thomas leverett weblog

Go Hawkeyes! Go Hannah!

This post has an agenda, I might as well warn you; it starts with some really nice stuff but then I have this forty-or-fifty-year grudge and I just can't keep it out of here, so I might as well warn you now.

The other night the Iowa Hawkeyes women's basketball team scored a stunning victory over the Maryland Terps, in Iowa, in front of over 10,000 people. That's over ten thousand people. Women's basketball has apparently made it, at least in Iowa. Forty or fifty years ago when I went to a game, there were barely a hundred.

That's fantastic, because I'm an old Iowa Hawkeye fan, and a women's basketball fan, and it's nice to see it all come together. But there are two more cool things about it. One is that a rising star is a freshman named Hannah Stuelke, and she's actually related to me, although it's a somewhat indirect relationship. She and my daughter are second cousins, though on my daughter's side it's a step-relationship, but the entire extended family is very close and they're all going to the games and totally behind her. Though she's a freshman, she has good chemistry with the team's star and they catch on fire and can't be beat. That was the story with the Terps victory, apparently.

Second, I am now in the area again, only two hours from Iowa City, and have grandchildren who are playing girls basketball in small-town Illinois schools. So I am able to use Hannah as a role model and we can all cheer for her together. I can also hope these girls choose Iowa and stick with basketball.

I'm an old Iowa fan, having gone there twice, once in the seventies and once in the eighties, and this last story comes from then. See that big ugly bird up in the left-hand corner? It was brought to Iowa by Hayden Fry, a men's football coach from Texas who was hired to take the Iowa men's football program to great heights. He actually was a pretty good coach and many people remember him fondly. But he had a PR man, and that person had a condition of his being coach: we had to take that ugly bird, AND we had to make all other hawkeye images illegal. I will never forgive him for that.

I didn't mind his brash Texas style; I didn't mind the way he painted the opponents' locker room pink just to make them mad. As I said, he was at least reasonably successful. But he shouldn't have made other hawkeye images illegal.

Forty or fifty years later, I am still a loyal Hawkeye fan. Go Hawkeyes! Go Hannah! But get rid of that bird. Or at least, let us wear some better-looking ones.

posted by tom @ 5:41 PM