BMatt’s Monday musings

AUBURN | Unselfish

There’s no better word to describe this Auburn men’s basketball team.

You see it every time they take the floor and you hear about it every time you speak to a player or coach.

“This is the closest team I’ve ever been on. And everyone has each other’s back,” said senior Dylan Cardwell. “It all started back in the summer when Bruce Pearl was adamant about us, you know, eating together, hanging out together, making sure that we’re always together.”

The 13th-ranked Tigers blew out No. 22 Ole Miss 82-59 Saturday night with nobody playing more than 22 minutes and 11 players with 10 or more minutes.

That 11th player, former walk-on Lior Berman, averages 6.2 minutes per game but played 10 minutes against the Rebels because when it was time for Chad Baker-Mazara to check back in, the junior college transfer told Pearl to keep Berman in because he was playing so well, especially on the defensive end against Allen Flanigan.

Unselfish.

And the biggest celebration came from the regulars on the bench at the end of the game as backups Chaney Johnson and Addarin Scott combined to block three shots over the final five seconds.

I’ve never seen an Auburn basketball team this united. Credit to Pearl and his staff for creating the culture and credit to the players for unabashedly adopting it.

I also know it’s still a long way until March and this team, which is 16-2 overall and 5-0 in the SEC, hasn’t faced a lot of adversity so far.

But it’s coming. And three of the next four games on the road might just provide a good dose.

It’s adversity that will really put that esprit de corps to the test. I don’t have any doubts this team will pass that test but it can also accelerate the growing process.

Championships aren’t won in January. That 2019 Final Four team lost three consecutive conference games in January and lost nine regular season games before reeling off 12 consecutive wins.

There are some very talented teams in the SEC and around the country that will be playing much better six weeks from now.

For Auburn to compete and beat those teams, it needs to improve too.

Pearl said as much after AU’s win over the Rebels.

“Can we play at the level as the competition increases? As greater competition, athletes and size and physicality increase, will we continue to play at this level,” said Pearl.

We’ll have those answers in March.

For now, enjoy this team for what it is: talented, hard-working and very unselfish.

***

In today’s musical journey, we go back 52 years to the day the American Troubadour had his first and only No. 1 album, which included his first and only No. 1 song. On Jan. 22, 1972, Don McLean’s second studio album, American Pie, rose to the top of the Billboard 200 where it remained for seven consecutive weeks. It included the hit single, “American Pie,” which remained at No. 1 on the Billboard 100 for four weeks from the end of 1971 to the second week of 1972. McLean wrote nearly all the songs on the album including “American Pie,” which includes the line, The Day the Music Died, referring to the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper in a 1959 plane crash. McLean was a 13-year old delivering papers at the time of the crash. The album was dedicated to Holly. At 8 minutes and 42 seconds, “American Pie” held the record for the longest song to reach No. 1 until Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” hit No. 1 in 2021. The song was preserved in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2017. The album had one other hit single in 1971’s "Vincent (Starry Starry Night),” which reached No. 12 on the U.S. charts. The tribute to Vincent Van Gogh was Tupac Shakur’s favorite song and was reportedly played by his girlfriend when he was in a coma shortly before his death.

Donald McLean III was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., in 1945. He grew up listening to Holly and Frank Sinatra and bought his first guitar at age 16. After graduating from high school in 1963, McLean briefly attended Villanova before dropping out to pursue a music career. He performed in small venues as a solo artist while attending night school at Iona College where he graduated in 1968. He recorded his first album, Tapestry, in 1969, but really hit the mainstream with the release of American Pie a couple of years later. He’s gone on to record a total of 21 records and had a few other hit singles including 1972’s “Dreidel,” which reached No. 22 on the Billboard 100, 1981’s “Crying,” which reached No. 5 and 1981’a “Since I Don’t Have You,” which peaked at No. 23. He has sold 50 million records. McLean was inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame in 2018.