UL basketball coach Bob Marlin made a promise to the “Shipley Boys” Sunday afternoon. A few hours later, his Ragin’ Cajun team made good on that pledge.
He told a number of longtime Cajun coach Beryl Shipley’s former players, during a Sunday ceremony in which a bust of the late coach was unveiled at the Cajundome, that his team would play better than the last time they were on hand.
Marlin was referencing a 69-63 loss to Cal State Fullerton in last year’s middle game of the inaugural Beryl Shipley Classic. The Cajuns went 2-1 in that event, but it was that Saturday night game that featured the main ceremony honoring Shipley and which drew the biggest crowd of the coach’s former players.
About two hours after Shipley’s wife Dolores pulled the red cover off the bronze bust, unveiling the likeness crafted by local artist Delia Soper, Marlin’s young troops rallied from a five-point halftime deficit to down Oakland (Mich.) 90-79 in their season opener.
The cast was obviously different from the time that Shipley roamed courtside — in fact, this year’s UL team bears only token resemblance even to the squad that last played at the Cajundome less than nine months ago. But the keys to a second-half 53-37 scoring advantage were strikingly similar — hitting key shots and clamping down on the defensive end.
UL hit 73.1 percent from the field in the second half, making 19-of-26 shots, while holding Oakland to a 37.9 percentage after the Golden Grizzlies had hit 54 percent in the opening half. And don’t let the name fool you; Oakland has four starters back from last year’s CollegeInsider.com Tournament semifinalist, and the Grizzlies were in the NCAA Tournament in both 2010 and 2011.
“That’s another postseason team,” Marlin said of Oakland after the game.
A few hours earlier, Marlin was one of the speakers at the unveiling of the Shipley memorial and talked about his connection with the coach in the final year of his life. Marlin took over the post in late March of 2010 and Shipley died in April of the following year, but Marlin said he made several trips to the Shipley household in that year.
“We shared a special bond because we were in the same seat,” Marlin said. “Once I went over and Coach met me at the door and started talking about the tough times we were having. Dolores got him some paper, and he started diagramming offenses and defenses. I felt like I was in the principal’s office, but he was right, and we took some of that to heart.
That connection was part of the rekindling of a relationship between the school and Shipley, one that former assistant coach Tom Cox said had been missing for more than three decades.
“The fire of love between Coach and the university went out, and the ashes went cold for 35 years,” Cox said to the group on hand for the unveiling. “Our new president re-lit that fire, and thank God for him doing that.”
“We all hope we do something in our lives that helps and influences people,” said UL President E. Joseph Savoie. “Coach Shipley influenced a whole community. His commitment to his team, to the university and to the community created a movement of support that hasn’t happened many times in our history.
“This bust makes sure that for generations to come, people will know that Beryl Shipley is someone to be remembered, someone who made a difference, and that’s a wonderful thing.”
He also influenced Louisiana, making basketball relevant in a football state and eventually putting together a 296-129 record in his career from 1957-73, and guiding the Cajuns to the national Top 10 in each of his last three years — once in the college division and the final two in the university division (now known as Division I).
And he influenced the entire South, becoming one of the first coaches in the region to recruit African-American players during a time when that wasn’t popular among conferences and university families. A 2011 Sports Illustrated article credited him with helping break the color line in college athletics, and a documentary film currently in production and scheduled for a 2013 release delves deeply into that issue and the connections between that and UL’s NCAA-mandated program suspension from 1973-75.
The program has since risen, and Marlin is hoping this year’s new-look team — only three of the 11 players that saw action on Sunday were on last year’s squad — will make another addition to that legacy. If Sunday is any indication, it’s off to a good start.
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MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
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MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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