“Jerome,” Evans said as calmly as he could, “this team doesn’t press.”
He turned to Smith. “Charlie, it doesn’t matter if Perdue scores his 25. What matters is that he doesn’t score them from the foul line. You know we need you in the game.”
Smith nodded. Pitt had been assigned to the Nebraska women’s locker room, which was not only too small but had all sorts of inspirational sayings on the walls. There was even one from Bob Knight: “The will to win has always been overrated as a means of doing so. The will to prepare and the ability to execute are of far greater importance.”
Evans had nothing quite so deep to tell his players. “Let’s get [win] number twenty-five and let’s get to Detroit so Demetrius [Gore] can play at home. We win a couple more and Charlie and Demetrius can go out of here as part of the best Pitt team in history.”
They started superbly, leading 25–14 after twelve minutes. Everyone’s shots fell. No one was tight. A blowout seemed possible.
But it didn’t happen. Pitt went cold. Vanderbilt put together a 12–2 run and cut the lead to 27–26. At halftime, it was 34—all. Evans took his time before saying anything to his team. When he started, he was firm but quiet.
“It’s always the same shit with you guys. You don’t know how to put people away. Charlie, you pull up and shoot when everyone else is expecting you to pass. There’s no one to rebound and we blow a possession. You can’t do that at this level! This time when you build the lead up, keep going inside and don’t start rushing.”
There would be one change. Freshman Bobby Martin had done well against Perdue. He would start on him in the second half in place of Jason Matthews as Evans went to a bigger lineup.
There would be no big leads in the second half. Pitt led briefly, 48–43, but Vandy immediately ran off eight straight points to lead 51–48. It became a game where every possession seemed like life-and-death.
Vanderbilt led 61–57 with 6:20 to go but didn’t score for almost six minutes. By that time, Pitt led by three, thanks largely to Darelle Porter, who coolly hit a three-pointer to put Pitt up 62–61 and then hit a jumper to make it 64–61. Eric Reid broke the Vandy drought with a short jumper that made it 64–63 with 1:40 left. Pitt ran the clock down, then ran a clear-out for Gore. Wide open from fifteen feet, Gore missed. But Lane came down with the rebound. Pitt ran the clock all the way to seventeen seconds before Smith was fouled going to the basket.
He hit the first shot to make it 65–63, but missed the second. This time, Lane pulled the ball out of Perdue’s hands. It squirted free and went right to Smith. He was fouled immediately but Vanderbilt wasn’t over the limit, so Pitt inbounded rather than going to the line. Matthews was fouled right away. Once again, one of the freshmen came through. Matthews hit both shots and with twelve seconds to go it was 67–63.
Vandy had scored two points in 6:28. Now though, desperate, Barry Goheen threw in a three-pointer from the corner to make it 67–66. Vandy called time with five seconds left. Pitt ran a lob play on the inbounds, getting the ball to Smith. He grabbed the pass and was instantly fouled by Perdue. There were four ticks left.
That was Perdue’s fifth foul. Dejectedly, he walked to the bench, certain his career was over. “Don’t five up yet,” Coach C. M. Newton whispered. “You may have more basketball left to play.”
That hardly seemed likely when Smith hit both free throws to make it 69–66. Perhaps, here, Evans should have called time to make certain his team knew what he wanted on defense. The clock was stopped anyway, so why not be sure? Evans thought that Porter understood what to do: Foul Goheen right away if he got the ball. That would keep him from having any chance to shoot a tying three-pointer.
Goheen took the inbounds pass and streaked upcourt. Porter never fouled. Goheen bobbled the ball for a moment, got it back and, as the buzzer was about to sound, went up from twenty-three feet. Porter was in his face, but it was too late, he should have been there earlier. As the buzzer was sounding, Goheen’s shot swished cleanly. It was 69–69. Overtime.
That shot, for all intents and purposes, ended Pitt’s season. The Panthers were a stricken team in overtime. Smith missed a wide-open Lane underneath and took a bad shot on the first possession. Frank Kornet, who had one field goal in regulation, promptly hit to make it 71–69. Smith then missed a dunk and grabbed the rim for a technical in the process. Goheen hit the technical and Eric Booker hit a three-pointer to make it 75–69. Pitt never got even again. The final was 80–74.
Evans didn’t have much to say in the aftermath. He started to get on Smith, then realized it was pointless. “Jerome was wide open, Charlie,” he said.
“Wide open, man,” Lane added.
Smith was fighting tears. “My fault,” he said.
“No, it wasn’t,” Evans said. “It was all of us. I don’t want anyone getting on Darelle for not fouling [Goheen] because his shooting got us back in the game. All you freshmen did a great job. You had a hell of a year. Charlie, Demetrius, I wish you were coming back next year.”
Evans left the building soon after that. He would fly to California the next day. What he didn’t know, when he left, was that Smith and Gore, stunned and hurt by the sudden end of their careers, had made him the scapegoat, claiming he had not told anyone to foul on the last play of regulation. “Anyone who knows basketball knows whose fault this was,” Gore said.
He was wrong. No one person was at fault. As Evans had said, it was everyone. Pitt just hadn’t been able to rise to the level needed at this stage of the tournament. Evans’s concern about this team in January had been correct. “You don’t have the mentality to be great,” he told his players.
Prophetic words.
Larry Brown watched the end of the Pitt–Vanderbilt game in amazement. First, N.C. State had been upset a round before Kansas would have played them. Now, Pitt had been beaten one round before it would have played the Jayhawks. “You know,” he told Ed Manning, “we couldn’t have matched up with Pitt. No way.”
Maybe all the bad luck of the winter was becoming good luck in the spring. There was still the not-so-small matter of beating Murray State that day. Brown, of course, was nervous. Danny Manning wasn’t. He sensed that his team was about to go on a roll. The loss in the Big Eight Tournament had been deceiving because Kevin Pritchard, their point guard, had sat out the game with a bad ankle. Pritchard was healthy now.
Still, there was nothing easy about Murray State. The Racers had a tough-to-guard point guard in Don Mann and a pure scorer in Jeff Martin. The Jayhawks came out flying, taking a 25–13 early lead. But Murray came back to trail just 28–23 at half. The second half was a struggle for twenty minutes. Paul King put Murray up for the first time, 50–48 with 6:50 left. Pritchard answered with a three-pointer. The lead seesawed. A drive by Mann and a follow by Martin put Murray up 56–53 with 3:55 left. Brown called time.
Every team that wins a national championship must survive this type of game. Somewhere along the line an underdog shows up, plays loose from start to finish and pushes the favorite to the limit. If you survive, good things often follow. If not …
Manning cut the lead to 56–55, rebounding his own miss. Mann missed a jumper, then Newton hit a twisting jumper to put KU up by one with 2:10 left. They traded misses until Martin hit two free throws to give Murray State a 58–57 lead with fifty-one seconds to go.
Now came the most important possession of Manning’s career. A miss here and it might all be over. The thought never occurred to him. “I just never thought we were going to lose,” he said later. “We’d all been through so much together this just seemed like something else we had to take care of. I really thought we would get it done.”
It was not easy. Pritchard got the ball to Manning to the right of the basket and he calmly tossed a baby hook in with forty seconds left. Kansas was up 59–58. But now Murray would get the last shot. The Racers called time with twenty-four seconds left. Their plan was simple: clear out and let Mann penetrate.
He did
just that. With Scooter Barry—playing because Pritchard’s ankle was still tender—guarding him, Mann drove right, popped into the clear and was about to toss a scoop shot up with no one near him when, suddenly, Manning slipped around a screen and jumped. He didn’t get to the ball. To make sure there was no contact, he only jumped toward Mann, not at him.
But Mann, seeing Manning flying at him, had to adjust his shot. The ball rolled around the rim—and off. Manning grabbed the rebound and was immediately fouled. Only one second was left. The Jayhawks were celebrating as Manning went to the line. “Hey,” Manning commanded sternly, “calm down. It’s not over yet.”
They calmed down. But it was over. Manning made both shots, then intercepted the last Murray inbounds pass. Kansas had survived, 61–58. In the last forty seconds, Manning had hit the winning basket, helped out on the crucial defensive play, grabbed the rebound, made the free throws, and intercepted the final pass.
Remarkably, Kansas was in the final sixteen. “That’s not my goal,” Manning said softly. “I’ve been to the final sixteen before. There’s still more to do.”
18
AND THEN THERE WERE SIXTEEN
March 24 … Birmingham, Alabama
The term Sweet Sixteen is a relatively new one in the sports vernacular, coined partly to grant glory to more teams at the end of each college basketball season, but also used in recognition of the fact that reaching the NCAA round of sixteen is not nearly as easy as it once was.
Until the 1975 expansion of the tournament, seven conference champions were seeded right into the round of sixteen without having to play a game. Nowadays, with sixty-four teams in the field, it takes two victories to reach the sixteens. Often getting those two victories is not so easy.
The 1988 tournament was a perfect example of how difficult it is. None of the 1987 Final Four made it back as far as the sixteens. Providence didn’t make the tournament: Indiana was gone in round one; Syracuse and Nevada–Las Vegas were gone in round two. In fact, only five of the Sweet Sixteen of 1987 made it back in 1988: North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Duke. To go one step further, only three of those five—North Carolina, Kansas, and Duke—had gotten to this point three years running.
And, of those three only North Carolina, with a remarkable eight-year string, had been this far more than three straight times. Looking at that last stat, one might conclude that Dean Smith was in the most successful coaching slump in history.
So, where once there had been just a Final Four there was now also a Great Eight and a Sweet Sixteen. No doubt the Thrilling Thirty-two and Special Sixty-four aren’t far behind. Nonetheless, to be among the last sixteen in a race that 291 started is no small achievement.
Four of the Sweet Sixteen were genuine surprises. Only in the West, where Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, and North Carolina had all advanced with ease, was there no need for any glass-slipper purchases.
In the East, there were two Cinderella types, Richmond and Rhode Island. The Spiders had followed up their “nonupset” of Indiana by beating Georgia Tech. In a way, this victory was even more surprising because the Yellow Jackets had lost to the Spiders in the regular season. But Richmond played another near-perfect game and sent Bobby Cremins home with his third straight NCAA disappointment. (That loss and a couple of recruiting defeats sent Cremins on a junior-college shopping spree. By April, he’d signed three JC transfers—and had basketball people wondering what direction the one-time boy wonder was heading in with his program.)
Rhode Island, after beating Missouri, had turned around and shocked Syracuse, building a big first-half lead, then hanging on for dear life. Syracuse’s season ended when Earl Duncan’s three-point shot, which would have tied the game, spun out at the buzzer. The four-year battle between Boeheim and center Rony Seikaly had finally ended. Each was delighted to be rid of the other, even though the relationship had been beneficial to both. Two weeks after his shot failed to drop, Earl Duncan announced he was dropping out of Syracuse to transfer.
In the Midwest, the surprise entry was Vanderbilt. C. M. Newton, at fifty-eight, is someone everyone in coaching respects and almost no one outside of coaching has ever heard of. Newton built the program at Alabama in the late 1960s and early 1970s, recruiting black players long before it was in vogue and making basketball something more than filler time between football seasons in Bear Bryant country.
He had now done a similar rebuilding job at Vanderbilt, taking high school players wanted by few other coaches and making them into standout college players. “C. M. hasn’t got any high school All-Americans on that team,” Don DeVoe commented, “but they sure play like they are.” Now they had played their way into the Sweet Sixteen.
And then there was Villanova. The Wildcats, to the amazement of everyone but themselves, were in Birmingham along with the powerhouses: Oklahoma, Louisville, and their round-of-sixteen opponent, Kentucky. Their 66–63 victory over Illinois in the Thrilling Thirty-two was, in many ways, a microcosm of their season. Realistically, there was no way to pull this one off. But they found a way.
This was not your average upset. Late in the first half, Doug West went down hard, hit his head and suffered a concussion. It was not a serious go-to-the-hospital concussion but it was apparent, after West tried to come back in the second half, that he was woozy and couldn’t play. With West, beating Illinois would have been a major undertaking. Without him, it looked impossible.
This, of course, is where Pat Enright comes in. If anyone specialized in the impossible, it was Enright. His presence on the team was impossible to begin with—he had been cut twice and graduated once—but there he was. When West went down, Enright knew he was going to play more than just a run-in, run-out role. His reaction? Was he cool, ready to go, just dying for his chance?
“I was scared to death,” he said. “I sat there and looked around and there were seventeen thousand people in the place [including his parents and brother] and now I’m going to play a role, some kind of role in this game. I thought to myself, ‘Oh God, Pat, what have you gotten yourself into now?’ ”
But when the time came and Enright was in the game, his mind went blank. The crowd, the situation, the quality of the opponent, all went out of his head. The Wildcats were rallying from 14 points down, Illinois was missing free throws all over the place (the Illini only made 10 of 23 for the game), and Enright was out there instead of their best shooter when his team had to have points—and quickly.
He took one shot and missed badly. “Concentrate, stupid!” he told himself. Fear was replaced by anger—with himself. Mark Plansky and Tom Greis were leading the rally, but they needed help. A Plansky bucket cut the Illinois lead to 61–59 with a minute to go. The Illini missed at the other end and here came the Wildcats. The ball swung to Enright and this time he just did what he had been doing for years in practice, alone in his yard in the summer, on the schoolyard: He caught the ball, squared up and shot from outside the three-point line. Swish! Villanova led 62–61 with thirty seconds left. But Illinois came right back and scored to lead 63–62.
This time, the Wildcats went into the other corner to Plansky. He head-faked and drew a foul with four seconds left. “I knew Mark would make at least one,” Enright said. “But I was scared if he only made one and we went into overtime we’d be in trouble with me in and Doug not in. I was praying he’d make ’em both.”
Plansky made ’em both. Another Illinois miss, one last foul and, amazingly, Villanova, down 14 with less than four minutes left, was in the Sweet Sixteen. “All the years I’ve watched and coached basketball, that was as fine an effort as I’ve ever seen,” Massimino said, drained but overjoyed. “I told the kids they had to earn this and today they certainly did.”
Later, when he looked back and thought about Enright’s role in the victory, Massimino just shook his head and said, “Can you believe that little schmuck is a hero?”
Kentucky was next. Wildcats versus Wildcats. This was exactly the kind of matchup Massimino craved. Not
only was his team an underdog, it was facing a team so arrogant it did not believe it could lose. One of the first questions Massimino faced in Birmingham was, “How does it feel to have the chance to play a school with Kentucky’s great tradition?”
Massimino’s answer was brief: “We’re not exactly chopped liver.”
To Kentucky and its fans, that is about what Villanova was. The local papers were full of stories wondering whether Kentucky would play Oklahoma or Louisville in the regional final.
In truth, Kentucky was not a great team. It had won a close race for the Southeastern Conference title in a year when the SEC was not nearly as strong as it had been in recent years. The Wildcats were talented—they always are—but they weren’t overwhelming. The back-court was superb, with underrated senior Ed Davender and The Boy King, Rex Chapman. But Rob Lock was hardly frightening at center. Winston Bennett was solid and experienced but not scary at power forward. And Eric Manuel was a major talent, but still only a freshman. The bench was good but Coach Eddie Sutton hadn’t used it all that much during the year.
Villanova’s coaches looked at all the tapes, then showed them to the players. By Wednesday everyone was in agreement. “We play our game,” Enright said, “we definitely beat these guys.”
The coaches felt the same way. Oklahoma scared the hell out of them, but Kentucky didn’t. Steve Lappas, who had been assigned to look at the Oklahoma tapes, kept walking out of his office groaning after watching the Sooners. “If we beat them,” he told John Olive, “it’s a bigger upset than when we beat Georgetown in ’85. They’re at least as talented—and now there’s a shot clock and a three-point line.”
Olive understood. “Lapp, we need to beat them just once. If we played them a hundred times could we beat them once?”
Lappas thought for a moment. “Maybe” was the best he could finally come up with.
A Season Inside Page 48