recruits joining Angel McCoughtry and some seasoned veterans next season. This program has already achieved under Walz and will only get better.

June 30th is the deadline to purchase season tickets for $50 each for next season. They will be going up after that, like everything else.

Buying women’s basketball tickets may well be the best option for some fans to gain entry into the new downtown basketball arena, scheduled to open in 2010.

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Ready for Football? – Not quite yet, thanks, but Frank Pos over at Hell In The Hall is trying to convince himself that he is. Take a couple of aspirins before you get his take on some of the recent influences on college football locally.

Winning In Dallas, Heaving In Memphis

Clutching two tickets to the Final Four basketball tournament just two days before the action will begin in Dallas in 1986. Dad, Mom and Steve are going. Pack the bags, gas up the vehicle, attach the University of Louisville car flags. Friend in Dallas will loan us his apartment, stay with his girlfriend. Go, go, go.

Arrive a day later at Reunion Arena a few minutes before the first game, buy a third ticket for $20 from a guy near the entrance. Cards proceed to beat LSU in the semifinal. Buy another ticket from a disheartened LSU fan in the restroom. Three tickets again , we’re all in for the championship game.

Dad is separated from Mom and Junior during the game, closing his eyes a while during the final minute. Opening them, realizing U of L was going to beat Duke 72-69. The Cards do it, win their second national championship. Family takes a couple of victory laps, maybe more, through Reunion Arena, bump into UNLV Coach Jerry Tarkanian, and bribe a concessionaire for his 1986 NCAA branded apron.

We will drive back to Louisville same night. Stop at a Cracker Barrel to eat, exchange hugs with the Lady Birds as they are getting on their bus, turn the volume up on Queen’s “We Are The Champions” and hopefully ride on air all the way home.

A tire blows about 80 miles outside of Dallas in the middle of nowhere. It is pitch black. To get some light, have to burn the Dallas newspapers with all the NCAA coverage we are saving. Not a good decision. Texas is in the midst of a drought and there are reports of wild fires in numerous locations. But we have no choice. Fortunately, the burning newspapers don’t add to the crisis.

Have to use one of those “nubs” the automakers provide as spare tires, with warnings not to drive over 40 mph. Creeping through nowhere land in Arkansas in the wee hours of the morning looking for places that sell tires. At about 5 a.m. finally find an old garage with a used tire. Exhausted but still ecstatic.

Junior, 9, sleeping in the back seat through all the drama wakes up on the bridge leading into the home town of the Memphis Tigers. He’s sick, nauseous, has to throw up. The only container available is his brand new Easter basket half full of candy. He throws up, and throws up again, filling the basket the rest of the way.

He’s fine again in a few minutes, wanting to replace the Easter candy. Mom and dad are feeling good again, too. We have a good tire, we’re moving again, and we have just finished reading the stories of U of L’s second national championship in the Memphis newspapers.

Bustin A Trail for U of L

Sonja reports that U of L will be well represented in the U.S. Olympics in August, with Pam Bustin working with the U.S. field hockey team:

By Sonja

When Pam Bustin signed on to coach women’s field hockey at the University of Louisville in 1998, the team was playing on the equivalent of a cow pasture and had won only one game in 38 tries the previous two seasons.

Bustin, a member of the 1996 U.S. Olympic team, was coaching the under-age-19 national team when she got the call from Associate Athletic Director Julie Hermann about an opening at U of L. With successful coaching experience at Hofstra, Michigan State and Temple, Bustin could have easily passed on the job to wait for an inevitable offer from the field hockey hotbed in the Northeast.

According to Louisville Magazine, what sold her was:

“Tom’s (Jurich) vision and Julie Hermann’s vision of what this department was heading for is what sold me,” Bustin says. “And I believed them because I hadn’t heard an administration speak with such conviction and such determination. . . . I was thinking, ‘What a place to build a program and establish myself as a head coach! This could be what we build.”‘

In 2006, year two of their Big East membership, U of L took a share of the regular season champion honors and earned a top seed in the league tournament. Her team compiled a 14-6 record before this season losing to Providence in the Big East tournament semifinals. One of her coups was hosting NCAA tournament action at Cardinal Park.

Bustin will be an assistant coach on the U.S. Olympics field hockey team in Beijing, China in August.  Among the members of that team will be Barb Weinberg, a Male grad and an All-Big 10 honoree for three years at the University of Iowa.

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Bustin notes that the U. S. players will have to practice in masks because of the terrible air pollution in Beijing and that several world class players will not make the trip for the same reason. Gasp!

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Unadulterated Plug — Wanna help Card Game out? Click on the Google ads (air purifiers, postage stamps, small U of L ads ) now and then.

Cotton Top Adopts U of L

If you visit this site frequently, you know the moderator is a diehard University of Louisville fan. It goes back to childhood, more specifically to 1955-56 when he began following U of L basketball and football.

Cotton Top was 12 years old, living in an orphanage (the kids hated the word orphanage and preferred to call it a children’s home because many of their parents were still living but dirt poor) when he became a fan. His cousin’s family lived in Louisville, and Cotton Top knew he would go there after high school  The “home” was in Versailles, 12 miles from Lexington.

He took a great interest in everything Louisville, even paying for subscriptions to The Louisville Times during football and basketball seasons, keeping meticulous scrapbooks.  Between Sunday school and church, he slipped down to the corner drug store to get the Courier-Journal’s Sunday editions. During the early years, he also clung to every word of the stoic George Walsh or the zany Ed Kallay calling the games on WHAS or WAVE radio. He adopted UofL, helping him to escape some of the realities of the orphanage.

As a Cards’ fan living in Wildcat country, Cotton Top was often a target at the orphanage. Had to step outside a few times to physically debate the issue. The orphanage’s activities director even got in on the act at times, loudly proclaiming at one point that the University of Louisville would never win a national basketball championship or be any good in football.

Many years later, as an adult, Cotton Top would travel to Indianapolis and see UofL win a national basketball championship, and then again in Dallas six years later, this time with his 9-year-old son. He would also see the football team become a top 10 football team and win a BCS Orange Bowl in Miami. He would see the beginnings of a dramatic new basketball arena in downtown Louisville and the expansion of the football stadium to over 55,000 seats.

Among Cotton Top’s biggest regrets is never having gotten back in touch with the orphanage’s activities director to make him eat his words before he went to his eternal damnation. Another minor irritation is that the reason people nicknamed him Cotton Top didn’t exist any more.

Looking Back: Fight Night at Fairgrounds

Nobody was keeping count but there had to be a record number of fights between opposing fans when the University of Louisville and Tennessee football teams squared off in September 1992. The introduction of Muhammad Ali before the game may have set a pugilistic tone.

“It was unlike anything we had ever seen,” recalls Bill Olsen, former athletic director. “Fights were breaking out everywhere. I was called before the athletic board the next week  for an explanation.”

One of the major reasons was that Tennessee required 15,000 seats for its traveling fans.  “It wasn’t feasible to contain the visiting fans in one section. We had only about 2,000 seats in the visitors’ section so all the Tennessee fans had to be interspersed with U of L fans throughout the stadium.

“It was not a good situation to begin with,” he says. “The place was packed with about 36,000 people, and Tennessee fans are pretty serious about their football. We also had a lot of fans not used to having access to beer.”

Tensions were high at the half because Tennessee only led by a touchdown.  UT fans feared Howard Schnellenberger and remembered that U of L had thumped Alabama 34-7 in the Fiesta Bowl a few months earlier.

Tennessee broke it open in the third quarter, winning the game 28-11. It was a skirmish some fans would not soon forget.