Why We All Should Root for Kentucky

Why We All Should Root for Kentucky

A Bluegrass State author explains why America shouldn’t begrudge the undefeated Wildcats or their delirious fans

By Erik Reece in the Wall Street Journal

Lexington, Ky.

Where I live, April really is the cruelest month—because it means the end of the Kentucky basketball season.

So even though it is officially April, we Kentuckians are extending March a few more days with hopes that it results in the first-ever wire-to-wire, 40-win championship season. You know, Secretariat-style.

A local grocery has started selling poundcakes that resemble burning couches. A local brewery just concocted team-color beer: a blueberry-and-white Belgian ale. In the neighborhoods around campus, men and women with advanced degrees and positions of tenure stand on their front porches after tournament games and issue primal expressions of triumph right alongside the undergrads. We’re all in our full March form down here.

“It’s like your Mardi Gras,” transplanted New Orleans poet Julia Johnson told me the other day, “and it’s contagious.” Then she jumped up from her desk and did an impromptu fist-pumping dance.

Here’s the thing: Kentucky, as a state, has a lot of problems. There’s a heroin epidemic, the coal industry is hemorrhaging jobs because of cheap natural gas and a recent study named us the nation’s most psychologically depressed state. Which is to say: We need UK basketball, and we need it to be good.

Most things Kentucky is known for aren’t particularly good for you: coal, bourbon, tobacco, gambling. But being a UK basketball fan is a dopamine-boosting, community-building, problems-shirking great time. You get to feel good about yourself without really doing anything to deserve it. That is the beauty of sports fandom. And here in Kentucky, we have perfected it.

It’s in March that the rest of the country gets to see on TV the real Kentucky fans, not the more staid season-ticket holders who fill Rupp Arena during the regular season, but rarely rise up out of their seats to cheer. The rest of Big Blue Nation saves up all year so we can travel with the Cats to the Southeastern Conference and NCAA tournaments. In March, we hit the road like nobody’s business. We’re the basketball version of Alabama football. We’re loud and we’re proud and we’re everywhere. Sure, a lot of us carry a few extra pounds, have a hollow leg and may burst into our fight song in the middle of an Indianapolis crosswalk this weekend. But don’t worry; there’s nothing menacing about us. We just think you should love UK basketball as much as we do, and we’re genuinely flummoxed if you don’t.

I know, coach John Calipari can be insufferable. The man loves the sound of his own voice. He’s a large personality with a commensurate ego, but in a state where most fans think they could better coach the team, that’s honestly the man for this job. A nice guy like Tubby Smith just got tired of jerks putting “For Sale” signs in his yard after a bad loss, so he finally, quietly left for balmy Minnesota. Calipari would have probably just released the hounds.

A couple of years ago, the local sports radio guru, Matt Jones, came up with this prescient take on the historical trajectory of UK basketball coaches: they go from great, to good, to drunk. Witness: Adolph Rupp (great), Joe B. Hall (good), Eddie Sutton (rehab). Then: Rick Pitino (great), Tubby Smith (good), Billy Gillispie (rehab). The point being, now we’re back to great and we want to soak it in while it lasts.

Nobody likes Goliath; we all get that. But Kentucky fans feel like we’ve earned our vicarious victories. Unlike, say, Duke fans, most of us have been doing this our whole lives. And unlike the restless transients that the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville first observed on his visit to America, we Kentuckians tend to stay put, cheering our team together, year after year, through the good and the bad. Even those who leave the state take a little bit of Big Blue Nation with them. Last year, I watched a Kentucky game in a San Francisco bar called Zeke’s. It was crammed with nothing but jubilant UK fans. One guy dressed in blue-and-white-striped overalls passed me a plate of bourbon balls he had made himself. I wanted to cry. Heaven is a place like Zeke’s.

Coach Cal likes to run a news conference by answering and asking all of the questions. That way he can control the narrative, and this year’s narrative goes like this: Look how I took a bunch of superstars and taught them the virtues of selflessness, camaraderie and the quaint concept of sharing. But you know, it is a good story, and it has merit. Our leading scorer, Aaron Harrison, averages only 11 points a game, which ranks him a decidedly anonymous 632nd in Division I basketball. There hasn’t been a whiff of scandal around this team (or its coach); no player we know of has even violated a team rule this year. There’s no hint of alleged impropriety of the sort that vacated the Final Four appearances of Calipari’s Memphis and Massachusetts teams. And in a Mean Joe Green moment, when after a game a fan commented on shooting guard Devin Booker’s high-top Nikes, Booker actually gave the guy the shoes right off his feet.

Unfortunately, as much as we all have cottoned to Booker, no one really expects him or Trey Lyles or Karl-Anthony Towns to be back next year. There is, I think, a perception around the country that here in Kentucky we like the one-and-done era. The truth is we hate it. Now it takes my father half a season just to learn the players’ names, and then he has to start all over again the next season. But what we do like is having the best high-school players in the country choose UK year after year. We know that choice is based on Cal’s promise to put them in the NBA before they are 20. But if they didn’t come here, they would just go somewhere else where another coach would make a similar, if more subtle, promise.

Here’s my bottom line: Don’t hate Kentucky. We might be the next UCLA dynasty and we might not. But for now, let us just glory in the moment. If you’re looking for a team to hate, let me recommend Duke. After all, back in the early 1900s, the university’s founder, James Buchanan Duke, built his fortune on the backs of poor Kentucky tobacco farmers, just as Christian Laettner made his mark in the 1992 East Regional final by stomping on the chest of UK center Aminu Timberlake. In my unbiased opinion, Laettner should have been tossed. But instead—we’ve all seen The Shot a gazillion times—Duke won the game and went on to win the tournament. So this year, let the farmers and the rest of us have this one good thing. This one great thing. Maybe this one perfect thing.

—Erik Reece is the author of “Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness” (Riverhead). He teaches writing at Kentucky, and if the Wildcats win it all, he’s canceling class on Tuesday.