Our guess is that no one was more thrilled with Evansville’s huge upset of Kentucky than former Ace Jerry Sloan.
The legendary Bulls guard and Jazz coach was famously tough. He had a bit of that Larry Bird thing. He just wasn’t going to back down to anyone.
Sloan played in the NBA from 1965 to 1976, mostly for the Bulls (he was a Bullet for his first two seasons).
Later he coached the Utah Jazz and infused his sense of toughness into the franchise’s DNA.
In 2016, Sloan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementias which currently is essentially a death sentence.