Beware. The Illinois men’s basketball team is spreading the latest strain of a lethal sports virus. Full of promise, but prone to losing it all under pressure, the Fighting Illini are the Cubs of college basketball, the allure of their self-destructiveness something Chicago fans uniquely succumb to.
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So instead of checking up on the already infected at the United Center, where the Big Ten tournament was being played last weekend, I decided to head into the neighborhoods and study how deeply the virus had penetrated there, the better to treat it when the all-but-inevitable calamity strikes. The Illini overcame a few opening jitters in their first game of the tournament and brushed aside Northwestern, so for Saturday’s semifinal, against Minnesota, I walked down to Mulligan’s Public House in Roscoe Village. It has a reputation as a Big Ten bar, particularly among Illini loyalists; unfortunately, that reputation was bestowed by Metromix, which doesn’t know shit. When I settled in for the opening tip just after lunch, there were a handful of people at the front corner of the bar and a couple of regulars in back–none following the game. The bartender, a bearded, burly guy, apologized for serving a pint in a plastic cup–he was expecting an influx of neophytes on a pre-Saint Patrick’s Day pub crawl–and tried to make up for the lack of Illini fans all by himself. When they fell behind by scoring only one basket in the first four minutes, he said, “That’s it, Illinois, let’s watch you lose.” When they finally got going, and Head hit a three to put them in front 14-13, he shouted, “Yeah, Luther!” And when Head, trailing a fast break, immediately added another basket, the bartender said, “Yeah! That’s what I want to see!” At the half, with the Illini leading 30-24, I decided to beat the pub crawl and head out. So far, no need to impose a quarantine.
When Head set up Williams on a lovely backdoor alley-oop to put Illinois ahead 35-24, no one jumped up or shouted or oohed or ahhed. It wasn’t until Minnesota’s Vincent Grier muffed a breakaway slam dunk, bouncing the ball off the rim, that a bunch of people revealed with their hoots that they’d been watching. When Dee Brown missed a pair of free throws–the first telltale sign of tightness–to leave the score at 43-35 with 12:45 to play, the place got noticeably quiet. The guy in the orange shirt and the guy next to him both had their chins in their right hands, like side-by-side replicas of The Thinker. The wife of the other guy in an Illini shirt curled her arm around his waist as the game grew close–offering comfort, in sickness as in health. It was a sloppy contest at both ends, and James Augustine was keeping the Illini in it with a beastlike performance on the boards; but when he made one of two free throws Illinois led just 57-53 with under four minutes to go. Brown salvaged the rebound on the miss and passed the ball back to Augustine, who was fouled. This time he sank both shots. Moments later Williams drained a jumper from the top of the key to make it 61-53, and there was quiet clapping in one corner of the bar. When Illinois won 64-56, the two guys in Illini shirts and their friends all seemed blase about it, but you knew that if they’d lost, it would have been schnapps all around to chase down the angst. In short, for all the surface normality, the infection had clearly taken hold. If it had hit Roscoe Village, forget about Wrigleyville and other sports hotbeds.
