Hoop dreams live on, 18 years ago

In 2001, it was a space oddity…the La Crosse Center had space for a professional basketball team, but no team. Early that year, the La Crosse Bobcats folded in the middle of their fifth season in town, when the C-B-A temporarily shut down. La Crosse Center manager Art Fahey spoke with the city room tax commission that year about trying to get another basketball team to town. Others in the community wanted to forget about basketball and bring in pro hockey instead.

As part of its yearly program to bring Nobel-winning physicists to campus, UW-La Crosse invited Dr. Steven Chu for a lecture in 2001. Chu won his Nobel for studying the effects that laser beams have on atoms. Chu, who later served as U.S. Secretary of Energy, told local science students not to take anything as gospel…and said a fear of some forms of science, such as cloning, is a good thing.

The Oscars held in March of 2001 honored ‘Gladiator’ as best picture of the previous year, and the film’s star Russell Crowe won the award for best actor. Julia Roberts was named best actress for ‘Erin Brockovich,’ and her co-star Albert Finney got the last Oscar nomination of his career for the movie, in 2001, yesterday in La Crosse.