As Good As It Gets

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Ask any college basketball fan to list the greatest games of all time, and there are certain games that any such list is bound to include:

• The 1966 NCAA Tournament title game, in which all–black Texas Western upset favored powerhouse Kentucky.


• The 1979 title game, in which Larry Bird of Indiana State and Magic Johnson of Michigan State gave NBA fans a preview of coming attractions.


• The 1983 title game, in which Jim Valvano's North Carolina State team upset the heavily favored Houston Cougars of Phi Slamma Jamma fame.


• The 1985 title game, in which lightly regarded Villanova shocked Georgetown.

Clearly, many of the memorable games have been the ones in which championships were on the line, although there have been some truly great games played when a title was not at stake ...

... Such as the night in January 1968 when second–ranked Houston defeated top–ranked and defending national champion UCLA in the first college game ever televised nationally in prime time. Prior to that game, UCLA had won 47 consecutive games.

It was called the Game of the Century, and it is widely remembered as the precursor to the March Madness that millions celebrate every year.

And every college basketball fan will tell you that he has certain memories that are special to him — but not necessarily to others.

One of my most cherished memories from my college days was the afternoon when my alma mater, the University of Arkansas, turned back defending champion Louisville with a half–court buzzer shot.

There were so many incredible finishes on that day, wrote Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated recently, that March 14, 1981, was the day that transformed the NCAA Tournament to March Madness.

Or, at least, it was the day when that transformation began.

That may be so.

But, if there was a game that really cemented the tournament's popular image of March Madness, I think it had to be the East Regional final that was played between Duke and Kentucky on this day 20 years ago.

Kentucky, of course, is one of college basketball's elite programs, along with UCLA, North Carolina, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan State, Louisville ...

... and Duke, which may or may not have qualified as an elite program in 1992. Mike Krzyzewski had led the Blue Devils to the national title the year before, but that was Duke's first.

Duke was, however, making its fifth straight appearance in the Elite Eight when it faced Kentucky 20 years ago today so Coach K clearly had established a pattern of success — but he had not yet won the four national titles that currently have him tied with the legendary Adolph Rupp for second place in that category.

Coach K won't get to add to that tally this year, but on this day 20 years ago, he was about to return to the Final Four for the fifth straight year.

Both Duke and Kentucky cruised to their rendezvous in Philadelphia. Only once — in Kentucky's second–round clash with Iowa State — was victory achieved by fewer than 10 points.

In other words, nothing that had happened in the earlier rounds could have prepared the partisans from either side for what they were about to witness.

Duke and Kentucky had to play an overtime period to decide their duel — and, even then, it came down to a last–second shot by Christian Laettner.

There were five lead changes in the final 30 seconds. The teams combined to make nearly two–thirds of their shots in the second half and the overtime period. And Laettner's shot still makes every important college basketball highlight reel, just as Kirk Gibson's World Series homer and Dwight Clark's end zone catch always make the highlight reels in their sports.

Duke went on to successfully defend its national title against Michigan after a nail–biter of a semifinal against Indiana.

Kentucky would scale the championship heights again, but, as Alex Wolff writes in Sports Illustrated, the wound is still raw.

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"Even today, 20 years after what's widely considered the greatest college game ever played, Kentucky loyalists regard the Blue Devils' 104–103 overtime victory ... as having touched off a collective psychotic break."

Alex Wolff

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I almost missed it.

It was a Saturday. The game, as I recall, was scheduled to begin in mid–afternoon, and it so happened that a family friend was getting married that day, too.

The wedding was to take place here in Dallas. I lived in Denton, which is roughly 40 miles north of here. Through the ceremony and the reception, I kept an eye on the clock — and I finally managed to leave just before tipoff.

I listened to the first half on the radio and was home in time to see most of the second half.

Most, if not all, of the Kentucky fans who watched probably wish they hadn't seen it. But, if you are a fan of a team, you are going to feel compelled to watch its games, especially the ones in the postseason.

Fans of most teams know there is always the possibility that the game they watch will end in defeat, but fans of certain teams have been conditioned by past success to expect to win, even if the oddsmakers disagree.

For such fans, any defeat — but especially one like the one that was handed to Kentucky 20 years ago today — is awfully difficult to choke down.

And, in spite of subsequent successes, Wildcat fans still struggle with it, wincing at the bitter aftertaste.

Wolff observes that the author of a new book about the game has been told by Kentucky fans that they won't buy the book because Laettner's image is on the cover.

And even the passage of two decades has not been enough time to permit them to see that picture on their coffee tables without remembering in vivid detail the pain his fallaway jumper brought them.

A Champ of a Different Color

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It is almost a cliche now to think of basketball as primarily a black sport.

That sounds racist, I know, but it is simply a statement of fact.

It is a recognition of the almost total transformation that basketball has experienced in the last half century, a transformation that may well have begun 45 years ago tonight when Texas Western University (now the University of Texas at El Paso), with an all–black starting lineup, won the national basketball championship over perennial contender Kentucky.

No other team, no individual coach or player has had the lasting influence on college basketball that that team had.

Black athletes were not new in America in 1966. They had been participating in professional sports for many years, and most schools outside the South had black players on their rosters, but until 45 years ago tonight, no team in any sport had fielded an all–black starting lineup in a championship game.

On that night in College Park, Md., Kentucky was making its fifth appearance in an NCAA final. The Wildcats had never lost an NCAA title game before.

The Miners of Texas Western, meanwhile, had never been in a championship game, and they were widely expected to lose that one. Many people acknowledged that Texas Western was good, but it was the first college in the South to integrate its athletic programs.

The Miners' coach, Don Haskins, made a point of recruiting black players — a fact that contributed to his inductions into both the Basketball Hall of Fame (1997) and the College Basketbal Hall of Fame (2006).

It was admired in the mid–1960s, too, but, in spite of ample evidence of black competence in all other endeavors, white athletes were still widely regarded as superior by most Southerners.

Black athletes were the great untapped natural resource in the South, but few people in the region realized the impact they would have on all sports. Even among more enlightened observers, there was a prevailing belief that an all–black lineup simply couldn't compete with an all–white lineup.

Nevertheless, the Miners won with an all–black starting lineup.

It is interesting, now, to look in the rearview mirror and see what people are saying about that time in history, that night and that team.

I was not yet old enough to be in elementary school — and my family did not own a TV set at the time — so I have no memory of it. But things were clearly changing in the South.

In my little hometown in Arkansas, for instance, segregated schooling was coming to an end that spring. Generations before me had gone through a segregated school system, but I never knew a time when blacks and whites did not attend school together.

March 19, 1966 "might just have been another day for millions upon millions," Bill Knight of the El Paso Times observes.

(That is a particularly intriguing comment for me because I mentioned this anniversary to my father at dinner the other night — but, although he is old enough to remember that night and my parents were passionate advocates of civil rights, he doesn't remember Texas Western's victory.)

"But, for the world of college basketball, it is a landmark," Knight writes. "For a basketball team, a band of brothers, it was the moment of a lifetime. And, for the city of El Paso, that day did, does and always will loom larger than the beautiful blue desert sky, will always cast a warm welcoming shadow grander than the Franklin Mountains over the city."

John Wallingford of the Tacoma (Wash.) News Tribune recalls that Texas Western came to Seattle two weeks before the championship game to play Seattle University in the regular–season finale. The undefeated Miners were ranked #2 in the nation and were assumed to be next in line for the top spot following Kentucky's loss to Tennessee earlier in the day.

But Seattle ended up handing the Miners their only loss of the season.

Hollywood didn't exactly give an honest portrayal of that "pothole" in its 2006 "Glory Road" movie retelling of Texas Western's triumph, Wallingford wrote.

That may be so, but the fact also remains that, with the Miners' victory 45 years ago today, "the complexion of the game changed for good," writes Wallingford. Whether you take a few modest liberties in telling that story (as "Miracle" did in its dramatization of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team) doesn't change the bottom line or its inspirational quality.

In the Christian Science Monitor, Geoff Johnson and Rex Nelles have called the Miners' victory one of the NCAA's top 10 Cinderella stories of all time.

I guess you could call it a "statement game" — before anyone really knew what one was.

When they met the Wildcats 45 years ago tonight, University of Maryland junior Gary Williams was there, and he remembered that Kentucky fans treated the Miners "as if it was beneath their team to even play the Texas Western guys," wrote John Feinstein in the Washington Post when Haskins died in 2008.

Feinstein also wrote that Williams remembered that, after the game, he heard "Kentucky fans saying to one another, 'We need to get some of them.' It wasn't long afterwards that everyone began to recruit them."

The game that was played 45 years ago tonight changed everything about college basketball, Feinstein observed. "Basketball people now refer to Texas Western–Kentucky as the Brown v. Board of Education of college basketball."

I suppose it is appropriate that this 45th anniversary occurs during an NCAA Tournament that will crown its champion in the Lone Star State.

Other Texas schools have been in the Final Four, but Texas Western remains the only one to win a national championship.

And, other than a couple of U.S. Olympic teams, it is the only team enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame.