Although based in Urbana-Champaign, the Fighting Illini men’s basketball team fits perfectly into the Chicago sports continuum. Ever since Lou Henson revitalized the program 25 years ago, it has been known for producing talented teams and players who never quite live up to their promise. They’re soft; they’re fragile; they’re brittle; they are, in Kerry Wood’s word of choice, chokers. Henson was known for being a defense-oriented coach, almost anally compulsive on the offensive end, thus putting a bad case of the shakes into coulda-been stars like Bruce Douglas. The Illini broke free of Henson’s restraints and were allowed to soar for one brief season–the Kenny Battle-Kendall Gill team of 1989, christened the Flying Illini by frantic ESPN commentator Dick Vitale–but even then, though they made it to the Final Four of the NCAA tournament, they lost to a Michigan team they had beaten twice, and the Wolverines went on to win the championship.
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So when Bruce Weber moved up from Southern Illinois to replace Self, he had his work cut out for him. For one thing, Illinois alumni look down on all other colleges in the state–they even find ways to look down on Northwestern–and the idea of someone who had been coaching dullards (no matter his success) taking over this team of skittish, pensive Hamlet-esque thoroughbreds seemed improper to many–both players and fans. What’s more, Self had been popular–especially with the players, including the three star freshmen his last year that he’d recruited, Dee Brown, Deron Williams, and James Augustine–while Weber was considered unproven at this level. Though a preseason favorite, as those three all were returning as sophomores, the Illini sputtered through the early going and lost a couple of key games on the road when Big Ten play began, getting blown out at Wisconsin. The team seemed to have found, unfortunately, a coach entirely consistent with its stereotypical personality.
Lo and behold, early last week the Illini had a chance to win their first outright Big Ten title since 1952, when John “Red” Kerr was a sophomore at Illinois. Michigan State had led most of the season but stumbled at the end, allowing the Illini to claim the crown if they won their last two games on the road. They got the first in Purdue, with Head scoring 19 points, including the winning basket in overtime. That set up a potentially humiliating game at Ohio State. But the Illini, showing a rare big-game killer instinct, pounced on the Buckeyes with seven unanswered points in the first minute-plus and shifted straight into showtime. The fleet Brown, who scoots across the floor like a water spider, dished a behind-the-back trailer pass to junior forward Roger Powell to put the Illini up 23-12, and Brown and Head added back-to-back three-pointers to make it 29-14 on the way to a 34-22 halftime lead. They padded that out to 44-27 after another Brown three that found him flashing an orange smile through his plastic tooth guard. Then Ohio State came back, pounding the ball in to Terence Dials, exploiting the weak Illini front line. This was when previous Illinois teams would have packed it in. Sure enough, the Illini’s three-point shots were suddenly falling short; yet Brown and Williams kept running the offense, getting baskets when they needed them, and the Illini weathered the rally to win 64-63 and capture the championship.
