Louisville is a town divided along sports lines. Go to any store selling NCAA-licensed products, and you’ll see just as much blue as red. Last weekend, in an ultimately fruitless search for a hoodless black Cardinals sweatshirt prior to the tipoff against West Virginia, my subjective impression was that there was more blue than red for sale. More on this dynamic later. For now, at least, it appears that the Cards’ Final Four appearance is beginning to heat up the locals.
Yesterday, 16,000 Louisville fans packed Fourth Street Live for a pep rally, a huge crowd considering that I didn’t hear a word about it until I tuned in to the ESPN Radio affiliate broadcasting live from Fourth Street to hear the chants on behalf of local boy made good Larry O’Bannon. Here’s the Courier-Journal’s take:
Surrounded by a sea of red, Maurice Sheckles didn’t mind fighting for a
spot yesterday among the roughly 16,000 people elbowing each other for
a look at the Final Four-bound University of Louisville Cardinals.
He only wished he could see more of the stage where they were standing.
"Let me sit on your shoulders, man," said Sheckles, 34.
That, in fact, was about the only way for thousands of people to see as
4th Street Live was engulfed in a wave of red-and-black fan frenzy
during a late-afternoon pep rally for Coach Rick Pitino and his men’s
basketball team…."We had 10,000 wristbands, and we had given them out by 5 o’clock,"
said Kimber Goodwin, director of marketing for the entertainment
complex’s developer, the Cordish Co. She estimated that 16,000 to
17,000 people filled the blocklong expanse of stores, bars and
restaurants….The mania spilled out past the 4th Street Live entrance, where
bumper-to-bumper traffic blared music and honked horns while hundreds
more people tried to muscle into the rally long after it began.
The spirit seems to be building. Some time yesterday, a local car wash changed its signage to implore "Go Cards Go," even though the car wash (at Hurstbourne and Westport, in the East End) is quite a ways from either Freedom Hall or Belknap Campus.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Louisville is, after all, in the hunt for its third national title and first since Never Nervous Pervis Ellison swished free throw after free throw in 1986. It’s a basketball town in a basketball-crazed state, one where fans may begrudgingly forgive, but certainly don’t forget. But it’s not a college town, per se. It’s not Chapel Hill or East Lansing or even Champaign-Urbana. Residents here fly their black and red (or blue and white) flags from their cars and call talk radio shows and criticize Clear Channel for dumping their Cards deal for one in which UK gets priority. But the support for the local boys and the buzz being generated seems almost palpable. The radio guys broadcasting from Fourth Street got it right yesterday - it really seems like the week before Derby, just without the mint juleps and hats.
Final note: not everybody supports the Cards or Cats. I spotted this car flying a green and white flag that I presume to be support for the Spartans in the parking lot this morning. The plates are from Indiana. Hopefully the UK fans have calmed down a bit.
