There is absolutely nothing better in college basketball's regular season than city rivalry games. Recently, I had the good fortune to watch two of them on back-to-back nights, the well-known grudge match between Xavier and Cincinnati and the absolutely unknown tussle between two Atlantic Sun teams, Belmont and Lipscomb here in Nashville, Tenn.
On consecutive nights each of these games featured evenly matched teams and went into overtime amid a raucous crowd full of fans from both schools. I watched the Xavier-Cincinnati game on television, but the next night I went to a small gym near downtown Nashville to watch Belmont and Lipscomb in person.
Here's what you should know about Belmont and Lipscomb:
1. Their campuses are separated by 3.5 miles and essentially lie on the same road.
2. Both are religious schools. Belmont is Baptist and Lipscomb is Church of Christ. The Church of Christ religion does not allow dancing.
3. My friend Tardio and I had to buy standing-room only tickets because the 5,000-seat Lipscomb gym was completely sold out.
4. With the game tied and 6.6 seconds remaining, Lipscomb called a timeout with possession of the basketball. At this point, the entire arena was on the verge of riot. Children who could barely stand stood on seatbacks, adults who had children forgot they had children, and I actually had to catch one kid who almost fell while standing on a seatback. Even those confined to wheelchairs miraculously rose. Tie game ... 6.6 seconds remaining ... what song means victory for your team? It was all left to the arena deejay.
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| Lipscomb vs. Kentucky is a whole different ballgame than Lipscomb vs. Belmont (Getty Images) |
6. Yep Vanilla Ice's own Ice, Ice Baby rang throughout the Lipscomb arena. Just the perfect selection. It even convinced me I could score. And let me tell you something: When you are playing your crosstown rival in a tied game and your team is about to inbound the ball, and Ice Ice Baby comes on -- even if your religion forbids dance, you dance.
7. Ultimately Lipscomb didn't win in regulation, but it did win 97-85 in overtime. And for the record, Lipscomb is stacked with athletes and may well terrify a big-school come March.
Seeing these two city rivalry games on back-to-back days left me desirous of seeing as many games like this each college basketball season as possible. Even if I have absolutely no connection to either school, I appreciate the passion brought about by city rivalry games. Even a southern boy like me enjoys watching Philadelphia city schools deck it out in the Palestra as part of the Big Five.
The cities of Cincinnati and Philadelphia are fortunate to have such a plethora of local rivalries, since most major cities in America aren't blessed with two evenly matched, top-caliber basketball schools. That's why it disappoints me when a city like Washington D.C. has two schools -- Georgetown and George Washington -- whose campuses are separated by about a mile and 24 years of refusals to play.
What makes the inability of the two schools to match up particularly galling is that the first game between the two was all the way back in 1907. G.W. and Georgetown played three times that year, with G.W. taking two and Georgetown winning one. The games were front-page news in Washington. Georgetown cemented the rivalry when it began the 1908 season by recruiting away G.W.'s best player, Fred Rice, by enticing him with enrollment in its law school.
