I am pleased to report to you, avid follower of athletics (or, at least, athletics-oriented opinion columns) that, upon examining anecdotal evidence throughout the Chippewa Valley, a professional baseball team plays in our state. Not just a minor league team, but one that plays – get this – Major League Baseball! They’re called the Brewers, and you will notice the evidence by the preponderance of scripted M’s on caps, and shirts featuring logoed gloves with baseballs in the middle.

The return to success of the Milwaukee Brewers over the past few years, culminating in a playoff slot this season, combined with the statewide marketing effort on the part of the team, has re-established a western Wisconsin fan base for the Brewers. I first noticed this trend in one of my columns last year. Despite fundamentally being a Twins fan, seeing more fan support for the Twins in this part of the state earlier this decade did not feel right to me. The Packers and Badgers dominate our region’s fandom, and the Brewers should have never had a problem finding similar levels of passion, especially considering our area’s baseball heritage. To a significant degree, that problem has now gone away.

That problem is now the exclusive possession of the Milwaukee Bucks. (For those of you unaware, that’s the professional basketball team in the state. They play in a major league, too!)

The lack of tangible support for the Bucks in the Chippewa Valley has bothered me for years, crystallized by my discovery of one fan following the Bucks during their appearance in the 2001 NBA Eastern Conference Finals. One fan, in all of Eau Claire. This was in June, when the Packers and both prime Badgers sports were in dormancy, and the Brewers ... well, they, too, were dormant, even though they were in the middle of their season. The Express were still four years away from taking the Carson Park field. Yet, no one seemed to care that our team was a couple games away from taking on Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal and the rest of the L.A. Lakers for the NBA title.

Our team – or was it, really? Is a team our team when no one cares about that team? It may be Milwaukee’s team, though reading other opinion columns about the Bucks indicates even sports fans in that part of the state exhibit ambivalence.

Excuses? For one, there’s the long-term futility of the franchise, with 4 winning seasons since 1991. Yet the Badgers’ basketball and football teams, plus the Packers, went through multi-decade stretches of losing campaigns, yet both maintained a statewide level of interest. Statewide, not just in the Milwaukee-Madison-Green Bay triangle.

Another excuse involves NBA TV rules that require the Eau Claire area to receive Minnesota Timberwolves games. So, yeah, we haven’t been able to regularly watch the Bucks in the Chippewa Valley since about 2001. That doesn’t account for previous years when we could watch them. And that sure doesn’t account for apathy in the rest of the state.

Therefore, I call for a campaign: Operation Buck ’Em Up. It’s my call to arms to find ways to increase the level of Bucks passion in the Chippewa Valley. We could try quadrupling the total number of fans in the region, but that only gets us to 20, and we need to think bigger.
I have some starter ideas. For one, a Bucks preseason game could be held at Zorn Arena, though there is the risk of attendance smaller than what would be seen at a non-conference Blugolds game; perhaps the Cornell high school gym could guarantee a sell-out. Another idea is a Bucks “legend” appearing at high school basketball games – though one can imagine the confused crowd reaction to the presence of Paul Mokeski or Blue Edwards.

Chippewa Valley, we can do better. What are your ideas for Operation Buck ’Em Up? E-mail me: lucanthony@yahoo.com, or leave comments online. Later this winter I’ll publish the best ideas for increasing the Bucks’ visibility in western Wisconsin. With a little of your ingenuity, we can accomplish a miracle: Milwaukee Bucks excitement in our neck of the woods. Dream the impossible dream. Paul Pressey wouldn’t have it any other way.