Passion and Pride

Have you ever seen the Legend of Bagger Vance? That's the one where Matt Damon plays a former golf prodigy who lost his career due to alcohol and the war, then gets invited into an exhibition with greats Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones in Savannah, the main character's home town, and turns around a terrible opening in the exhibition into a tie at the end. His wise and mysterious caddy, the titular character of Bagger Vance played by Will Smith, turns his fortunes around by telling him to give up - just carve the next drive out into the ocean.

That took a lot longer than I wanted to explain, but that's kind of how I felt with 15 minutes to go in the game. Just carve one out there. Screw it, just run up and take threes for the rest of the night. Let's let this get to 40.

They didn't, which is fine, but you wouldn't know it to look at the body language. But that wasn't what coach Rob Jeter was talking about in the post game press conference. "One thing we have to learn as a group is that we have to understand the passion and the pride it takes to wear a Milwaukee uniform. Not just the guys on the court, but the guys on the staff. We have to understand that and attack and prepare with that in mind."

The sentiment from coach Jeter was that it's not anything in the box score, it's not any one facet of the game that needs to change. There's a culture that has been brewing for awhile where players take for granted what it means to wear the uniform, and it causes them to become complacent, to not care about the final score as much as maybe their stat line or the other parts of their lives.

I guess that's what I feel, but for me Jeter said all the right things in the press conference. He identified parts of the game where the team totally failed, he identified what the real problem is: passion and pride.

The scary thing was when Demetrius Harris was asked what Javon McCrea's impact was. Earlier, Jeter had said "The scouting report told us that he's strongest when he's going left, and we never took that away from him."

Afterward, Harris said, "We didn't buy into the scouting report. I don't think we paid attention. And his effort, he just outworked all of us." Jeter had mentioned earlier that he knows what needs to be done, and it's his job to make sure the players know what needs to be done. So you can take that as his failure if you want.

But it's gut check time. At some point, the players, the coaches, everyone - they all need to decide individually if they're going to put in the effort they can be proud of, have the passion to get it done. If they decide that they can't, then I'd love for them to be shown the door. Because people would kill to wear that uniform. I know that Milwaukee isn't the New York Yankees or even Marquette, but the Black and Gold means a lot to a lot of people. They need to understand that and they need to put everything they have into making that right.

It doesn't matter if they love the guys they play with or play for, or even like them. But they need to grow up and put their differences with other members of the team aside if they have any, and check themselves to see if their heart is in it. Because if it's not, I don't want them to represent our program.

It's not the end of the world. There's still time to figure this out, to get it to the point where they can start playing the way they can play, to reach their potential. The ceiling is still high - Davidson is a team that can go to the Sweet 16 and we were better than them - but potential is only what you can be, not what you are, and these players, this team, this program has to figure out how to join potential and reality.

Jeter was solemn after the game, but he was far from giving up. "We're in a bad place right now. The only thing we can go back to is pride, and what it means to be a Milwaukee basketball player. That's where we have to start."



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