| | Associated Press
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- They traveled from miles around Friday
night to Assembly Hall.
|  | | Jason Hite is mad about Indiana basketball. |
To see their team and their new leader, coach Mike Davis, and to
show their support for the program.
"I'm a Hoosier fan, and I always will be," said Tim Holder,
who traveled from Cincinnati and waited outside for nearly four
hours. "There's more to Indiana basketball than Bob Knight."
Hard as that may seem sometimes, even to Davis.
"It's just exciting," he said, smiling. "It won't really sink
in till the first game."
But the fans understood fully Friday night; this is a new era.
And the several thousand fans who started filing in at 11 p.m.
wanted to show they're still Indiana fans.
"I'll be an IU fan and I've been an IU fan for years," said
Charles Clark, who traces his Hoosiers roots to the 1950s. "It
would have to be an awful drastic thing for me not to be an IU
fan."
Not even Knight's firing could reach that level.
But what many of these fans wanted to illustrate at this event
was that they still supported these Hoosiers -- regardless of
Knight.
Holder, an annual attendee of the midnight practices, came to
Bloomington with three other people and detected the changes almost
instantly.
"The atmosphere feels a lot different," he said. "We got to
go inside, before they closed the doors, and walked around on the
court. Before, you usually got this feeling that you weren't
allowed to do that, that you might bump into Coach."
While Holder and his friends managed to mingle with some of the
players, namely freshmen guards A.J. Moye and Andre Owens, they
also managed to bump into the coach.
"I was just telling this guy that Coach Davis needs to know
we're behind him," said Kevin Morgan of Tipton, Ind. "Can you
imagine being in his position, replacing a legend, replacing maybe
the greatest basketball coach of all-time and we're not happy with
20-win seasons here? We expect Big Ten championships and national
championships.
"As a matter of fact, we spoke with him and we told him that we
were behind him 100 percent."
Other changes also were immediately apparent.
Davis, who accepted the Hoosiers' job two days after Knight was
fired for violating Indiana's "zero-tolerance" policy, added
3-point shooting and dunk contests to the repertoire and also made
the women's basketball team a first-time participant in the
late-night event.
"I'm just being myself," Davis said. "We did some things for
the kids. We want them to have fun tonight because (Saturday) at 4,
it's going to be serious."
While most everybody wore the school colors and voiced their
support, some fans admitted they preferred Knight's old-school
practices better.
"We're actually hoping they come out and practice," said Mark
Detweiler, head coach at Randolph Southern High School near
Richmond, Ind. "We hope it's not just a circus or all this glitz.
I kind of liked the practices because we want our players to see
what it takes to play at this level."
Many, such as Clark, had mixed emotions that Knight was not
inside Assembly Hall -- with his team.
"He's still my man," Clark said, pointing to his Knight
sweatshirt. "I like Mike Davis, and I'll always be an IU fan. But
I hated what happened to Knight." | |
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