Midnight at the Oasis
Posted: Monday October 26, 1998 04:35 PM
Sports Illustrated's Kelli Anderson checks in with the fourth in a series of glances around the college basketball scene.
Stanford,
Calif.
TEAM: Stanford Cardinal
VENUE: Maples Pavilion
(7,391)
'97-98
record: 30-5 (Lost to Kentucky in national semifinals)
PREDICTED '98-99
STARTERS: G
Arthur
Lee , F
Mark
Madsen , F
Pete
Sauer , G
Kris
Weems , C
Tim
Young
If you're looking for a place to get fortified before or
after some Stanford athletic event—a gridiron scouring
by the Oregon State Beavers, say—there is no place
better, in my book, than the Oasis in Menlo Park. Like the
many other burger-beer-peanut
pubs in the area, its
pièce de
resistance is a greasy cheeseburger with a handful of chips served in
a plastic basket. But it is a SUPERIOR greasy cheeseburger,
et al. In recent years the place has tried to go
upscale—the wooden booths carved up by graffiti are
still there, but there is now
pizza on the menu and the peanut shells seem to get swept up
off the floor a little too often—but not so much so
that you'd turn your nose up at
it.
Indeed, I turned my nose into it as soon as I arrived in
town to witness Stanford's first attempt at Midnight
Madness, which the campus marketing people were calling, a
bit euphemistically, "Cardinal Chaos." (The only
hint of chaos, it should be noted,
would occur near the end of the evening, when it was
announced that pizza was being given away at the northeast
concessions stand.) Among the students I chatted up outside
of Maples Pavilion a few hours beforehand was senior
Brian
Burke , a member of Stanford's Sixth Man Club rooting section and
one of the hundreds of students who had occupied a 60-tent
lineup for tickets for a week before the athletic
department sent everyone home (in part, one campus observer
guessed, "because it
looked too messy"). Burke, who grew up in the area and
remembers being "dragged" to games as a kid when
the Stanford teams were Pac-10 pushovers, still can't quite
believe the level of play and fan interest he now sees in
Maples. "My freshman year, you
would never have seen people lining up or camping out or
voluntarily going to a practice," he says. "This
is pretty incredible."
More than 2,000 people showed up for the Chaos, which
turned out to be two hours of contests in which nobody
looks particularly sharp—ordinary citizens trying to
make layups after spinning around in circles to get dizzy,
that sort of thing. The three
people trying to "shoot for tuition" ($7,500, and
that's just for one quarter, I think) weren't handicapped
by anything other than the 80 feet or so between them and
the goal, but none of them made a basket, much to the
athletic department's relief.
The crowd seemed to be bereft of celebrities like
Chelsea
Clinton (whom everyone here refers to as "Chelsea") or
Ken
Starr 's daughter (whom everyone here refers to as "Ken
Starr's daughter"), but there were celebs down on the
judges panel, such as distinguished alums
Jim
Plunkett and
Kristin
Folkl . And then there was
Kerri
Strug , whose presence puzzled me. Doesn't she go to UCLA? Is she
a
Steve
Lavin operative? But as the evening wore on, I ceased to care
about her connection to the
university.
When the men's and women's teams finally started doing
layups at midnight (11:55 by the watch of a local reporter
next to me, who promised to report this violation to the
NCAA), I was dying for a pizza and eager for something
noteworthy to happen. The
evening concluded with a slam-dunk contest, during which the
student body got to see something they aren't treated to
very often with this excessively well-behaved team: a
natural showoff.
Kyle
Logan , a skinny, impish freshman from Maryland, can both dunk
and ham it up for the crowd. He may not see a lot of action
on this top-5 team, which welcomes back 10 players who
averaged 10 minutes or more last year. But we hope he sees
some.
Hasta,
KA
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