Associated Press
DETROIT ó Practice ended with a huddle in the center circle. At their backs, the walls of noise on every side were closing in. In the midst of that pandemonium, coach Tom Izzo barked out a final set of instructions: Walk to the four corners of the court and bask in all the love.
“I just told the guys,” Izzo said afterward, ‘Spend the moment to do two things: thank the people that came, thank Detroit and then soak it in, because you’re not going to get to soak it in from here on out. It’s dog-eat-dog. We’re going to be thinking about what we’ve got to do to accomplish our goals.’ ”
Nine times before, schools have advanced to a Final Four played in their home state, 10 if you count 1988, when Kansas played just across the line in Kansas City, Mo.
All those teams, no doubt, felt as if they were on a mission. None has anything on Michigan State.
The Spartans can’t do much about the economic woes of a city and state that have been hemorrhaging jobs for decades. Because their campus is just 90 miles down the road, they might pull a few extra fans into town for the weekend, adding a few dollars to the bottom line of an event that estimates said would pour $50 million into the local economy, whether they made it here or not.
In terms of an impact that can be easily measured, that’s about it. Walk around this place, though, and you can feel the Spartans touching people every bit as tangibly as the wind-whipped bite in the spring air.
Thirty-thousand people showed up for their practice Friday afternoon and howled throughout most of it as one. Not long after, a crowd gathered behind barricades set up at one end of an alley just to cheer as the Spartans walked off a loading dock and onto the team bus. But lifting spirits isn’t always that loud, nor so public.
Someone asked sophomore and hometown hero Durrell Summers whether anybody close to him had been hurt by the latest economic downturn. The answer tumbled out so matter-of-factly it could give you chills.
“Oh yeah. My mom, my dad, my uncles. I could go on,” Summers began. “I know a lot of people who’ve been touched by it.”
“They got laid off and had to get smaller jobs for the time being, looking for other jobs and still trying to support families and things like that. My dad used to work at General Motors. He’s working at a post office. My mom used to work at Receiving Hospital as a lab assistant, and she’s also at the post office.”
Summers sounded just as stoic about what the future might hold. It’s not so much pessimism as a pragmatism learned from absorbing so many body blows.
“They’re trying to see when the next thing is coming in,” Summers said. “Even through the bad times, they’re constantly excited and cheering me on, telling me not to worry about it and keep doing what I’m doing. I’ve been kind of helping them through it as well, but this is big for them. They were just speechless and in tears, making it this far.”