> Behind the Facepaint

We all know the scene. Family on a road trip, sitting in the car, kids squabbling in the back seat, and dad keeps losing patience. He grips the steering wheel tight, his knuckles getting whiter with every passing second. Dad’s blood vessel on his temple is visibly thumping, blood rushing to his face. He’s losing his composure, and after awhile, even mom has given up trying to calm him down before he explodes on the kids. One kid goes a little too far, and pushes dad right over the edge.

“Do I have to turn this thing around?!”

All right, now you have no excuse.

Following a sparsely attended basketball season in 2006-07, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee athletic department has its hands full in trying to get you, the student, to start going to basketball games. Over the years, the marketing department has tried seemingly everything under the sun to get an apathetic student body to go to games.

On a warm Saturday evening in Milwaukee, the Menomonee Valley was as quiet as could be expected. The casino wasn’t packed, Canal Street was nearly empty and most of the noise was coming from I-94 half a mile away.

There wasn’t much in the way of action until about 4 p.m. Then the Valley was electric.

The end of the semester in December brought the usual rush to students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. With everyone packing their things, cramming for finals and bombing them, saying goodbye to friends and preparing for a month with mom and dad, it was easy to lose track of other things.

If you paid attention to the men’s basketball team at the end of last semester, you would have noticed one thing: turmoil. Before the season even started, last year’s leading scorer, Avery Smith, and coach Rob Jeter mutually agreed that Smith would leave the program. This year’s leading scorer and rebounder, Torre Johnson, punched a woman at a party during exam week and got booted off the team. Roman Gentry, a shooting guard who started several games for the Panthers this season, got homesick and left UWM to be with his newborn daughter in Sioux City, Iowa.

If you weren’t reading the shirts, you might think you were in Madison for a Badger basketball game.

But we weren’t in Madison. We weren’t even in Green Bay. We were in Peoria, Ill., for the ESPN Bracket Buster game between the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Bradley University.