BlazrDawg Wrote:Those first 3-4 seasons must have been magical for the people of Birmingham.
Magical is a good word to describe it. The "people of Birmingham" embraced the Blazers. You could be a Bama fan AND a Blazer fan, because the Blazers were "Birmingham's team", and were not yet seen as a threat to, or a distraction from what went on in T town. It was OK to be Tide fb fan and a Blazer bb fan. For those in Bham who were not Tide fans, the Blazers were an easy choice, because these young upstarts were turning the bb world upside down. Vitale called them the biggest bb story of the 80's.
But that was before the acrimony and animosity grew and got out of hand on both sides. Recruiting wars got ugly (I mean real ugly), letters were written, lines were drawn, and sides were chosen, and as they say, the rest is history.
Due to the emphasis in Alabama on college sports, the tensions between UAB and the Bama campus were largely ignored until they spilled onto the sports arena. There had been, since our inception in 1969, a tug-of-war over several academic programs that the Bama folks wanted to keep on campus, particularly many graduate programs. Their prevailing attitude, at the time, was that UAB would be all undergrad studies, and then students would have to come to T-town for advanced work (with its higher per hour costs). Bama's staff fought the enlargement of UAB offerings in most fields where they were already in place in T-town. Engineering and business schools come to mind. They did not gracefully step aside to make the growth of UAB's programs possible.
BAMANBLAZERFAN Wrote:Due to the emphasis in Alabama on college sports, the tensions between UAB and the Bama campus were largely ignored until they spilled onto the sports arena. There had been, since our inception in 1969, a tug-of-war over several academic programs that the Bama folks wanted to keep on campus, particularly many graduate programs. Their prevailing attitude, at the time, was that UAB would be all undergrad studies, and then students would have to come to T-town for advanced work (with its higher per hour costs). Bama's staff fought the enlargement of UAB offerings in most fields where they were already in place in T-town. Engineering and business schools come to mind. They did not gracefully step aside to make the growth of UAB's programs possible.
I understand that there was tension between the 2 campuses prior to bb, but we were talking about the REALLY important battleground of sport, not the insignificant squabbles amongst academic types.
I did a lot of research last year regarding the hiring of Bartow. (This week marks the 31st anniversary of his hire) and in reading some of the school newspapers from the mid 60's before UAB became a separate university, there were complaints from UAB students that they were not treated equally to students at Tuscaloosa. For example, they could not purchase student tickets for Bama football games.
As far as those first years of Blazer basketball, a lot of the excitement generated around Bartow. College basketball (thanks to Bird and Magic in 1979 and the birth of ESPN) was reaching new heights in popularity. And UAB starting its program and hiring away Gene Bartow from UCLA brought that excitement to Birmingham, where college basketball had almost no following. UAB, Gene Bartow and Oliver Robinson allowed Birmingham to connect to the excitement that would become March Madness with their own personal team to cheer for.
By the mid 80's, Alabama with Wimp Sanderson and Auburn with Sonny Smith realized that there was a point to college basketball and begin to focus more on having success there. But UAB had beat them to the punch and would be the premier college basketball program in the state for some time. Sadly, college basketball has now been BCSed and it is now more important to be in a power conference than to have a good program. But it wasn't that way in the early 1980's.
(This post was last modified: 06-12-2008 09:16 PM by Memphis Blazer.)
On a side note, your's truely was the one toting the yellow flag w/ green "BLAZERS" across it after the slam in the BJCC. It was so loud I coundn't hear myself think.
BlazerDave Wrote:On a side note, your's truely was the one toting the yellow flag w/ green "BLAZERS" across it after the slam in the BJCC. It was so loud I coundn't hear myself think.
Go Blazers!
WOW. I thought only Memphis fans made that many grammatical errors in one sentence.
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