I’m sure my fellow Marquette friends received something in their e-mail or mailboxes plugging today being National Marquette Day or the 30th anniversary of it. At first I was puzzled since it was the first I ever heard of it. There was never any shindig when I attended in the late Eighties. Could it be something regarding Father Marquette, the Jesuit priest who traveled the area centuries ago and who the university is named after? No, it’s just another celebration reminiscing over Marquette’s only NCAA basketball championship plus the team will be on ESPN tonight against Pittsburgh. I guess I will check in on it if it’s not blacked out and the Flyers aren’t losing right away.
Somebody in charge at Marquette needs to issue an edict on everybody getting over the lack of a recent title in basketball. My degree and diploma were not revoked when the team was clobbered in New Orleans four years ago so the obsessing needs to stop. Some days I feel like I attended a school full of Cub fans but at least those perennial losers have a decent name and a cool slogan. I’ve never let the annoying pledge monsters forget how I dislike Marquette becoming the Golden Eagles in 1994, a lame choice. What got even lamer was the million bucks they pissed away staying with it several years ago since the proposed replacement, Gold (right, just a noun not an adjective) was met with strong objections. Meanwhile they have the nerve to ask me for donations to help new students attend when the university obviously has cash to burn on focus groups. There was nothing offensive with Warriors, it was just another cowardly victory for the PC forces. The former mascot wasn’t even an Indian but Grover with a pituitary gland problem. Besides, the state’s tribes are too busy counting their newfound income; bingo parlors and casinos; to care about “inaccurate” representations of a tribe that was either exterminated by the Iroquois or moved to Oklahoma in the 1800s, the Illini’s fate.
I apologize for the tirade, I just wanted to take a dig at my alma mater’s pathetic priorities and the NCAA’s recent decision to purge a trivial “crisis” while little to nothing will be done about Reggie Bush and others who use college as a farm system for the NFL and NBA.
Sports are nice and having friendly rivalries is a part of life yet I admit to not being a very “patriotic” alumnus. Oh the wife will go on about how fanatical I get with my Flyers but inevitably, I am over it quickly. Whoever beats my team usually outplayed mine and wanted it more. I can’t refute that. The four-and-a-half years and $40K I spent at Marquette were a mixed bag. Most of the experience was positive, even when I couldn’t see it then: I made some great friends I still have, I learned things in and out of the lecture halls I retain today. I just hate dealing with anyone who put sports above everything with the nation’s universities. Marquette should take a chapter from Northwestern’s play book. That school is often dead last in the Big Ten Conference yet a degree earned there has more credibility than the most in the region. Why do you think their students chant, “That’s all right. That’s okay. You’ll be working for us one day.”