Call it the battle of the Bowling Greens.

Two schools rich in basketball tradition -- Bowling Green State University, the home of Nate Thurmond and Howie Komives, and Western Kentucky University, alma mater of Clem Haskins and Tellis Frank -- have taken to the court some 27 times.

The score, Bowling Green fans, reads Kentucky 19, Ohio 8.

The series opened in 1944, when the Harold Anderson-coached Falcons hosted the E.A. Diddle-led Hilltoppers, with the brown and orange eking out a 52-51 win. The latest in this long series was back in 1978, when BGSU left the friendly confines of Anderson Arena to face their Kentucky counterparts in Diddle Arena, where the visitors absorbed a 70-48 loss.

In fact, the Falcon roundballers have won only once in 12 tries in the "other" Bowling Green, an 83-58 rout in the Thurmond/Komives days of the 1962-63 season -- a victory which ironically snapped a 29-game WKU home winning streak. Frustration of this magnitude is rare for a Falcon program that has won 887 games in its 71-year history, compiling a winning percentage of better than .550.

Less of a surprise, though, after a quick look at Hilltopper history: 68 season, 1185 wins, and winning percentage of better than .690.

"Western's basketball tradition is very rich," admits Fred Hensley, director of public information at WKU. However, he continues, "It's better-respected out of state than it is in, probably because of the success of the University of Kentucky and Louisville."

Competition with "name" schools such as these traditional powers is bound to hurt Western in yearly recruiting wars, but there was a time when the Hilltoppers' location helped it to win another recruiting battle -- with the Bowling Green Falcons.

The young man's name was Bob Lavoy, and he was all set to go play ball for Coach Anderson's Falcons, when a mailing mixup directed his application material to the admissions office at Western. Hensley recalls with a laugh that the WKU coaches thought to themselves, "'Hey, this guy looks pretty good.' So they went out and got him, and he came here and went on to become an All-American."

Lavoy scored 1,071 points in three seasons as a Hilltopper, and averaged 21.7 PPG in that All-American year of 1949-50 -- a year which saw the Falcons fall to the Hilltoppers twice, including a game in which the WKU squad cracked the 100-point barrier for the first time in school history.

The long traditions of the mens' programs aren't the only striking parallells between the BGSU and WKU basketball programs; both schools have also enjoyed more recent success in developing outstanding womens' programs. Fran Voll's Lady Falcons captured the attention of national pollsters by posting a 27-3 mark last season, while the Lady Hilltoppers boast a program that is traditionally a Top-10 team. They ended the 1986-87 season ranked sixth.

Perhaps the most marked difference in the programs is the quantity of fan support. Hensley explains, "When there's an athletic event going on in Bowling Green [Kentucky], that's the place to be. It's one of the community's primary social functions." The Kentucky town of 50,000 produces crowds for Hilltopper contests that average over 10,000, more than three times the average Anderson Arena crowd of recent years.