Bluegrass battle on tap for Kentucky, Louisville
NEW ORLEANS — Kentucky coach John Calipari likes to say there are no rivalry games at this point in the season.
Try telling that to the Bluegrass State, where basketball’s version of the civil war — Kentucky vs. Louisville, winner plays for the NCAA title — has so divided the small state that senior citizens have actually come to fisti- cuffs.
“The fans take it as, whoever loses, it’s their funeral, really,” Louisville senior guard Chris Smith said. “It’s really cut-throat, I would say.”
The game today is the fifth time top-seeded Kentucky (36-2) and fourthseeded Louisville (30-9) have met in the NCAA tournament. They split
the previous four meetings.
Basketball purists may argue Duke-north Carolina or Kansas-missouri are the game’s biggest, most intense rivalries. But those are like quaint tea parties compared with the animosity between Kentucky and Louisville, which required government intervention to get them to schedule each other.
No, think Auburn-alabama on the hardcourt, and you get the idea.
“We get along with most of them,” Kentucky fan Pat Stahl said of Louisville fans, “as long as they don’t talk to you.”
Or, heaven forbid, say something at a dialysis appointment. A 71year-old Louisville fan punched a 68-year-old Kentucky fan earlier this week after their discussion over tonight’s game got out of hand.
To be fair, police say the Kentucky fan did flip off the Louisville fan.
“It all started with the racial lines in Kentucky,” Louisville coach Rick Pitino said of the rivalry. “Now (it’s) no longer racially motivated. It’s just pure hatred.”
It’s a given that Louisville and Kentucky would be rivals, their campuses a mere 70 miles apart in a state where basketball is king.
To hear fans of both schools tell it, however, the programs might as well be on different planets.
Kentucky is a college basketball blue blood, its seven national titles second only to UCLA, while Louisville has a nice little tradition going with two national titles.
Kentucky is the bigger school, and its campus is set in bucolic hill country. Louisville sprawls over several city blocks, smoke from a soy processing plant billowing overhead and railroad tracks cutting through the center of campus. (If the Louisville lacrosse coach never sees a train again after she retires, it’ll be too soon.)
Big Blue counts most of the state among its fan base, too, while Louisville isn’t necessarily even No. 1 in its own city.
In fact, about the only thing the two schools have in common is Pitino, who led the Wildcats to one national title and two other Final Four appearances in eight years at Kentucky.
Forget that engendering any warm-and-fuzzy goodwill with the Kentucky folks, however. Now that Pitino isn’t theirs, Kentucky fans hate him, too.
“Since we got Rick, (the rivalry) is more on their part,” Robert Coke said. “They’re used to getting the cream of the crop and being top-notch, so it’s hard when they see someone else doing well.”