Smoking them one more time

When I left home Thursday morning, I threw some ratty jeans and a frayed shirt into the car.

'Oh, that's right,' my wife said. 'The smoker is tonight.'

Every October, the Independent Sports Club invites the head basketball coaches from Bradley and Illinois to join a panel of Journal Star sports reporters for a Q&A free-for-all with several hundred paying customers in the banquet room at the Lariat Steakhouse. Proceeds go to benefit area youth sports.

The event is a sellout, though I hear tickets on StubHub could be had for somewhat less than $1,000. I didn't check that out, though. Could be just a rumor. The StubHub part, I mean. The sellout is for real.

Anyway, there's a food line and an endless supply of beer and an even more endless supply of cigars, which are then lit up and puffed profusely until you can barely see across the room and the clothes you're wearing deserve only to be burned. Hence, 'the smoker.'

Maybe the last smoker, too; Illinois having joined the ranks of nanny states that dictate what's good or bad for you.

Now, I don't smoke, and I generally don't like walking around in a haze. But I also thought we were living in a country where we're free to choose our own bad habits, as long as they don't encroach on others. And I gotta tell you: If I decide to attend an event called 'the smoker,' they're not encroaching on me; I'm encroaching on them if I enlist government to make them stop.

At least the Guv and the legislative stooges who still lick his boots don't dictate which basketball teams are good or bad risks for our mental health. Or how many 3-pointers per game constitute a threat to the well-being of a shooter's elbow. Or whether the Fighting Illini should be compelled to play a series of home-and-homes with their in-state Division I brethren.

Yet.

Give them time.

?By the way, questions of that latter ilk were nipped in the bud by emcee Dan DiOrio. There has been one attendee in particular the past few years who inevitably asked Illini coach Bruce Weber, a former coach at Southern Illinois, when he would schedule the Salukis. So DiOrio opened the affair by saying anyone wishing to pose that

question would be 'required to submit it in advance, in writing, with the pen stuck up his (rear end).'

And so the evening began.

The annual smoker started back in 1996 as 'The JS Sportswriters Unplugged.' We had a regular radio show in those days, and someone got the idea that a public session, off the air and free of FCC cops, might be fun. It was. A couple of years later, someone else suggested inviting coaches to share the stage. So here we are.

Technically, the smoker remains unplugged. Thanks to the Internet, though, nothing's really off the record. As soon as a coach opens his mouth in a room full of cigar-smoking beer drinkers, what he says will be posted on the Web.

So, what can I tell you?

Probably everything, but I'd like to be invited back to the smokeless in 2008.

I will tell you Weber and Bradley coach Jim Les did a nice job, as usual, of answering questions about their programs. Each got roars of laughter with some pointed zingers that, in the unplugged spirit of the show, I won't repeat here.

But there were some nice one-liners that can be shared without betraying the speakers and will give you an idea of what the night was like.

For example, in the context of Michael Jordan's son Jeff being a walk-on at Illinois, JS assistant sports editor Gary Childs asked Weber if he might bring in Dennis Rodman's son.

Negatory, Weber replied. 'We don't have a wedding dress.'

Later, after Weber talked about the basketball recruiting benefits that come from the U of I football team being nationally ranked, Les piped up: 'I looked in mid-September, and Bradley's football team had scored as many touchdowns as Notre Dame's.'

(Note to newcomers and drunks: Bradley hasn't had a football team since 1970.)

And when someone asked Les about the newcomers on his coaching staff, he started by acknowledging retired assistant coach Chuck Buescher, who was in the smoke-filled room. 'The old coach,' Les said, 'still shows up every day at lunchtime. If there's free lunch, you can count on Coach Buescher to be there.'

And so it went, for a good cause, as always.

I have to stop writing now, so I can get out of these clothes and into a shower before I choke to death on the stench. Do-gooder politicians, however, please note: I chose to do this to myself, and I had a good time. So did hundreds of other guys and even a couple of women.

So there.

'I feel like Christopher Plummer, playing Captain Von Trapp in 'The Sound of Music,'' DiOrio told the audience. 'I'm telling everybody to have fun before the Nazis take over.'

KIRK WESSLER is executive sports editor/columnist with the Journal Star. Contact him at kwessler@pjstar.com, or (309) 686-3216.