Gate 21

Not so very long ago, Tennessee fans would be preparing themselves for one last hurrah (a/k/a the bowl game) before walking into the wilderness in terms of men’s athletics. While the Lady Vols have always been competitive and have always given Tennessee fans something to cheer about through the Winter and Spring, the BasketVols have not always followed suit.

The year before I first walked on campus as a student, was Wade Houston’s last year as head coach of the BasketVols, and Tennessee won a whopping 5 games that year. I think they actually managed to lose to Kentucky by 300 points or something along those lines. Needless to say, ESPN wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit air Tennessee games, and I think the total attendance for the season (including the event staff) was 95. Apparently, the only player Wade Houston had recruited during his years in Knoxville was his own son, phenom Allan Houston. I imagine that wasn’t a very hard sell, but once Allan was gone, so was any chance that the Vols were ever going to be competitive under Wade. Thus he got “Dickeyed” and shown the door. Wade wisely chose to focus on something other than basketball (which he already seemed to be doing) and went to run a trucking company in Louisville, Kentucky.

My freshman year was the first year that Kevin O’Neill was coach of the Vols. To O’Neill’s credit the tank was empty when he showed up in Knoxville. We had no talent base, our players had not been truly coached since Don DeVoe left, and fan support was at an all-time low. I was in the Basketball Pep Band back in those days, and I can tell you that there weren’t many butts in the seats at Thompson-Boling (a/k/a “The Big Brown Box”). Kevin strung together a few decent seasons, considering what he had to work with. O’Neill tried to inject some life into the team with his no-nonsense, fire-breathing, foul-mouthed style. Me and my buddies used to count how many times he’d “kick Revco” at each game (O’Neill constantly was kicking the scorer’s table beside him square in the middle of a Revco sign) and count how many expletives we could actually make out from our seats. Truth told, the totals actually got pretty high.

I genuinely liked O’Neill, and thought he was heading the program in the right direction, he recruited well, and had a tremendous work-ethic. Still, from the outset, O’Neill never really seemed to fit in in Knoxville. He was from up North (and I mean way up north — he went to school in Canada), and never really warmed to the idea that Tennessee’s favorite song was about drinking moonshine. After three seasons, Doug “The Big Dick” Dickey pissed O’Neill off so bad that he jumped ship.

Next came Jerry Green. I grew up in Asheville, NC, so I knew Jerry Green when he was coaching at UNCA. Hell, I went to his basketball camp once. So I felt like I “knew” Jerry. I had high hopes, and at first it seemed like I was justified. Jerry took the Vols to the NCAA’s for the first time in like 90 years, and the team was playing pretty damn well. Jerry’s problem wasn’t his win/lose record, it was his inability to keep his players from acting like thugs, and his lack of discretion when it came to his own public comments. Once Jerry publicly said that if the fans didn’t like what he was doing they could “go to Wal-mart and get somebody else” it was pretty much done for him. Jerry got Dickeyed in 2001, and went off to sell a successful line of “Jowls For Men” personal care products (Actually, last I saw him he was an assistant at Indiana).

Then came “the Buzzard” — Buzz Peterson. On pedigree, Buzz seemed like a good choice. Played for Dean Smith at Tarhead State, had a substantial amount of coaching experience at Appy State and Tulsa, and seemed to have his act together. Again, having grown up in Asheville, I actually knew Buzz’s family, so once again I felt like I “knew” Buzz. Well, let’s just say that things didn’t work out for the Buzzard. His teams played with little fire, and simply couldn’t win when it mattered. He had the talent, but could never make it happen. At the same time, Buzz’s former teammate from the Tarhead 1982 National Champion team Matt “Doh!”-erty was also running the Tarhead program into the ground. First lesson learned: don’t hire coaches who played on that team. Second lesson: don’t hire anyone I know personally.

Then “Smiling” Mike Hamilton hired some guy from Cheese-land named Bruce Pearl. Never heard of him…

Well, I can tell you this, the SEC has heard of him now. Bruce and the Barbarians have turned Tennessee Basketball on its head. Gone are the days of all the SEC teams overlooking Tennessee. Gone are the days of The Big Brown Box being empty. Gone are the days of sucking the tubes. Bruce is here, in his orange jacket, his ripped-up shirt, and his big painted belly. The fans are rockin’ the renovated Thompson-Boling, and he’s just getting warmed up. No longer is Basketball the gimp of the Tennessee athletics department. All of that we owe to Bruce. But don’t take my word for it, you can learn more over at the Bruce Ball Blog, which covers the BasketVols about as well as anyone, over at UT Sports.com, or on Coach Pearl’s own website.

Now that I have written a ridiculous amount on a topic which everyone already knows, I thought that in honor of the BasketVols, I’d change the header on the blog for basketball season. Hope everyone likes it…

Go get’em Bruce!

— Go Figure … lawvol

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