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Show Jack Says . . . Local Talent Inferior to Other Colleges in Nation by Jack Hill "Best sports show in the nation." Thats what some call the NCAA basketball tourney. tour-ney. With the Western Regional s held in Provo and finals in Salt Lake, Utah basketball fans had a chance to see the nations best basketball talent in action. Local fans were both gratified and disturbed by what they saw. Gratified because of the excellence of play, skill and ability demonstrated demon-strated and disturbed because it became evident how inferior local college talent is when compared to players across the nation. BYU made it to the final 40 by winning the W.A.C. With a young and exciting team, the Cougars will no doubt be W.A.C. contenders again next year. Coach Arnold ate some of his rash statements ("you will never see BYU play a zone defense as long as I'm coach") to put together a championship champion-ship squad. By the thousands, fan's returned to "Big Mac" watch players like Danny Ainge, Fred Roberts and Allen Taylor win the conference con-ference title. But, as one die-hard Cougar fan stated, "BYU is light-years away from the final four." He was probably right. Ainge, excellant player (with the exception excep-tion of being an official cry baby) reverts to bench warmer status when compared to a DePaul Gary Garland; UCLA Roy Hamilton or Michigan States "Magic" Johnson. Fred Roberts gave W.A.C. opponents trouble in his freshmen year and will do so for the next three seasons. Even terrorizing them on occasion. But matched mat-ched against a David Greenwood of UCLA, Greg Kelser of Michigan State or Indiana In-diana States Larry Bir, Roberts doesn't come out to well. With "hard working" Allan Taylor, it was evident that hard working players, with "talent", will always be better. Unless things change Cougar fans will have to be content with being competitive in the W.A.C. -Facilities-Skiing at Snowbird Saturday, I met a group of basketball fans from Chicago. Along with the "great snow", these fans were very impressed with te "fantastic basketball facilities in Utah." They had seen BYU's Marriott center and thought Utah's Special Events Center was great. When I told them that both Weber & Utah State had new 10,000 plus seat arenas, they were truly . amazed. Many schools in their area (DePaul, Marquette, Marquet-te, etc) play in old buildings that seat 6,000 or less. What we need is some of their great players to go in our great facilities. |
