Just curious how/when posters on this site became MU fans - how the connection got started? Are most on this site alumni of MU? Are/were most of the posters from the Milwaukee area? Were parents fans? Etc.?
I started following MU hoops in 1957-'58 when I was in sixth grade. I used to listen to games on WISN Radio. The announcer and play-by-play guy - I think it was Tom Collins - really captured the excitement of the game, made it come alive. I loved listening to him describe Mike Moran making a left-handed hook shot or Walt Mangham skying for a rebound or Jimmy Kollar making a pass on the fast break for an assist or Jim McCoy nailing an outside shot. I remember how excited he was about a young player named Ron Dibelius.
I remember being fascinated that McCoy and Kollar and Mangham were all from Pittsburg and wondering how/why they came to Marquette.
But it wasn't just the excitement of the games and the players. I loved the name Marquette. It was so much cooler than the names of other schools they played - Detroit, Dayton, Xavier, Loyola, Creighton, St. Louis, etc. And the nickname was even cooler - Warriors! Yeah. Loved it. So much better than the Ramblers or the Flyers, or the Blue Jays, or the Billikens, whatever the hell that was.
Marquette Warriors just had a certain coolness that other combinations did not have - were nowhere close to.
And the, of course, there were the chants - You could hear them on the radio: "We Are.....MARQUETTE!" And "Ring Out Ahoya" captured the heart of an 11- 12 year old boy trying to survive a frigid, snowy Milwaukee winter. I also liked the Badger fight song, but MU's was just so in line with the kind of revolutionary rhythms that Elvis and Buddy Holly and the other young, fledgling pop singers were sending over the air waves and putting out on 45s. Just so much hipper than Perry Como and Doris Day.
That was the start of my love affair with MU hoops, basically 60 years ago. I was a UW fan as well, but for some reason Marquette basketball and its culture captured my heart a little more passionately than did Badger hoops.
And that's the rest of the story.
(This trip down Memory Lane was brought to you by certain cathedral bells - the ones on Jefferson and Wells - as well as by Northwest Orient Airlines.)