Minnesota was the kind of game losers lose & champions win.
On a night when Ayo Dosunmu converted 4-of-12 shots, Trent Frazier managed 4-of-13 and Giorgi Bezhanishvili 2-of-7, you can see how desperately the Illini needed someone else to lead the way.
Fortunately, Illinois had two someones answering that call.
In years past, John Groce would begin his postgame remarks by saying obviously, if you’d told me we’d hold them to 48 points or obviously, if you told me we’d limit ourselves to 8 turns and keep the rebound margin close or obviously if you told me we’d get production from all eight guys who played, I’d like our chances.
Things are better now. Illinois had an off-night and still found a way to win its seventh straight game.
It was a knife fight in a dark alley. Or a dogfight. Luckily for Illini fans, Andres Feliz and Da’Monte Williams are fighters.
Kofi Cockburn tallied a **yawn** double-double with 13 & 10 and managed, with the help of some deft coaching maneuvers, to avoid fouling-out despite challenging all-conference favorite Daniel Oturu throughout the night.
If Cockburn can stay toe-to-toe with Luka Garza on Sunday, he’ll earn his **yawn** eighth B1G Freshman of the Week.
So, survive and move on. Iowa awaits.
And now to the non-basketball aspects of Thursday night. If you take a head in the sand approach, this is your cue to stop reading.
In the top-middle of that second Giorgi feed, you’ll notice the rainbow “Pride Night” banner.
The Illini men wore long-sleeved Pride Night shirts over their jerseys, and State Farm Center was illuminated with rainbow colors rather than the traditional Orange & Blue.
The “Pride” movement and its various parades was created to make LGBT persons feel okay about themselves.
the promotion of the self-affirmation, dignity, equality, and increased visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people as a social group … as opposed to shame and social stigma
According to the U.S Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, LGB youth are almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth.
Of course, Pride Night can be a tough sell when the audience is mostly white, small-town conservatives. Cleverly, the DIA took the Hobby Lobby approach, championing not LGBT rights, but “religious freedom,” the last constitutionally approved method for suppressing the uncomfortably different.
At the same time, the DIA announced the Robert Archibald Student-Athlete Health and Wellness Fund. Archibald’s funeral is today in Barrington.
So far, nobody has used the word “suicide” in relation to his death. Mentions of “demons” and “struggles” are as far toward that word as the discussion has ventured. It’s just coincidence that Pride Night aligned with the creation of a fund to support mental heath & wellness, even more coincidental that they landed on the same day that DJ Carton “stepped away” from the Ohio State basketball program for mental heath reasons.
Everyone who knew Arch is now questioning themselves about whether there was something they could have said or done to help. His last gift to the program is the wake-up call that addressing depression, anxiety & all forms of mental wellness issues must be a proactive pursuit. That young people should not be shamed against confiding their emotional identity.
It was the first Pride Night for men’s basketball. Volleyball and WBB have done it before, perhaps because the existence and occasional greatness of LGBT athletes has been acknowledged in those sports.
MBB has not crossed that bridge, and it’s yet to be noted that the Illini’s greatest alpha-male of the last decade was raised by lesbians.
Maybe next time, if DIA decides to have a next time; they’ll give the cheerleaders a less euphemistic slogan to promote.
Instead of the Hobby Lobby approach, why not just come out and say it: “It’s okay to be gay.”
