Two sides to every story - Cornell
You can have Kentucky. You can take Ashley Judd, Adolph Rupp, Sam Bowie, Pat Riley, Coach Cal, Refuse to Lose, the one-and-done freshmen bound for the NBA, and all the bags of cash needed to make the Wildcats run.
I’ll take Cornell and the Ivy League, which has long been a joke in college basketball.
But these Cornell guys pretty much all came from upper-middle-class backgrounds at least (one is the prototypical “coach’s son”; Ryan Wittman’s dad Randy was an NBA player and coach) and will have cozy lives waiting for them after they graduate. As player Louis Dale joked: “After this, it’s just nothing but babies and memories.”
Meanwhile the Kentucky kids are mostly inner-city types who needed some breaks just to get where they are. John Wall’s father died when he was nine and his mother worked multiple jobs to get him his shot; DeMarcus Cousins had no father either and his mother had to move him out of Birmingham to get him away from a bad neighborhood. Obviously they both won the genetic lottery, too, but plenty of parents have blown it for kids with the same luck.
I get that within a few years both of them and Bledsoe and Patterson and the rest of them will probably be the overpaid, entitled douche bags most NBA stars turn into. I also get that D-1 college basketball is crooked as a barrel of snakes and that recruiting whizzes like John Calipari are morally probably on par with white-slavers and Colombian drug lords. But while they’re still teenagers basketball is a life-or-death deal for kids like Wall and Cousins and their families. So I have a little trouble with all of these stories talking about how we should root for the Big Red because the Cornell kids just try harder and love the game more.
This is only food for though, of course I’m only thinking GO BIG RED!!
