The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  That included those sitting on the team benches since they were below court level. A coach’s reward for getting his team to the Final Four became a little stool he was given so he could sit at court level and not have to look up at the action like everyone else.

  But this was 1983, and the Pit, as the University of New Mexico’s basketball arena was fondly called by everyone, was one of college basketball’s legendary locales. The building seated 17,327, and the court was located well below street level—although street level in Albuquerque is 5,312 feet above sea level. To get to the court, teams walked down a steep ramp into a cauldron of noise. Then, at halftime, they had to walk back up the ramp to get to the locker rooms. That alone gave New Mexico a home-court advantage. When visitors walked into their locker room they were greeted by signs warning them of the hazards of playing in thin air.

  “Welcome,” the signs all said, “to the Legendary Pit.”

  For one week, Valvano made the Pit—its actual name was University Arena but no one called it that—his home. By Friday night, he was sick, running a fever but undeterred. He had won a dance contest one night and talked repeatedly about how fortunate the Wolfpack was just to be playing and, wow, beating Georgia would be hard enough, but Houston or Louisville?…Gosh.

  As it turned out, Georgia’s run was done. The Bulldogs, having upset both St. John’s and North Carolina the previous weekend in Syracuse, were just happy to be in Albuquerque. State, now very much on Valvano’s “divine mission,” won the opening semifinal with relative ease, 67–60. That set up the feature attraction: Phi Slama Jama against the Doctors of Dunk.

  Houston had emerged as a truly great team during the regular season. The Cougars were led by Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, both future NBA Hall of Famers, and guard Michael Young, who was their leading scorer and also a future first-round draft pick. They were deep, they were experienced, and they had dominated opponents for most of the season. They had beaten a good Villanova team, 89–71, in the Midwest Region final and arrived in Albuquerque with a 30–1 record and a 25-game winning streak.

  They had been dubbed Phi Slama Jama in January by Thomas Bonk, then the basketball writer for The Houston Post. Bonk called them “The Tallest Fraternity in Texas” in giving them their name. Although Phi Slama Jama remains an iconic nickname to this day—it even has its own Wikipedia page—and Houston made millions of dollars selling Phi Slama Jama gear, Bonk didn’t get a nickel out of his creation.

  “They gave me a jacket,” he said. “With the logo on it.”

  Louisville also played consistently above the rim. The Cardinals had won the national championship in 1980, and Denny Crum, who had once been John Wooden’s top assistant at UCLA, consistently recruited top players to Kentucky’s “other” basketball program. Louisville was in its fourth Final Four in Crum’s twelve seasons as coach and, perhaps even more important, had beaten Kentucky in overtime in the Mideast Region final.

  Kentucky had refused to schedule Louisville for more than twenty years, and the chance to play and beat the Wildcats in the NCAA Tournament meant almost as much to Louisville people as winning the national title had meant three years earlier.

  For two hours, the two teams flew up and down the court, making one spectacular play after another. Houston finally wore Louisville down and pulled away in the final minutes for a 94–81 win that would have left everyone in the building breathless even if they weren’t a mile above sea level. In all, Houston had 14 dunks in the game, including 8 in a row during one breathtaking stretch in the second half when they Phi Slama Jammed the game away.

  Roger Valdiserri, Notre Dame’s associate athletic director, who had worked as a volunteer public relations assistant at the Final Four for more than twenty years, summed the game up best: “Welcome,” he said, “to basketball in the twenty-first century.”

  There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Houston’s performance had been the climax of the basketball season. Just as N.C. State had been forced to go through the ritual of beating Marquette on Monday night in 1974 after its climactic double-overtime win over UCLA on Saturday, Houston would have to make its crowning official by beating—in a small twist of irony—N.C. State on Monday night, nine years later.

  On Sunday, Valvano told the media he completely understood that thinking. “If we get the ball first,” he said, “we may hold it until Tuesday. We certainly don’t want to get into an up-and-down game with them.”

  Coaches always sing the praises of an opponent (see Smith, Dean E.), but Valvano’s words that Sunday made sense to everyone. Dave Kindred, the distinguished Washington Post columnist, who had worked for years in Louisville and knew great basketball when he saw it, wrote this in his Monday column: “Trees will tap dance and elephants will drive in the Indianapolis 500 before N.C. State beats Houston on Monday.”

  No one knew it that day, but the trees were trying on their tap shoes and the elephants were warming up their engines.

  —

  “There is no way we’re not attacking this team. We’re going after them right from the start.”

  Not long after he had told the media about his plans to play keep-away, to slow the game to a walk, if not a halt, Jim Valvano told his players they were going to do no such thing. This was on Sunday afternoon, just before the Wolfpack practiced in the empty Pit. Unlike the Friday practices that were open to the media and the public, the Sunday practices were completely closed.

  “You could feel the surge of adrenaline in the room,” assistant coach Tom Abatemarco said. “All our guys believed we could compete with anyone by that point. We’d beaten Carolina twice, we’d beaten Virginia twice, we’d beaten Vegas, which was twenty-eight and two when we played them. We knew Houston was good, but Thurl Bailey wasn’t afraid of Olajuwon. Lo [Charles] and Co [McQueen] weren’t afraid of Drexler. V had a plan. At that point if V had said, ‘Fellas, we’re gonna play standing on our heads,’ the guys would have thought it was a brilliant move.

  “There was no doubt in the room. And when V said, ‘We’re going after them,’ that was exactly what everyone wanted to hear.”

  Years later, Sidney Lowe shook his head as if he could hear his coach’s voice all over again. “We already didn’t like Houston,” he said, smiling. “When we were going through our open practice on Friday, they came walking through on their way to the locker room to get ready for their practice. I remember checking them out, and they were all laughing and joking or wearing headphones. They never even looked at us, as if we didn’t matter, like we were invisible.”

  Lowe laughed. “At least that’s what we decided they were doing. When Coach V said we were going after them it was exactly what we wanted to hear. The only thing we were disappointed about was that we couldn’t go out and play them right then. I can tell you for sure we weren’t afraid of them.”

  In the end, N.C. State would dunk the ball twice in the game—once more than Phi Slama Jama. The second dunk, the one that ended the game, has been seen millions of times since that night, Charles somehow rising above everyone to pluck Whittenburg’s “pass” from the air. But the first one, by Bailey, forty seconds into the game, was probably just as important.

  “It was a message,” Whittenburg said. “Not so much to them but to us. It gave us a surge of adrenaline that put us into the game emotionally right away—took away all the jitters.”

  Valvano never forgot that play either. “Honestly, at that moment, I thought, ‘We’re gonna win,’ ” he said. “It wasn’t as if I didn’t believe we could win before that. I did—absolutely did. But when Thurl went over them all and dunked Sidney’s miss that way, I felt this surge go right through my body and I turned to Tom [Abatemarco] and said, ‘We got ’em T, we got ’em.’ ”

  The irony in that comment was never lost on Abatemarco or anyone else on the bench. Valvano and Abatemarco were like a comedy act during games, voice of doom vs. absolute voice of doom.

  “Cozell would lose the opening tip and Jim would turn to Tom
and say, ‘My god, what’s going on with that—he’s killing us,’ ” Terry Gannon, who always began the game on the bench, remembered. “Tom would say, ‘I don’t know, V, I don’t. I think he’s lost it. Maybe we should get him out.’ Remember, this was the first possession of the game.

  “Then if, say, Whitt missed his first shot, Tom would say, ‘He hasn’t got it tonight, V, we gotta get him out.’ And V would say something like, ‘Jeez, we got no chance tonight. No chance.’ Usually the score was about two to two at that point.”

  There was none of that frenetic talk on that fateful April night in Albuquerque. Everyone on the bench was too focused on every possession to let little things bother him. The Wolfpack jumped to a 6–0 lead and was up 33–25 at halftime.

  Could they possibly continue to control the game? No. State’s shots stopped falling when the second half began, and, as is almost always the case, grabbing rebounds after misses rather than inbounding the ball after makes allowed Houston to find some offensive rhythm. The Cougars began the half on a 17–2 run to take a 42–35 lead, and it looked like the game was over and the dream was dead.

  But with State clearly tiring—Valvano played six players, the starters plus Gannon, the entire game, except for the one minute Ernie Myers played—Cougars coach Guy V. Lewis decided to spread the court and kill the clock.

  It would turn out to be the most crucial mistake of his Hall of Fame coaching career.

  “It gave us life,” Valvano would say later. “It gave us a chance to catch our breath a little. And it gave us a chance to foul. If they keep playing, they’re probably going to end up with dunks for Olajuwon or Drexler because our guys were gasping a little—especially in that thin air. They were much deeper than we were. Honestly, if they don’t spread the floor, we’re probably dead. But we weren’t meant to die. We were meant to win.”

  As with all the other teams that had been in position to put the Wolfpack away, Phi Slama Jama couldn’t do it. There were more missed free throws, and suddenly Lowe and Whittenburg got their second wind, each hitting a couple of long jumpers to bring the Wolfpack back. With a little more than a minute left, Whittenburg hit again to tie the game at 52–52.

  Houston came down, presumably planning to hold the ball for a last shot. Valvano wasn’t about to let that happen. With 1:08 left, he ordered Lowe to foul freshman point guard Alvin Franklin. Naturally, Franklin missed the front end of the one-and-one. State brought the ball into the frontcourt and called time to set up for a last shot.

  “By then we were all so dialed in to what we were doing we didn’t even have to think very much,” Gannon remembered. “We were on offense so I automatically went to the scorer’s table to check in for Cozell without even checking with the coaches. That was what we’d done the whole run at the end of a close game: Co in on defense, me in on offense.”

  The players knew what Valvano wanted on the final possession: the ball in Lowe’s hands once the clock was under ten seconds. Lowe would penetrate and create either for himself or, more likely, for Whittenburg or Gannon, flashing open on a wing when someone collapsed to help on Lowe. Charles and Bailey would try to position themselves underneath for a potential offensive rebound or tip-in, like the one Bailey had gotten to win the UNLV game.

  As they came out of the huddle with the national championship on the line, they all caught themselves thinking about the moment.

  “I wanted the shot,” Whittenburg said. “I always had faith in myself in moments like that. I was ready for it.”

  Gannon, only a sophomore, wasn’t so sure. “I have to admit I thought about Fred Brown,” he said. “I said, ‘Please, God, don’t let me be Fred Brown.’ ”

  Brown had been the Georgetown guard who, a year earlier, had mistaken James Worthy for a Georgetown teammate and thrown him the ball in the final seconds of the championship game with the Hoyas trailing North Carolina, 63–62.

  It was then that Guy Lewis sprang a surprise on the Wolfpack—changing his defense to a 2-3 zone, trapping if the ball went into the corner.

  “He surprised us with that,” Abatemarco said. “It was a good move, and we didn’t have a time-out left to get the guys over and call something different against the zone. We had to leave it up to Sidney to make the right decisions.”

  Lowe kept the ball moving on the perimeter as the clock melted away. But with just under ten seconds remaining, he picked up his dribble and was forced to find Bailey, who had drifted to the left corner. As soon as Bailey caught the ball, Houston trapped. Surprised and a little bit desperate, Bailey threw the ball back in the direction of the key. Whittenburg had rotated in that direction, hoping for a catch-and-shoot pass, but Houston guard Benny Anders saw the pass coming and got his hand on it. He was about a quarter step from a clean steal that might have led to a game-ending dunk at the other end.

  But he could only deflect the ball, and Whittenburg alertly chased it down near midcourt. Knowing there were no more than two seconds left, he swiveled, took one quick dribble and, from thirty-five feet, heaved the ball in the direction of the basket.

  All the Houston players had reacted to Anders’s deflection, and seeing the ball heading toward their basket, they had turned their bodies that way.

  “I thought Benny had it,” Olajuwon said years later. “I took one step and then realized that Whittenburg had it.”

  Too late. Olajuwon’s one step pulled him just far enough away from the basket that neither he nor anyone else was in position to box Lorenzo Charles out.

  As Whittenburg picked the ball up, Gannon was wide open on the right wing with his hand in the air. “I don’t think I meant it, though,” Gannon said, laughing. “I knew Whitt was going to try to shoot anyway.”

  Whitt shot. Or “passed.”

  Left without a man on him because of the Anders deflection, Charles saw the ball in the air and realized it was going to come up well short of the rim. He leaped, grabbed it cleanly, and dunked it as the buzzer sounded.

  “I was just trying to get in position for a putback,” Charles said later. “Then, when I saw that the ball was short, I went up to try and get it.”

  “Think about it,” Lowe said. “If he grabs it and comes down and then goes back up, the clock runs out. But somehow he had the presence of mind and the athleticism to just grab it and dunk it in one motion. It was amazing. Except, by that point, nothing was amazing anymore.”

  On CBS, play-by-play man Gary Bender was so stunned, he said nothing for a moment, not quite sure what had happened—which was completely understandable. It was analyst Billy Packer who first understood that the clock was at zero and N.C. State had won. “They did it!” he screamed. “They did it! They won!”

  Pandemonium broke out on the court. As the Houston players stood, sat, or kneeled in complete shock, Charles was mobbed by his teammates. Valvano, not knowing how exactly to react to having his life’s dream realized at the age of thirty-seven, began running around the court looking for someone to hug.

  “Whitt was my designated hugger,” he would say later, retelling the story—joking, but not joking. “I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t find anyone, so there I was just running around in circles.”

  It may be the most iconic run to nowhere in sports history. It is replayed throughout the basketball season hundreds if not thousands of times every winter.

  It was Valvano’s run to nowhere, the ultimate moment of joy for any college basketball coach. Moments later he would do what he had fantasized about in his mind and pretended to do at the end of clinics since the day he had started coaching: he would cut down the final net.

  And then his run to nowhere would begin again.

  15

  When the North Carolina State basketball team flew into Raleigh-Durham International Airport on the night of April 5, 1983, a crowd that police estimated to be about five thousand people was waiting to greet the team. As Jim Valvano exited the plane, a local police officer was waiting for him.

  “Coach, don’t worry,�
� he said. “There’s a back exit over here where I can take you and get you out of here without fighting your way through this crowd.”

  Valvano looked at the cop as if he had lost his mind.

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “No way am I passing up all of this. I want every hug and every kiss. I want to savor this for as long as I can.”

  The cop shrugged. “Whatever you say, Coach.”

  And with that, Valvano led his players and coaches into the adoring crowd. He savored every hug and every kiss and every pat on the back and every “I love you, Coach.” And then, when he was finished, he circled back to where he had started and waded slowly through the crowd for a second time. When the bus carrying the team arrived on campus later that evening, Valvano did the same thing—this time circling back so he could reboard the bus and come out the front door for a second time.

  “He was the first guy in and the last guy out,” his brother Bob said. “He’d actually done that before. When he was a senior and Rutgers made it to the NIT semifinals, the team would bus back to campus after each game and they’d be met by the cheerleaders and the band and a lot of the students. Jimmy would jump off the bus first, go through the crowd, and then circle back and get on the bus through the emergency door so he could also be the last guy off. There was never too much love to go around for Jimmy.”

  —

  Bob Valvano is fifty-nine years old now, twelve years older than his brother was when he died in 1993. Bob was the third of the three Valvano boys, eleven years younger than Jim and fifteen years younger than Nick. “I think it’s fair to say I was something of a surprise,” he said with a laugh, sipping a cup of coffee on a cold February morning in Charlottesville, Virginia.