I asked someone Sunday morning if he knew who won the Illinois high school basketball championship the night before.
“Richards and Marshall,” he said.
“I mean just the boys,” I said.
“Richards and Marshall,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘and?'” I asked.
Different classes, he said. Two separate state championship teams.
I know, a large school and a small school. Class A and Class AA.
No, he said — Marshall won the 3A title game and Richards won the 4A.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
(I’m a little slow.)
He told me Illinois has four different classes for its boys’ basketball tournament now.
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
“The IHSA changed it,” he explained.
I don’t understand. Marshall isn’t a little schoolhouse on the prairie. Marshall is a Chicago Public League school. Marshall is a proven power. Marshall has had some of this state’s mightiest basketball teams.
Marshall’s girls’ basketball program is also as good as it gets.
You mean to tell me Marshall won a state championship game Saturday, but then somebody played in another state championship game?
Brother, you can’t be serious.
What next, elect Barack Obama our 3A president and Hillary Clinton our 4A president?
Oh, my aching, breaking heart. One of the things that made Illinois a charming place each and every March for around 100 years was crowning a brand new state high school basketball champion.
By which I mean one true champion.
OK, sure, we would also have that Class A “small school” champ, but nobody kidded anybody as to which team would win in a shootout. The Class AA state champ would murder the Class A champ 99 times out of 100.
Never mind how much you loved that “Hoosiers” movie or how nostalgic you get about that tiny team with the fabulous name, the Cobden Appleknockers, that stole our hearts with their runner-up finish in the Illinois state tournament of 1964.
We came to understand why a two-class tournament was necessary. Let the small schools have their day.
But this? Marshall and Richards, two big schools, both state champs? This is a joke.
“March Madness” began right here in this state, but this really is madness.
If you made Marshall and Richards meet 50 times, they might go 25-25. Or they might go 35-15, but it would essentially be an even match.
That’s why you need one game, winner take all.
I hate not knowing which is best. I didn’t even like it in the ’70s when we considered Quinn Buckner and his Thornridge team invincible, but Indiana fans felt the same way about Junior Bridgman and his East Chicago Washington guys.
There was nothing to be done about that. You don’t pit your state champs against some other state’s champs.
I kept an eye on this season’s Illinois tournament from afar. My own alma mater, Bloom, had a highly ranked team. I was disappointed when my guys were knocked out by Lockport in overtime, but hey, that’s the way the ball bounces.
What I didn’t pay proper attention to was this 3A and 4A stuff.
I merely thought a state tournament was going on.
Saturday morning at the Big Ten tournament in Indianapolis, somebody told me the IHSA’s Final Four were Zion-Benton, Richards, Simeon and Marshall.
Z-B’s game with Evanston was as wild as it gets, I was told. A player named Ronald Steward won it with a long, long, long buzzer-beater shot.
I was fairly buzzed myself.
For a half-century of following Illinois prep hoops, watching the state tourney on TV as a kid, covering a few myself, I couldn’t recall good old Zion-Benton Township having a team get this far.
It was fun to imagine all the kids up there singing the school’s fight song: “Hurray for Zion, we know you’re tryin’ … to bring us all to victory. We know you’re loyal, through all your toil … and to good old ZBT.”
As for Richards, well, as an old south suburban boy, I can tell you that most of our schools used to neuter the Bulldogs in basketball, often to get even for them doing likewise to us in football.
Saturday’s title game between Richards and Z-B was a gym dandy, a war to the wire before Richards won it 67-63. Congratulations.
Except by then, Marshall and Simeon had engaged in a beautiful hardwood war of their own, a 69-61 battle captured by the Commandos. I guess congratulations to you too?
What kind of foolishness is this? Two best teams? “We’re No. 11/2?”
Double your pleasure, double your fun?
I mean, who is running basketball in this state, Ernie Banks? Let’s play two?
Let’s go back to playing one.
Put it back the way it was. Our teams deserve hoop dreams, not co-hoop dreams.
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mikedowney@tribune.com
