There are many types of banners.
One of my favorites is the parade banner, which usually is around 30 inches in height with a width of six feet or so. Definitely a great type of banner. We also have the street banner that is usually double-sided and hung from lampposts and streetlights. There’s Bruce Banner, who turns green and punches things when he gets mad. The Star-Spangled Banner is a popular one, especially recently with its Colin Kaepernick fling. However, in Bloomington, Indiana, there is only one type of banner — the championship banner — that truly matters.
1940, 1953, 1976, 1981 and 1987.
Those are the vital ones hanging in Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall. They indicate a National Championship took place for the IU men’s basketball team. Until recently, when two friends named 1983 and 2013 joined them.
With the renovation to the arena, Athletics Director Fred Glass made the call to take those two banners down. As important as they were — ’83 symbolizing the fans’ contribution to the Big Ten Championship and ’13 saluting the spirit of the fanatics who stuck by the team in its down years — these were not championship banners.
Glass made the right call.
Those two seasons were special and will stick with IU faithful for years to come, but commemorating a season that ended with a loss feels like a farce in some respects.
These two banners were anomalous as the rest of their league titles hung on a pair of banners listing the individual years. Isolating those two years in particular made sense but still felt like a waste of a banner.
As someone who’s become ingrained in the IU basketball way of life, I now know Big Ten Championships are kosher, but the goal and what the program is constantly striving for is that sixth banner that reads “Basketball Champions.”
On the south side of the stadium now hang seven banners: two for achievements by the women’s program, two listing each men’s Big Ten title, one for Final Four appearances, one to recognize the undefeated season and UPI National Championship in 1975 and one more for NIT titles.
Across from these seven hang the five men’s national championship banners on the north side of the renovated hall.
It would have cost between $50,000 to $100,000 for the infrastructure to hang the 1983 and 2013 banners, but it seems only right to save this money, perhaps for a sixth banner on the north side to be strung up sooner rather than later.
gigottfr@iu.edu @gott31
