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MTV finally airs Salukis

Documentary shows softer, sometimes embarrassing side of the men’s basketball team

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The much-anticipated debut of MTV’s documentary featuring the SIU men’s basketball team aired Monday night, showing, sometimes in great detail, the life of the Salukis off the court.

The show chronicled the 2002-2003 from December’s win over Cal State-Northridge through the end of the Missouri Valley Conference tournament, focusing mainly on Kent Williams, Jermaine Dearman and red-shirted freshmen Tony Young and Ryan Walker.

MTV followed the players everywhere, including the locker room, their homes, their classes, their hotel rooms and the places they went to celebrate after wins.

It was that last one that may get some of them in trouble.

About 40 minutes into the one-hour show, SIU is shown stomping Wichita State in Wichita Kan., and after the game head coach Bruce Weber told his players to have fun, but cautioned to do it with class.

The show immediately cut to a picture of Kent Williams dancing closely, for lack of a better word, with a girl at a bar in Wichita. The narration never identified her, but she was not the serious girlfriend Williams had been shown with earlier in the show.

Williams has not talked to his girlfriend, but said he doubts she would care about the scene.

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“It doesn’t make me nervous,” There’s nothing wrong with going dancing, and my girlfriend doesn’t have a problem with it because she dances too, so it’s just going out and having some fun.”

Young was shown at the same bar playing a video strip-poker game and back in his dorm with many affectionate female friends, prompting him to jokingly yell to his mother that he is not really like that.

But Young was not angry with the show and said he loved every minute of it, though he said there were a great deal of interviews and camera shots he expected to see but did not.

Ryan Walker, the team’s other red-shirt freshman who was given a great deal of airtime, said the same despite a few embarrassing moments.

Walker was shown in Weber’s office receiving instructions on how to “brown-nose” coaches to make them like him, and the final shot of the documentary showed Walker and Young doing lunges, making them look like ballet dancers.

“That’s embarrassing,” Walker said. “We want to call Justin, the dude who shot the video, and ask him why he put that on there. I don’t know why he did that to us.”

But Walker is not mad and said it was a relief to finally see what the man who had followed his team for months had come up with.

“It was kind of weird seeing something on TV when no one knew what to expect on it,” Walker said. “It was pretty cool, though, being on MTV.

“I’m just glad it’s over. I get to see it and I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

After the show, Williams said he loved what the cameraman, who he has grown to consider a friend, did with the documentary and like a few other players, enjoyed the trip down memory lane the show provided.

“The things in my mind were the things that happened most recently, so it was nice to kind of reflect back on when we struggled,” Williams said. “It was nice just to look back on the little things, not just basketball, but some of the little stuff you forget about as time goes on.”

Reporter Michael Brenner can be reached at [email protected]