Wednesday, December 19, 2012

King Rex

This 85-51 win over Louisville was probably Rex Chapman's greatest day as a Kentucky player -- and it may have been Eddie Sutton's best day as Kentucky's coach.  For some reason, I missed this game at the time.  But now I can watch it whenever I want.

22 comments:

  1. This season was the first in which everyone played with the three-point shot, and this game was one of the first to show what a three-point attack could do. Kentucky hit 6 of its first 8 three-pointers in this game. At that point, UK was up 27-18 and U of L had yet to take a single three-point shot.

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  2. Oddly, Louisville switched into a zone about halfway through the first half, which is just suicide against a team that can shoot threes. I have no idea why they did that.

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  3. I don't think Americans have ever seen happier commercials than the commercials that were airing during 1986 and 1987. Everything is upbeat, peppy, lots of singing.

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    1. Mr. Toy was always making fun of these commercials. So was my dad.

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  4. During that 1986 broadcast, Billy Packer said that Richard Madison is the best athlete on the team.

    The other day, someone on the UK message board suggested that Alex Poythress is the second coming of Richard Madison, and the board exploded as folks rushed to denounce such a comparison as unfair to Alex. (For the record, Poythress is averaging 15 points a game. In Richard Madison's best season -- his Junior year -- he scored 9.1 points per game).

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  5. Madison had amazing talent, but never developed as a player. If someone like Pitino or Calipari had been coaching that team in 1986, I wonder what they could have done.

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  6. I never understood those Eddie Sutton teams at all. I didn't see them play all that often, and their results seemed almost random to me. I still don't understand how we lost to LSU in 1986 or to Villanova in 1988.

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  7. Brent Musberger ... man, he was huge. And he's still pretty darned big.

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  8. Cliff Hagan and Rex Chapman ... wow ... mad props to Owensboro.

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  9. The thing about Madison was that he looked so physically imposing relative to the everyone else on the court. Billy Packer mentions in this show about how he had also been a star football player in high school in Tennessee. James Lee, Winston Bennett and Richard Madison each looked like football players running around the basketball court. Of course, now everybody lifts weights like crazy, so it's hard for anyone to stand out.

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  10. Also Florence Henderson, of course! There's a Brady Bunch that mentions Owensboro, and now Brent Musburger is talking about Owensboro on this show. Owensboro's blowing up!

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  11. Everything really does taste better with Ritz crackers.

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    1. That's true. For that matter, Ritz crackers are pretty good by themselves.

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  12. Good for the coaches who encouraged Rex Chapman to return all his fan mail, and good for Rex for following through!

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  13. Man, I still see these 1987 Pontiacs around Madisonville a good bit.

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    1. I had one. Drove it for 13 years. It was a great car.

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  14. Replies
    1. I was excited about the 3-point shot when it came in, and I'm still very happy they made that change. If we'd had to go through last season with no shot clock, and everyone packed in around the goal to prevent UK from getting the ball inside -- which is pretty much how basketball was played from 1980 to 1986 -- I would have had a heart attack.

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  15. Well, that was great.

    I should note, too, that I really, really love Nabisco's Chicken In a Biskit crackers, and that I'm thrilled to learn that other flavors exist in markets internationally. A few years ago, I exchanged letters with Nabisco about the fact that they no longer offer those bacon crackers, but it sounds like I could find something like them if I ever get to Australia. Exciting!

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