This Is Our Culture
On the eve of the Final Four, Boswell looks at how this year's basketball team fits into Champaign-Urbana's cultural landscape.
A few years ago, I was driving back into Champaign where Interstate 72 ends. I stopped at Schnuck’s, as is custom, to pick up some groceries. On my way back to the car, I looked to the west and saw a beautiful, orange and blue sunset above an overflowing Texas Roadhouse parking lot, cars circling in a swarm, attracted to the honey butter rolls like moths to a flame. It sounds dramatic to say, but this image, to me, was a cultural moment in Champaign-Urbana.
Throughout the life of this blog, I’ve always been trying to find cultural meaning in C-U. Having lived around here my entire life, I’ve too often heard of central Illinois referred to as “cultureless” or otherwise not worth understanding, but that just simply isn’t true. People who speed through on I-57 or I-74 look out their windows, see flat land, and assume a flat culture. They miss the weird, wonderful friction between the agricultural roots of the surrounding county and the hyper-dense, micro-urban bubble of our twin cities. More importantly, it’s a place where you can buy ribeye steaks out of the back of a trailer in the mall parking lot and attend a world-class symphony at the Krannert Center hours later.
This initial thought spawned a series of tweets about what things are culturally Champaign-Urbana (usually with the caption “This is our culture”). Emo music (real midwest emo, not what emo came to be known as) comes to mind. College football games that kick off at 11 am. Two Circle K's across the street from each other. A box truck running into a railroad overpass. Lil Porgy’s sauce in a Styrofoam cup. Self-deprecation. The list goes on and on.
Beyond the cheap and easy jokes though, there are some more legitimate things that are uniquely Champaign-Urbana, and probably the most surprising amongst those is just how international it is here. To an outside observer it might seem strange, but C-U is a definitive melting pot. You see it in the architecture, the local businesses, and the grocery stores. You can walk down a stretch of Green Street and hear more languages than you would in much larger cities like St. Louis or Indianapolis, passing legacy campus dives right next to a half-dozen boba shops vibrating with the energy of hundreds of hometowns thousands of miles away. Here, in the middle of cornfields, we have a nationally renowned Chinese food scene with some of the best and most unique dishes in the country, all because of this internationalization.
We have world-class academics at Illinois, and part of what makes our town so vibrant is that the university acts as a magnet, attracting brilliant students from all over the globe.
Shahid Khan is a product of this exact same pipeline; he came to Champaign-Urbana at 16 years old as an engineering student from Pakistan, and has gone on to become one of the most prolific life-long residents in our town’s history. For those of us who live here, Shad’s story is something to be proud of. It's a true example of the American dream that simply would not have happened if we were not a community open to internationalization. It happened, in part, because of Champaign-Urbana.
Which brings us to this year’s basketball team. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so: this team’s roster is the most international in Illinois basketball’s 120+ year history. Three Croatians, a Greek, a Montenegrin, and a Serbian—most of whom contribute heavily to the team’s success.
Despite not violating any rules, national talking heads and opposing coaches have spent the season clutching their pearls. The complaints have been, at times, deafening, especially as the team as advanced to the Final Four. They cry foul over age gaps. They complain about international amateurism rules and supposed system "loopholes," acting as if Brad Underwood pulled some nefarious fast one on the NCAA rather than simply evaluating and building a pipeline to some of the best available global talent.
It’s not hard to notice the underlying tone of these complaints, though. The grumbling about the basketball team’s roster taking opportunities away from domestic players echoes a tired, thinly veiled xenophobia. It’s the exact same sentiment you see when political grifters try to score cheap points by attacking the international student population at Illinois. They use heavy-handed, en vogue undertones to suggest these students are somehow a threat. Both arguments rely on a fearful, zero-sum fallacy that fundamentally misunderstands what makes this place special. Just as international students elevate the academic rigor, research capabilities, and cultural fabric of our town, these international players elevate the standard of basketball being played in Champaign.
But ignore the noise and just look at the product on the floor. These guys aren't just taking up roster spots; they’re running a highly efficient, ruthless offense. It’s heavy on ball movement, elite spacing, and the kind of high-IQ processing that usually forces me to stay up late to catch a Nuggets game. They aren't trying to be the stars of a marketing campaign—they just play incredibly smart basketball. That pragmatic, ego-free approach fits perfectly here.
So forgive me if I roll my eyes at the media narratives that Underwood’s recruiting strategy is some shocking, unnatural phenomenon. Critics act like bringing global talent to central Illinois is some bizarre science experiment. But if you walk around campus, or sit in a coffee shop in downtown Champaign, or look at the names of the people who have walked these halls before, you realize that this is exactly what Illinois has always done. The university has spent a century acting as a beacon for international talent, bringing the best and brightest to the prairie to build the future. Why shouldn't our basketball program do the exact same thing?
Champaign-Urbana has always been a place for people from all over the world to prepare for great things at the next level, no matter their country of origin. This team is no different, and that’s what makes them a perfect representation of our home.
This is our culture. Illini by a billion.
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