Loyola/Michigan basketball becomes the battle of the deli sandwiches

Just in case anybody had doubts about how significant the Loyola vs. Michigan semi-final game in the NCAA Men’s basketball tourney is to Chicago, we have the latest bit of evidence.

Manny's gets free publicity from latest sporting bet

It’s VERY significant, because the mayors feel compelled to turn it into a sporting bet.

AS IN ONE of those things where the mayor of Chicago feels compelled to defend the honor of the Second City against that of the other city. Which in this case is Ann Arbor, Mich.

And in which case, each of the mayors puts up some food item supposedly significant to the respective city. Somebody supposedly will get to do some good eatin’ depending on who manages to prevail in Saturday’s game that leads up to the NCAA championship game scheduled for Monday.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is willing to buy corned beef and pastrami from Manny’s Deli and send it off to Ann Arbor IF Loyola’s “Cinderella” surprise team finally meets its match to Big 10 powerhouse Michigan.

But if it turns out that Loyola prevails and winds up playing in the championship game against the winner of Kansas/Villanova, then Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor will be sending sandwiches to City Hall from Zingerman’s Deli.

SPECIFICALLY, THE GEORGIA Reuben sandwich – which I’m told is turkey, cheese and cole slaw served on rye bread and slathered with Russian dressing.

It doesn’t sound appetizing to me (something about thick, creamy salad dressings is a turnoff), but I’m told by various University of Michigan alumni that it is a big deal – and something many of them crave when they think back to their collegiate days.

Will Chi win piles of Georgia Reubens?

I’ll have to admit to thinking this particular political bet is a little more intriguing than most. Usually, our public officials manage to put up a generic list of food products that they claim is associated with Chicago.

I remember back in the days of Richard M. Daley as mayor, the bets usually produced something resembling a grocery list that only Chicago-oriented geeks would ever think of buying.

TURNING THE WHOLE spectacle into little more than a marketing ploy – free advertising for Chicago-based companies. Rather than something that anybody with a real sporting interest would have put together.

I’m certainly glad to learn that Chicago isn’t offering to send pizzas to some other city so as to show off the superiority of the local product compared to whatever Little Caesar’s-like product the other city thinks is edible.

Largely because too many Chicagoans can’t agree on what a “real” pizza consists of, or how its slices should be cut (party-style into squares, I argue, and certainly not into triangles that one folds over. That’s playing with one’s food, rather than eating it).

Anything we’d send to another city would create a local conflict over whether we truly sent our best representative of pizza. Unless you’re so convinced that the Chicago-oriented ball club will prevail and we won’t have to send anything!

SO WHAT SHOULD we think of this bet? I like the part where the mayors also say they’ll make a contribution to the charity of the winning city’s choice. Which probably says more than the shipping of sandwiches.

Although to get within the spirit of the event, let’s say that Loyola manages to defeat number 3-seeded Michigan (Loyola’s ranked 11^th) and takes on the Kansas/Villanova winner.

Do we get to see our public officials make another bet? I can’t think of anything edible in either of those places. Particularly from anything in and around Lawrence, Kan.

Is this the ultimate Loyola over Villanova prize?

But if it became a matchup between Loyola and Villanova, would we get an Italian beef vs. Philly cheesesteak brawl? If so, we all know the superiority of a “hot, dipped combo” over any gooey mess that becomes a cheesesteak.

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What’s Loyola legacy for ’18 basketball team in Chicago sports history?

When I think of college basketball locally, the school that pops into my mind is DePaul University. But that fact may not be true for much longer.

 

Aguirre (right) went on to NBA glory

I was a high schooler back when the Blue Demons (still playing in the old Alumni Hall gymnasium) had that string of competitive teams in the early 1980s to go with that team that managed to make it to the Final Four of the 1979 NCAA men’s basketball tourney.

WITH LONG-TIME coach Ray Meyer at the head and star Mark Aguirre leading the team, there was a time when DePaul was one of the big deals of Chicago sports – certainly more significant than the pre-Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls ever were.

They may not have made it to the championship game (that was Michigan State/Indiana State that gave us a national preview of future NBA stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird). But there is a generation that will never forget that era of our local sports scene (particularly since the only other championship team of that time period was the 1981 Chicago Sting soccer team).

But is DePaul’s long-time local rival, Loyola University, about to knock the Blue Demons’ squad of nearly four decades ago off their perch.

 

Better known than any Loyola players

For the Ramblers who managed to gain themselves a spot in this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tourney have managed to far exceed what they should have achieved.

THEY’RE IN THE ‘Elite Eight’ of teams (65 started out the tourney a couple of weeks ago), and their victories were all by single points.

Loyola University has given us some gut-wrenching games to follow, ones that weren’t settled until the final seconds. I’m sure there will be many people watching Saturday night when the Ramblers take on Kansas State University.

CBS Sports is calling the game “the most unpredictable Elite Eight game in NCAA Tournament history.” Who’s to say if Loyola is capable of another victory – which would officially mean the Ramblers of ’18 will have matched the Blue Demons of ’79 in terms of athletic achievement.

 

The 'old days' of Blue Demon basketball

Which I’m sure would make Loyola alumni and Ramblers fans happy, since even though the school likes to boast that they’re the only Chicago entity to ever win the NCAA tourney outright (back in 1963), that one seems so long ago and some basketball fans I’ve heard dismiss it on the grounds that the game itself has changed so much.

NOW I’LL ADMIT to being a band-wagon type fan in all of this. My own alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan, plays Division III basketball, and yes, the Fighting Titans this year qualified for the NCAA tourney, but wound up losing in the first round to the Wooster Scots (they’re in Ohio).

Meaning there wasn’t much to root for on that front. Which made it possible to follow along with Loyola and also wonder about those individuals scattered around the country who have taken to using the name and image of “Sister Jean” in vain.

Mostly fans of the schools that have managed to lose by one point apiece during the three games Loyola has played this month. Should we expect those fans to have to go to confession for besmirching the image of the 98-year-old nun who has made herself the most visible Ramblers fan?

Although what can be said of the fact that for many people watching the games, they probably know of Loyola as Sister Jean and a batch of players they never paid much attention to before.

UNLIKE THE DEPAUL squads of those past decades where Aguirre was the “big name” that was destined to play a dozen years professionally in the NBA with Dallas and Detroit.

The only (oft-forgotten) Chicago team to win an NCAA tourney -- '63 Loyola

Although I suspect if you toss out the “Aguirre” moniker to a modern-day Chicago fan, his Blue Demons stint is more memorable than anything he did for those Pistons teams that won NBA championships just prior to the Bulls’ own string of six champs during the 1990s.

So what’s likely to happen Saturday. Will the Sporting News turn out to be correct in their prediction of a Loyola victory and a trip to the Final Four, being held this year in San Antonio, Texas?

Or will DePaul fans and alumni be able to breathe a sigh of relief that this year’s Ramblers’ squad didn’t go so far as their own team’s historic run of ’79?

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Did Bulls’ 6 NBA titles depend on half-century-old Loyola basketball team?

The Cook County Board engaged in its attempt to bathe itself in celebrity status by presenting a resolution Wednesday that paid tribute to the Loyola Ramblers men’s basketball program that 50 years ago won an NCAA title – the only such school from Illinois ever to win the tourney.

Would this have been possible ...

The Ramblers’ victory that year wasn’t so much that they beat the University of Cincinnati in the championship game. But it was their matchup against Mississippi State University that gets them their moment of glory.

THAT’S BECAUSE THE Ramblers had an all-black starting five at a time when some people thought they were doing black people a favor by letting a few of them play.

When they beat a segregated team (despite the efforts of political officials to prevent the game from ever occurring), it became a big deal for reasons that go beyond the court.

The “Game of Change,” as the 61-51 victory over Mississippi State came to be known, is the reason that the Loyola team – as a unit – will be inducted next month into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

Like I wrote earlier, the county board came up with their own resolution, which they presented to one-time Loyola center Rich Rochelle.

COUNTY COMMISSIONER DEBORAH Sims, D-Chicago, went so far as to praise Rochelle and his teammates, saying, “if that (the Loyola victory) had not happened, we would not have had our Michael Jordan or Scottie Pippen.”

She extended the thought to the present, saying, “We might not have D-Rose now,” referring to Bulls’ recovering-from-injuries star Derrick Rose.

Which might mean our Chicago Bulls might be even more of a dreadful team than they have been for much of their five decades of existence. Just think of how nasty the Chicago sporting experience would have been in recent years if not for that brief taste in the 1990s of New York Yankees-like dominance over a sport that the Bulls gave us with two three-straight runs of NBA titles.

... without this?

For his part, county Commissioner Larry Suffredin, D-Evanston, recalled following the ’63 Ramblers, remembering that the championship game wasn’t even televised live in the Chicago market (quite a difference from today’s broadcast juggernaut that is the Division 1 NCAA basketball tourney).

THERE WAS A delayed television broadcast, although Suffredin recalls word of the Loyola victory slipping out prematurely. “Everybody on the North Side who heard the screams coming from the campus probably figured out that something good had happened,” he said.

County Commissioner John Daley, D-Chicago, took the moral high ground; saying at one point that a Loyola victory with an overwhelmingly African-American roster (a term no one would have used at the time) was something that needed to be experienced.

“It is a sad commentary on where we were,” Daley said, of the segregated ways of the past. “It is something we should not forget.”

Although despite the efforts of political people to dominate the scene, it may well have been Rochelle who was most eloquent –even though he tried to describe himself as, “a man of few words.”

AS HE PUT it, “At the time we played, you have to understand the world we existed in.”

In a condition when maybe a sports starting lineup could have a black player (with maybe another on the bench), a team with four starting players and a fifth who also saw significant playing time, “was unheard of.”

Yet Rochelle said he and his teammates were less concerned about revolutionary racial acts and were more concerned about how their actions would be perceived by others – particularly if that perception would be seen as negative.

The Ramblers have accomplished something no other Division 1 Illinois school has

 

“We didn’t expect to be in the national limelight,” he said. “We just wanted to represent Chicago well.”

IT COULD BE argued they did exactly that – even if the ultimate outcome for Loyola was so unique. After all, they won.

While also creating a moment that forevermore brings some pride to our city; even if it leaves DePaul Blue Demons basketball fans (and fans of the 1979 team that fell just short) seething with a touch of envy.

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