Where once there was glory...

I'm good with the hiring of Kelvin Sampson. I think he's been an excellent coach at Oklahoma, and I see no reason why he won't continue that at IU.

But there is clearly something rotten in the state of Denmark. Pat Forde - whose columns I've grown up despising because of my dad's hatred for his work with the Louisville Courier-Journal - wrote an excellent piece on the decline of basketball statewide in Indiana, and it breaks my heart to read about the disconnect between the basketball past and present in my homestate.

I never played organized basketball - not a church league or an elementary school team, much less playing varsity ball - but I have loved basketball since I was incredibly young. My favorite views of the games were all from a catwalk three stories above the floor of my alma mater's gymnasium, hating the games in my youngest days because the crowds were simply too loud for me back then. Watching games in the top row of the stands, even with the catwalk, and spending time with John Stevens - a friend of my family and near-uncle to my father - who ushered every game that I can remember for as long as he was healthy and around. I remember 4700 screaming fans packed into a high school gym that I always considered to be mid-sized, cheering when Damon Bailey made a free throw that he had to miss and sealing his last high school defeat.

And I remember driving to New Castle for the Hall of Fame tourney to see Anderson take on Vincennes in a near blizzard just because Sully and I had tickets. We - along with the 9000 other fans - spent the afternoon touring the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame - one that I enjoyed way more than the national one two summers ago.

I recognize that another generation will have wonderful memories, but it looks like for most of them, those memories won't center around basketball, and there's sadness in me for that. For decades there has been a constant in Indiana...and it's sad to see that lost...