Who do we call the “home” team this time of college basketball season?

We’re at the point of the year where much public attention will be spewed upon the NCAA men’s basketball tourney for Division I, yet we here in the Land of Lincoln don’t have an obvious team to root for.

Now I’m sure there are many Chicagoans who went to college at various places across the country who can turn to their alma maters that were worth anything this past season to root for.

YET FOR THOSE of us looking for a local team, there isn’t much of anything. No Illinois school was able to get a bid to partake in the tourney.

Admittedly, Valparaiso University in Indiana is on the outermost southeast fringe of what could be called the Chicago area, although I’m sure people living north of 95^th Street would prefer think of it as alien turf. And some people like to think of Notre Dame as an area college, while just as many detest the very concept.

But the Hoosiers definitely got more on us this time of year – Indiana U. and Purdue also made it while the west side of State Line Road got nothing.

Those of us whose sporting attention isn’t totally dominated by spring training baseball and fantasies of that all-Chicago World Series taking place this year will have to look to the so-called lesser college basketball tournaments.

WITHIN THE CHICAGO area, there is Loyola University which got an invitation to the College Basketball Invitational. Where they will play their first (and potentially only) game Tuesday night against Rider College, and we likely will hear many repeats of how the Ramblers won the whole thing back in 1963!

There also will be Tuesday night basketball for the University of Illinois in Urbana, which got selected to participate in the National Invitational Tournament – which once was a big deal but now comes across as the ultimate consolation prize for failing to make it to the NCAA Division I tourney.

But they get to play the University of Alabama, which is noteworthy because they recently fired their basketball coach. Just BEFORE getting selected for the NIT.

I’m sure on a certain level, it would be a more intriguing story if Alabama were able to achieve some success under these circumstances. Could this mean the sporting nation would view a Fighting Illini victory as the ultimate bummer – completely ruining the story line?

I ALSO CAN’T see much enthusiasm for the other Illinois-based school that made it to the NIT – Illinois State University in Normal, which on Wednesday will have its first tournament game against the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Will anyone (outside of alumni with fond memories of Garcia’s pizza) get worked up rooting for a team whose own NCAA tourney dreams came crashing down with a loss in the Missouri Valley Conference tournament to the University of Northern Iowa (which did get the NCAA bid)?

Perhaps if we pretend to ourselves that the team from Green Bay is the Packers, then we could get Chicagoans to care. Otherwise, I just don’t see it happening.

We may wind up finding a better tale if we drop down to the NCAA Division III level, where their national tourney began a couple of weeks ago. They already are down to their “final four” schools (out of 64) playing for a national title.

AND THERE, WE find an Illinois-based school with a serious shot at winning a championship – the Rock Island-based Augustana University, which will play Babson College Friday and possibly the winner of Virginia Wesleyan/University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point for the championship on Saturday.

Those of us with an Illinois rooting interest may have to look to the banks of the Mississippi River to find a local team to cheer for, although I’ll have to confess to feeling some confusion about this prospect.

The Illinois Wesleyan University alum in me knows of Augustana because the two schools both play in the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin (and the Vikings beat IWU in the conference tournament last month), while the Titans’ own national title dreams fell short last weekend with a loss to Stevens Point.

If those two schools make it to the title game Saturday in Salem, Va., it really would become a choice of which one’s victory would annoy me the least. It also could have me looking forward to the coming of a new baseball season all the more.

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Bring back the Maroons! It makes more sense than having SIU in Big Ten

Every year in the Illinois General Assembly manages to bring about a bill or two that gets a lot of attention just because the idea being espoused is so knuckleheaded and absurd that we know it’s going nowhere.

Not a ringing endorsement for Ill. flagship

This year, it seems the nonsense bill in question is one based upon the idea that Illinois needs to improve its educational opportunities for students by getting another of its public universities into the Big Ten.

AS IF WE don’t suffer enough by seeing Fighting Illini and Wildcats sports teams get their behinds kicked by Michigan, Ohio State and Indiana, state representatives Michael Connelly, R-Lisle, and Matt Murphy, R-Palatine, somehow think that having the Illinois State Redbirds or the Cougars of Southern Illinois-Edwardsville in the mix will bolster things.

This is just ridiculous on so many levels. But let’s take the key point that Connelly made in talking to the Chicago Sun-Times about this issue. “”Big Ten,’ to me, means a top state school. There’s a lot of pride in that. The Big Ten has a cachet and a record of higher academic and athletic excellence.”

Now I’m not looking to go on a diatribe against the University of Illinois. I have known many people (including my brother, Chris) who were educated there. It’s a fine place. But that statement from Connelly is just a bunch of hooey!

The reason some people choose to attend universities elsewhere is because they have achieved such standards and reputations that those top students want to challenge themselves (either that, or they have “legacy” connections that get them in).



MURPHY: Placing too much faith...

WE ALL KNOW it’s not 100 percent accurate to recall Tom Cruise’s “Joel” character from “Risky Business” and his reaction to learning he probably wasn’t going to be accepted to Princeton. But the Urbana-Champaign campus doesn’t really get bonus points academically because it’s in the Big Ten conference.

And the Big Ten sure doesn’t get much respect athletically when compared to the other major conferences that comprise the world of NCAA Division I sports.

Somehow, I suspect some alum of an SEC school is laughing his behind off at the thought of the Big Ten being elite. Then again, some of those alums may not be literate enough to read this commentary, so who knows how they will react. And as for the Ivy League types, their snootiness lets me easily disregard them.



CONNELLY: ... in Big Ten label?

I just think that some people are equating an athletic conference with way too much significance. And in the case of the Big Ten, it doesn’t help that their latest expansion efforts have been to get into the big media markets. That is, if you think of Rutgers as New York-area and Maryland as Washington, D.C.

THE ONLY WAY I could see the Big Ten wanting a third Illinois-based academic institution is if it would put them in Chicago proper (Northwestern University is, after all, based in suburban Evanston). I just can’t see them caring about Normal, Ill., or suburban St. Louis (as in Edwardsville). And don’t even bring up the main campus in Carbondale – a place so isolated physically it makes Champaign seem cosmopolitan.

Besides, what does any of this have to do with academics? Connelly and Murphy say their concern is that University of Illinois standards have become too high and many students get rejected.

How about working on ways to bolster the level of the other state-funded public universities? Which has nothing to do with the Big Ten label.

There’s also the fact that Connelly and Murphy think that students rejected by Illinois are going to other states, and not coming back. Yet how often do we hear about University of Michigan (or other Midwestern university) alumni who beehive it straight for Chicago once they graduate?

SO WHAT COULD this all mean? Probably nothing. The bill that already has made it through a state Senate committee calls for a commission to spend a year studying the issue – if it even gets approved. Nobody is bound to do anything.

Which means we’re not likely to ever see anything actually happen with this. Not even a return of the one Chicago university that actually has a Big Ten history.

The Stagg Field of old (and its Big Ten memories) are long gone from Hyde Park neighborhood campus. Illustration provided by Chuckman Chicago Nostalgia.

Restore the Chicago Maroons to the athletic conference for the first time since the late 1930s? I doubt it, largely because university officials themselves would see the Big Ten as a hindrance to their academic mission!

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Taylor a throwback to old Chicago

I saw blues singer Koko Taylor perform several times during my life, but the occasion I recall most vividly occurred in a place far removed from the South Side atmosphere that her rough, rugged voice brought to mind.

It was at Illinois State University, the Normal-based college that was within walking distance of my own alma mater – Illinois Wesleyan. Back in what was most likely 1984, Taylor and her Blues Machine band was earning a living performing the blues, and they gave a concert on the college campus.

WHAT MAKES THAT event stick so strongly in my mind is the fact that I literally got a front row center seat. I was probably about 10 feet away from her in what was a packed (several hundred, maybe up to 1,000 people) hall of people whose idea of a study break was to spend a Saturday night listening to Koko giving us her take on “Wang Dang Doodle” and other blues songs.

Now I don’t listen to the blues as much as I used to back in college. I still have all my old LPs of Taylor’s music, but the most recent recordings on CD are ones I haven’t gotten around to buying yet.

But back in the days when I did manage to blow much of my spare cash on music and recordings, I remember that a Koko Taylor record was always more valued than some of the other stuff that passes for blues these days.

I still own some of my old vintage recordings of music by artists such as Muddy Waters, Magic Sam and B.B. King (who once gave us a recorded concert performed from our very own Cook County Jail).

BUT THERE WAS always a difference between listening to something like “I Just Wanna Make Love to You” by Muddy Waters, and anything recorded by someone like “Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials.”

Whether it was in the writing of the songs or just the fact that so much of life and our society has changed that no one could possibly come up with a song like “Hoochie Coochie Man” these days, the modern-day “bluesmen” all too often sound like a parody of the real thing.

Too much worried about getting the right “sound” to their guitar solo, rather than trying to catch the earthy feeling that is what makes the blues legitimate.

That is what always, to my ear, made Koko Taylor unique.

THE LADY FROM Tennessee who followed the migration of black people from the South to the South Side and who once was the cleaning woman for rich white people (who probably had no clue of her “night” job and its cultural significance) was one of the few blues singers I ever heard who had a sense of the real earthy feel that used to be heard in clubs all throughout Bronzeville some 70 years ago.

None of the guitar-oriented nonsense that can overwhelm a true blues singer, which at its best should be some of the simplest music played.

And definitely none of that bleached out sound that too often comes from listening to white rock ‘n’ roll types trying to play the blues because they like the guitar sound.

I’d rather hear Muddy Waters any day than any of the cover versions recorded back in the 1970s by Led Zeppelin or Eric Clapton – even though I know of people who feel just the opposite (they view the newer versions of the songs as “polished and improved” versions – I say they’re nuts).

THE WORST PEOPLE, in this regard, are the ones who think that “the Blues Brothers” film had anything to do with blues music. My reason for getting into that film is seeing the grittiness of a now-gone Chicago on film. The music itself is too pop oriented at times.

No one would ever call Koko Taylor’s music polished or pop. And that was its beauty.

What made her special is that she was still with us even into the 21st Century, giving us a taste of what used to echo from clubs along East 43rd Street (the old Checkerboard Lounge) back in the first third of the 20th.

Plus, she was still in her prime physically until recent years. So we got to hear the earthiness of the blues at its best.

THAT WAS PARTICULARLY rare. I can claim to have seen both Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker perform live. But by the time I saw them in the 1980s, they were old men who didn’t sound anything close to what they were in their prime.

Seeing Hooker, in particular, was like listening to one of those oldies revival tours, with bands such as the Buckinghams trying to pretend they can turn the calendar back some 40 years. In Hooker’s case, he was trying to go back about 60 years, and it wasn’t convincing.

It made me wish I could have seen him in his prime. But in the case of Koko, I got to see and hear her in her prime.

Those occasions will be among the moments I recall of an older Chicago likely for the rest of my life.

NOW EXCUSE ME while I walk over to my turntable (I still own a functioning one) and put on my copy of “Queen of the Blues.” (And I don’t want to hear arguments about how I ought to own the CD instead).

At this particular moment (which is about one day after I first learned Taylor died following complications from surgery performed a couple weeks ago), I think I need a jolt of “Queen Bee” to brighten my day.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen and learn for yourself about the musical career of the late (http://www.kokotaylor.com/index.html) Koko Taylor.