Mac and Me

Armstrong, Marble, Gamble, Lohaus, Moe. Give me some candy.

I was born in 1980. That’s as good a place to start as any.

My dad grew up in Spirit Lake, Iowa. For those of you not from Iowa, Spirit Lake is in the far northwest corner of the state, about as far from Iowa City as you can get while still being in Iowa. It’s far closer to Ames, Minneapolis and Lincoln, as well as just about any school with a ‘Dakota’ in its name. And yet, with the possible exception of Johnson County itself, it might be the most historically pro-Hawkeye portion of the entire state. My grandparents, Earl and Nelda, came to Iowa from Minnesota, but adapted quickly. Iowa basketball was a constant in their house as I was growing up; even after Earl died, Nelda would watch the games and fidget in her glider chair with every missed shot.¹

My dad played basketball in high school. He wanted to coach, so he got a degree in education, met mom, took a job teaching English and coaching basketball at an Omaha Catholic school, and futilely tried to name me Lute². We then moved to a tiny town in north central Nebraska so he could take a head coaching job. It was Nebraska in the 1980s; even if Board of Regents of Oklahoma had taken effect by that point, you still probably couldn’t see an Iowa football game on television. But we had cable, so you could get Iowa basketball.

I was always good at memorizing things, and quickly developed a series of parlor tricks I could perform for adults in exchange for candy or pocket change. With my dad, it was the names of all the teams in the Lakes Conference: The Spirit Lake Indians, Sheldon Orabs, Spencer Tigers, Estherville Midgets³, Emmetsburg E-Hawks, Cherokee Braves, Sibley Generals, and Storm Lake Tornadoes. That was simple. After all, how can you forget a team named the Midgets?

Earl was a harder nut to crack. But when I was six, I found my way to free candy by naming the starting lineup for Tom Davis’ first squad at Iowa. Again, it was pretty simple, mostly because they were Gods living among us here on earth: Roy Marble, B.J. Armstrong, Kevin Gamble, Brad Lohaus and Jeff Moe. Four of those guys, along with sixth man Ed Horton and freshman center Les Jepsen, ended up in the NBA. That team went 30-4 and was ranked in the national top 3 from December 15 through January 26, including a week in the top spot in mid-January. Like many people my age, the first thing I remember is the Challenger explosion; unlike many people my age, my second memory is staying up to watch Iowa beat Illinois on a school night in January 1987 and run their record to 15-0. They made the Elite 8 of the NCAA Tournament, ran up a 16-point halftime lead on No. 1 UNLV, and gave it all back to lose by three.

Three months later, we moved to southwest Iowa. Being an Iowa fan was easier there, but football was still hard to find. It was southwest Iowa in the early 1990s; even though Board of Regents of Oklahoma had taken effect, you still couldn’t see an Iowa football game that close to Lincoln. But you could get Iowa basketball. There were Horton and Bullard and Jepsen, Earl and Barnes and Street, Settles and Kingsbury and Woolridge, all holding mythical status but none ever reaching that mountaintop again. Dad would drive a handful of local kids to Wednesday night catechism, muttering curse words as he listened to another radio call of yet another 21-10 Iowa basketball season gone by.

I finished high school in Iowa, enrolled at the UI, graduated from there, and went to law school there. My college years were Kirk Ferentz’s ascendancy and Steve Alford’s flop, when it was much cooler and more relevant to be an Iowa football fan. I took a one-week class over spring break during my last year of law school, and met my friends at The Airliner after the final just in time to watch Northwestern State bury Iowa in the first round of the NCAAs. It’s been difficult for me to fully buy into this program ever since. Frankly, it often feels like that’s been the case for the entire fanbase. Even with the transcendent talent of Luka Garza and Keegan Murray, it’s always been accompanied by the interminable wait for the other shoe to drop. And that other shoe has always, always dropped.

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Ben McCollum is the first coach of a major Iowa program who is my age. He graduated high school in 1999, just as I did. He was born in Iowa City to a mom who holds three degrees from the University of Iowa, and grew up in one of those Iowa-crazed Lakes Conference towns: He was a Storm Lake Tornado. McCollum didn’t play at Iowa — didn’t have the opportunity — but there were enough potential connections there to make him an honorary alum.

When he became the top contender for the Iowa job — and, depending on who you talk to, somewhere between one and five other jobs — I wondered if he might have had the same experience that I did. Maybe he, too, memorized the starting lineup of that 1986-87 squad. Maybe that team made him an Iowa basketball fan, as it had me. You didn’t get out of Storm Lake as a basketball junkie in that time period without becoming a fan of that team, and if he did, there was no way he was taking another job somewhere else.

When Iowa announced McCollum as the new coach Monday on Facebook, it came with this photo from the family album as proof that Ben and I share one defining memory:

I’m pretty sure I owned that SURF RAGE OASIS t-shirt. Mine wasn’t autographed by Dr. Tom.

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There hasn’t been an “Iowa guy” at the helm of Iowa basketball since Dick Schultz in the early 1970s. Since then, Iowa has had varying degrees of success with coaches from the West Coast, the East Coast and back-to-back guys from Indiana. I typically believe the “connections” game we play during coaching searches is grossly overblown, as if someone who did not grow up immersed in the program cannot understand the depth of love its fans hold for it. Tom Davis wasn’t from Iowa. Neither was Fran McCaffery or Lute Olson.

But for a program that feels stuck in a two-decade slump, maybe a particular kind of “Iowa guy” can make a difference. Maybe we need a guy who can tell you where he was when Kingsbury made nine threes against Drake in 1994, or when Woolridge tried to will Iowa past Kentucky with 29 points in the 1997 NCAAs, or when Chris Street broke the consecutive free throw record. Maybe we need a guy who knows Jeff Moe was the fifth starter on the 1986-87 squad. Maybe we need a guy who remembers that time with the experience of a child watching a basketball game for the first time and understanding that this is his team, and his team is winning.

1. My mom once mentioned to Nelda that I was considering Iowa State for college, at which point Nelda asked her to put me on the phone and politely informed me that “we don’t go to that school.”

2. When that didn’t work, he tried to name me Hayden.

3. Yeah, you read that right.