Fan base strengthens after UK win

With just 5.6 seconds left, down by one at home to the No. 1 team in the country, it seemed like all hope had been lost.

Then-sophomore guard Victor Oladipo, while driving to the basket, lost control of the ball, and Kentucky’s Doron Lamb picked it up. Oladipo put the quick foul on him, but Lamb was an 89 percent shooter from the line, and he had two shots ahead of him.

“One of our roommates, Tom, was like, ‘The game’s over. We just lost,’” IU senior Zach O’Kyle said. “I said ‘Hold on, we still have a chance.’”

Lamb missed the first free throw but wouldn’t miss two.

Following the free throws, junior forward Christian Watford passed it in to senior guard Verdell Jones III, who wove around a pick from freshman forward Cody Zeller.

Watford trailed Jones III by a couple of steps, and when the senior dribbled just inside the three-point line, he turned around and passed the ball to Watford.

The junior caught it, pulled up from behind the arc and put up arguably the biggest shot of his career. Even if he missed, it would mean IU was back in the hunt of becoming the program it once was before former IU Coach Kelvin Sampson left the team in ruins.

But as Watford held his follow through and the sold-out Assembly Hall crowd held its collective breath, the shot sunk through the net as the final seconds ticked off the clock.

ESPN sportscaster Dick Vitale couldn’t believe it. A sea of red soon consumed Branch McCracken Court.

It was just a single shot, but to the IU basketball program and Hoosier fans everywhere, it meant so much more.

***

O’Kyle has been a Hoosier fan since he was young. After receiving his acceptance letter during the winter of his senior year of high school, he quickly decided to attend.

The IU basketball team had stormed out to a 22-4 record with freshman star Eric Gordon holding the reins.

The Hoosiers were in the middle of Sampson’s second season, and it appeared he had the program on the right track.

But just days after O’Kyle made his intent to attend IU official, bad news broke when Sampson was accused of improper recruiting tactics.

Sampson resigned Feb. 22, 2008, and IU Coach Tom Crean was brought in after the season to try to rebuild the once-storied program.

O’Kyle still bought season tickets as a freshman, but he knew he had several seasons of rough basketball ahead of him.

“I remember when I was a freshman and sophomore, I had tickets, but I didn’t even go to a lot of the games, ’cause I didn’t want to see us lose,” he said.

But O’Kyle was one of the 17,472 fans who came to Assembly Hall Dec. 10, 2011, as IU met the No. 1 Wildcats.

“Going into the season, I was thinking ‘We’ll be a little better with Cody. I don’t think we’ll be that good, but we might make the tournament,’” he said. “Then, everything started clicking going into that game.”

O’Kyle had seats in the balcony that night with a group of friends, but he said win or lose, they knew they were going to have fun later that evening.

After winning trivia night at Kilroy’s on Kirkwood earlier that week, the group had access to free bottle service on a night of their choosing.

They decided the night of the Kentucky game was perfect.

“Our team was like ‘Let’s set it for Saturday, and if we win, it’ll be the craziest night ever, and if we lose, we’ll just drink our sorrows away,’” he said.

The group was in for a wild evening.

After the shot fell, O’Kyle and his friends decided instead of trying to get down to the court like most of the crowd, they would go back home, change clothes and head to KOK to celebrate.

They arrived just minutes after the game ended, but mayhem was already beginning to brew in downtown Bloomington.

As they began to down their first of many drinks that night, thousands engulfed the streets, piling onto cars, chanting and singing along to “This Is Indiana.”

O’Kyle said that night was what he’d hoped to see when he decided to come to Bloomington.

“It was the reason why I chose to come to this school,” he said. “I was waiting for a moment like that, and for it to happen my senior year with all my friends, it solidified my decision to come here.”

***

Just across the street, Susan Bright watched the evening unfold from inside Nick’s English Hut.

Bright, the financial analyst at Nick’s for five years, normally works on game days only until the pregame crowd starts to file out an hour or so before tipoff.

But she and her husband could tell this night was different.

They decided to sit at the bar with some friends as the restaurant continued to fill past capacity.

The normally quaint bottom floor became increasingly energetic as the game went on and the Hoosiers kept up with Kentucky.

“It was so loud down here at the front of the bar that it was hard to hear yourself, which is unusual, ’cause this front room for over three-fourths of a century has been more of a quiet sit-and-talk crowd,” Bright said. “But that night became all about basketball.”

When Watford’s shot went in, she wondered if the place would survive the eruption of the crowd.

“It was wall-to-wall people,” she said. “People were standing on tables screaming, and I was like ‘Oh my gosh, this place is going to fall down’ because there was so much jumping up and down, and it was fun.”

This wasn’t Bright’s first experience watching the streets of Kirkwood flooded with IU fans.

She graduated from IU 1983 and was on-site in Bloomington to see the aftermath of both national titles in 1981 and 1987.

“There was just this excitement that was there when I was in school in the ’80s,” she said. “I saw the ’81 and ’87 wins when everybody poured out onto Kirkwood, and they did the same thing. Everybody after the game just poured out onto the street, just a sea of people out there.”

***

For the NCAA tournamnet rematch with UK on March 23, Capt. Joe Qualters of the Bloomington Police Department said police made sure no destruction of cars or other property near Kirkwood.

BPD cleared Kirkwood of all cars hours before the game and made sure to have extra personnel there in case anything did erupt.

He said the first win took most of the country and Bloomington by storm because virtually no one expected IU to pull off the upset.

Inside Nick’s, Bright said the place started filling up at 11 a.m. for the 9:45 p.m. tipoff.

At KOK, then-IU senior Lauren Henderson said even though the bar wasn’t quite as full as it may have been for the first game against the Wildcats that season, the atmosphere was just as electric.

“Going into the first game, it was kind of like ‘They’re the No. 1 team. What’s the likelihood we’re actually going to beat them?’” Henderson said. “I was like ‘We can do this. We’ve done it before.’ I think it just had everyone more on edge.”

IU fell to UK 102-90.

“I definitely think since we won the first time, it made it a lot more disappointing the second time,” Henderson said. “Everyone was just upset about it. You could see it on everyone’s faces as you were leaving. People just slowly trickled out of the bar and walked home, shoulders slumped, like they were visibly upset that we had just lost.”

***

Though Kentucky eventually cut down the nets in New Orleans, the Hoosiers are on top of the nation one year later.

IU sits at 9-0 as the nation’s No. 1, and Kentucky has fallen out of the top 25.
Their team unranked less than a year before being annointed No. 1, fans say a
similar culture change occurred in the Hoosier fan base much before talks of a No. 1 ranking began.

“You have a common aspect to share with everyone on campus,” said senior Justin Hillman, who watched the first Kentucky game from inside KOK. “You can ask someone else random ‘Where were you at the Kentucky game?’ and they’ll tell you. It’ll be something you can share with the whole IU community. I think it’s something that brought us closer together.”

Henderson said she’s also noticed a change this year in the support of students at games.

“I think people are taking their season tickets more seriously and actually showing up,” she said. “Like the preseason game, there were people in line at 7 a.m. for GA tickets, and it wasn’t even a game that mattered. Had it been last year, no one would have showed up that early. No one would have cared.

“It doesn’t matter who we’re playing or if they’re any good. They’re excited to see us play, and they’re excited to see us win.”

Brooks Chumley, an IU senior last year who had tickets to witness IU’s win firsthand, said although there certainly is an aura around IU basketball this season, this atmosphere as been building since he stood on the floor of Assembly Hall after storming the court last year.

“We went into that game not expecting to win, really, but knowing that we had a chance,” he said. “It got everyone excited about basketball season, and it brought back Indiana basketball to something that everyone looks forward to. I feel like, especially with the fans, they’re kind of more or less expecting to win games now, where last season when we were playing UK, we weren’t expecting to get that win.”