The Return Of... The 88 Illini

I had a synthesizer (a Yamaha DX-7) and a drum set. The drum set was an "oh please oh please oh please" purchase that my parents caved on. See, I went to drum camp at Eastern Illinois University in June of 1988 and one of the classes at the drum camp was set drumming (the rest was, like, percussion stuff) so they had this room full of 15 new Remo drum kits for everyone taking the class. At the end of camp they told the kids "hey kids, Remo is selling these kits at cost if you want to purchase them" so I called my parents and begged and begged and they caved. When they picked my friend Aaron and I up from 1988 Eastern Illinois Drum Camp, we loaded the Remo drum set into the back of my mom's station wagon.

I have so many memories from that drum camp. It was my very first time staying somewhere for a week without my parents. Here, I'll just give you three quick stories from that week in June of 1988:

• My mom would only let me have diet soda when I was a kid. But when we went to Wilb Walker's in Charleston to get snacks for the dorm room at the 5-day drum camp, I convinced my mom that Big Red (the cream soda) was actually a diet soda. She bought a case for Aaron and I. It was the greatest sugar-high week of my life.
• The final night of Drum Camp was June 21st. I know this because it was Game 7 of the Pistons/Lakers NBA Finals. There was a guy who was an instructor at the camp – an old guy from Los Angeles who smoked cigs constantly – who was a big Laker fan. And the poor guy was forced to watch Game 7 of the NBA Finals on a lobby television at some dorm at Eastern Illinois University with 75 band camp kids. I remember that the kids in front of him kept standing up and he was losing his mind. James Worthy scored 38 and the Lakers won the title.
• The guy teaching the drum set class was Ndugu Chancler. He was a famous drummer for one thing: the beat on Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. It is perhaps the most famous drum beat of all time, used in hundreds of songs. Eighth-notes on the high-hat, bass drum on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4. When he played it at camp we lost our minds even though it was the most simple lick of all time.

Aaron and I – he was my best friend growing up and remains so today – were caught between childhood and adulthood. We'd play "the floor is lava" in our room (one of the dorms at EIU) and then go downstairs for a meal and try to act all cool around the girls. And then we'd sneak around the corner to try to play one of the arcade games they had in the lobby of the dorm: Heavy Barrel. I wasn't any good and constantly lost. Aaron was the master.

So there we are, 14 years old, being all cool during "how to play the marimba" class and trying to impress the band girls with our hold-four-mallets-at-once skills and then running back to the dorm so I could watch Aaron dominate this game while we drank more Big Reds:

The last night of camp there was a dance. I told Aaron I was going to ask that Bethany girl to dance (even though I didn't know how to dance). He didn't want to dance so he got more quarters from the front desk and played more Heavy Barrel. I asked Bethany to dance, she said yes, we were dancing (not to a slow song, but to some 1988 dance song like Girl You Know It's True) when Aaron came running up.

"I beat Heavy Barrel! You have to come see! I get to put my initials in the top spot!"

I paused there between boyhood and manhood. Go see my friend's video game score or keep dancing with this girl? I know this was only drum camp, but it took a lot for me to reach the point of actually saying the words "want to dance with me?" Do I just give that up?

Yes. I told Bethany I needed to go see his video game score and left the dance floor. He entered his initials as the top score and then we celebrated in the room with the last of the Big Reds. Drum camp ended the next day and I never saw Bethany again. As for Aaron, well, he was best man in my wedding 17 years later.

I made the right choice.

I thought of this moment in time while on a road trip with my wife this past week. For our 20th anniversary, we decided to re-create our honeymoon. It wasn't a flight to an island, it wasn't a cabin in the mountains - our honeymoon was a road trip. We got married at the Grand Canyon and then spent the next nine days making our way back to St. Louis. We had no reservations, no destinations planned, just... nine days to get back home.

(True story: we wanted to rent a convertible for our honeymoon road trip. But no rental car places in Phoenix would let you rent a convertible at their place and then return it in St. Louis - you could only do that with "regular" cars. But that's where Aaron stepped in. In the best Best Man move ever, he and his girlfriend at the time rented a convertible in St. Louis and drove it to the Grand Canyon. We flew out to Arizona and then drove it home. They drove it out to Arizona and flew home.)

It's been 20 years since that trip. 20 years ago today – let me see if I can figure this out – we would have been traveling between Taos, New Mexico and Alamosa, Colorado. That night we went to a drive-in movie theater in Alamosa and opened the roof of the convertible to watch a movie under the stars (I want to say it was the Jennifer Lopez movie Monster In Law?). What a great trip. Juice Williams verballed to Illinois while we were on that trip.

For our 20th anniversary, this past week, we decided to do the same thing. Not with a convertible, but a road trip. We rented a car in Champaign and just headed south. We had no reservations (and had a tent in the back in case the weather was nice enough to camp) and basically just tried to avoid the big storms rolling through. We ended up with a road trip that took us on a loop from Gulfport, Mississippi to Saint Augustine, Florida to St. Simons Island, Georgia to Asheville, North Carolina and back home. Never more than two nights in the same place. Just like we like it.

It's funny how a trip like that is a journey through the Illini football roster for me. The exit sign on Highway 49 in Mississippi for Lucedale? Home of Ashton Hollins! Getting off the interstate for gas in Pensacola and seeing that you're right next to Pine Forest High School? Devon Witherspoon! Wondering where Atlantic Coast High School might be while driving through Jacksonville and then looking it up to see that it's literally right next to you while you're on I-295? Pat Bryant! Lunch on St. Simons Island? Home of Tyson Rooks!

As we were driving, we were often listening to SiriusXM radio. When you rent as many cars as I do, you move up to President's Circle with Hertz and that means you get free SiriusXM whenever you rent. So we spent a lot of time listening to the 80's On 8. Their countdown over the weekend: the top 40 songs from this week in 1988. Which, I should note, would have been the songs on the radio when I went to drum camp at EIU. Maybe even the songs that were playing when I danced with Bethany for half a song.

So take all of that, put it in a mixing bowl, and you should be able to see how this came out of the oven for me. I said before I left that I'd have a lot of time to think about what I was going to do with The 90 Illini. I was filled with thoughts of 1988 during the trip. I was constantly thinking of Illini football player home towns. And then it hit me. When I started The 90 Illini, it wasn't The 90 Illini. It was 88.

Here's the history. In the summer of 2009, in the first year of the blog, I decided I was going to be edgy and write a series called "Dear Bob, You're Doing It Wrong." Bob Asmussen was doing a countdown of the top 50 Illini for the 2009 season in the News-Gazette, and I was going to write a "those are wrong, THESE are right" series pivoting off of that.

The next year, for 2010, I decided to expand it to a full roster countdown and called it the 88 Illini. Then, in 2011, I added one more player and called it the 89 Illini. And, finally, starting in 2012, The 90 Illini.

Once I started writing the 20,000-word preview in 2014, it got very difficult to finish The 90 Illini. The preview has always come out on the Monday before the season, and it takes at least 50 hours to write (with research and everything else, probably two full weeks) and that leaves very few words remaining in my fingers. Last year, when Engine 77 was added to the mix (we purchased it at the end of July and had four weeks to get it painted, wrapped, repaired, and ready), I just couldn't finish the 90 Illini.

And yes, that's on me. I could pre-write a lot of the articles in June and July so that those posts are ready in August when I'm busy with other stuff. I've never written like that – I'll be honest, when a player verbals to Illinois and a full article about him verballing to Illinois hits Twitter three minutes later meaning the reaction to him choosing Illinois was written before he actually chose Illinois, it blows my "reacting in real time" writing mind and I wonder if there are dozens and dozens of "Dame Sarr has committed to Illinois" articles in a folder somewhere – but maybe that's something I should consider.

Another thing I remembered about the "Dear Bob You're Doing It Wrong" (and the 88 Illini/89 Illini articles): they were grouped. For DBYDIW I wrote up 10 players at a time. For The 88 Illini I wrote about eight players at once. The genesis of this series was not "one player per day." And that thought made everything click.

No, I probably shouldn't do The 90 Illini again. I guess I could go back to The 89 Illini but that's a prime number. However, the first time I wrote about the full roster it was the 88 Illini, and the radio is full of 1988 songs right now, and my mind is back at drum camp in 1988, and the Monday I get back from vacation is exactly 88 days until the season starts, so....

This year I will do The 88 Illini. It will be a countdown of the 88 most-important Illini for the season. I will write them four at a time. Meaning, the first one, going up later today, will be players 88-85. And then in four days time, players 84-81. I will get rid of the "I can't write stuff ahead of time" thing in my brain and start stockpiling the articles in June and July so that August is freed up for the preview (which will certainly be the largest preview to date).

The last week was great for me. My wife and I had been making every single vacation the last three years about going to see the grandkids. So we both decided to unplug from the entire world for nine days and just drive around doing stuff. I didn't touch the blog. I was on Twitter for maybe 15 minutes total. We abandoned everything and just explored.

And who knew that doing this...

...would refresh my writing brain like nothing else the last few years? I do the yearly "don't write very much in May" thing to renovate my headspace but I think I'm gonna have to add "take a full week off" to the mix as well. I can't remember the last time the view was this clear.

So rest in peace, The 90 Illini. Welcome back, 88 Illini. I might not always put the articles at the top of the page (I'll compile a list of all of them directly below like I did last summer), but look for a new 88 Illini article every four days from now until the season starts (in 88 days!). Starting later today with the first four players.

And yes, I promise to stay on topic. Not all of these will start with "this one time, at band camp..."