There wasn’t much of a basketball/hockey rivalry to capture the hearts and minds of the Minnesota sports public until the late 1960s. Basketball was played from border to border, by hundreds of countries with Crackerbox gyms at the Williams Arena airport hangar that holds 18,000 fans, a third of whom may smoke.
Someone shouts “Fire!” – What the hell, we could all get out of there in 30, 40 minutes if it was close to full.
Hockey was played in the Twin Cities and “Up North,” though not in Bemidji, where coach Bun Fortier was famous in the state for his fiercely competitive basketball teams.
The one-class state basketball tournament (boys only, of course) filled Williams Arena in late March, while the hockey tournament was played a month earlier in the half-sized St. Paul Auditorium with basically eight of the same 15-20 teams every year.
Then, in 1967, the North Stars came to occupy the Met Center quickly built as an NHL expansion team, and from the slowly developing suburbs to the west and south, and from Duluth and the Range, and from the East Side of St. Paul, and, by golly, even from Rochester, came hockey hungry to fill the place.
Meanwhile, there was also a basketball team in the new ABA, the Muskies, and they achieved such popularity that Jim Klobuchar wrote in the Minneapolis Star that when he called the team’s ticket office to ask what time the game, was asked in return. , “When can you get there?”
Two years later, in March 1969, came the move of the hockey tournament to the Met Center – and the Warroad vs. Edina, “Henry Boucha hammered the boards” final on the river, screaming, unforgettable Saturday night basically understood the high school. winter sports scene.
Bill Musselman, and then Jim Dutcher, and finally Clem Haskins did much to create a Gophers basketball scene that made “the Barn” the liveliest athletic arena in town for many winters.
Then again, Howard Cosell never came to town for a Gophers basketball game. He did so for a state hockey tournament.
I have explained my preference for basketball like this for decades:
“I grew up in southwest Minnesota. I might as well have been in northern Indiana. The only time we saw a hockey game was when the United States won the Olympic gold medal in 1960 — and mostly because the heroic goalie, Jack McCartan, had played third base for the Fulda Giants city team in 1956.”
Now, Luverne, in our southwest corner, the dreaded, press court, crew Cardinals, one-class state basketball champion in 1964…is a hockey town.
And Sherburn, another prairie town, was the last of the single-class champions in 1970 — well, the U.S. under-18 team’s goaltender who stopped 29 of 32 shots in their loss 3 -2 to the Gophers Thursday night. at Mariucci it was Carsen Musser of Sherburn.
Right now, Bob Motzko has the most talented Gophers men’s team since Don Lucia won the first of his back-to-back titles in 2002, and across the street, the second-ranked basketball team in the Ben Johnson’s Gophers bordered on the impossible.
On the TV. I didn’t do the hike. I could cry at the sight of 3,500 people watching bad basketball. And worse for us dedicated Richard Pitino bashers: He’s 13-0 and has No. 1 ranked New Mexico. 22 in his second season with the Lobos.
The favorable element for basketball in October seemed to be on the pro front:
The Timberwolves seem to have upgraded after losing a six-game playoff series in the first round of the NBA. The Wild seemed to have regressed after losing a six-game playoff series in the first round of the NHL.
We hoop-heads got screwed again. New $8 million-a-year basketball coach Tim Connelly has the Wolves on the precipice for the franchise’s biggest disaster, which is saying something.
And the Wild – Kevin Fiala’s goals are gone and a guy named Sam Steel is centering the first line, but they have Kirill Kaprizov, and there’s only one professional athlete here to compare, and that’s Justin Jefferson.
It’s hard to do in hockey, but Kaprizov is a team carrier. The Wolves don’t have one of those — not Anthony Edwards yet, not Karl-Anthony Towns ever, and not Rudy Gobert, the franchise’s future savior.
This prairie boy must finally admit: basketball vs.
Any outfit might even want to make a slogan out of it.
