Gonzaga plays in Hook-mad Spokane, Baylor thrives in Waco

And so floated – and floated and floated – two places in the midst of dizzying climbing: Gonzaga longed for a first national title and a second place after a breathtaking March 21 in a row, Baylor after 1950 for two first Final Four Elite Eights in the 2010s Years. And there they will float in the All-Indiana March Madness, as almost all of their townspeople from home hope.

It’s a colorful duo of university towns, both with rivers, both love their pedestrian bridges over their rivers, one with snow-capped mountains in the distance, the other with big snow this year, both with small schools enjoying small schools. ness. Gonzaga has enrolled 7,295; Baylor, 19,522 (“small” for Texas); Spokane has about 220,000 people, Waco about 135,000. Around one (Waco) it is common to hear mentions of Jesus and around the other (in the Pacific Northwest) it is possible to pass successive billboards advertising Jesus and cannabis.

So, are these what you call basketball cities?

Absolutely (Spokane) and somehow (Waco).

Now you don’t want to play around comparing your tires to Spokane. Spokane with its giant Gonzaga and its gigantic annual 3-on-3 hoop festival breathes basketball in such a way that it was nicknamed “Hooptown USA” in 2019. The nickname fitted “like your first pair of Chuck Taylors in elementary school,” “wrote editor Rob Curley in the Spokesman Review.

Matt Santangelo, the Gonzaga star and CEO of Hoopfest in the late 1990s, unwinds a list of former Zags who have chosen Spokane. He noticed Gonzaga’s abundant senior fans, welcomed a rare “thread through the generations” and said of basketball, “It’s the connector. It cuts across generations. It cuts across backgrounds. “

Waco, that’s harder to pin down. This is in Texas, man. Perhaps no American city is calling their football as fast as Waco. McLane Stadium hugs Interstate 35 as the trucks and others roll between Dallas and Austin. But in Waco, winning basketball is combined with a current atmosphere of civic hope, with Wacoans reporting on Baylor’s high placements from acrobatics to golf to the basketball dynasty of Waco ambassador Kim Mulkey, while around 1.5 in 2018 alone Millions of souls visited the famous magnolia market in the silos of the famous chip and Joanna Gaines from the famous TV show about renovated farmhouses and reclaimed wood as well as sliding doors and of course ship panels.

“I think my analysis is that Waco is a sports city,” said Dillon Meek, the new mayor whose age (36) and energy (contagious) and baylor-ness (bachelor’s degree, law degree) mean a renewal of waves of civic pain – inflicted and not.

Spokane and Waco were just spending a pandemic season indulging in the Gonzaga (26-0) and Baylor (22-2) routes, but the reveal came largely in the anonymity of the homes and the typical visitor numbers sighed at 2,350 (Baylor). and 200 (Gonzaga), such left digits. As the longtime Baylor play-by-play voice, John Morris said to partner Pat Nunley on March 7th as the Bears ended a spotless home season, first direct conference title in 71 years, and a Seniors Day: “How great would that have been? A loan to the 2,350, however [a full crowd] would have blown the roof on some of these pieces. “

He also said, “The other side is, at least we play games.”

One thousand five hundred miles northwest the wonderfully little Gonzaga campus had a quiet, pretty Tuesday last week, through the statues of historic Catholic point guards like Pierre-Jean De Smet and Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a long graffiti on a short wall of Black Lives Matter “, The sculpture of Bing Crosby from Spokane, the bulldog – sorry, Bulldog – by the sculptor Vincent De Felice, which in good earthly times threatened 6,000 seats from outside the McCarthey Athletic Center, where the famous kennel was located.

Those who visit this building or long to do the same have come quite a way from favorites to cute mastodons. Under Dan Monson for one year and Mark Few for 22, Gonzaga has reached a national final, three Elite Eights, six Sweet 16s, eight rounds of 32 and three rounds of 64, with seeds of 10, 10, 12, 6, 9, 2 , 3, 3, 10, 7, 4, 8, 11, 7, 1, 8, 2, 11, 1, 4, 1 and now again 1. Dan Dickau, the ESPN analyst, former Zag and NBA player with seven teams, whose name adorns some of its Spokane barbershop, remembers ESPN’s first visit in 2002 as a big bang that “ESPN is a regular” these days.

All of this brings with it some of those things that have been seen in many profit-drunk university towns, such as a game ticket as a status symbol or the Art Nouveau sight of some fans leaving their routes early. Fans looked seasoned at two of these bars, which gave city authenticity against the flood of chains on the night of March 9th while Gonzaga ran into trouble against BYU in the WCC championship game in Las Vegas. With known fractions sitting neatly at the tables of Jack and Dan, a shout from campus and the famous Park Inn just south of town, in a pandemic, it was hard to worry that already eroded when the stunning Gonzaga offense flooded the 12-point half-time deficit. Zag fans know what to expect even when faced with the turmoil of other kingdoms, a factor Santangelo attributes to intimacy.

“You know [the players’] Mom and Dad, ”he said of the fans. “You know your siblings. There is only one really personal, intimate connection with the athletes who come through GU. “

But Gonzagatown is not the whole city of Gonzaga, because in the wilderness of 1990 Hoopfest slipped in the direction of its currently 6,000 teams, 3,000 volunteers, 225,000 fans, 425 seats, 45 city blocks. “I was overwhelmed,” said Dickau of September 2002 and his first sight of Hoopfest. “I had never seen anything like it. Downtown Spokane is taken over by Hoopfest. There are 65- and 70-year-old men playing, and then you turn the corner and first-grade and second-grade girls play. “

“We are a four season community,” said Santangelo. “We’re getting snow. It is dark. We are gray. We are not like Utah, which has snow on the ground, but blue skies. We spend a lot of time in the mud. “Basketball carries them out, and since 1942 football has been croaking like it was once a cough Stockton, who later became the grandfather of John Stockton, who later became the Gonzaga and Utah jazz institution.

Football didn’t croak in Baylor, although sometimes it felt like it should. When a crowd of people storms the field for a Big 12 title in the deliciously small stadium of 45,140 spectators in 2014, it can lead to one or more goose bumps. For Waco, the sexual assault scandal in mid-2010, which scared away the hierarchy, combined the psyche with other traumas. A century ago lies one of the worst examples of lynching in the country. In recent history there has been a devastating tornado (1953), the Branch Davidian tragedy (1993), the Baylor men’s basketball horror with an intra-team murder and scheming head coach (2003), and a very deadly shootout among bikers -Bands (2015).

“So often is the human experience and the experience of so many cities in our country that you have these moments of greatness and then moments of real failure that you have to grieve and get up and dusted,” Meek said. “There’s a story here about redemption and renewal, [around] We move forward, owning our past, repenting what we need to repent, and striving for excellence in the days to come. “

The new air is bursting with the “Magnolia Effect”, as Morris calls it: with football as always (and almost in the playoffs of 2019 before coach Matt Rhule moved to the NFL), with Mulkey, who, as always, from court on the subject of whether 18-year-old men’s basketball coach Scott Drew did the best rebuild job ever.

“I know where we came from,” said Doug McNamee, former Baylor student manager, former Baylor sports administrator and current president of Magnolia. “And I know where he is right now, mostly with no great facilities and, I would say, limited fan support.”

Now it’s long gone as 30,000 Baylor fans gathered at Houston Stadium for the 2010 Elite Eight, right down to the sounds and feelings of 2020-21.

“The chatter, the conversation,” said McNamee. “Everyone knows when the game is. You know what the score is. “

Morris said, “There is Baylor gear all over Waco, which is taken for granted, but McLennan County has more A&M and Texas graduates than Baylor graduates.”

McNamee said, “I think we are on the verge of being a rabid environment.”

On Friday night, with the temperature of 75, the trees blooming near the river, the governor lifting the mask / capacity mandates, and the winter under way, Baylor played the emerging in a Big 12 semi-final Oklahoma State. There was a home baseball game and giant pickup soccer game all around the sprawling campus, and a sports bar tour of the wide boulevards would find a scattered amount of gigantic cricket tables at the popular Bubba’s 33, a good amount of that funny, authentic salty dog. Attention for the game seemed a bit shy, but later at Billy Bob’s Burgers, with TVs over outdoor tables and the sound of Tracy Lawrence’s “Find Out Who Your Friends are,” a woman saw the score and said, “Baylor’s will lose. “

That was strange in Spokane-Waco in 2021.