Scott Davis: Carpe Diem
GamecockCentral.com columnist Scott Davis, who has followed USC sports for more than 30 years, provides commentary from the perspective of a Gamecocks fan. You can follow Scott on Twitter at @scdonfire.
A couple of minutes after South Carolina’s basketball team wrapped up a fairly routine win over Ole Miss to remain undefeated in SEC play, I had a sudden thought.
As we all know, thinking is never a great idea for me.
Still, I couldn’t shake it. One question kept hanging in my brain like a bad case of poison ivy you can’t get rid of: What’s the number?
What’s the number?
How many wins will it take for this team to make the NCAA Tournament for the first time since the Paleozoic Era?
After last season, I think I know the definitive answer to that question: I have absolutely no idea.
Ahhhhh, last season. You were hoping I’d bring that up, weren’t you? Some Gamecock fans congratulate themselves for “only living in the moment,” for constantly being in the here and now. Those fans aren’t worried about what happened last season, or in 2012 or in 1999. It’s all about right now, and nothing that happened before has any bearing for them on what’s happening right this second.
I am not one of those Gamecock fans.
I still remember every agonizing loss, every mediocre season, every bad coach who roamed a sideline or a dugout or a court for USC. I can’t NOT remember that stuff. Believe me, I wish I could. If you can forget the Ghosts of Gamecocks Past, say a word of prayerful thanks, because it’s a gift.
Now, in the midst of South Carolina’s most successful basketball season in a generation, I find myself all too often thinking about what happened last season. You remember, right? The Gamecocks went 24-8 in the regular season. They won 11 games in the SEC. They beat Clemson on the road.
And…they somehow did not make the NCAA Tournament.
It remains the most mystifying outcome I’ve experienced as a sports fan – and I was alive to see the Atlanta Braves win a World Series.
As the Gamecocks embark on the most important two-game swing for the program since who knows when (Florida at home, Kentucky on the road), it’s fair to ask what exactly they need to accomplish this week to make a definitive “no doubt about it” case to the folks that decide who they want to play in the Big Dance.
Will splitting the two games get it done? Do they need to sweep them? How much is enough? What’s the number?
I’ll just step out there and state the obvious: Wednesday night’s tilt against Florida looms as perhaps the single most important game this team has played since it moved into the Colonial Life Arena in 2002. Yes, it’s been that long since Carolina has played basketball games that truly mattered.
Kentucky? In Lexington? That’s the tallest of tall orders. But Florida at home? It’s time to seize the moment, go carpe diem all over the Gators and emphatically state to the Tournament Committee: “You’re not leaving us out this year. Not this time.”
Channel the late Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society,” Gamecocks: Carpe diem.
Carpe diem.
A Roundball Lifer
From 1991 to 1999, I attended just about every South Carolina home basketball game at the old Carolina Coliseum. There were a few moments to savor back then – the Gamecocks won the SEC in the ‘96-‘97 season, even beating Rick Pitino and Kentucky in Lexington on the Wildcats’ Senior Day, no less. BJ McKie ‘s career rejuvenated a Gamecock fan base that hadn’t seen consistent winning since Frank McGuire was still coaching the team.
Mostly, though, it was a parade of mediocrity – non-descript 16-14 seasons, an occasional NIT bid. Still, I was always there, once even leaving a Thanksgiving family gathering early to watch the Gamecocks lose to Providence and hurting my poor mother’s feelings in the process.
Today, McKie’s son plays for South Carolina, and the Gamecocks haven’t really been relevant since BJ was on the court.
That’s a long, long, loooooong time for an SEC team to be irrelevant in a major sport.
What’s sad is that Gamecock fans genuinely want to embrace this program. For all the talk about the atmosphere being sterile at the Colonial Life Arena and the fans being fickle in their support, the actual truth is that basketball was this fan base’s first love.
I wasn’t alive in the late ‘60s when McGuire’s teams set the state on fire, with names like Roche, Joyce and Cremins roaming the court.
But I still hear about those teams almost 50 years later.
They only won one conference title and did next to nothing in the NCAA’s – but I still hear about them. To be honest, if you had to pick one sports team that resonated with Gamecock fans the most over the last 100+ years, it would probably be them, even over the baseball teams that dropped back-to-back national titles.
My aunt (who is not even a sports fan, much less a Gamecock fan), once told me a story about her time working for a phone company in Columbia during the McGuire years. “You could always tell if South Carolina was playing basketball, because every single one of our lines would be filled,” she told me. “We couldn’t put in enough lines to carry all of the phone calls during their games.”
That’s what South Carolina basketball meant once.
When Eddie Fogler, who played against those teams as a North Carolina student, was hired to coach USC, he was asked if he had any memories about coming to Carolina Coliseum to play the Gamecocks.
“It was really intense,” he said. “Bordering on nasty.”
You can’t tell me these fans don’t care about basketball.
But the sad reality is that anyone who is currently a student at USC probably doesn’t remember the Gamecocks ever playing an NCAA Tournament game. The last time Carolina graced the Dance was in 2004, and even that team wasn’t that good – they went a mere 8-8 in SEC play and were fairly lucky to get invited to the party.
Think about how many things have changed since March 2004. George W. Bush hadn’t been elected to his second term yet. No one knew who Barack Obama was. “American Idol” was just starting. I was still, like, young.
Thirteen years is a straight-up eternity for a major college team to miss the Tournament. This is how long ago it was: The Gamecocks lost in the NCAA’s that year to Memphis, which was coached at the time by John Calipari, who has been at Kentucky now for what seems like centuries.
So maybe the atmosphere in Colonial Life Arena hasn’t always resembled a Duke home basketball game.
But is that really the fans’ fault?
It’s Time I’ve long believed that South Carolina could build a very successful men’s basketball program. There’s good talent to draw from in this state, the university’s facilities are of a high quality, the fans will absolutely be there if this thing ever gets going, and quite honestly, the SEC just isn’t a particularly rugged basketball league. As Florida has shown, this conference is ripe for a program to slot itself in as the other good SEC team besides Kentucky.
It can get done here. It should get done here.
From the day Frank Martin was hired as head coach, I just had a feeling that he was the right guy at the right time. I believed he could rebuild this once-proud program and make it something to be proud of again. Now he’s on the cusp of doing exactly that.
Because if this team can break through right now, and it’s still playing basketball in March in a tournament that is NOT the NIT, then look out. Look out.
The truth is, we need this team right now.
We need them.
As much as we might want to ignore how our football season ended, and as much as we might want to pretend that an Upstate college didn’t just do whatever it did last week, we can’t.
We can’t.
South Carolina fans need an uplifting storyline, now more than ever. We need this movie to have a happy ending.
And these guys deserve it. They play hard every night. They never quit, never fold the tents when things look grim. They battled through a six-game stretch without their best and most talented player, and lived to tell about it.
Now it’s their time.
It’s time to get it done. It’s time to seize the day.
Carpe diem, Gamecocks.
Carpe diem.