Now that April is here, perhaps it is safe to reminisce on the Madness of March some of us witnessed on our television screens (while others traveled to Newark or Tucson or Houston or wherever) to participate in the drama and spectacle of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.
The fact that our Racers did not make the tournament after winning the OVC regular season championship certainly diminished the excitement around here, but two of my alma maters made the field.
The University of Kentucky, where I completed two graduate degrees and which I follow both as a fan and as a subject of academic interest overcame six SEC road losses in the regular season to win the SEC Tournament in Atlanta and then four games in the NCAA Tournament—against Princeton, West Virginia, number one seeded Ohio State, and then North Carolina—to make the Final Four before succumbing to the eventual champion Connecticut Huskies by 1 point (56-55).
Now, for Kentucky, the drama continues to unfold: Who will stay? Who will enter the NBA draft? Players have until April 24, I think, to decide. From what I’ve seen from high school all-star games, however, with Davis, Gilchrist, Wiltjer, and Teague—it sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it?—the Wildcats will be loaded for another year.
My undergraduate alma mater, Belmont University, had the best season in the school’s history since ascending to NCAA Division I status. When I played there in the mid-1970s, Belmont competed in the small college NAIA.
This year, Belmont went 19-1 in the NCAA’s Atlantic Sun Conference (losing only to our arch-rival Lipscomb University in the “Battle of the Boulevard”) and went 30-5 overall, winning the A-Sun Conference Tournament in Macon, Georgia, and then, as a 13th seed losing to 4th-seeded Wisconsin,72-58, in Tucson in the NCAA Tournament’s first round.
The game proved to be an inglorious end to a storybook season for the small Nashville school. I say “small Nashville school,” but the Belmont University of today, with almost 6,000 students, is five times the size of the Belmont College from which I graduated in 1978. Then, only 1,400 or so undergraduates scurried across that tiny gem of a campus, located not far from the downtown of the Music City, just at the end of Music Row. Today, the institution’s storied Music Business program continues to thrive, but represents only one of many other top-notch undergraduate and graduate programs.
Now there is a new Pharmacy School and ground has been broken for a Belmont School of Law. The university has expanded in both enrollment and real estate.
I flourished at Belmont in Nashville and at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. In fact, I look back on those years with fondness and appreciation, and I cannot go back to either city without visiting the campuses, however changed they might be.
Despite the tournament losses to Connecticut for the Wildcats and to Wisconsin for the Bruins, the games of last month brought back a flood of memories of bygone days, when a small-town western Kentucky boy played basketball, not against Ohio State and North Carolina and Connecticut and Wisconsin, but against Lambuth and Bethel and Lipscomb and Tusculum and Fisk.
I miss those days, to be sure, but at least I can continue to live out the dream of college basketball, albeit vicariously now, by watching Murray State and Belmont and Kentucky. But, oh, to be young again.
I will write more next week about my Belmont experience, and then in two weeks I will delve into my graduate school years in Lexington.
As for now, let me just say that I am proud of the institutions with which I am associated. I love them all, whether they are located in Nashville, Lexington, or Murray.
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