Indiana's T-Shirt Campaign Is Offensive

I watched the halftime interview between the BTN talking head and the new athetlic director at Indiana, whose last name is Glass.  During the interview, Glass and the BTN talker pimped the white t-shirts that everyone was wearing at the game (and yes, an Indiana "white-out" in basketball looks about 1/30th as good as a Penn State football "white-out.")

Well, on the back of the shirt, it said this:

"Never, never, never give up." 

Winston Churchill, 1941.

This was crossed out, and below it read:

"Never, never, never give up."

Tom Crean, 2009.

After I got done throwing up in my mouth, I thought about the context of the two quotes. On one hand, we've got the Prime Minister of a country who was being attacked by Nazi Germany, where people were being bombed out of their houses and living in the London subway system. In a few months after the speech was made by Churchill, Pearl Harbor would be bombed and the United States would enter the war.

This is part of the "never give up" speech by Churchill.  Look at the eloquence and the despair that Britain was suffering at the time:

Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination. But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period - I am addressing myself to the School - surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.

Now, let's turn to Indiana. They are supposed to "never give up" over their former coach who repeatedly broke recruiting violations, that they lost most of their scholarship players, that Eric Gordon complained that his teammates were in altered states last year, and that the program hired a highly successful ex-Marquette coach and paid him $600,000 per year, at least $1.4 million per in "marketing and promotional efforts," 2 late model cars, 60 home tix per bball game, 8 tix per football game (yeah, I know, that reduces the contract). 

Spare me.  The use of a quote attributed to a man who was helping a country fight against its destruction, in order to rally a fanbase to win a few basketball games, even as I rationally consider the quote, is offensive.  I highly doubt the Indiana program would sanction the use of quotes by Martin Luther King, Yasser Arafat, or Gloria Steinem to use in comparison with their basketball team's self-inflicted wounds. This quote should not have been used either and the program, or whoever sanctioned the shirt, should be embarrassed.