As we first noticed in January, Rick Barnes’s Wikipedia page is ridiculous. On a website known for silly encyclopedia entries, Barnes’s is up there for the funniest we’ve seen, claiming that Barnes transformed Texas into a national basketball power and casting him as a sort of basketball prophet here in the Lone Star State. Specifically, this sentence exists:
“Barnes’ success at Texas, a traditional football powerhouse, sparked interest in college basketball at the university and throughout the state.”
To hear Wikipedia tell it, basketball wasn’t a thing Texans paid attention to before Rick Barnes rode in from Clemson, bringing with him only a strange orange ball and a dream. By the time he left? Children everywhere were dribbling, and were asking for hoops in their driveways. Never mind, I don’t know, the David Robinson Spurs, or the Hakeem Olajuwon Rockets. Never mind, I don’t know, Tom Penders’s career. Rick Barnes is, per The Internet’s greatest source of information, the founding father of basketball anywhere in these 250,000 square miles we call Texas.
It’s been bothering us since then, and with Barnes on the brain again tonight, playing in the “Sweet Sixteen” of a highly-watched postseason tournament, it was time to figure out who the hell wrote this. Basically, our thought was: This was a Tennessee fan, wasn’t it?
It wasn’t!
As far as we can tell.
Rick Barnes’s Wikipedia page was created on March 20th, 2006, one day after P.J. Tucker’s Longhorns beat NC State to earn Texas its now third-most-recent “Sweet Sixteen” appearance. Four days later, after Texas beat West Virginia in the next round, an editor named “Raskolnikov4138” penned the following sentence:
“Barnes’ success at Texas has arguably lead the football-crazed school–and state–to take a serious interest in basketball for the first time.”
Outlandish? Yes. But hey, who is Raskolnikov if not a man who gets caught up in the moment? Surely, this would be edited, and surely enough, it was.
On April 4th, after Texas had lost to LSU and LSU had lost to UCLA and UCLA had lost to Florida, user Jareha edited the sentence to more or less its current version. That is when it happened. There was a different tense, because Barnes was still the coach at that point, but the sentence is effectively from April 2006. It has lived quite a life since then.
Who is Jareha? Well, according to his own Wikipedia user page, he went to Texas. Raskolnikov4138? He or she doesn’t have an active user page, but you can see everything any other Wikipedia editor sent to them, and a lot of it has to do with image credits, with part of that Rick Barnes and part the LBJ fountain on Texas’s campus. Given the timing of the Barnes entry, the best explanation is that Raskolnikov was probably a Texas fan. Insert the Übermensch joke of your choosing.
What we really have with this sentence, then, this claim that Rick Barnes was to basketball in Texas what St. Patrick was to Christianity in Ireland, is the product of two Texans in 2006 writing what felt like such evident fact at the time that it belonged, unsourced, in an online encyclopedia. It’s a ridiculous sentence now, a sentence implying Texas didn’t care about basketball before Rick Barnes walked through the door (they weren’t bad under Penders, guys). At the time, though? In 2006? In 2006, this was just what everyone in Austin thought. And that was before Kevin Durant had even taken a jump shot in burnt orange.
Really, what we’re dealing with is not shoddy history, written 17 years later. It’s primary source history, written in the moment, and just inconsequential enough to have survived roughly one thousand edits in the years since. Rick Barnes? In some moment in the space-time continuum, he is a Texan basketball god. That moment is right around the end of the 2005-06 men’s college basketball season. And Jareha and Raskolnikov4138 are writing about it.
that fountain really is something, though