greg.w.h said:
Evree heard of Chennedy Carter. She puts the lie to the claim he tailed off. He won the championship in a year no one here predicted he could beat Baylor even once.
Hats off to Gary Blair for winning basketball championships at a school that seemed to have a perverse pride in how much it ignored basketball.
Blair brought unprecedented success to a Texas A&M that seemed to realize it had basketball teams for a six-week period each year -- between the end of the football bowl season and the start of the baseball season.
As Mark Turgeon found out, you paid a price for criticizing the Aggie fan base for its ambivalence, even as he was bringing his teams to March Madness each year. How dare some basketball coach demand attention at a football school! But Blair found a way to celebrate success without offending these strange football-minded creatures.
He was successful at a university that, before Bill Byrne's tenure as AD, didn't have a basketball pep band -- and had to rely on a football band that would show up sometimes, and often not, playing music that was ill-timed and slow-tempo for a basketball audience.
Blair would go door to door giving away tickets to strategically selected local football donors. He reemphasized a weekly radio show, monthly coaches luncheons, started a Blair's Buddies donors group of his own to buy things for the team that weren't in the athletic budget, held a yearly golf tournament for Gary Blair Charities, and set up a pre-game play room for Maroon-clad kids.
All the while, he had to put up with a small but ever present subset of backstabbing "fans" who were enamored with the "Cult of Vic," wished Blair played more white kids, or were threatened by the fact that a basketball team made up of college-age women would actually have a few gay people on the roster.
Gary Blair gave Texas A&M more than it deserved.
