I've known Greg Propes for for at least 25 years, so it's very cool to see him get a few minutes of fame from the Chronicle based on a picture he took back in December 2013:
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Greg Propes, via the Houston Chronicle |
Greg Propes arrived inside Hofheinz Pavilion just as the starting lineups were being announced for a non-conference game against Alcorn State in 2013.
“My jaw dropped,” Propes said. “Even by the poor standards that had been set at UH, my jaw dropped when I saw literally nobody there. It blew my mind.”
Propes took photos of Hofheinz from different angles, each showing completely empty sections of red seats for an early December game in coach James Dickey’s final season.
Once again, the photos surfaced on social media this week, showing just how far the University of Houston men’s basketball program has come since the arrival of coach Kelvin Sampson a year later.
That night, Propes posted the photos on the fan website CoogFans.com. He counted 43 fans sitting in the section behind the scorer’s table. He counted 15 students. The announced attendance for UH’s 31-point win was 2,833.
“I’m embarrassed to be here. I’m embarrassed for the players. I’m embarrassed,” Propes wrote on the website’s message board.
UH message boards were referring to Hofheinz as "the Tomb" at the time, because people simply weren't going to the games. It didn't matter that the game Greg attended was on a Monday night during finals week against an uninteresting opponent; the Coogs could have been playing North Carolina on Saturday and the crowd probably wouldn't have been much larger. The program was simply not relevant nationally nor of interest to local sports fans, UH alums included. About six weeks after Greg took this picture, I wrote:
I freely admit that I'm part of the problem; I rarely attend UH basketball games these days because, well, the games just aren't much fun for me anymore. Sure, I should be a good alumnus and support my school's hoops program through thick and thin. But when the team plays one of the weakest non-conference schedules in the nation but still only manages an 8-5 record, when the program has made exactly one NCAA Tournament appearance in the last twenty-two years, when the head coach is an aging retread who was coaching middle school girl's basketball when he was hired, when attending Cougar basketball games feels less like entertainment and more like a chore... Well, I guess I've just reached "that point of apathy" that [former Houston Press writer John] Royal writes about. There was a time when I really cared about UH basketball. Now I couldn't even tell you when the next home game is.
After the 20213-14 season was over, the University of Houston fired James Dickey (who never should have been hired to begin with), and tapped Kelvin Sampson to lead the program out of the abyss.
Today, things are completely different. The Coogs play in front of packed crowds at the renovated Fertitta Center. The program won the Big XII conference for the second year in a row. The team is heading to their seventh Final Four in program history this weekend. UH basketball is no longer merely relevant; it is one of the nation's best.
It's amazing to see just how much things have changed in a dozen years.
“Kelvin Sampson is a miracle worker,” Propes said. “What has happened to UH — and I don’t use the word lightly — is a miracle what happened here.”