Swoosh

Over 40 some years ago my high school had some very good boys basketball teams. While they never made it to the state tournament, they came within a game of playing at the UW Fieldhouse. Our immediate family would occasionally be visited by my mom’s brother and his wife who lived in Chicago. My uncle was a petroleum salesman, and his job would take him around the Chicago area to industrial plants and car dealers, and places in between so he well knew the city of Chicago. While visiting us it was not unusual for him to comment that he could probably find some groups of Chicago street boys who could play and beat the Sun Prairie High School team in basketball. Basketball being played in the urban playgrounds, and empty lots of large cities is a stereotype, but in many respects it seemed to fit reality if not now, certainly back then. My uncle would have seen his share of pickup basketball games while travelling about Chicago. This gets me to swoosh, it is not only the sound of orange ball going through the net or chains of the rim, but it is also the sound of urban living: the packages on a conveyor belt, the large truck on the expressway, or the basketball going through a net.

Loyola of Chicago 1963 National Champion Team

When I was a student of urban geography so long ago in the 1970’s, American Cities were not the hipster, millennial dominated places with craft breweries, distilleries, urban lofts, or chocolatiers as is seemingly common in the urban landscape of today. One would not really want to live in many areas of the city. For some, however, the cultural forces inherent in demography, transportation, income, and race dictated certain situations. One common, although generally academic, book titled The Unheavenly City, by Edward Banfield, and his later The Unheavenly City Revisited, can generally sum up the urban situation. It was an era of loss of American jobs in the large old factories and plants which would later become the sleek sought after urban lofts; there was decay, poverty, riots, red-lining, and white flight. Or, for those who gravitate to popular culture, the 1969 song popularized by Elvis “In the Ghetto” would give a taste of the despair present in the nation’s major urban areas. Swoosh, the middle class vacated the cities for the suburbs and the size of the demographic was such as to alter the landscape of the nation. This has reverberated down to this day in the national land use pattern.

Four Villanova Players at Conclusion of NCAA Title Game

Recently, before the NCAA Men’s basketball championship game last Monday, on March 30, 2018, the New York Times had an article by Marc Tracy titled: “Why Catholic Colleges Excel at Basketball”. One of the main points the author made ties my above two stories together. The author notes a number of reasons for why Catholic colleges seem to do well in basketball. They range from the nature of their “mission-oriented institutions” to what he terms the sociological and spiritual.  one specific quote is instructive:

Several characteristics of Catholicism in America, both sociological and spiritual, have helped determine this affinity: the Catholic Church’s decision not to abandon the urban poor in America particularly in the second half of the 20th century, when so many other institutions did was particularly significant.

Many of these Catholic colleges and universities were formed, the article goes on, to serve immigrants of the working class.  The Poles, Irish, Italians, and other ethnic groups upon which discrimination was heaped because they did not meet the nice clean White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant definition upon which this nation had (has?) so long relied. Yes, the nation liked these immigrants for the labor they provided in the factories and hell-holes of urban life, but society desired that they be kept in their place. These schools were founded to provide higher education to the children of  immigrant parents or grandparents in the large cities to which they were attracted to find work: Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans, being some main examples the Times article pointed out.  Basketball fit a need for the urban area, and for urban Catholic colleges, as it did not require a great deal of space, and teams did not have to be big (as opposed to football). Over 20 Catholic schools dropped football before 1954, including Loyola-Chicago which dropped football in the 1930; Marquette dropped football in 1960. Today only Boston College and Notre Dame have division 1 football bowl subdivision programs. Football, as opposed to basketball, is a much more money intensive sport. Catholic schools were, by need, in many respects the first to reduce, reuse and recycle. My Catholic grade school, for example, would mimeograph assignments on the back of paper from CUNA (secured by the husband of a teacher) so I was surprised upon entering public school how the back of paper was always blank. Basketball was the selected sport because, as noted by Hofstra University professor Julie Byrne (quoted in the NY Times article)—it was cheap. It did not need the high overhead of football. In the 1960’s as more and more white Catholics moved out as part of the white flight, the parishes and schools stayed and the CYO leagues would continue, albeit with a more mixed racial, ethnic, and religious dimension than when created. And as American Studies professor James Fisher said to the Times, as the Catholic parishes and schools stayed, black kids were more and more admitted regardless of religious affiliation. He goes on to say that “the church turned demographic fact into theological virtue by embracing urban advocacy and racial justice.” The Catholic schools, as the article noted, became a magnet for some black athletes. Think Bill Russell at the University of San Francisco (who helped the team win two straight NCAA titles in the 1950's), or the 1963 Loyola of Chicago national champion team being the first to break the unwritten rule of the color barrier limiting the number of black players allowed on the court at one time.

Marquette University 1936 Cotton Bowl Football Team
(Personal note, my Dad is front row, fourth in from left)

The NY times article uses the example of the former great Marquette coach, Al McGuire, who being from New York, used his personality to recruit black New York residents to the Midwest school. Fisher notes that McGuire would say that he may not have lived in the neighborhood, but he lived next door.   Al McGuire is quoted as saying he would not recruit a kid with grass in the front yard, that was not his neighborhood.  His neighborhood was urban and cracked sidewalks.  Much of the urban tradition of American Catholic colleges owes to the Jesuit nature—think Marquette, Loyola (not Big East), Georgetown, Xavier, Creighton, all urban schools. But, add in DePaul, St. John’s (NY), and Seton Hall, and you have much of the basketball Big East which was formed out of the ruins when the big public universities left to form the power five football conferences. In fact, when the Big East was reconstituted as mainly a basketball conference, sportswriters, and the power house universities of football scoffed at its basketball-based existence and believed it would never be able to make it without any football schools. But, yet the Big East has proven them wrong. Big East member Villanova has won two of the three past Men’s NCAA tournaments. Two of the top four seeds were from the Big East in the 2018 tournament. Catholic colleges represented 9 of the 64 teams in the tournament.

Al McGuire, Hank Raymond, and Rick Majerus closing seconds
of Marquette win in 1977 

Continuing a failed line of thought some commentators have since claimed that Villanova was not that good of a team.  Yet, they beat another #1 seed Kansas by 16, and beat every other team they faced in the tournament by double digits--only the fourth team in tournament history to do so.  Villanova head coach Jay Wright makes $2.6 million annually, but to win the tournament most teams he had to beat were led by a coach with a higher salary: John Beilein of Michigan ($3.4 million), Bob Huggins of West Virginia ($3.8) and the great Bill Self of Kansas who is paid $5 million a year. Wright is probably due for a raise. But what Jay Wright does is to find the second and third tier players and form them into a team. That is why even though Michigan shut down Villanova’s starting five for part of the game, Michigan had no answer for the 6th man who came off the bench to score 31 points. The team adapted, and work to find the open man.  Jeff Potrykus of the Milwaukee Journal believes that the Wisconsin team which lost to Duke in the championship game a few years ago could have beaten the 2018 Nova team. Why? He explained it is because Wisconsin had superstar (Catholic high school product) Frank Kaminsky. But, what he gets wrong is that Nova played a team game, where it is not dependent on one or two players, or even, as was shown, its starting five. By focus on a few Potrykus falls into the trap that team effort does not matter. If anything this year’s tournament should have given him pause in his ridiculous post tournament analysis. Kentucky is made of one and done's where did they end up?  Loyola made the final four playing unselfishly as a team, with three games decided in the last seconds by only a few points in each, and in each game a different player made the game winning shot. Loyola, as an eleven seed, lacked the talent of the many power house teams, but they played together.  It was the virtues of team work, persistence and a belief in themselves that allowed them to transcend the expected first game loss to a higher seed, and to continue that trek to the semi-final game. Loyola brought back some meaning and hope to college basketball felled by scandal.

Marquette National Championship Team Photo
Al McGuire always did things his way.

Many institutions left the inner cities of our nation decades ago creating an atmosphere that the hipster urban dwellers of today would not recognize. That is not to say there is not still poverty, or decay, or racial isolation but in many cases sections of our urban areas have been gentrified over the last decade or two. It is now hip to live in the city, and food, beverage places have followed. But yet, in many of the large urban cities of our nation there is one institution that remained constant through the era of white flight, poverty and neglect of the 1960’s into the 1980’s (and even beyond). While the hipsters drink their designer coffee, beer, or whiskey, or do their yoga in the park, they may well benefit by looking to what urban life was like 30 to 60 years ago. The swoosh of Villanova’s three pointers against Kansas, and the swoosh of the in-lane action against Michigan had its start in the early years of urban Catholic schools like the University of San Francisco, Loyola, Holy Cross, DePaul, Georgetown and Marquette.  Those urban dwellers with the cracked sidewalks produce some remarkable athletes.  Perhaps my Uncle was right, some street kids from Chicago could have taken down the Sun Prairie High School team.