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Good Will Hunter

OSU game therapy for the daily grind

By Ryan Greene
January 12, 2007 | 1 comment

Zac Hunter chips in his two cents while bloggin' from Boston.

I was talking about the game all day on Wednesday at work, even if my co-workers didn’t want to hear about it. I was ready for Kansas to start Big 12 play against Oklahoma State.

Boston isn’t a huge college basketball town, but the people I work with seem to humor me.

I’ve got one pretty good basketball buddy who happens to be a Duke fan. We go back and forth everyday, but today the intensity was turned up a little bit. He calls Sasha Kaun a goon ,and I call Greg Paulus a floor slapper. Thursday morning was good for me with Duke losing and Kansas making enough incredible plays to fill ESPN’s Top 10 for an entire weekend. (How Darnell Jackson’s put-back dunk didn’t make it I will never know).

Needless to say I was ready for the game, and with a 9 p.m. start out here, I had plenty of time to get that way.

My hour at the gym was split between rooting against Duke and thinking about this surprise Top 10 match-up at the Fieldhouse. I couldn’t wait.

But my trek to Wednesday night bliss was not without a few bumps along the way. I’m fairly new Boston and ran into some Jayhawk fans at a bar called the Sports Depot last Sunday. We made some tentative plans to meet for the Oklahoma State game. I was pretty pumped because it’s a lot more fun to watch ‘Hawks with a few other birds of the same feather.

My roommate doesn’t quite feel the same love for the ‘Hawks that I do. Sadly, I was the only one who made it to the Depot. But don’t feel bad for me. I had a Miller Light in hand and the ‘Hawks on a 42-inch plasma. Coincidentally, I could have done the exact same thing at home, but let’s not get into that.

I had my beer. I had my spot right in front of the television. It was game time. So why did ESPN2 take a back seat to the Christian Slater classic Pump Up the Volume? Much to my dismay it was 80s night at the Depot. It’s not that I dislike the movie or Slater, but I had to find a TV in the corner and have it switched to the Kansas game.

Let’s try this again. I had my beer. I had my spot right in front of the television. I had Huey Lewis blaring on the speakers. I had Slater up to his pirate radio shenanigans on the television right next to mine. It was game time.

And that’s when it happened. All the junk that happened before the 9 p.m. tip went away. Kansas came out like a runaway freight train and all the Cowboys could do was watch it go by. I was trapped in two hours of bliss. I had blinders on to everything, save for my cell phone and the television.

I logged around 50 text messages last night. I wasn’t concerned if other patrons thought my first pumping was weird. What was I supposed to do? Kansas was playing like the best team in the country and making sure its Big 12 brethren from the South stayed zero for the conference in Allen Fieldhouse. And the fist pumping couldn’t have seemed too out of place with a movie like Pump Up the Volume airing at the same time.

Wednesday’s game was the type of game that makes you forget. It makes you forget about work for the day so you can brag about your team. The memories of the DePaul and Oral Roberts get smaller in the rear-view mirror as the current winning streak grows. And it makes you forget that you’re the only Kansas fan in a Boston bar on 80s night.

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