Tigers take the road less traveled
Bill Koch, National Columnist
You’ll be hard-pressed to find too many teams who do what Missouri did on Sunday.
And no, I don’t mean roll to a 114-68 victory in an exhibition game against an overmatched opponent. Missouri Southern is a fine Division II program, but there was never any real doubt that new coach Frank Haith and the Tigers were going to have their way in this one. Marcus Denmon led six scorers in double figures with 25 points for the winners, who have played in three straight NCAA Tournaments and are on the fringe of the experts’ respective top-25 rankings entering the start of the regular season.
Putting principle before a pay check, however, isn’t something that we see very much anymore out of heavyweights like Missouri in the high stakes world of college athletics. Playing a true road game, exhibition or not, in an arena that seats barely 3,000 fans is unheard of in this modern age. Why do such a thing when the promised riches of an additional home gate and an almost certain victory can be had by simply making a phone call to the nearest patsy?
The answer lies within the small Missouri city of Joplin, population 50,510 – or just 16,000 more people than undergraduates who call the Tigers’ Columbia campus home. The Joplin community and the state itself are still recovering from a devastating May tornado that left more than 160 people dead, thousands of homes and businesses destroyed and an untold number of lives broken and shattered. Every donation large and small could mean the world to those affected by the F5 monster that cut a six-mile path of despair through their collective heart. Every ray of hope that they receive could give them a reason to keep on fighting for themselves and their respective futures.
The One State, One Spirit Classic afforded Missouri the chance to show that it understands this concept. The game was played at the Leggett & Platt Center, an arena that accommodates some 80 percent fewer people for home games than the Tigers’ gleaming Mizzou Arena. Courtside seats were going for $500 a pop and commemorative t-shirts being sold by Missouri’s athletic department were flying off the racks, as they have been for the past five months. Sunday’s game generated an anticipated $100,000 in aid for the tornado victims and their families, many of whom live just a stone’s throw from Missouri Southern’s campus. The Tigers have agreed to kick in another $275,000 from their t-shirt sales to date, a total that only begins to scratch the surface of the amount needed to make life normal again throughout that area of the Midwest.
Missouri’s other three exhibition games will be played at Mizzou Arena. The Tigers play 15 of their first 16 games within the state’s borders, including high-profile matchups in Kansas City with Notre Dame and either California or Georgia in the CBE Classic and in St. Louis against Illinois. They only leave Missouri for another glamour game at Madison Square Garden with Villanova. As you can see, the Tigers, much like their big conference brethren, don’t pack their suitcases very often before January.
To think what power programs in other places could do with such a concept. Let’s imagine Connecticut, the defending national champion, moving its Nov. 11 game against Columbia from Gampel Pavilion to an arena in the New York area. Donating the proceeds from such a contest to a charity benefiting prostate cancer, something that has afflicted Huskies’ coach Jim Calhoun in the past, would be a magnificent gesture. Let’s see Duke, a program that has a fan base stretching across the country, move its Dec. 19 game against UNC Greensboro from Cameron Indoor Stadium to Charlotte. The Blue Devils still wouldn’t need to leave the state and could pledge the gate receipts to help a charity like the Emily Krzyzewski Center, a facility near the Duke campus named after Blue Devil coach Mike Krzyzewski’s mother that is dedicated to academic outreach programs.
This isn’t to say that schools don’t already do their share of charity work. Calhoun and Krzyzewski have been involved with The V Foundation for Cancer Research and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on its behalf through participation in tournaments, made-for-TV matchups and private fundraising. The difference is that most of those games are also showcase events that help Connecticut and Duke maintain their already lofty national profiles, aid in recruiting and swell their RPI rankings with the promise of a quality opponent on a neutral floor.
The Tigers as a program aren’t completely without the same ulterior motives from time to time. Missouri is doing the same thing in its game against the Wildcats, the opening matchup of the Jimmy V Classic doubleheader on Dec. 6. What the Tigers did by agreeing to play in Joplin, however, promised very little in the way of financial or competitive benefit, and Missouri did so for the benefit of their fellow citizens.
In doing that, for at least one day, the Tigers provided a different definition of what it means to be one of college basketball’s elite.
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