We Will Rise

by Steve Beaven

  Now, after nearly four years, as Brad’s college career neared its end, he had one last chance to fulfill an unspoken commitment to his adopted hometown.

  Tip-off was set for 7:00 p.m. at the Mabee Center at Oral Roberts University. It was the first night of the tournament and a turning point for college basketball. For the first time, the tournament would be televised by CBS, which had snatched rights for the event away from NBC the year before with a staggering $48 million bid for three seasons. At $16 million a year, it was 60 percent more than NBC had paid for the rights in 1981. NBC had carried the tournament for twelve years, providing the foundation for college basketball’s rapid growth in the 1980s. But it was CBS, with its deep pockets and marketing muscle, that made the tournament a major event on the sports calendar.

  The University of Evansville was one of forty-eight teams to play that weekend at eight sites, from Uniondale, New York, to Pullman, Washington. Each of the four regionals included schools that had long dominated college basketball. North Carolina, led by a skinny freshman named Michael Jordan, was the top seed in the East Regional. Kentucky was sixth in the Mideast, right behind Indiana, which had won the championship the year before. In the Midwest, Ray Meyer’s DePaul Blue Demons had captured the top seed. UE was seeded tenth in the Midwest, and Marquette was seventh. The winner of their matchup would play Missouri, which had received a bye. Norm Stewart’s Tigers finished the season 26–3. But his best player, center Steve Stipanovich, injured his right ankle before the tournament, and his status for the second round was uncertain. So, in a perfect world, the Aces would beat Marquette and then face Missouri without its best player. What a delicious possibility: five years after Bobby Watson beat Stewart in the Mike Duff sweepstakes, UE could beat him again. Only this time, the stakes were much higher.

  The UE-Marquette game would be carried in Evansville on two radio stations and the local CBS affiliate. Aces fans all over the city gathered in bars and living rooms and basements, waiting, hoping.

  Arad McCutchan and his wife watched at a friend’s house, not far from the UE campus. McCutchan taught a math class that evening, but changed the start time from six o’clock to five so he and his students had plenty of time to get in front of a TV before tip-off. Mayor Vandeveer watched with his wife and two daughters, “a family affair,” Mrs. Vandeveer said. The elderly residents tuned in at Buckner Towers, a high-rise apartment building for seniors, and the regulars lined up at the bar at Ensor’s First and Last Chance Saloon, in nearby Boonville.

  At the University of Evansville, hundreds of students crammed into the Harper Dining Center. Harper, with its tall ceilings and wide windows, sat facing Walnut Street and the Carson Center gym, and it wasn’t usually so rowdy. The students crowded around televisions at the front of the room, one a behemoth provided by the local CBS station and the other smaller, with its antenna pointed toward the ceiling for the best reception. Students had come two hours before tip-off, prepared to celebrate. Some snuck beers in under their coats, fully prepared for a victory toast. The entire room crackled with electricity.

  Chris Weaver threw a party at the Executive Inn, the nicest hotel in Evansville, splurging on a sixty-dollar suite for a dozen friends. It had been five years since he’d met with Bobby Watson, back when Weaver was vice president of the UE student association and Watson was a young coach drumming up support for his new team. As a senior in the spring of 1978, Weaver had gotten to know Dick Walters during meetings with student leadership. Walters was intense, Weaver thought, and not as personable as Watson. But he was perceptive, and Weaver admired how Walters acknowledged the tragic circumstances that brought him to Evansville and the raw emotions that lingered, while simultaneously looking toward the next season and the season after that. Weaver didn’t begrudge the new coach’s big-city persona or his naked ambition. Walters’s arrogance was a necessity, given the Herculean task he faced. And if he got a better job after building a winner at UE, good for Walters and good for the university. After Walters’s success, the top job at the University of Evansville would be coveted by coaches all over the country.

  Weaver graduated in 1978 and stayed in Evansville, working first for the reelection campaign of US representative David Cornwell, a southern Indiana Democrat. After Cornwell lost, Weaver took a job as the executive assistant to Mayor Vandeveer. The crowd in the suite for the Marquette game included coworkers from City Hall, UE alumni, and friends—men and women, middle-aged and recently graduated. Drinks in hand, they gathered in front of the television, nearly overwhelmed by the anticipation.

  “At tip-off,” Weaver recalls, “people were either yelling and screaming in pure joy, or crying like babies.”

  I harbored great expectations that night, sitting on the floor in our living room, just two blocks from Harper Dining Center.

  I was fifteen, a freshman in high school, and no longer interested in accompanying my dad to Roberts Stadium. But to me this game was a once-in-a-lifetime event, like Halley’s Comet, when everyone gathers to take in the spectacle and then spends the next day talking about it. It was important to me that the Aces were playing on a national network, that maybe people who knew nothing about my hometown would be rooting for our basketball team that night.

  And this team, unquestionably, was ours. We’d seen Brad Leaf and Theren Bullock emerge as if from a cocoon, watching them grow from gangly freshmen to veteran cocaptains. We’d seen Steve Sherwood evolve from a cheerleading benchwarmer to a rugged lunch-bucket sub. We’d witnessed the roller coaster of Eric Harris’s career, from starter to invisible sub, and back to starter again. These were our boys, and I felt a special affinity for them. We were practically neighbors. They lived just a few blocks away. I occasionally saw them in the summer at Carson Center. Once, when I was in elementary school and shooting around in the nearly empty practice gym, Brad Leaf made a half-hearted attempt to block my shot as he walked off the court. The thrill lingered for days.

  Perhaps more than anything that night, I wanted to see the underdogs—our underdogs—prove the doubters wrong.

  My dad watched the game with me, relaxed as always in the orange recliner as I sprawled on the deep-pile carpeting only a few feet from our enormous faux-wood television console. Dad still maintained that a small school like UE couldn’t compete with national powerhouses, that truly elite players like Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan would never choose Evansville over Indiana or North Carolina.

  “I’m not a pessimist,” he’d say. “I’m a realist.”

  I had no evidence to dispute his theory. But I was a rebellious teenage smart-ass, learning to smoke ditch weed and choke down warm beer with my friends, and an Aces victory would allow me to remind him that he was wrong. That prospect appealed to me a great deal.

  But looking back now, nearly forty years later, I realize that claiming victory over my father was only one of the reasons I hoped for an Aces win. Despite the mushrooming drama of my teen years, I held on to the same unrealistic hope I’d felt four years before, as an eleven-year-old boy grateful to spend a Saturday night with my dad at Roberts Stadium.

  NINETEEN

  First Dance

  TONIGHT, IN THE LATE-WINTER twilight, the Mabee Center resembles a spaceship from an old Martian movie, saucer-shaped, having landed on a sea of blacktop here on the edge of the Oral Roberts campus. Encircled by narrow white columns that stretch from roof to ground, it appears from a distance that a gust of wind could lift the whole building up and send it spinning away over the oil fields that dot the Tulsa landscape.

  Inside, a couple hundred Aces fans have positioned themselves in a single cluster, a vocal minority in a half-empty arena. This is the first game of a doubleheader, and the NCAA parceled only 313 tickets to the University of Evansville. And anyway, the main attraction is the second game, which will include Houston, with Clyde Drexler, Hakeem Olajuwon, and the rest of their Phi Slama Jama teammates. No matter how compelling its story, Evansville remains an understudy. No one is mistaking Brad L
eaf for Clyde Drexler. And yet, the beauty of the NCAA tournament is that underdogs always have their day. The previous year, a single day produced some of the most memorable upsets in the tournament’s forty-two-year history. On March 14, 1981, tiny St. Joseph’s beat top-seeded DePaul on a layup with two seconds left. Arkansas beat defending champion Louisville on a forty-nine-foot heave at the buzzer. And Kansas State beat second-ranked Oregon State on a jumper with two seconds left. That was the day that March Madness was born.

  At the Mabee Center, as the pregame scoreboard clock ticks down to zero, UE assistant Gary Marriott assesses the Aces from the sidelines. He doesn’t like what he sees. Missed layups. Clanking jumpers. The Aces do not look confident, prepared, and eager, as Walters had promised the day before. They look intimidated. They look as if the pressure of the past four years, the enormity of the moment, and the weight of the city’s expectations have worn them down.

  Even Rick McKinstry is feeling it. Which is odd, because McKinstry played in some big games as a freshman at Clemson in 1980. That season, the Tigers made a run in the NCAA tournament that ended just shy of the Final Four, when they lost to UCLA in the West Regional Finals. McKinstry transferred from Clemson after that season because he felt limited in a college town that offered him little more than practices and games. He’s a quiet kid, majoring in business, and a member of the Midwestern City Conference all-academic team.

  “I’m not just a basketball player,” he said before the season began. “I’m a student and a social being.”

  He had to sit out a year in Evansville, but played in every game this season. At 6'6", Rick is a gifted athlete. Sometimes, though, he has to remind himself to play with Theren Bullock’s intensity because it doesn’t come naturally to him. In high school, McKinstry had forged a reputation as a great scorer, and Walters had hoped he would provide instant offense off the bench. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Rick averages less than three points a game, and he is absolutely dreadful from the free-throw line.

  At Ensor’s First and Last Chance Saloon, the walls are lined with pennants, fifty-seven to be precise. Major League Baseball. The National Football League. Colleges and universities. All donated by regulars.

  “You had to be at the game to get one,” says Junior Fisher.

  Ensor’s sits along the Southern Railway tracks smack in the middle of Boonville, northeast of Evansville. It’s a workingman’s bar, always has been, dating back to the horse-and-wagon era, when men had bloody gunfights out front. Legend has it that the saloon got its name from its proximity to the railroad tracks: it was the first and the last place a fella could get a drink, whether he’d just arrived in town or he was on his way out. These days Ensor’s is populated by coal miners, railroad workers, carpenters, and electricians. On some days, you’ll find the local gravedigger sitting at the bar. They play cards and watch sports and bullshit each other, from the middle of the day through to the end of the night. Ensor’s is owned and operated by a woman named Pinky, who serves up burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, and her own homemade potato salad. Ensor’s is only fifteen miles from the UE campus, but a world away from its close-cropped lawns, budding trees, and kids sneaking beers into Harper Dining Center. Tonight, though, the regulars at Ensor’s nurse their drinks and dine on chicken wings and french fries, awaiting the opening tip with a cautious optimism. Pinky’s son Stan is tending bar. He’s taking the Aces by a point.

  “I’d take Marquette,” says one of the regulars, “but I can’t bet against my heart.”

  They meet at center court, Dean Marquardt and Emir Turam. Could they be more different? One kid, an oversize linebacker from a Wisconsin factory town. The other, skinny as a garden snake, from a multilingual family in Istanbul. One, thick and muscular, averages less than three points a game. The other, after working his ass off the previous summer, lifting weights, shooting for hours a day, is enjoying his best season in college. Tonight, only one of them will play the greatest game of his career.

  Turam stands four inches taller. But they weigh about the same, and Marquardt has spent the entire season banging around in the paint against bigger and more talented centers than Turam faced in the Midwestern City Conference. So it’s no surprise when Marquardt controls the tip, and no surprise when Michael Wilson dumps a pass down low to Marquette forward Brian Nyenhuis for an easy basket in the lane.

  Thirty seconds in, Marquette by two.

  Larry Calton sits at the broadcast table, calling the action for Evansville fans in his sing-song baritone. Calton is always bullish on the home team, unabashed in his zeal for the Aces. But tonight, as the game progresses, his delivery swings from utter despair to hopeful hysteria, from disgust at the referees to love for Brad Leaf. He’s already expressed his irritation that tournament officials invited the Marquette pep band but didn’t make room for UE’s. He’s also prepared Aces fans for the potential that their team might play a little tight early in the game.

  But barely a minute has passed and now every sentence out of Calton’s mouth is an exclamation. It’s the first hint of things to come, the first subtle shift in momentum. Maybe the Aces aren’t nervous. Maybe Gary Marriott was wrong about UE’s warm-ups. Maybe everyone is feeling like Brad Leaf, confident and eager to show the whole country that this season was no fluke, that the University of Evansville is no sob story.

  It begins with Richie Johnson, whom the sportswriters have dubbed “Magic,” because his game resembles Earvin Johnson’s. Richie is 6'9" and a masterful passer on the break. He also possesses a decent midrange shot, and both of those skills are on display soon after the Nyenhuis basket. First, he slips into the corner along the baseline, takes a pass, and launches a fifteen-foot jumper. Good! Then he dishes to Bullock in traffic. Theren scores, draws a foul, and drains his free throw. Suddenly the Aces are in control. Now it’s the Warriors who appear tight. They try a full-court press, but it doesn’t slow UE. Each time the Aces get the ball, they run. Leaf streaks toward the basket on the left side of the floor and, as a defender closes in from the opposite side, Brad drives to the rim, twisting, and lays the ball in with his left hand.

  Marquette’s brutish front line is throwing elbows and forearms, treating Turam like a stuffed animal. But they have no answer for the balletic ferocity of Theren Bullock, all arms and legs and yet playing with purpose and precision.

  “Bullock gets it in to Leaf on the left side,” Calton says, his voice rising in anticipation. “Brad heads for the bucket, puts it up, no good. Bullock rebounds. He scores! Bullock scores, and the Evansville Purple Aces lead it 13–7! Thirteen minutes to go!”

  Pandemonium erupts at Harper Dining Center. UE students have been standing since before tip-off, their arms raised, screaming at the television. But now the clamor drowns out the play-by-play on TV. When Wallace Graves appears on the giant screen, cheering from his seat at the arena, the students are chanting.

  “We are . . . UE! We are . . . UE!”

  They are kids, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, full of unreasonable expectations, most born and raised within an hour or two of campus. They’ve been sheltered. They’re too young for cynicism. They’ve never been laid off or divorced. They don’t yet understand the disappointments of middle age, and that’s a blessing for them, because they can lose themselves in this night, they can stand and bellow at the screen until the final buzzer sounds and their throats are red and raw.

  Their synchronized shouting ends once Theren Bullock’s inspired play gives way to a stretch of Aces basketball so incomprehensible and alien that it sucks all the energy out of Harper Dining Center. This shift happens so slowly, like the steady erosion of a dusty farm field, that the damage is clear only when it’s over.

  Evansville’s 1-3-1 defense works against Doc Rivers every bit as well as it did against Darius Clemons. The Aces have sealed off the lane, leaving Rivers no path to the basket. But with four UE defenders focusing on the Warriors’ two guards, Marquardt and Nyenhuis run Bullock ragged along the base
line. Hank Raymonds has found the soft spot in the 1-3-1: big men who can shoot from the corner, before Bullock chases them down. Marquardt is hitting free throws and Nyenhuis, a 6'10" bruiser in a bowl cut who averages four points a game, is playing like Moses Malone. After Eric Harris overthrows a pass to Leaf, Nyenhuis responds with a basket, a steal, and a dunk. Marquette leads 17–15 with less than nine minutes to play in the first half.

  Now, clearly, Brad Leaf’s moment has arrived. He knows it. His teammates know it. Just get the ball in his hands and the rest will take care of itself, as it always does.

  And yet, when the Aces look to Leaf in the first half tonight, believing in him with the faith of apostles, his gift inexplicably vanishes at the moment UE needs it most. His open jumper from the right wing clangs off the rim. Seconds later, he lofts an air ball from the same spot. Since that twisting layup that gave the Aces an early lead, Leaf has missed seven straight, shots he makes every day in practice and twice a week in games.