RE: KSU and Ingle mention on Mid-Majority.com
II. Cruel Sunrise
The game will hurt you. That's will hurt you, not might or could. If it ends in a loss, it's because Our Game itself doesn't end. Basketball doesn't stop for you, me or anyone else, and there are no exemptions or exceptions to this basic rule. Basketball is timeless, and it will end up outlasting us all. Seasons commence in the autumn, close in the spring, and new ones begin again once summer is finished. The calendar takes away eligibility and ability, and every championship must be defended.
Seven years ago, it ended in a win for Tony Ingle. It was a final victory that few recognized as important, but it was a certified championship nonetheless. In his fourth season at Kennesaw State University, he led the Owls to a 34-4 record and the 2004 Division II national title. In 2005-06, the school became a provisional D-I member and ended up with a surprisingly even record of 10-10 in the Atlantic Sun Conference. In 2010, once the school was eligible for the local and national postseason, KSU promptly pulled an upset of Lipscomb in the league tourney, the first 8-over-1 in any D-I league in five years. Then, once this most recent season began, the Owls beat Georgia Tech by 17 points at home.
But that was one of only eight total wins in 2010-11. Ingle and his staff were fired on March 8, and the administration cited poor academic progress as the reason.
A few days after the news came down, I called him up. He was driving. "Hey Kyle, guess what!" he shouted into the phone in his deep-fried Georgia accent. "I got canned!"
We laughed, and settled into our normal pattern of inside jokes and one-liners. He told me that his family was taking the turn of events as well as they could, and that he had some projects to keep him busy over the summer. The book we wrote together might still be turned into a movie, he reminded me, with a working title of "Sunrise." That's a reference to the end of his playing career, a gruesome and twisting leg break he sustained during the national junior college basketball tournament in Hutchinson. The next morning, gazing out of an airplane window into the first rays of a Kansas dawn, his leg propped up in a heavy cast, Tony Ingle vowed that he'd win the National Championship as a head coach. He overcame high odds to win a D-II title, but his ultimate dream was still very far away on the horizon line.
He turned somber and serious. "I did the best I could do," he told me. "I loved those kids like family. I wanted so bad to help them be better ballplayers and men. I want you to be honest with me, Kyle. I'm 58 years old. Do you think anybody out there is ever going to take a chance on an old guy like me? Who's going to hire me now?
"Do you think I'm ever going to get another shot at a National Championship?"
If Our Game loved you back, it would hold you there in your greatest moments, stop time, embrace you and keep you young and ageless and happy. But it will never love you back, not like you want it to. It conspires with the clock to wear you down with constant struggle, to keep you hooked with temporary rewards. That sun keeps rising, over and over, each and every day.
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