Always with the (deserved) accolades for Young, Blair and Fields. The discussion of potential with Gil Brown, Wanamaker and Gibbs. Let’s not forget the defensive stopper and slashing threat in Jermaine Dixon. His hometown paper has a piece on him, where it turns out many in his own community don’t seem fully aware.
“It’s funny; I had couple people from high school talk to me like, ‘Oh my God, I saw you on TV, man. I had no idea,'” he said. “Some of my old friends, I’ll run into them and they’ll be like, ‘What’s up, Coop?’ like, maybe they don’t know. People always used to call me Coop, so I’ll have to be like ‘No, I don’t go by that anymore.'”
The nickname, short for Cooper, is part of the reason people do not connect the current Panther to the ex-Bengal. He grew up in a prestigious basketball family, the younger brother of both Washington Wizards guard Juan Dixon and former Providence College player Phil Dixon.
They share the same mother, Juanita Dixon, but Jermaine has a different father, Robert Cooper. Dixon said his older brothers (“my father figures”) pushed him to change his last name from Cooper for years. Shortly after leaving Blake, he finally had it legally changed.
But that only scratches the surface of Dixon’s quiet ascension to the Big East.
He’s thrived and is loving it at Pitt.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “It’s been crazy. It’s a dream come true. And no matter what happens, I will be right back here at Pittsburgh next year. Hopefully, I’ll be on the football field getting that ring.”
I believe it was the 2006 tournament, the one where we lost to Syracuse and 865 year senior Gerry Macnamara in the finals, and the one where Krauser poked that guy from Villanova’s eye out (which by the way, almost caused me to change my name on here to “Carl Krauser Eye Poke”).
Anyways, I forget who we were playing, but we went up really big early. I believe we even held them scoreless or close to it for the majority of the first half and went up by 20+ at one point. Then, the other team came back and actually had it pretty close at the end.
Anyways, my questions are, did all three of these things take place in the same tourney (Loss to ‘cuse in the finals, Krauser pokes out ‘nova guy’s eye, Pitt opens up huge lead in the 1st half against some team and holds them nearly scoreless for a long time)?
Also, what was the guy’s name who Krauser wounded (I remember he was one of ‘nova’s, much heralded guards that year), and what team was it that we opened that massive lead on in the 1st half? Marquette maybe? I can’t remember.
I just remember that at one point late in the 2nd half, Louisville had it down to 2 or 3, and I wanted to vomit.
Even though we lost, that was a pretty eventfull BET.
We must have played really poorly in the 2nd half to let it get that close… then again, they played really pooly in the 1st half.
Also, pantherman, there’s a play by play of that Louisville game here: link to sports.espn.go.com
They cut it to 57-54 with 20 seconds left.
Our last field goal of that game was with 13:42 left to play. All of our remaining points were free throws.
Fine, Let’s Go Pitt!