Speaking of the Final Four

Tonight’s Final Four match-up between Butler University and University of Connecticut should be a great game. I was raised on Indiana Basketball and, as far as I’m concerned, Butler was the real winner last year and now deserves to take the title home. Unfortunately, deserving to win and actually winning in basketball, especially this level of basketball, do not always go together. In any event, I’ll be there cheering on the Butler Bulldogs until the final buzzer.

But today, I’m thinking about a different Final Four on a day that came close to changing our country in a very dramatic way. It was a Monday just like this one in Seattle, cool and cloudy. My colleague picked me up in his van at about 11am as we headed for the airport and a client trip to Austin, Texas. He had the radio tuned to a news station and, as we drove to the airport, we heard the first report that President Reagan had been shot coming out a hotel in Washington, DC.

We cringed as we thought that March 30, 1981 would be yet another of those days indelibly branded into our psyche’s forever. Until that moment, all I had been thinking about was getting to Austin in time to watch the Indiana Hoosiers take on North Carolina in Philadelphia for their second national championship under coach Bobby Knight.

A significant aside to the game and the shooting was that the President’s attack was covered by Ted Turner’s 9-month-old television experiment called Cable News Network, now CNN. Never before did we have such instant, in-depth coverage of a breaking news event, much of it directly from the scene. You literally couldn’t turn it off. I watched the whole basketball game from my hotel room, switching back and forth between it and CNN’s coverage of the shooting aftermath. What an amazing advance in broadcast news…one that has changed television forever.

Fortunately, we arrived in Austin in ample time to get checked in and find some carry out before the tip-off. And more importantly, both events of that day ended happily, for me at least. President Reagan made a healthy recovery and the Hoosiers beat North Carolina 63 to 50. It did not become a day that “will live in infamy” in our lives. But it’s one that I remember quite vividly, along with the huge Tex-Mex burrito that I ate in my room while watching the game.

Tonight the Butler Bulldogs will carry the flag of all those small schools that are populated with very talented and intelligent student athletes who deserve to be recognized on a national basis. GO BULLDOGS!!!