FfldCntyFan
Texas: Property of UConn Men's Basketball program
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2011
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I know that I am not alone on this board but I was at the first game at the Rent (we blew out Indiana).
I also know that I am not alone in knowing what games at Memorial decades ago were like. For a little clarification, forty years ago was the start of my senior year (college, not HS). The following spring, the Big East tournament was in Hartford (the last time it wasn’t held in MSG).
I still remember showing up to a few Saturday morning games, hung over, laughing at the idea that what we were witnessing was collegiate football while on TV CBS would show SWC games (often SMU when they were a top five team), ABC would show the Big 10 (obviously Ohio St, Michigan but also Wisconsin and Iowa as both programs started being good again for the first time in decades). If you saw Memorial in 1979, 1980 or 1981, the Rent in 2003 would never have been considered a possibility.
To the point: Lew Perkins announced his departure from UConn in the spring of 2003. Our leadership at that time thought they pulled off a coup by bringing his crony (Hathaway) back to UConn from Colorado State. JH was barely on the job at UConn when the Rent opened (to a full house, with a team that finished merely .500 the prior year after being a few miles shy of being remotely competitive the prior three years).
At that moment, if JH was an achiever, someone with the vision and ambition to move to the top of his field. Someone with the character and the quality to want to always offer his best when his reputation is on the line and his livelihood is at stake, he would have said to himself “My God, if we can fill this stadium today, in ten years we can pack a 60,000 seat stadium. In 20 years we can pack a 70,000 seat stadium. We need to do everything necessary to ensure that the program is always moving forward, always taking the steps to be better tomorrow than it is today”. Unfortunately he saw the packed house and said to himself “my work is done here”.
What infuriates me is we aren’t far from that twenty years later and instead of people debating how best to complete the next stadium expansion we are hearing too many people refer to the stadium as a white elephant. Hathaway never saw any need in true success for football. He assumed that as long as we had a program capable of filling the seats, nothing better was worth any effort.
I also know that I am not alone in knowing what games at Memorial decades ago were like. For a little clarification, forty years ago was the start of my senior year (college, not HS). The following spring, the Big East tournament was in Hartford (the last time it wasn’t held in MSG).
I still remember showing up to a few Saturday morning games, hung over, laughing at the idea that what we were witnessing was collegiate football while on TV CBS would show SWC games (often SMU when they were a top five team), ABC would show the Big 10 (obviously Ohio St, Michigan but also Wisconsin and Iowa as both programs started being good again for the first time in decades). If you saw Memorial in 1979, 1980 or 1981, the Rent in 2003 would never have been considered a possibility.
To the point: Lew Perkins announced his departure from UConn in the spring of 2003. Our leadership at that time thought they pulled off a coup by bringing his crony (Hathaway) back to UConn from Colorado State. JH was barely on the job at UConn when the Rent opened (to a full house, with a team that finished merely .500 the prior year after being a few miles shy of being remotely competitive the prior three years).
At that moment, if JH was an achiever, someone with the vision and ambition to move to the top of his field. Someone with the character and the quality to want to always offer his best when his reputation is on the line and his livelihood is at stake, he would have said to himself “My God, if we can fill this stadium today, in ten years we can pack a 60,000 seat stadium. In 20 years we can pack a 70,000 seat stadium. We need to do everything necessary to ensure that the program is always moving forward, always taking the steps to be better tomorrow than it is today”. Unfortunately he saw the packed house and said to himself “my work is done here”.
What infuriates me is we aren’t far from that twenty years later and instead of people debating how best to complete the next stadium expansion we are hearing too many people refer to the stadium as a white elephant. Hathaway never saw any need in true success for football. He assumed that as long as we had a program capable of filling the seats, nothing better was worth any effort.
