If you know me, or even just of me through social media, you know that one of my first loves is college basketball.
I’ve attended countless of games in my life, that number is easily in the triple digits, I’ve been to 15 NCAA tournament games and I’ve watched thousands of games since I started following the sport.
On the eve of a new college basketball season, I can’t help but think about my grandfather, who passed away on October 8.
Papa loved all sports; baseball, football, hockey, horse racing, auto racing, but his first love was basketball and specifically college basketball. He attended Siena College in the 1950s and followed the basketball program for the rest of his life. He took his sons to games when they were kids and eventually started taking his grandkids to games in the mid and late 2000s. I was the one who went with him most of the time.
A lot of this came during Siena’s run of success from 2007-2010, which they went to three consecutive NCAA tournaments and were one of the best mid-major programs in the country. Around this time, he was attending just about every home game and took me to a lot of them. It made me fall in love with the game (it helped that they won just about every time we went, too).
One of my first college basketball memories was watching Siena upset Vanderbilt in the first round of the 2008 tournament at his house. His favorite player was Alex Franklin; I liked Ronald Moore and Clarence Jackson myself.
I first got into it on the national scale around 2010 and started following Syracuse as a fan (and yes, a fan – you tend to lose your individual fandom when you cover a sport), a few years later he got us tickets to go to my first Syracuse game, during the Orange’s magical 25-0 start to the 2013-14 season. The game I went to was a 78-62 win against Villanova.
When I got a little older and decided I wanted to make a career of covering college basketball (my career goals involve covering the sport on a national level), he knew I’d be able to do it. Honestly, it goes back to him taking me to Siena games when I was 7, 8, 9 years old. That’s where it started.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I went to a Siena game with him for the last time this past February, when I visited home for a long weekend. Siena ran out of gas in the second half and lost to Marist 62-53. Everything was as usual – went to the game, listened to the postgame show on the radio on the drive back, talked about what we had just spent the past two hours watching.
I hope that if I achieve my career goal, he’ll be watching and smiling. If that happens, I’ll have to stop back at a Siena game, for old times sake.
AJ Hoops 