As one of my Twitter followers pointed out, there should be a college basketball hall of fame, and a separate professional basketball hall of fame. But there’s not. Instead we have one Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. And it stands to reason that if you combine the college hoops memorabilia with the NBA artifacts….you’ll have one great museum to tour! Since you could eliminate the filler.
But we don’t.
Instead we have a strip mall in the middle of nowhere that charges you $21 to enter, when a fair price would have been about $7. So it’s safe to say I want my money back. Even if it were free, I’d STILL want my money back!
Springfield is where Dr. James Naismith invented the game of basketball, so unfortunately, that’s where it’s located. The people of New England tell me Springfield is a very rough town, so it’s a good thing the hall is located adjacent to the interstate and south of the downtown. It’s very close Hartford’s airport, but unless you’re interested in insurance corporation buildings, there’s pretty much NO reason to go to Hartford. I was only here to go to ESPN headquarters in Bristol. I came for business, but decided to make it a vacation.
No one I talked to at the World Wide Leader, who live and work in Connecticut, bothered to have ever made the trip to the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Then again I really didn’t bring it up much since my tourist priorities on this trip went like this: New Britain Art Museum, Yale University, Basketball Hall of Fame.
I’ve now been to all of the hall of fames (college football, Canton, hockey, even the Bowling one in St. Louis) except for Cooperstown. Which is the one Hall of Fame that people ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT. Well, people care about Canton only because they have a preseason game and their enshrinement weekend is an event. And football is America’s crack cocaine, and that enshrinement festival comes at a time when we are all most in need of our crack fix.
Of course, Cooperstown, like Springfield, is in a place that no one really ever needs to visit. Aside from the hockey hall of fame in Toronto, all of the fames seem to be boring places. Why not move it to Hartford, which is one of the most boring places you’ll ever find.
Anyways, some asked me what I saw at the Basketball Hall of Fame that I remembered, and my answer was……..uhhhhh……..ummmmmm……hmmmmmmm…..yeah……..*crickets chirping*……….silence………..Naismith’s quilt? One of Dr. Naismith’s diplomas??
The total white wash of Adolph Rupp’s racism? The completely skewed revisionist history of Bob Knight, who is almost universally regarded as a……I don’t even need to finish that sentence.
So what did I see in that strip mall/Foot Locker store on steroids (literally it’s what the Basketball Hall of Fame is)? The Chicago Bulls 70th win ball (pictured above)! And the American flag composed entirely of Air Jordans shoes. Is that worth the money? Maybe like $5 or $6, $7 tops. But it’s not.
It’s worth making the trip…if you live within walking distance. But the Basketball Hall of Fame is not.
Which is extremely disappointing because my college basketball is my favorite sport.
Paul M. Banks owns The Sports Bank.net, an affiliate of Fox Sports. He’s also a frequent guest on national talk radio. Banks, a former contributor to NBC Chicago and the Washington Times, has been featured in numerous outlets including NFL.com, Forbes and the History Channel. President Barack Obama follows him on Twitter (@paulmbanks)