Buckeyes will honor their biggest fan: LeBron
Ohio State’s top-ranked basketball team will wear new jerseys next week that include a logo of Buckeyes fan LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The logo on the Nike jerseys reflects James’ name and his Cavaliers uniform number 23.
James has said he would have played for Ohio State if he didn’t enter the NBA directly out of Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High School four years ago.
He said he saw parallels between his prep team that won a state championship in his first year in high school, and the young Buckeyes.
“I like the way they play,” James said. “You’ve got four freshmen out there on the floor like we did when I was in high school when we were able to win it all, so I’m definitely a fan.”
The Buckeyes (26-3, 14-1) will wear the new jerseys when they begin play in the Big Ten tournament next week.
“I like it a lot better,” freshman point guard Mike Conley Jr. said of the new jersey.
He said being affiliated with James was a thrill.
“We’re definitely very proud to have that,” he said.
Ohio State is in the final year of a seven-year contract with Nike that goes through June. Most of the financial benefit of the deal involves providing uniforms, shoes and other gear for athletes in the university’s 36 intercollegiate sports.
James has more than $150 million in endorsement deals with Nike, Sprite and others. Cleveland’s All-Star forward recently teamed with Microsoft Corp.’s MSN to launch lebron.msn.com, a storybook-style Web site about his life designed for kids and teens.
So long, farewell
Riley Wallace’s farewell tour has generated plenty of good wishes and some gifts as well. Among the gifts the Hawaii coach has received since announcing his retirement in December are a rocking chair from Nevada, a gift certificate for a Park City lodge from Utah State and a lei made of red chilies from New Mexico State.
Despite the gifts at nearly every stop in the Western Athletic Conference, retirement is finally becoming a reality for Wallace, who has spent the past 20 years as Hawaii’s head coach.
“It’s starting to hit me now,” Wallace said last weekend after receiving golf balls and other equipment after a win at San Jose State. “I was very uptight for this game.”
Wallace was expected to get an emotional sendoff at home this weekend before heading to the WAC tournament in New Mexico next week, where every game could by his last after 22 years as a head coach.
“This will be the first time I won’t have to go into work in my life,” he said. “That will be hard to do. I lived it 24-7. It was never off my mind. You don’t get to treat your family the way you want to treat them. But I’m not ready to totally quit. I’m not sure what I can do. But I can’t go home and sit and have my wife give my honey-dos all my life. I got a lot of life left in this body.”
Centenary, where Wallace went to school and began his college coaching career, contacted him recently to see if he had any interest in being the athletic director.
“I’m not sure I want to move back to Louisiana after living in Hawaii,” he said. “Our mosquitoes are the little black ones. They have the ones that two of them can carry you off.”
One thing Wallace knows about his next job – it won’t require all the travel he had to endure as Hawaii’s coach.
“There might be something out there that I enjoy doing that doesn’t take 75-80 thousand miles on an airplane every year,” he said.
Happy at home
Besides a pro sports team, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman wants a new arena for his city. But even if he gets it, UNLV is in no hurry to leave its on-campus home.
The Thomas & Mack Center is nearly a quarter-century old. And though it was good enough to host the NBA All-Star game and the FIBA Americas tournament this summer, Goodman decided after attending last year’s All-Star festivities that it’s time for something new.
“As soon as I got back from Houston and saw the Toyota Center there, I said our Thomas & Mack is a wonderful old grand dame, but that’s what it is,” Goodman said. “We need something that is world class and sparkles. We’re going to have ourselves a new arena and we’re going to have a team that’s going to be playing in it.”
But if UNLV was invited to play there, athletic director Mike Hamrick said the school doesn’t know if it would accept the offer. And with one of college basketball’s best home-court advantages, why would the Rebels want to leave?
The Rebels have won 83 percent of their games at the Thomas & Mack Center, going 323-66 at home since the arena opened in 1983, including a current 13-game winning streak. UNLV drew 17,056 fans for its Jan. 27 victory over New Mexico, its largest regular-season crowd in more than nine years.
“We haven’t made that decision,” Hamrick said. “The Thomas & Mack is still a quality facility, it fits our needs. I’m talking about UNLV. It’s on campus, it has 18,000 approximate seating capacity, we have suites, so it fits our needs at this point. Now if a new facility is built, we haven’t really went that far as to whether we would play there or stay here in our own facility and play.”