In the most recent edition of Sports Illustrated, the magazine sent a reporter and a photography crew to Eastern for an article about men’s basketball player Bil Duany and his family.

Certainly a moving and motivational story, writer L. Jon Wertheim told of the Duany family and how it had made the move to the United States from the Sudan even as civil strife and constant danger surrounded the parents and five children.

The article’s main purpose, so it seemed to me, was to highlight how the Duany parents, Wal and Julia Duany, have seen all of their children get into and or through college on Division I basketball scholarships while keeping in mind the troubled past the family overcame.

But while there isn’t a negative word about any of the colleges that Bil’s four siblings went to and played basketball, there seemed to be a few cheap shots in the article about Eastern and the town of Charleston.

Certainly Eastern is a smaller and less reputable basketball school than the one’s that Bil’s brothers Duany and Queth went to, considering they went to Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse respectively, but the writer seemed to miss the boat on Charleston and the atmosphere here.

While Wertheim pointed out that there had been obvious and somewhat narrow minded attempts at humor by the “hairsprays on SportsCenter,” who poked fun at the Duany’s names just because they were a little different, he still couldn’t help but take the same tone of humor just a paragraph later when describing Charleston.

Wertheim noted that Charleston was “sleepy” and a place “where the radio station provides hourly updates on soybean prices and the biggest store in town is called Rural King.”

No doubt these are facets of Charleston, even though Rural King isn’t the largest store in town, but the way they were written about smacked of tastelessness and a bit of sarcasm.

Why, in a story that pinpointed just how successful a family has been at raising its children and instilling the values that it cherishes the most, does a writer have to sidetrack and needle a small Midwestern town?

As Bil points out at the end of the article, Charleston has given him a chance, and he has taken advantage of that opportunity over the course of his first season with the Panther basketball squad.

I doubt that Bil listens to the soybean reports or even shops at Rural King. So there doesn’t seem to be any point to use this needless humor that the writer himself decreed as a negative aspect of journalism from various shows like SportsCenter.

Granted Charleston is a different kind of college town, especially when compared to the campuses that grace the towns of Madison, Wisc. or Syracuse, N. Y. But that kind of small town atmosphere that is seen at Eastern, also breeds familiarity, which in many people’s cases at Eastern never breeds contempt. In fact, it usually breeds the opposite.

Take a look around this campus and, unlike the larger campuses where athletes may rarely be seen, ours at Eastern are not only seen but they also take the time to get to know many of the students. I’ve noticed that a few still take notice when a lowly writer, who once covered the basketball team, walks by and acknowledges them around campus.

That facet of small town American wasn’t really pointed out when Wertheim took the time, or lack there of, to lay down his feelings about Charleston in one paragraph towards the end of his article.