By Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports
November 9, 2005
In the spirit of the great American road trip, powered by a love of college basketball and the eternal hope that the start of a new season brings, we are set to embark on our sixth annual College Hoops Trippin' Tour.
Presumably, regular readers will be glad to hear the Tour is back.
For the next 10 days, we will visit with at least 12 schools and tour at least eight different campuses in the Industrial Midwest, below the Mason-Dixon Line and amid the cool New England air before winding up in the heart of Midtown Manhattan for the Coaches vs. Cancer tournament that, for the most part, kicks off the 2005-06 season.
As always, we'll travel by car, not plane, because the allure of the open road and the inevitable hijinks prove that the best part of the trip is getting there. Besides, we don't like having to take off our shoes to get through security.
We'll visit with as many top players and coaches as possible, report about some of the best teams and take a shot at the season's most interesting stories. Every day, we'll file a story along with the ever-popular "Traveling Violations," dispatches that cover ground normally put of the limelight. We are even going to try to leave a bar before last call, although we can make no promises.
College hoops is not considered the national pastime and it is not as popular as the NFL (or even college football), but no other team sport cuts across as many geographic, social, economic and racial lines.
The Division I championship is contested by schools from 49 states (only Alaska sitting out). They range from giant state institutions to tiny religious colleges, from military academies to the Ivy League, from rural America to the big city. Just about everyone has a team to relate to.
Of course, because we are driving, we will again open ourselves up to cries of East-of-the-Mississippi bias, which we will ignore as always. We know there are great teams out west, but you try driving from Spokane to Tucson in any kind of reasonable time.
Trust us; we'd love to visit teams in the Pacific Time Zone, if only to hang out with our guy Tark.
The list of tour stops is to the right of this column. We'll hit four of the Associated Press preseason poll's top five, six of the top 10 and 10 of the top 25. Not bad. We'll also likely catch up with Bob Knight and certainly visit with little Bucknell, which returns everyone from arguably the greatest upset in NCAA tournament history.
When the tour has ended, we will have visited over 40-something schools in six years of tripping, which is pretty darn good. This year consists of old favorites (Kentucky and Louisville, the only schools to have been visited on all six trips) and some new faces (West Virginia, Bucknell and Villanova, as well as likely Coaches vs. Cancer semifinalists Florida and Texas Tech).
For the most part, the tour is all fun, games and laughs. We encourage readers to email any bar and restaurant recommendations since there is always a chance we'll hold a mini-party at your favorite locale.
This year's trip is dedicated to a man who took a road trip far greater and more important than we could ever imagine – former NCAA tournament director Bill Hancock, who now works with the BCS.
In 2001, Hancock's son, Will, the talented sports information director at Oklahoma State and a personal friend of mine, died when the Cowboys' team plane crashed in a snowy field in Colorado. As a new parent, I can't comprehend what the loss of a child at any age could be like. Neither could Hancock, who decided to cope with the tragedy by getting on a bicycle in Huntington Beach, Calif., and riding it 2,747 miles until he reached Pleasant Hill, Ga., three weeks later. He described the journey as trying to chase the "blue moth" of grief and depression out of his life.
It both worked and didn't work, all of which Hancock retells in his new book, "Riding with the Blue Moth," which is simply one of the most heart-wrenching, compelling, joyous, eloquent and incredible books you could possibly read. You don't need to be dealing with seemingly impossible loss to appreciate it. Hancock's homespun writing and thoughts are amazingly profound in its simplicity. This book will hit home in a way that will change your appreciation of life and the loved ones in it.
And so while the Trippin' Tour is mostly about fun, about food and beverage reviews, about the hope for a new season of great memories, about the jokes that our once-again wheelman Bret Bearup will provide and about giving all of you who have a job, morning class, a life or a wife (or husband) a chance to ride along, we make the trip with thoughts of the Hancocks, too.
We hope you follow along. Dan Wetzel is Yahoo! Sports' national columnist. Click here to follow him on Twitter. Send Dan a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast. Updated on Wednesday, Nov 9, 2005 11:32 am, EST Email to a Friend | View Popular
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