On Sunday night, the latest installment of SEC Storied aired. It was a fifty-minute ode to the most legendary figure in Mizzou sports, Norm Stewart (let's forget for a moment that Norm never played or coached a game in the Southeastern Conference, but hey, it's nice of the league to make Mizzou feel at home, so you know, whatever).

The film was about what you'd expect. It was a surface level lovefest for the Stormin' One made for a crowd that probably doesn't know all that much about him. And that's fine. Missouri fans watched and probably enjoyed a trip down memory lane to when they had one of the country's best basketball programs and non-Missouri fans learned a little bit about this school's biggest legend.

But to those of us who had a front row seat to Norm's career (and if you're reading this, or pretty much everything I ever wrote, you're probably in that group), there is so much more to the man than you can put in an hour of television.

Norm is the reason I'm doing this job. Norm is the reason--like many of you probably--that I'm a sports fan.

I grew up when Missouri was a basketball school. There wasn't a discussion. Before and since, football has taken the place atop the mantle, but not from the early 1980's to the late 1990's (also known as the wandering in the desert years of Mizzou football), which were my formative years as a fan.

I don't remember Stipo and Sundvold. I was only six when they won the last of their four straight Big Eight titles. My Norm fandom started a few years later, right about the time a kid named Derrick Chievous came to Columbia from New York City. If somebody asked me to build a statue somewhere on campus, it would have a Band-aid.

Norm brought the best player I've ever seen in person to Missouri in Anthony Peeler. He coached the best Missouri team I've ever seen in 1993-94. He won 732 games and and eight Big Eight championships (Missouri, incidentally, has not won a regular season championsip in any of the leagues in which it has played since--oh, by the way, Norm also played on one of the two Missouri teams to ever win a national championship). Yeah, he never made the Final Four, but the accomplishments and the numbers alone made Norm a Hall of Famer.

But Norm was so much more than the accomplishments for Mizzou fans. He isn't on the Mount Rushmore of Mizzou sports. He is the Mount Rushmore of Mizzou sports. There's Norm and then you can fight amongst yourselves about the three guys (or girls) who should be carved into the rock below him.

When it came time to choose a college, I'm not going to tell you I chose Missouri because of Norm Stewart. But I'm not going to tell you it wasn't a factor. The idea of being able to go to Mizzou basketball games for four years was a draw.

Having gone into journalism, I ended up having the chance to cover Norm for a couple of years in college. This was not something that came without some nerves. Because of the J-school, Mizzou students get a chance to work right alongside the "real" media while they're in the midst of trial by fire. Covering Norm, now that'll teach you some lessons.

One of the very first assignments I had as a J-school student was to run the camera while my boss interviewed Norm at media day (back then, the local TV stations got one-on-one interviews with the head coach every week--all of them! The horror!). Anyway, this was back when we used a 20-pound camera attached to what was more or less a VCR to shoot video. They ran on batteries that would quit at any time and you always carried at least three of them because you had no clue when they'd quit working.

About ten seconds into Norm's answer to the first question of our interview, my battery dies. I quietly switched for another one. Ten seconds into question number two, that one died too. Same with number three. Now I'm out of bullets.

So I'm sitting here, a 20-year-old kid, in front of a man who I've come to think of as a legend. And the only thing I can think is, "Well, I'd rather have my boss yell at me when he finds out we don't have this interview than have Norm do it now." So I sat there and pretended I was recording the interview. Fortunately Norm never asked why the little red light wasn't on. Incidentally, when I told my boss what happened and that we had maybe 60 seconds of usable sound we could edit together, he told me I did the right thing not stopping the interview.

I don't remember the first time I had the balls to ask Norm a question. But I know it took me a few games. Stewart had no shame in baptizing a member of the student media. I had no intentions of giving him that chance before he even knew who I was.

The SEC Storied episode portrayed Norm as a nice old man, a guy who pets puppy dogs and kisses babies and is head over heels in love with his wife after more than 50 years of marriage. And these days, that's probably a pretty accurate portrait. But that wasn't the Norm I was around. The guy I saw was Stormin' Norman. He would rave at the officials, the media, and just about anybody else who might be around if they were keeping him from winning a game (his players and assitant coaches were certainly not exempt from these rants from the stories I've heard over the years).

Norm was a Missourian. Norm was us. It wasn't just that he went to Mizzou, but that was part of it. He was from small-town Missouri. He was a Midwest guy. He never seemed to want to be anywhere else. He even told us how much he hated Kansas all the time. And he beat them a decent amount too. If he'd ever have run for governor, he'd have won in a landslide without spending a penny on his campaign.

In March of 1999, I'd moved to South Dakota for work. Missouri got sent to the West Regional of the NCAA Tournament (don't they always) and was matched against New Mexico in Denver. I drove down to meet my parents and watched the game in the stands with my mom. I didn't know it at the time (and neither did anybody else), but I was watching the last game Norm Stewart would ever coach. Of all the sporting events I look back on and am glad I have seen, that one's right up there on the list.

The documentary last weekend introduced Norm to a lot of people who probably didn't know much about him. For those of us who do, it gave us a chance to remember why we loved him. He was the best Missouri's ever had. Still is. And for a lot of us, always will be.