There is no doubt that you know what happened in my home city of Cincinnati on Saturday afternoon.
One of the best rivalries in all of sports — not just college basketball — was taking place just a couple of minutes from where I sit writing this. The Crosstown Shootout is something that not many people outside of Cincinnati fully understand.
The best way I can describe it is to make a small correlation to the Civil War. We’ve all heard stories about brothers fighting brothers over their differing beliefs.
That is the case in Cincinnati. I can think of more than a few examples of families that have both die-hard University of Cincinnati supporters and die-hard Xavier University supporters.
Admittedly, many of these allegiances start out as sibling rivalries — “My brother likes UC, so I’ll root for XU.” — but as time wears on, those allegiances stick.
Full disclosure: I am a lifelong UC fan. Every year around this time, I question my friendship with those who support Xavier University. That’s how intense the rivalry is.
Seriously, I don’t want to talk to Xavier fans for a few weeks at least.
But, bearing my fanhood in mind, my parents and I spent a lot of money on an education to train me to be an objective journalist, so that’s where these ramblings will come from tonight.
There is any number of examples that I could start with to explain the history of this rivalry, but I think the best way to understand how heated this game has been over the years is to look to the 1994 Shootout that featured the infamous (non) handshake between Cincinnati coach Bob Huggins and Xavier coach Pete Gillen.
From the Chicago Tribune:
They went at it from a distance, then punctuated a frenzied night when Huggins refused to shake Gillen’s hand.
“I’m not phony,” Huggins said. “If their bench is going to yell things at me during the game, that’s their business. I’m not going to shake hands and pretend everything is all right.”
The 10,121 fans got the idea something was wrong at halftime. Huggins and Gillen were yelling back toward the court as they headed for the locker rooms.
It got worse in the second half. At one point, the two coaches appeared to be yelling at each other from their benches. Finally, there was the handshake snub.
Fast forward 15 years, and not much has changed except for the players’ and coaches’ names.
Coming into this year’s Shootout, UC and XU’s seasons couldn’t have been going in more opposite directions. The No. 8-ranked Musketeers were undefeated, pulling off Tebow-esque victories on two occasions (Vanderbilt, Purdue), keeping their star, Tu Holloway, in the forefront of National Player of the Year debates. Cincinnati came into the season ranked as high as 20th in national polls, only to lose twice unceremoniously, once to Presbyterian and again a week later to Marshall.
A Shootout that many pegged prior to the season as having the possibility of being one of the best in recent memory was on the verge of floating into obscurity.
Enter Andy Furman, a Cincinnati sports talk mainstay.
Furman had Cincinnati guard Sean Kilpatrick on his radio show on Thursday night and frankly, he baited Kilpatrick into putting some gas on the Shootout flame.
Furman: “Are you better than Tu Holloway?”
Kilpatrick: “I’ll let the fans decide…”
Furman: “I need to know. No one’s listening. Just between you and me.”
Kilpatrick: “Yes I am.”
Furman: “Would Tu Holloway start for UC?”
Kilpatrick: “Would he, with the players we have now? I would say no.”
Kilpatrick has played well in his sophomore season at UC, averaging 15 points per game, but there have to be only a handful of people in the country that think Kilpatrick is better than Holloway and most of them are related to SK.
The entire point of Furman’s line of questioning was to provoke Kilpatrick to say something that would get people talking about the Shootout. Mission accomplished. But what did you expect Kilpatrick to say? That Holloway’s better than him? That Holloway would start on the Bearcats’ team? If he were to say that, his comments would be spun to allege that Holloway is better than one of his teammates, that Kilpatrick doesn’t have the confidence in one of his guys to play better than Holloway. It’s just not plausible to expect Kilpatrick to say anything other than what he did.
However, Furman got what he wanted. People from Xavier took it as disrespect from a player who hasn’t earned; people from UC liked Kilpatrick’s confidence in himself and his teammates.
Those are some of the ingredients for a good Shootout, no doubt about it.
Come Saturday, Xavier was well on its way to serving up a beatdown, something many UC fans would admit, deep down, that they thought was a possibility.
And that’s fine. It happens. Last year, Cincinnati ran Xavier out of the gym, winning by 20. Xavier was primed to do the same to UC last week.
As Mike Krzyzewski said two weeks ago after his Duke Blue Devils were blown out by Ohio State,”I’ve had my butt kicked before, and we’ve kicked some butt. Tonight my butt is sore.”
The true test is not whether or not you’re kicking butt, or receiving the butt kicking, but how you deal with it.
As the seconds ticked down and the Xavier soundman cued up Jay-Z’s “Run This Town,” things got ugly quickly.
Xavier’s All-American hopeful Tu Holloway taunted the Cincinnati bench, saying “this is my city.”
Cincinnati’s Ge’Lawn Guyn didn’t want to hear any of that, and as he went to put his hand in Holloway’s face to shut him up, XU’s Dez Wells shoved Guyn to the ground. Before Guyn made it to the floor, Cincinnati’s bench was on the floor — and all hell was breaking loose.
Most infamously, the Bearcats’ senior forward Yancy Gates walked into the fray, sought out Xavier’s 7-foot center, Kenny Frease, and caught him with a sucker punch to the left eye.
Other punches were thrown. UC’s Octavius Ellis and Ge’Lawn Guyn threw some; Cheikh Mbodj tried to kick Frease while he was on the ground. Xavier’s Mark Lyons and Laden Amos got into the punching spirit as well.
It all happened so fast that the officials were forced to call the game with 9.4 seconds remaining on the clock. Nothing worthwhile was going to come from playing out the last few seconds. But what came next was just as destructive as the brawl.
Cincinnati, who under head coach Mick Cronin, had worked for five years to lose the label of “Huggs’ Thugs,” was back in the national spotlight for the wrong reasons. And although both teams were at fault, Xavier seemed to get out of the fracas with the least amount of damage to its reputation.
Some will point to the fact that Xavier’s players were provoking Cincinnati with trash talk, but anyone who’s played a game of 21 with their buddies in the backyard knows that smack talk is part of basketball.
If you dish it out when you’re winning, you better be able to take it when you’re losing.
Xavier got into the locker room looking none the worse for the altercation. Then head coach Chris Mack made the fatal error of letting Holloway and Lyons address the media minutes after the brawl that had already gone viral on the Internet.
“That’s what you’re going to see from Xavier and Cincinnati,” Holloway said. “We got disrespected a little bit before the game, guys calling us out. We’re a tougher team. We’re grown men over here. We got a whole bunch of gangstas in the locker room, not thugs but tough guys on the court. We went out there and zipped ’em up at the end of the game.”
To be fair, Holloway’s post-game comments were misconstrued by many and by most accounts, were subject to a generational divide. Holloway was not calling he and his teammates “gangstas” in the “Scarface” sense. He simply meant that they were a tough team that can stand up to the rigors of an intracity rivalry.
However, with the sports media being made up mostly of older, white men, the comments were seen as inappropriate.
So with the respect that Cincinnati lost during the brawl, Xavier lost just as much with their reaction to it.
Media-types praised UC coach Mick Cronin for his emotional and seemingly sincere postgame comments.
“There is no excuse for that in basketball,” Cronin said. “You’ve got to learn how to win on one side, you’ve got to learn how to lose on the other side. All these kids all need to realize they are here to get an education.
“If my players don’t act the right way, they will never play another game at Cincinnati. Right now, I just told my guys, ‘I will meet with my AD and my president and I’m going to decide who is on the team going forward.’ I’ve never been this embarrassed. I’m hoping [UC] President [Gregory] Williams doesn’t ask me to resign after that.
“I made everybody take their jersey off — and they will not put it on again until they have a full understanding of where they go to school and what the university stands for and how lucky they are to even be there, let alone have a scholarship, because there’s a whole lot of kids that can’t pay for college and don’t get to go to school.”
That’s just a small snippet of what Cronin said, and he was applauded nationally for his words. The following day, when the University of Cincinnati administration announced the suspensions — six games for Gates, Mbodj and Ellis; one for Guyn — the same media blasted Cronin for not living up to his words.
Again, in fairness, what did they expect? The decision to suspend the players was made by the president of the university and his board, not Cronin.
Cronin still holds the option to keep his players out more games if he feels they are not ready to represent the University of Cincinnati.
Overall, Cincinnati has seemed to come out as the better side in the handling the aftermath.
Across town, Xavier was being blasted for their lack of public relations savvy. Xavier laid out its suspensions — four games for Wells and Amos; two for Lyons and one for Holloway — but still was dealing with the perception that came from Holloway’s actions and words following the fight. To make matters worse, Sean Miller, now the coach at Arizona, told the Arizona Daily Star that the fight didn’t surprise him. Even worse, he was proud of the guys he recruited, including Holloway and Lyons, who still play on the Musketeer team for their actions.
“Happens every game. I’m proud of those guys, I really am,” Miller said of Xavier, his former team. “I would fully expect there to be a fight.”
“If Cincinnati tries to do what they did (Saturday) they’re going to get a fight,” Miller said after UA beat Clemson on Saturday. “So I’m proud of those guys.
“They have a chance to win it all,” Miller said. “It’s just such a great story. I’m really proud of those guys and I watch them any time that I can. No one’s going to bully those guys.”
Not a good look for Xavier, but really, who cares what Sean Miller has to say? He’s as much a part of this as Bob Huggins. That’s to say he’s no part of it at all.
These are Cronin’s and Mack’s teams, respectively, and both of the teams’ actions are a representation of the coaches in charge now, not ones from the past.
It would appear that both teams, in their own ways, are trying to move forward from the low point of a great rivalry. Both universities have said that they will have the players involved do work in the community and talk to young people about their actions and why they were wrong.
Some are calling for an end to the game all together, and it’s a strong possibility. There are even prosecutors looking into the fight to see if there are criminal cases to be tried.
The bottom line of all of this is that there is enough blame to go around; no one person is solely at fault. Regardless of who started the fight, what happened during it and what the fallout was, both teams and universities have been damaged by what took place on Saturday.
And while it appears as if both sides are taking the right action to put the fight behind them, the fact remains that the city of Cincinnati is the one that came out of the Crosstown Punchout with a black eye.
