"Will the Real Champion Please Stand": article draft by Roosevelt Fitzgerald

WILL THE REAL CHAMPION PLEASE STAND BY ROOSEVELT FITZGERALD
"Of all the rotten luck." That's what I thought in the early spring of 1989 when the road to the Final Four started and the Runnin' Rebels were seeded in the first round in Boise, Idaho.
Fifteen years earlier, I had been up in that country—camping. It was in the Bitterroot Mountains right along the border of western Montana. I entered the state on highway 12 out of Missoula and followed the Lochas River down to Kooskia where I cut north by northwest on that same highway to the North Fork of the Clearwater River just past Orofina. From there it was down to Lewiston and on south to Cambridge where I veered off to the north on highway 71 up to Hell's Canyon on the Snake River.
All told, I spent right at two months in Idaho and never had a problem with anybody. Beautiful country, ter.iffic roads and camping and real nice people. For the next decade, almost, I thought of returning to Idaho and seeing more of it but I could not find the time and then it was too late. The next thing I knew there were reports of neo-nazis, skinheads, klansmen, survivalists and all sorts of other white supremacists all over the place up there. They held annual meetings at Hayden Lake, near Coeur d'Alene, with thousands in attendance. You probably saw something about it on television or in the papers. The biggest gatherings of bigots since Hitler met up in that neck of the woods. Fatigues, automatic weapons, men, women, children—brainwashers and brainwashees teaching and learning to hate black, brown, red, yellow and Jewish people.
It became increasingly clear to me that the new Idaho was nothing at all like the Idaho I had known. It was because of that transfiguration that my first thought, in early spring of 1989, when the Rebels were seeded to play the first round of the NCAA Tournament in Boise, Idaho, was; "Of all the rotten luck." Then it occurred to me that it was just the sort of thing the Selection
Committee would do—send a team of primarily black young men into hostile
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territory.
■Well, the joke was oh them. You see, the overwhelming majority of those hate mongers that we've been hearing about in Idaho are not Idahoans. They are the transplanted.muck found in the backed-up sewage lines of America. We must guard against developing a negative, stereotypical view of Kansas and Kansans simply because the NCAA is headquartered there. Many of the people involved in the recent decision which we all loath come from other places where if they didn't imagine they were superior to Las Vegas, the only things left for them to imagine they're superior to would be minority people.
As this past year's basketball season got underway there was indeed great anticipation for success. We were ranked one, two or three in all of the preseason polls and most of them had us ranked number one. Disaster set in right from the start. One of our starters and the sixth man were acacemically ineligible for the Fall Semester. Then there were the one and two game suspensions followed by injuries to several key players. We had a Makeshift team for much of the season and dropped a few key games. Still, the enthusiasm remained high. Much of our season--the past thirteen years—is analogous to Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables where the relentless inspector Javert hounded Jean Paul Jean for years because he had.once stolen a loaf of bread in order that his sister could feed her children. How many times must one pay for having made a poor decision? Over and over again for a lifetime? There is the law and there is justice. Are we to believe, as Kipling has said of the east and the west that "never the twain shall meet"? Are we to stand on the balcony of life and cry out into the night for justice as Juliet did for Romeo? Justice, Oh justice. Where forth art thou? Will our incantations and lamentations be whisked away by the winds to forever be lost among all the everlasting sounds waiting through the universe? Of course not. And we will not.
Who will speak up for us? What a wonderful time for these events to unfold. As the democratic ideal is spreading to other parts of the world,
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we can let them see how important it is. Soon there will be only one dictatorship left in the world where due process is gone with the wind and the power hungry gives a fair trial even as the hangman and his cohorts prepare the scaffold for the hanging.
The NCAA has set itself up in much the same was as were Medieval kingdoms. All of the universities are manors and the players are serfs and the concept of the Magna Charta has not yet been conceived.
Once again they have slapped us down and once again, like the pheonix, we will rise. We may not win this battle with them. We probably will be denied the opportunity to defend our championship. As a concession, they will probably compromise and allow us to play in the NIT (don't forget where you heard it first) just to show that they are not all bad. Keep the crumb. It has been my observation that whenever a punishment is overly severe, it is usually in multiple distinct parts. Several of the parts are there only for bartering as necessary. They surround the main punishment like a moat does a castle. The victim oftentimes imagines that there is a degree of leniency when some portions of the punishment are lifted. On closer examination it is frequently found that those lifted portions are not punishments at all but only a ruse. This is why I say; keep the crumb--we'll eat cake, lose our heads and regenerate.
The NCAA does not understand that we're on a far higher level. They do not understand that they have provided this community with something that pulls many parts of it together. Certainly, there are those who have no interest in these going ons and others who say that the NCAA are justified in what they're doing. The latter are part of that group which are lifetime slaves to authority—any authority. They don't want to make the authorities mad. They do not understand that they need not be concerned with making the authorities mad. Such authorities who do indeed get mad do not need an excuse
to punish. Such authorities flagrantly and outrageously misuse their authority.
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They rely on Argumentum ad Baculum or the appeal to force. They believe as did Attila; "Might makes
Yes, there are people who had never really had an interest in the university or its athletic teams who are now saying; "They don't puM that crap with the big name schools." "They've been picking on UNLV for years--since I was a kid." "Who do they think they are?" "We'll show them."
We will show 'em. We're going to go through next season like crap through a goose. We're not only going to beat everybody we play, we're going to cause them to go into their locker rooms, kneel down, put their hands together, look heavenward and ask; "Do You think we ought to get out of this basketball business?" When the regular season ends we will have left a trail of devastated
teams which will rival the trail of devastation left in Europe during World War
II between Leningrad and Berlin. Whatever teams do in fact get invited to the "Big Party" will know that whatever happens in the course of the tournament
and whoever wins the final game and whatever feeling of accomplishment and
triumph they might feel, the real national champions will be in Las Vegas.