Got Gordon?

Whoda thunk so much would come out of an innocent trip to Yogi’s?\nThat’s where then-17-year-old Eric Gordon and his younger brother Evan had dinner with IU coach Kelvin Sampson and players D.J. White and A.J. Ratliff and current Memphis star Derrick Rose on Sept. 2, 2006. \nMaybe Sampson wanted Gordon to try Yogi’s taco salad, the coach’s favorite restaurant meal. Better yet, maybe they just wanted to catch Sampson’s Atlanta Braves in action before the regular season drew to an end.\nIt wasn’t that big of a deal, except for the fact that about one year prior to the meal, Gordon committed to play for Illinois coach Bruce Weber.\nLittle more than a month later, Gordon changed his tune. And his wardrobe. Like a rock star entering a sold-out arena, Gordon announced his college decision simply by strolling into IU’s Assembly Hall decked out in a cream and crimson jumpsuit, igniting 13,000 IU fans who turned out on Oct. 12, 2006, to watch Hoosier Hysteria.\nWhen the No. 10 Hoosiers (13-1, 2-0) host Illinois (8-8, 0-3) on Sunday, Gordon, now 19, will meet eye-to-eye with Weber for the first time since he decommitted. \nBut if you ask Gordon or Sampson, Sunday’s matchup is nothing more than basketball.\n“It’s just another Big Ten game,” Gordon said during a press conference Thursday. “I knew this was going to be a big game that was kind of on me and coach. But it’s just a normal game in the Big Ten that we’re going to have to play.”\n“It’s our third conference game,” Sampson said Thursday. “We are playing Illinois. That’ll be our focus, and I am sure that’ll be their focus, too. Illinois wants to beat Indiana and Indiana wants to beat Illinois. I don’t think there’s anything else that needs to be said.”\nThat didn’t stop Sports Illustrated from calling the Indiana-Illinois college basketball rivalry the hottest in the nation. And it won’t stop reporters from national media outlets from flocking to Bloomington come Sunday.\nPublicly, Weber maintained he was upset another coach would try to recruit an athlete that was already committed to another school.\n“My philosophy, and how I would instruct my staff, is unless a kid goes publicly and announces that he’s decided he will decommit – if that is a word – and go to that school and is looking to open it up, then he’s kind of free game again,” Weber said during Big Ten Media Day in 2006.\nWeber was also upset, ironically, that Sampson never made the phone call to let the Illinois coach know he and the Gordon family had begun a dialogue. \nThe Sampson-Gordon-Weber drama will draw a national audience on CBS with everybody anxiously watching how Weber will react when Gordon, the conference’s leading scorer, makes a big play. Will Weber shake Gordon’s hand after the game? Or for that matter, will he shake Sampson’s?\nSunday is part one of a two-act play. The second act begins when Sampson and Gordon travel to Assembly Hall (the other one) on Feb. 7, and will likely receive a more sour reception than Weber will receive Sunday. And though both Sampson and Gordon will say it’s just another game, Gordon’s been thinking about his trip to Champaign, Ill., since he agreed to play at Indiana. He knows what to expect. \n“A lot of boos,” Gordon told the Chicago Tribune in Oct. 2006. “A lot of them.”\nDuring the interview. he recalled the time when native Hoosier and IU legend Scott May’s son, Sean May, returned to Indiana as a North Carolina Tar Heel in 2004. The IU fans berated May and chanted “Sean May sucks.” When he travels to Illinois, Gordon expects something just as bad, if not worse.