I Root for the UConn Huskies

If you know me well you know that I am more than a casual fan of UConn Men's Basketball.  If you know me better than well, you know that I didn't even attend UConn.  In fact, I went to the University of Massachusetts and while I do root for the Minutemen, The Huskies have been a part of my life as long as I can remember, before I was born in a manner of speaking.

My dad took a job as a professor in UConn's psychology department in the early 60s.  Later he courted my mom who was living in New York City and in 1969 they were married and driving cross country to California for his sabbatical.  Somewhere along the way, I was conceived and in December of 1969 after they returned from the West Coast, I was born in Willimantic, CT - just a few miles from the UConn campus in Storrs.

Storrs is a section of the town of Mansfield which was incorporated in 1702.  The university began as Storrs Agricultural College in 1881 and still excels in the study of animals, farming, and natural resources.  For those of us who grew up in the Storrs/Mansfield area, the UConn campus was the center of most of our activity.  Drive off campus and the landscape quickly becomes wooded, rural, and bucolic.  Campus was where all the action was (and still is!).  There were movie theaters and galleries, museums and performance halls.  There was the Student Union with its cafeteria, ice cream fountain, and basement hall of video games.  There was the UConn Dairy Bar with its delicious freshly made ice cream.  And there were the athletic facilities, the hockey rink, the baseball fields, the tennis courts, the soccer field, and the indoor field house.

Growing up in the early 80s, the sport that dominated was UConn Men's Soccer.  Coached by the legendary Joe Morrone, the team was a perennial contender for the National Championship, winning it under Morrone in 1981 (and again in 2000).  The soccer stadium is where we kids wanted to be on game day, there and nowhere else.  I'd go with my mom and my sister and friends of our family.  We'd sit behind the goal and when the opposing team's goalie was in the net, we'd hurl insults at him with relentless zeal.  When one time the goalie (from St. John's, I think) turned around and gave us the finger after their team scored, he propelled us into a vicious and unrelenting tirade.

When the weather was warmer, early in the season, I'd sometimes wander below the bleachers and collect cans and bottles to return for money.  I can still palpably recall the time someone deliberately and cruelly poured their beer on my head.  But such was the risk I took. The crowds were rowdy and raucous.  When the season wore on from fall to winter, and especially as the play-offs arrived, we'd bundle up and sit on the cold metal bleachers in snow and ice storms to watch our team play.

One of the highlights of my youth was being on a town soccer team, sponsored by Rosal's Restaurant,  that played a 10 minute game on the UConn field at half-time.  It was pouring rain that day and the field was a soaking mess.  We ran around, kicked up mud, and slid all around.  I am sure some of the players were focused on the game, but I wasn't a very good player and was mostly just thrilled to be on the UConn field, highly amused at the vaudevillian falls that we were all taking.  I couldn't have been more elated the next day when the local paper, The Willimantic Chronicle, featured a picture me and a friend, running through the rain.  My glasses are coated in mud and I have the widest smile on my face a boy could have.  I still have that photo somewhere.

When the soccer season ended, it was time for basketball.  In the late 70s and early 80s, the team was coached by Dom Perno, who'd been a player for the Huskies in the 1960s.  I was thrilled to be a friend of his son, Matt, even invited over to the Perno house for dinner one night.  (Embarrassingly, I accidentally got locked in the upstairs bathroom.  Too shy to call for help, it was many minutes before someone came looking for me and helped me unlock the door.)  UConn was one of the founding teams in the Big East, which was a fledgling conference in the early 80s.  The heavyweights were teams like Georgetown, Syracuse, and St. John's (Coached by legends, Thompson, Boeheim, and Carnesseca).  UConn was competitive, but we (notice the inclusive 'we') were not an elite team and certainly didn't have a lot of national recognition.  I can clearly recall going to games at the old UConn Field House, which held just a few thousand fans, at tip off time and finding our regular seats behind the hoop.  Corny Thompson was the star player then.  Fans of that era will also recall names like Vern Giscombe, Chuck Aleksinas, Gerry Besselink, Norm Bailey, Bruce Kuczenski, Earl Kelley, and Karl Hobbs - to name just a few of our beloved Huskies.

Perno had three 20 win seasons as coach of the Huskies, but was eventually succeeded by Jim Calhoun.  As the mid 80s became the late 80s, UConn recruited the players that would begin our transformation from a New England powerhouse team to a Big East Title contender and an eventual National Champion.  Chris Smith (talk about a crossover move!), Cliff Robinson, Tate George, Scott Burrell were some of the big names of that era.  And no one who grew up in Storrs can forget where they were the day Scotty Burrell threw the ball the length of the court to Tate George to hit the winning shot against Clemson to propel us to the Elite Eight in 1990.  It will forever be known as "The Shot."  (I was on spring break with the UMass Crew Team in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, listening on the radio of my coach's truck.)  It was the shot that would precede stars like Marshalls, Donyell and Donny (no relation), Ray Allen, Kevin Ollie, Richard Hamilton, Ben Gordon,  Emeka Okafor.  It would be the shot that precipitated our rivalry with Duke (We hate Duke and we particularly loathe Laettner), and our National Championships in 1999 and 2004.



The other thing is this, growing up in Connecticut, we didn't have much to put us in the national spotlight.  When the NHL Hartford Whalers, rarely a play-off contender, moved to North Carolina it left the Huskies as really the only team to unify the state.  And having a winning team was heaven.  Before Men's Basketball (and much credit must be given to original Big East commissioner Dave Gavitt and the rise of both cable and especially ESPN in the early 80s for our national prominence) if you told someone you were from Storrs, they had no idea what you were talking about.  Even within the state there were many who had no idea where Storrs was.  Today, along with storied programs like UCLA, Duke, and North Carolina, UConn has amongst the most players in the NBA.



Winters can be bleak in Connecticut.  Cold, Gray, Windy.  But inside the Field House, now Gampel Pavillion - the Hartford Civic Center, now the XL Center, it's been hot for a long time now.  Calhoun is a Hall of Fame Coach.  The women's team rivals the men's and now owns 6 National Titles, has won 55 straight games, and regularly thrashes its opponents by double digits.  Even UConn Football has gone big time.  The team has gone from The Yankee Conference to the Big East, from Double 1-AA to Division 1-A.  Old Memorial Stadium on campus is more like a miniature field compared with the new Rentschler Field in East Hartford which can accommodate upwards of 40,000 raving fans.  They've won two bowl games in a row and have several players in the NFL.  Since the UConn Men's Basketball team won the NIT in 1988, UConn's stature in athletics and academics has steadily risen.  We may still be in podunk Storrs, Connecticut, but there are few that follow college athletics that don't know the Huskies.  And having come of age here during those seminal years fills me with the kind of pride that can only truly be understood by those of us who grew up or lived here during that time.  You know who you are.

The UConn men lost last night to Pittsburgh.  They lost to Georgetown last Saturday.  The losses hurt more than I can accurately express.  As go the Huskies, so go I.