For any red-and-white blooded Badger fan, today is kind of a big day.
For those of you who bleed any other color or have been hiding under a rock for a majority of the school year, a little team from Illinois called the Fighting Illini are coming into the Kohl Center today for a friendly game of five-on-five against our men's basketball team. Oh yeah, this team from Illinois has kind of been ranked No. 1 in the nation for the past eight weeks, and the Badgers are defending a 38 game home win-streak. So no pressure or anything, but this game is kind of important.
Or is it? (I can hear your gasps already.)
To any Badger fan, this game has been circled on your pocket schedule since day one of the season. To Dick Vitale, who will be in town tonight, this game is going to be awesome, baby! To any Badger basketball player though, this is \just the next game on the schedule,"" nothing more, nothing less. To any sports writer like myself, I don't think I could be more tired of hearing those words.
After interviewing this team for the past two seasons, that is usually the response I get when previewing the next opponent. So this past Sunday before I went out to basketball practice to get quotes for a story, I kind of had an idea of how the interview was going to go.
Me: So Illinois is coming to town. What are your impressions of them considering they're No. 1 in the nation?
Any Badger player: Well, you know they're a great team and they're the next game on the schedule. We just have to give it 110 percent and play like it were any other game. (Add a few more sports clich??s here.)
Sigh. How can they view this as just the next game? Don't they have any emotion or excitement about playing the best team in the country?! As you can tell, I get frustrated hearing the same thing over and over.
Before I braced myself for riveting interviews I decided to head to the library and actually get some homework done. I was reading an article titled ""The Mundanity of Excellence"" by Daniel F. Chambliss for my Sociology class and somehow this article got me thinking about the men's basketball team.
I apologize for bringing schoolwork into this sports column, but believe it or not, the end of the article made me re-think my thoughts about the quotes I knew I was going to get from the basketball team later in the day. Chambliss writes that ""in the pursuit of excellence, maintaining mundanity is the key psychological challenge ... winners don't choke. Faced with what seems to be a tremendous challenge or strikingly unusual event ... the better athletes take it as a normal manageable situation.""
Great. So now even a sociologist is telling me that in order for us to have a chance against Illinois we have to view it as ""just another game."" After reading his article though, I think I might be starting to buy into this grand philosophy.
If our wonderfully talented basketball team were to let it sink into their heads that they have the nation's longest home winning streak to defend and the challenge of handing Illinois their first loss of the season, they just may crack under the pressure as any normal human being would.
So this is why they don't and should not think about it. This is why I don't get the exciting quotes I want. And this is why, as much as I'd like to say this is the biggest game of the year, tonight's game really is ""just the next game on the schedule.""
Betsy is a sophomore majoring in sociology and hopefully journalism at some point. She can be reached for comment at eagolomski@wisc.edu.
