Today, I've decided to turn over the blog to my new friend. (Heck, I never use it anyway, why not let someone else use it for a day, right?)

It's part of the ongoing preparation for the upcoming college basketball season, which begins tomorrow, at least for those of us in the Hoops Nation community. This little guy will be traveling with me as we criss-cross the Midwest to watch as many live games as we can... more on that to come in the next few days.

So, here's more from my new friend Sal. I've gone ahead and edited some of the spelling errors out of it, because there were a lot. He's a little basketball... little basketballs aren't known for having big brains.

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Hi everybody! My name is Saluki Ballz. Yeah, Ballz with a z. It's German. But you can call me Sal.

I'm a basketball. But I was born dark red, instead of orange like most basketballs are. But if you look close around my seams, you can see a little bit of orange. It's ok though, folks have told me that basketballs are like people too and come come in lots of colors and they're all good people too, so I'm a good basketball... even if I'm red.

I'm small, too, but that doesn't bother me as much. Being small has lots of advantages, I can hide just about anywhere, and I'm easy to carry around.

I didn't really know my parents, but I think they were good basketballs like me. I spent the first part of my lyfe with a really nice guy named Kyle, who liked basketball a LOT. He always talked about how the smaller schools, the "Mid-Mayjors" were the best ones. He introduced me to my cousin Bally, who is orange and has been to a bunch of basketball games, even to a couple Fynal 4's which is where every basketball wants to go. They took really good care of me, and I was happi with Kyle and Bally, but I wanted to set out on my own. They wished me luck and suggested that since I was dark red, or marooon as they said, that I shuld go to Carbondale, and Southern Illinois University. They had been there a lot of times, and they really liked it. They said down there they all wore the same color as me, and their name was the Salukis, just like me!!! It sounded like heaven.

So I bounced onto a train and rode toward Carbondale. I fell asleep on the train and missed my stop and rolled off in a little town called Cobden, just south of Carbondale. They were really nice people there, too, and they liked the Salukis, and they liked basketball because their high school team was really good back a long time ago. The problem was their mascot is called the Appleknockers, and because I am small and red and round, everyone thot I was a apple. And they all tried to knock me... I won't tell you what being knocked means, but let me tell you being knocked is not a pleasant experience.

I finally found my way to Carbondale, and found my new home, SIU Arena. It was a huge place, and I had no problem finding lots of places to hide. Like I said, I'm a little basketball, I'm good at hiding. My favorite spot was under the bleachers where the students sat during basketball games. I would peek out from underneath and watch the Salukis play all their games and all their practices. And the students were awesome. I really liked to sing the fight song... "Go Southern Go!" That's the only words I know.

They were good teams then, they played really hard and won lots of basketball games. The coaches were good coaches and they went off to coach at bigger schools, but the coach they have now has been there for a while. He's not winning as many games. The players were all good too, and I really want to meet some of them, but I was afraid to.

One day they decided to make the Arena all nicer because it was getting kind of old and arenas have to be nice these days for people to come to them, at least that's what I heard all the men in suits say as they walked around the building. I liked my home the way it was, kinda dirty and old and popcorn-smelly, like a good little arena should be.  But I didn't have a say in it and they started to tear the place up, including my little home under the bleachers. I ran for my lyfe, and ended up on the streets in Carbondale. It was really rough for a while, and cold. I wondered if I'd ever have a home again. 

One day I was hiding out in the alley behind Don Taco, a little mexican restaurant in Carbondale. I don't need much food, but when I did eat I liked their nachos. So I was back there when I found my newest friend, or should i say he found me. He said his name was Donovan, and he liked basketball too, and he liked SIU but he didn't go there for school. He said he went to Missouri, which is one of the big schools Kyle always warned me about. And I really kinda don't like Missouri because they beat SIU in the 2003 tornament by one point, and SIU got a bum call from the refs at the end and the Salukis should have won. Donovan admitted it was a bum call too, so I felt a little better about him.

So he offered to take me home with him to St. Loois. I wasn't sure if I wanted to leave Carbondale, but I didn't have anywhere else to go, and I was cold, and Donovan promised we would make lots of trips back to Southern, and to a bunch of other basketball games this year too. So I went with him... and I am happi again.
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Thanks, Sal. Welcome home. Sal has a twitter page now, @SalukiBall, so follow his perspective on the beautiful game of basketball. Again, more on our potential travels during the upcoming season coming soon!

This time of year is what The Mid-Majority's Kyle Whelliston (and Bananarama) refer to as the "Cruel Summer", when college basketball fanatics like myself must appease their passion by reading up on recruiting and what is to come, or by watching replays late at night on CBS Sports Net or ESPNU or whatever we can find, or by discussing past events and somehow relating them to the grander landscape.

This is more along the lines of option 3.

We're gong to play a game of "What if?" This was brought about by a combination of reading the first few chapters of the aforementioned Whelliston's book One Beautiful Season, in which many of these following events are mentioned, and the "all-pieces-falling-together" clarity getting only 3 hours sleep in 2 days, due to a horrible case of insomnia, will cause.

Here's the event around which all the others depend:

March 17, 2006. Friday game, first flight, in Auburn Hills, Mich. #14 Northwestern State defeats #3 Iowa on a last second desperation shot by Jermaine Wallace. The play was chosen as the "Game Changing Performance" for the '06 Tourney. It turned out to be a life-changing performance for several men and their respective programs.

This was a stunning upset of the Hawkeyes. They won the Big Ten tourney that year. Greg Brunner, Adam Haluska, and Jeff Horner were all double digit per game scorers. It was a solid team.

Here's where the "What if" begins... WHAT IF THAT SHOT DOESN'T GO IN? (Main points in italics.)

-Iowa advances to the second round and plays the Pittsnogle-Gansey-Beilein West Virginia. Pure speculation but we'll say Iowa wins that one too. Their Sweet 16 opponent would have been Texas (PJ Tucker, LaMarcus Aldridge, Daniel Gibson) and we will assume Hawkeyes lose that one. Still a Sweet 16 run for Iowa.

-Fans and administration are a little more forgiving in Iowa City as the 06-07 Hawkeyes go 17-14. The storm clouds/pitchforks on the horizon do not look as bad (if they're there at all) and Steve Alford does NOT leave Iowa for New Mexico at the end of the 2007 season.

-The coaching carousel in April 2007 has some high profile names on it: Arkansas, Michigan, Colorado, Kentucky, Kansas State, Minnesota, Texas A&M, West Virginia. All of these jobs would be perfect for Todd Lickliter, coming off a Sweet 16 of his own and a 29-7 record. But none of those are Iowa, because Iowa's not open. This point is obviously my most tenuous, because in all likelihood someone hires Lickliter after the '07 season. Maybe A&M, maybe Minnesota, maybe he looks more appealing to Michigan than Beilein (remember in this universe West Virginia doesn't have their 2006 Sweet 16). Or, we assume no one really appeals to him and
Todd Lickliter does NOT leave Butler in 2007.

(Back to reality, I don't know if anyone else caught this as it was a touch under the radar, but Lickliter has been hired as an assistant at Miami (Ohio). Four years ago he was the hottest Mid-Major coaching commodity. What an example of what this game can do. Worthy of a further study at some point.)

-Naturally, Brad Stevens is NOT named head coach at Butler in 2007. In all likelihood he's either A) named head coach at Butler when Lickliter DOES leave at some later time (which is important for my next point) or B) he's noticed by another mid-major school and hired as head coach at some point between 2007 and today.

Chapter 39 of "One Beautiful Season" (Which is really chapter 2... Whelliston numbered his chapters starting at 40 and counting down... GENIUS!) discusses the process by which Gordon Hayward came to be a Butler Bulldog. Now it says he verbally committed to Butler earlier in his junior year of high school (2006-07) thanks in large part to then-assistant coach Brad Stevens' recruiting. But in summer 2007, Now-Head Coach Stevens reels in Hayward by promising him the playing time & statistics he needs to make an impression on NBA scouts.

-But in our alternate universe, still-assistant coach Stevens can't make that promise because he's not yet-head coach, and Gordon's parents' wishes win out.
Gordon Hayward commits to Purdue. Kyle Whelliston speculates in his book that at best he would have been a 7th or 8th man for the Boilermakers. So we'll go with that. As such, Gordon Hayward is not a national success story and the now-famous "TOO BIG YO" is never made, or at least never released on YouTube. And this is the worst scenario, because I don't want to live in a world where you can't try to rhyme "Reddick" with "credit."

-Without Hayward on the court in 2010 and Stevens running it both years, Butler does NOT make their back-to-back National Runner-up runs.

College Basketball is not quite as fun.

But, that shot in 2006 went in. Alford bolted, Lickliter left, Stevens took over and landed the "Too Big" fish and we saw magic (and near perfection, missed by 1/8th of an inch) from Butler not once, but twice. This is just a little example of how mid-major success indirectly begets more mid-major success, and how we are all connected in ways we will never comprehend.

Enjoy the rest of the cruel summer. 116 days until November 1.

You ever have the feeling when you read something so directly in tune with what you’re thinking that you’re certain the author has somehow crawled up into your head, maybe through your ear while you were asleep, walked around for a while inside your mind touring all the feelings, the thoughts, the hesitations and fears and guilts you had, jotted them down on a little notepad, crawled back out and wrote something specifically addressing them, but making it look like he was instead addressing those same feelings as though he felt them himself. Otherwise it would tip you off that he had indeed been inside your brain.

But then you check the Copyright date and when he was writing on what you’re thinking now you realize you didn’t even have those feelings, what you felt then wasn’t even close. He saw what it was going to be before you saw it, and he wrote you a letter just so you’d know how to work it out.

“Hey, Donovan, I’ve been up in your noggin for a bit and you and I aren’t too different. I know what it’s going to be like to be an up-and-coming, just past quarter age but not quite middle age man who’s not entirely sure where he stands with God, his family, his friends, the world at large or even with himself. You’re not exactly sure where you want to go, or what you want to do, and that’s OK. Actually you’re better off than a lot of guys your age. I know you’re lonely for a wife, and a family, and I am too. But you and I have amazing friends who help put life in focus and offer tastes of what we are missing -- a marriage, a family, good relationships-- so that you can prepare for better things to come. It’s like the way gummy peachy-o’s from the gas station sort of taste like a peach, but you know when you bite into a real peach it’s going to be SO much sweeter.
“So here’s what you need to do: Love God because He loves you, Love others because they love you, and most importantly right now… Love yourself, because you don’t love you. And if you don’t love yourself, you can’t properly love anyone else.”

Of course, he tempers it by writing: “Remember though, this is NEVER going to be all about you.”

At least that’s what I took out of it.

That letter to me was a book called Blue Like Jazz, and the author I could have sworn could read my mind from 2000 miles away is Donald Miller. I read it for the first time in 2007, while I was living in Kansas City. I’ve read it twice since then, along with everything else he’s written. And I’ve seen him speak live twice - once in my original hometown of Greenville, Illinois, and then in his adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Not too long after I read Blue Like Jazz, I heard they were going to make a movie out of it. I wasn’t sure how they’d translate it to a big screen (And if you read Miller’s next book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, you find out he didn’t know how they would either) but it was a good idea. I was looking forward to seeing it.

Then in late 2010, Miller posted on his blog that the project was dead. Despite having a good screenplay, they couldn’t get the money together to actually film it. I was disappointed and wondered how it could be saved, if it could be saved. Luckily two guys from Nashville had better ideas, better connections and more gumption than me and put a plan into action. They started a website, made another site on Kickstarter.com and asked people for funding through the now-traditional way of  Tweets and Facebook posts. Word spread faster than Oklahoma wildfire, virally. One month after the project had been shelved, 4500 people had donated just shy of $346,000. It set all kinds of records for what is called “Crowdsourcing.” Variety Magazine did a story on it. The movie was back on.

I thought long and hard about what the book, and the author who I thought could read my mind, had done for me and what I really owed them. I gave a decent amount of money to the project. Then I thought about it some more and tripled my donation.

I gave so much they invited me down to Nashville to watch the movie be made and to be an extra, possibly appearing in the movie itself. It’s an amazing experience to see how a movie is made. I had an notion that it couldn’t have been too much different than what I do, video is video. But I figured it would be more intense because of the time and money involved. I was right. I watched a full crew set up several shots that day, and each one seemed to take an eternity. The camera had to be set just right. The streets had to be cordoned off to keep random people out of the shots, which didn’t always work. The lights had to be set just so, and so did the props, and when everything finally seemed right… Action!

Steve Taylor, the director and co-writer, was more than accommodating. He greeted me by name, let me hang out and look over his shoulder all day. He’d converse with me sometimes while the crew reset, asking what I did and why I donated money. Because it was their last day of shooting in Nashville, he invited me to the wrap party at some fancy Nashville restaurant that has candles on all the tables and sells 50-dollar bottles of wine. After we shot the last shot of the day, the one I was in, I went to the fancy restaurant. I couldn’t stay long because I had to get up early and drive back to St. Louis and I didn’t want to stay long because I felt out of place.

But as I watched the actors and crew celebrate I realized that it was good for me to be there, good for me to see this. Maybe I represented all the donors in some way.  And I remembered what Donald Miller is quick to mention, that it wasn’t about me. It was about all of us. Steve the Director, Ben the Cinematographer, the young assistant director in skinny jeans, the grips who hustled like no others, the surly audio guy, the caterers with the syrup-sweet southern accents and their fat dog. They had all come together and created something because a larger group, the one I was a part of, had been touched in some way by a book that spoke to them as it had spoken to me. We all own this movie.

The trailer came out the other day. The movie itself comes out April 13, 2012, and I’m hoping to make it to Portland for the world premiere. I was told I’ll be in it as “Man in Green Coat,” although I’m not sure I’ll be credited. Just in case, I need to make sure my iMDB profile is accurate…