Midnight Madness is approaching, and while I haven’t forgotten about the South Carolina game, I like giving my attention to the next event when it comes to sports. Last night I was unbearable until the end of the Vikings game (an epic win, by the way). Madness is about 16 hours before kickoff, so I’m going to write about it. This was going to be a top ten list, but that would have been an impossible task to complete. For all the hype Madness gets, it’s a lot more sizzle than steak. The event itself never lives up to the hype, I don’t care how big the expectations are for the team. However, I was able to come up with five, and I’ll present them in chronological order.

1992 – Big Boo Madness

This entire show has a special place in my heart. Because of a stupid NCAA ruling, every team had to move their first day of practice up two weeks, so Madness didn’t take place until Halloween. This also happened to be my favorite UK team ever, and the crowd was in a frenzy because the expectations were the highest they had been since before probation. There have been loud reactions in my day, but I can’t remember a louder reaction for an introduction than the ones that Rod Rhodes, Jeff Brassow, Travis Ford and Jamal Mashburn got. Then, the event began and Rodney Dent bent a rim in the dunk contest, while Rhodes put on a clinic in the scrimmage. If you got to see that show, you’d have bet the house on a Final Four, and that’s what happened.

1993 – Jeff Sheppard takes off

This one was special because ESPN was launching ESPN2 at Midnight Madness for several schools. I know they went to North Carolina, and I think they either went to Indiana or Kansas. But they showed the Kentucky dunk contest on ESPN, and it’s all I remember from the event. Still, Jeff Sheppard came out to participate in the dunk contest, and not knowing anything about him because I was seven years old, I wondered why the short white kid was in the dunk contest. They asked Jeff what he was going to do, and he said, “This is called the ‘Mean Lean.’” He took off from just inside the free throw line and threw down a nasty windmill jam that floored the crowd. No wonder everybody loved Sheppard so much.

1995 – Two seniors risk life to perform a stunt

The 1996 team was the greatest team ever assembled in college basketball, and if you don’t believe that, you’re terrible. How incredible is it that the event which introduced the best college basketball team ever wasn’t even covered on local television? I don’t know if the World Series caused this to happen, but it was ridiculous that nobody got to see Ron Mercer and Wayne Turner in action. The big fall film of 1995 was “Batman Forever,” so the theme of the show was “Cat Fans Forever.” To start the show, the geniuses behind the event (or is that “genii?”) had Tony Delk and Walter McCarty swing from the balcony at Memorial Coliseum dressed as Batman and Robin. If that wasn’t crazy enough, Delk was Batman, while the much larger McCarty dressed up as the boy wonder. I have no idea what else happened that year.

2004 – Rajon Rondo jumps over Ramel Bradley

This was the last Madness held at Memorial, and it had the most incredible play I’ve ever seen. It happened during the dunk contest, and Joe Crawford had just wowed the crowd with the dunk that SHOULD HAVE won him the dunk contest at the McDonald’s All-American game. The only one who could top him was Rondo. He got Bradley to sit in a chair right in the middle of the paint, then he palmed the ball with those abnormally huge hands and threw down an especially sick dunk. Ramel flinched (if you’ve seen Semi-Pro, you can understand why), but to his credit, he didn’t duck. I look back at that event and wonder what could have been if Coach Gillispie had gotten an opportunity to coach Rondo and Randolph Morris.

2005 – Rupp is on fire

I don’t think many people knew how Madness would look in Rupp Arena. It just felt like a Memorial Coliseum event for reasons that are hard to explain. Then the day arrives and columns of fire shoot out of each basket like game 1 of the NBA Finals. Then they bring out Mason from the Detroit Pistons to introduce the players. Sure, he mispronounced most of the words, but it was Mason. I know Perry Stevenson attended the show and said it played a huge part in his decision to come to Kentucky. I don’t know how it is in person, but it looked impressive on TV that night. The point of Midnight Madness in today’s generation is to impress recruits, and hopefully it will impress again this week. Isn’t that right, Daniel Orton?

I’ll write about football tomorrow.

I’m Seth Stogsdill – three more days, guys.