PAGE 25   THE CATS' PAUSE, APRIL 8, 1978
g g g
James Lee And Darrell Griffith
Someone Else "Entertain9New York
"College sports," writes New Yorker Dave Anderson, "is [sic] supposed to be fun, supposed to be part of the learning experience."
Talk about non sequiturs! Learning is serious business. And perhaps the most important of life's lessons is that if you want something  especially if you want something that everybody else wants, too -- you have to dig in, lower your head and go get it.
There's no such thing as a free lunch [or even a three-martini lunch] on the athletic field of honor.
If he is looking strictly for entertainment, then Mr. Anderson is in the wrong business. He shouldn't be a sportswriter. He should be a theater critic. Because the name of the sports game is competition. Not entertainment.
Miss Sally Kay Stewart, a fine young lady who came to Kentucky from northern Illinois some nine years ago, tells me that the problem is a simple one.
"Northerners just don't understand Southerners," she says. "That's the whole problem. And, especially, they don't understand Southern men. Those guys up North can't figure out how real you all are down here. You know what I mean . . . real . . . down-home. You like hunting and fishing and drinking with the fellows and standing around talking about sports.
"And you take all of those things seriously. You take your whisky seriously, and your women seriously. Just like you take your basketball seriously. I don't think it means you don't enjoy them -- I think it means you enjoy them much, much more. They're closer to your hearts. It's just that your hearts are still very-close to the earth and the basics of life.
"New Yorkers can no more understand Kentucky basketball than they can understand Jimmy Carter."
Another friend concedes there is, after all, some truth to support Anderson's tirade. The Wildcats this year were sober, serious and strong. And Joe Hall is no replacement for Chevy Chase or Johnny Carson.
But he also points out that anyone who thinks the Notre Dame, Arkansas and Duke teams were out on the floor in St. Louis for a game of light-hearted, sand-lot basketball is as crazy as a June bug on wheels.
Those players, those coaches and those fans wanted the title as badly as did Kentucky. They just hadn't wanted it for as long. Therein lies the germ of the real point of this whole matter. Maybe the New York sportswriters and other national observers have forgotten what happened in the NCAA Tournament last year -- maybe they didn't even notice.
But Kentuckians remembered. And, much more importantly, the Kentucky Wildcats remembered. They remembered that they -- this same team, with Kyle Macy sitting helplessly in the bleachers -- lost. They were a good team. They could have won. They should have won. But they went out on the court and just didn't cut it. They lost their chance to play in the Mideast Regionals at home in front of their own loyal fans. And then they lost to North Carolina in a game that ended with Kentucky trying desperately to come back against a frustratingly efficient four-corner stall.
That, I think, is when it happened. The Cats came out of that gymnasium ashamed and humiliated . . . and with only two words on their minds: "Next year."
They started right then and there to pull together, to work together, and to demand of each other one thing: The 1978 NCAA Title. It was on every player's mind over the summer as he practiced individually . . . and ran, panting, through the early-morning stillnesses . . . and gathered his will to push those weights from his chest up into the air. When they started their regular practices in the fall, it was as if "St. Louis" were written on the backboards. And during every skills workout and scrimmage the pounding of basketballs in the empty gym echoed the letters: N ... C ... A ... A.
That is the story that has been entirely overlooked by the so-called experts. While they wrote and commented and criticized the Wildcats for not entertaining audiences with flashy passes, behind-the-back dribbles and the other "cheap thrills" of basketball, they were missing altogether a grander, more glorious chapter of human drama.
For -- though the Wildcats' journey to the Winner's Circle this year may have seemed boring to those who have surrendered their hearts and minds to the machine-gun stroking of a culture whose childlike attention span is no longer than a detergent commercial -- it was a living monument to hope and determination for those of us who remember enough about the classic human values to appreciate what it means to be given a second chance . . . and to take that second chance and succeed.
The trophy that Rick Robey held aloft on the balcony of the airport terminal at 4 o'clock in the morning on the 28th of March is a symbol of determination and hard work ... of knowing what you want and going after it ... of dedication to a cause and an ideal ... of undying effort to achieve an agreed-upon goal ... of delayed gratification instead of momentary satisfaction ... of the victory of the sober-minded tortoise over the fun-loving hare ... of all the things, in short, that we teach our young people to believe in -- or used to, anyway.