It was a tough loss yesterday for the Sooners in their first Final Four in 14 years. Difficult to stomach. I think this headline sums it up well:
Sooners' dream season ends with a nightmare finish
Last week, though, in the lead up to the Final Four, my hopes and dreams were still in tact. Reality had not yet crushed them so cruelly and callously. So last week I dove head first into the mass of media coverage.
I decided that my Big 12 River wasn't big enough. It only had regional stories. It was time to go national. So I went to Google News, did a search for oklahoma sooners basketball, and created a Google alert to notify me whenever it found a new story with those keywords. Over the course of the week, I read nearly every story it found. Here's a bit of what I read.
It wasn't just a tough final game for the Sooners, it was a tough 3 weeks of the tournament:
- The first week of the tournament, backup center Akolda Manyang learned his brother committed suicide. He left the team to be with his family and didn't return.
- The second week freshman Christian James learned two of his friends, and his high school girlfriend, were killed in a car accident.
- The third week starting center Khadeem Lattin's grandmother died.
It's almost unreal that all of that happened to one team during March Madness.
In more cheerful news, if you read only one story about Buddy Hield, read this one. It is absolutely charming.
ESPN The Magazine has an excellent article, A Beautiful Burden, about Khadeem Lattin and his grandfather, and the racism both have encountered during their playing careers.
The Sooners have been making it to the Final Four in 14-year spans. 2016. 2002. 1988. There's a basketball athletic trainer at OU who's been there 29 years, so this was his third Final Four with the Sooners.
There's a lot of love out there for head coach Lon Kruger. He's coached at K-State, Florida, Illinois, UNLV, and now Oklahoma. I came across several articles from newspapers in Las Vegas and Florida that praised the job Kruger did in rebuilding their programs. He's still fondly remembered at both places. Florida especially, because he took them to the Final Four in 1994. "Lon is the guy who made Florida basketball," says one analyst.
Rolling Stone had a great article interviewing some of Kruger's former players. My favorite story was from a former Florida player who remembered his team falling behind 12-0 early in a game, when Kruger called timeout. The player expected to be chewed out big time in the huddle, but instead Kruger took out the dry-erase board, drew a big smiley face, and told the players to take a deep breath and relax. They would be fine.
David Boren, the president at OU, absolutely loves Lon Kruger. He enthusiastically told a group of people that Kruger is one of the greatest hires ever at Oklahoma, and then spent 4 minutes explaining why that was a fact, and not an opinion. It all boils down to making students better people, not just better basketball players.
Here's to better days for the Sooners.