Once upon a time I was such a fanatic about the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay men’s basketball team that I bought season tickets for more than 10 years.
The radio station I worked for broadcast the UWGB games, and so we were able to attend for free. I became interested in the Fighting Phoenix when they fired their coach after a 4-24 season and hired a guy named Dick Bennett, who had taken UW-Stevens Point from a below-.500 program to the 1984 NAIA title game, where they lost to Fort Hays State 48-46.
I was intrigued by Bennett partially because he graduated from Ripon College 10 years before me in the Class of 1965, and partially because I loved his teams’ style of scrappy and tenacious defense, as exemplified by the final score of that championship game.
The radio guys and our friends usually sat about six rows behind the visitor’s bench in Section F at venerable Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena. As Bennett’s teams started getting good — 5-23 his first season in 1985-86 evolved into 18-9 by his third season as coach — the paying customers started pushing us to other parts of the room, and so a handful of us bought our own seats in Section F.
We were enthusiastic and merciless on the opposing teams. We had our own nasty routines; one of my gentler and favorite habits was, when UWGB got on a scoring roll, to scream, “You might want to call a judicious timeout, coach, before it gets completely out of hand!!”
I toned myself down after one night, when I brutally taunted a player who had missed a crucial shot late in the game, we made eye contact, and I saw the hurt in his eyes after he let down his team. Fanatics tend to forget the other side has feelings, too, and for crying out loud, it’s just a game. From that time forward I tried to make my taunts more good-natured than mean.
They built a new palace to replace the Arena in 2002 and sent season ticket holders a letter that said our seats would be assigned not on the basis of our enthusiasm for the team but on how many dollars we contributed annually to the Phoenix Fund, the booster club for the elite. As a solid member of the lower middle class, I was offered a chance to purchase a seat 20 rows up.
And so ended my storied career as a stalwart fan of UWGB. I went to a couple of games at the new palace, which has none of the charm of the old Arena, but the school had let me know what it valued from its fans, and I was unable to deliver what they wanted.
The program fell on mediocre to hard times, hitting rock bottom in 2022-23 when UWGB went 3-29 and was rated third-worst among the 363 Division I college basketball programs. While the best teams played last year’s tournament, last March UW-Green Bay hired an assistant Wyoming coach, Sundance Wicks, who immediately caught my attention with the enthusiastic optimism he exuded at his first press conference.
Going into Wednesday night’s home game against Northern Kentucky, UWGB was 17-9 overall and holding first place in the Horizon League after a five-game winning streak that brought their conference record to 12-3. The Phoenix are also leading the league in opposing team scoring, which is my kind of basketball.
Wicks’ team is flirting with the all-time record for turning a program around in one season, held by Towson, which went from 1-31 in 2011-12 to 18-13 in 2012-13. I decided to check out this year’s squad for old time’s sake.
I’m afraid to say I did not bring my Phoenix good luck. They lost by one point to drop into a tie for first place. But I had a good time. Remember when I said I admired scrappy and tenacious defense? The final score was 58-57.