Column: Kampe's win brings me great joy

Longtime Valparaiso rival has turned into a dear friend

I hated Greg Kampe when I was a student at Valparaiso.

Hated.

It was my sophomore year - my first on campus - and here came Oakland into the Mid-Continent Conference. The Golden Grizzlies were coached by this loud and brash coach who would work the refs, scream at anyone in his vicinity and just be a general clown on the sidelines.

He also couldn’t beat Valpo, regardless of how hard he tried.

Rewind a year earlier to the 1998-99 season when Valparaiso was coming off its Sweet Sixteen run and Oakland was completing its transition from Division II. Valpo went to Michigan (more on that later) and knocked off the Grizz 76-72 in the first game of a home-and-home that Homer Drew graciously decided to grant the school that would become Mid-Con newcomers the following year.

Oakland then played its first game at the Athletics-Recreation Center on Jan. 28, 1999. The infamous Tarrance Price game where the Valpo junior knocked down four 3-pointers in 54 seconds to help erase a 14-point deficit in a Valparaiso victory. Mention Price’s name to Kampe today and he’ll still cringe.

So now it’s my sophomore year and Valpo has won five straight conference titles. I transferred to Valparaiso in part because the school had a dominant men’s basketball program and I expected that to continue. The young squad, with current Valpo staff member Lubos Barton as a sophomore, lost 11 of 15 Division I games early in the season. Even in a series of adversity, Valpo managed to knock off Oakland twice.

Despite the pair of wins over Oakland, Valpo finished with a 10-6 record and in a three-way tie for second place. The Golden Grizzlies, despite a 2-12 record in the nonconference, put together an 11-5 conference season and won the regular-season title. Because Oakland was finalizing its transition to Division I, the school wasn’t eligible for the NCAA tournament and therefore didn’t compete in the Mid-Con tournament. Valparaiso waltzed through the tournament and returned to the Big Dance for the fifth straight year. Oakland (rightfully) claimed a championship and hung a banner, even if my 20-year-old self thought it was foolish. They never beat Valpo and they didn’t go to the Big Dance. I hated that.

Then came Jan. 27, 2001.

The Fight.

Oakland and Valparaiso were playing in what I believe was a regionally-televised game on Fox Sports Detroit or some station that few had access to. In my mind it was being broadcast on ESPN in primetime despite the fact the game started at 11 a.m. My friends and I partied through the night leading up to the game and it was a rare occurrence when I was out of the broadcast booth and in the student section. I wasn’t going to miss the chance to give the business to an inferior opponent, regardless of what the standings said from a year earlier.

A jolt went through the program that morning when word came down that Homer Drew was in the hospital and that Scott Drew would be serving as the head coach for the first time in his career. The game started and it was a bloodbath. A literal route. I don’t have the box score in front of me, but I’m not sure Oakland scored in the first half. They might not have scored in the second half either. It was a dominant 89-57 blowout that ended when Valparaiso’s Phil Willie and Oakland’s Jon Champagne got into a fist fight on the court. It was another log tossed onto the fire of Kampe hatred that was burning through the ARC.

I made my first trip to Oakland later that year. The Golden Grizzles jumped out to a huge lead, but it didn’t matter. Kampe couldn’t beat Valpo under any circumstances. Valparaiso erased the deficit and won 82-70. Two more wins followed my senior year and I graduated having never lost to Oakland, not that I had anything to do with it.

I know I’ve referenced it several times, but I really can’t overstate how much I hated Oakland. I hated that the school was called Oakland and it wasn’t in California. I hated that they had jerseys with the player names UNDER the numbers. What kind of idiocy is that? I hated Kampe’s sweater vests. I’m not a hateful person, but I loathed everything about that program.

Then I grew up.

In 2003, I was hired by an upstart website called Hoopville to write about college basketball. One of the leagues I was assigned was the Mid-Continent Conference. Most of the writers on the site would look at box scores or watch games on TV and write stories around them with no quotes attached. I made it a point to reach out to coaches. Imagine calling NCAA head coaches two decades ago and asking for an interview by announcing you were a national reporter, not from the New York Times or Chicago Tribune, but from something called Hoopville. My requests didn’t have a high success rate.

Greg Kampe took my calls.

It didn’t matter how small time I was. If someone wanted to talk Oakland basketball, he’d talk. If someone wanted to talk basketball, he’d talk. If someone wanted to talk, he’d talk, and he’d listen.

I returned to Valparaiso in 2005, just in time to see Kampe snap a 15-game losing streak against the rival program that he later told me he obsessed about beating. Oakland won the final three meetings before Valpo left for the Horizon League.

The schools met three times in nonconference action with Valparaiso winning a wild 103-102 game in regulation that led Sports Information Director Aaron Leavitt to include an entire page in his game notes about it for the remainder of the season. Reggie Hamilton hit a deep buzzer-beater in 2011 to hand Bryce Drew his first loss at the ARC as a head coach. Oakland added a win the following year at home. Then things got a little crazy.

Oakland accepted an invitation to join the Horizon League in 2013. The conference held a Media Day event in Chicago and what I had learned by now was that if you put Kampe in front of a microphone, he was right at home. He came up to me at the event and told me that I was the only familiar face that he knew and that if I was up for it, he was going to call me up to the dais when it was his turn to address the media. I had no clue what was coming.

Kampe has caught a lot of flak for his fashion choices over the years, including his hairstyle. Rumors swirled that he was wearing a hairpiece. When he got the microphone he called me up and in a moment of sheer hilarity, asked if I would tug on his hair. It was one of the strangest moments of my life and I’ll never forget it.

Nor will I forget the numerous radio hits with Kampe when he would host his call-in show from the Red Ox Tavern in Auburn Hills with Oakland play-by-play announcer Neal Ruhl. We’d talk basketball. We’d talk food. We’d just talk.

A hatred that had long thawed turned into a genuine friendship.

A friendship that included long talks about a pair of near-death experiences for Kampe, about the changing landscape of college athletics and about poker.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world shutdown, many of us took to the internet to find creative hobbies. Through a mutual friend, Kampe and I found ourselves in an online poker group during those early months of the pandemic. We’d play for fun. We’d play for some bragging rights. We’d play for the chance to feel a semblance of community that was missing from our lives.

The pandemic waned and I found myself in Las Vegas at the 2022 World Series of Poker. I made a deep run in the Main Event and when I went public with some of the details, one of the first people to reach out was Kampe. I had made it through three days and if I made it through two more I told him that I would need a coach to guide me through the final days of competition. He didn’t flinch and said he’d be on the next flight out as soon as I gave the word. I was obviously crushed when I got eliminated after besting 90 percent of the field. Not only because I missed out on life-changing money, but also because the idea of Kampe hanging on the rail with some of my best friends would’ve been so awesome.

The friendship continued last Tuesday when I made my way to Indianapolis for the Horizon League title game. I had texted Kampe the night before that with Oakland playing Milwaukee, it would be the only time in my life that I was cheering against my hometown. The chance to see my friend get back to the NCAA tournament in his 40th year at Oakland was too good to pass up. The Golden Grizzlies won and I made my way to the court. He put his hands over his heart when he saw me and we shared a long embrace.

On Thursday night I sat in the Buffalo Wild Wings in Valparaiso watching Oakland take on Kentucky. I get weirdly sentimental with sports now when it comes to people I know. Scott Drew winning the national title. Jake Diebler beating No. 2 Purdue in his first game as Ohio State’s head coach. Bryce Drew leading Vanderbilt and Grand Canyon to the NCAA tournament. I just want to see good people succeed.

So, while the rest of BW3 was taking joy in Kentucky’s demise, I was holding back tears watching Kampe and his beloved Golden Grizzles pull off the biggest win of their lives.

To think it’s been 25 years since I detested the ground the man walked on to now sitting at my computer at 2:35 in the morning finishing off a 1,700 word column about an unlikely friendship.

To hate like that is to love forever.