"When March Went Mad:" Fourth Excerpt

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"When March Went Mad:" Fourth Excerpt

By Tim Peeler

Dec 10, 2007

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Fourth excerpt

N.C. State beat Georgia 67-60 in the national semifinal, even though guard Dereck Whittenburg was recovering from a fever. But many in the media thought the Houston-Louisville semifinal would be the real national title game. And the Wolfpack players, in watching that game, realized what they would be up against in the national championship.

Saturday evening’s second semifinal took some of the life out of
the entire N.C. State contingent as they watched top-ranked Houston
and second-ranked Louisville play one of the most talked-about games
in NCAA Tournament history. The two teams were mirror images of
one another: high-flying, athletic, cocky, and on a roll. …

By the time intermission was almost over, N.C. State players Terry
Gannon and Mike Warren were walking down the ramp that leads from
The Pit’s upstairs locker rooms to the court, only to find that
Houston’s team was blocking the entrance. The Cougars, wearing their
Phi Slama Jama warm-up suits, were huddled together, preparing for
the start of the second half. They broke apart not with a traditional “1-
2-3 Houston,” “Defense,” or any of those other corny motivational
catchwords. The players simply shouted, in unison, “They dunk; we
dunk better!”

“If that’s not a game plan, I don’t know what is,” Warren said.

And it worked. The Cougars scored the first eight points of the
second half, six of them on dunks. …

The Cougars won 94-81, and wondered what all the fuss was
about. They simply played the way they had all year long. …

It was an awe-inspiring sight, especially for the Wolfpack players
and fans. “We watched that game, and we just kept looking at each
other, saying, ‘Jesus . . .’” remembered Sidney Lowe.

Gannon and Warren noticed that during every timeout, several
players would grab masks and start sucking oxygen, a common remedy
when playing in the high-desert altitude. The Wolfpack players,
however, were under strict orders from team trainer Jim Rehbock not
to touch the stuff, which caused a crack-like addiction for the rubbery
legs that often accompanied altitude sickness: once you tried it, the
body just craved more.

“You will go up and come right back down,” Warren said. “I think
Thurl might have hit it once on our team, but Houston, in the semifinal
and in the championship game, was sucking on it like it was Gatorade.”

Maybe there was a flaw in the fraternity.

After the games ended Saturday, there was still plenty of time to
hit Albuquerque’s nightlife. Four of N.C. State’s reserves were at a bar
in Old Town, the original city center of Albuquerque that has now been
redeveloped into a roaming hub for tourist traffic. They happened to
run into several members of the Houston cheerleading squad. The two
groups spent the rest of the evening together before heading back to
the players’ rooms at the Ramada, where a bathtub was full of iced-down
beer.

The cheerleaders were smitten.

“It’s kind of funny,” said reserve forward Tommy DiNardo, who
ended up dating one of the cheerleaders for more than a year. “They
were sitting catty-corner from our bench during the championship
game, and every time they would come on the floor, they would wink
at us and say, ‘We’re all cheering for you guys.’” …

The next morning was Easter, but Valvano found that he could not
rise again from his bed. Another victim of Densmore’s flu, he woke up
with his own 103-degree temperature. He attended the Wolfpack’s
mandatory open practice session, but the physical demands of the
season had long since worn him down. He suffered most of the season
with a painful hernia that forced him to wear a truss at all times. Long
ago, he had scheduled surgery for the Wednesday after the Final Four
to fix the problem.

This angry case of the flu turned his raspy voice into a gravel pit,
but he still managed to growl out one of the more famous lines in Final
Four history when asked during a Sunday afternoon press conference
what his strategy would be against Houston. “If we get the opening tap,
we are going to hold the ball until Tuesday morning,” Valvano said.

In the press building adjacent to The Pit, just about every member
of the media was trying to come up with the most unique way to
express how badly Houston would destroy N.C. State. Washington Post
columnist Dave Kindred began his column, “Trees will tap dance, elephants
will ride in the Indianapolis 500, and Orson Wells will skip
breakfast, lunch, and dinner before State finds a way to beat
Houston.”Wrote Joe Henderson of the Tampa Tribune: “Rain would make it
perfect. It always rains at an execution.” …

But as Valvano always liked to remind doubters, fairytales always
begin with “once upon at time.” …

n the night of April 4, 1983, University of Houston
coach Guy V. Lewis messed up. He thought his team — composed of
lithe forwards, a dominant, shot-swatting center, and a couple of
somewhat green guards — could sweep away Lowe, Whittenburg,
and the rest of N.C. State’s underdog basketball team with its superior
athletic ability. …

While the Wolfpack was impressed by the Cougars, they were
also a little annoyed by their arrogance. N.C. State coach Jim Valvano
feigned fright when talking about Lewis’ team, memorably saying he
planned to hold the ball. ...

Houston had heard it all before.

“Everybody we played slowed the game down, with the exception
of Louisville,” said Reid Gettys, who was a sophomore point
guard for the Cougars that season. “Nobody came out and said, ‘We
are going to run against them.’ So for us to go into a game where an
opponent said they were going to slow it down was like, ‘Duh, you
think?’ That is the way everybody played us.”

And that was Valvano’s style: thanks to Lowe’s dribbling efforts
and the lack of a shot clock in college basketball the year before, the
Wolfpack had been the lowest-scoring team in the ACC, recording
but 57 1/2 points per game. Throughout the 1982-83 season, the
Wolfpack was able to run-and-gun with the best teams in the nation
when using the ACC’s experimental shot clock and three-point line.
But Lowe was still capable of turning the tempo of a game to a crawl,
which is exactly what everyone expected for the championship
game.

Houston’s plan was the same as it had been all year: to out-run,
out-rebound and out-dunk its opposition. With a smile, Lewis told
CBS before the tip-off, “Usually the team that wins the rebounding
war wins the game. We have one other slogan, though, that we add
to that: the team with the most dunks wins the game.”

The Cougars did not scare the Wolfpack. Valvano’s team had
already played nine games that season against teams that were at
some point ranked at the top of the Associated Press writers’ poll:
four against Virginia, three against North Carolina, and one each
against Memphis State and Nevada-Las Vegas. Houston, ranked No.
1 in the final AP poll, was the Wolfpack’s 10th game against a team
that had been ranked No. 1, a total that no team before or since has
ever matched.

“A lot of people looked at us as the underdog in that game, but
we never felt that way,” said Lorenzo Charles. “Playing in the ACC,
our mentality was that anybody else from any other conference just
wasn’t really that good. If you take that same Houston team and put
them in the ACC in the 1980s, they would have taken four or five
losses.

"When you play against Ralph Sampson at Virginia and James
Worthy, Sam Perkins, and Michael Jordan at Carolina in January and
February, you are ready for whoever might come at you in the NCAA
Tournament. There was no intimidation on our part in that game.”

But the Wolfpack still needed some motivational brilliance from
Valvano to beat the Cougars. As the clock slowly ran down toward
tip-off of the national title game, Valvano gathered his team in the
University of New Mexico’s home locker room.

For 20 minutes, assistant coach Ed McLean went over the scouting report, telling the
team how to slow the tempo, keep the score in the 50s, and find
every opportunity to deflate the ball.

After McLean finished, Valvano slowly walked up to the whiteboard where his assistant had carefully listed every component of the game plan. He picked up an eraser, wiped the board clean, and flung the eraser across the room, which
nearly hit three of his players as it whizzed by.

Valvano, seemingly brain-addled by his 102-degree fever and in
severe pain because of the hernia he had suffered in January, had a
different look in his eyes, as intense and serious as his players had
ever seen.

“If you think,” he said, “we have come all this way, won all
these close games, and made it to the national championship game
just to hold the ball in front of 50 million people, you are out of your
minds.”

As Valvano related in his book, “They Gave Me a Lifetime
Contract, and Then They Declared Me Dead,” he went around the
room, pointing his finger in the face of every starter on the team and
gave them a reason to play the game of their lives: “You, Sidney
Lowe! This is your last game ever. You’re the finest point guard I
have ever coached and tonight you are going to play flawlessly.

"You, Dereck Whittenburg! You’ve come back from the dead. They said
you’d never play again. You are going to get those passes [from
Lowe] and hit those downtown Js from all over the gym. Y

"You, Cozell McQueen. You’re getting every rebound there is tonight. You’re
going against Akeem the Dream and you’re going to do a job on him.

"And Lorenzo Charles! You’re going to get inside position and power
for points and rebounds.

"And Thurl Bailey! You’re going to hit jumpers. And grab rebounds. And block shots. And dunk the dunkers. You’re going to jump and bang and control the glass.”

He punctuated every sentence with “and lead us to the national championship.”

His words were a relief and a blessing to the Wolfpack’s wide-eyed players. Lowe remembers being settled by the idea that he would not have to hold the ball. He wanted to run. …

"That was so perfect,” said Terry Gannon. “You think back on it
now, 25 years later, and it might seem a little contrived or something.
But V was able to pull that off. That was exactly what we needed
to hear at that moment. We didn’t need to hear that Olajuwon
goes to his left better than his right or that Drexler follows his shot.

"We needed to hear, somehow, some way, that he believed we could
win the game doing what we had done all year long. It created the
perfect atmosphere for us.”

Most Recent Comments

I attended NCSU, but if UNC/Duke/any other ACC team is heading for the NCAA finals this year, you can bet that I will be pulling for them. Go Pack! But it is time to put aside all of the juvenile hatred and pull for OUR conference. I met Valvano, and he was a man who could inspire people to be better than they thought they could be! He would have achieved success as a manager anywhere. Give him credit! He totally took Houston out of their game (made them shoot free throws, which they hated to do, and could not make) and made them play his game. He made Lewis chew up a perfectly good towel, and led a much inferior team to a national championship, and into college BB history. Why can't we all celebrate that? I love my woofies first, but if UNC is in the title run this year .... GO TARHEELS! If it's Duke, GO BLUE DEVILS! I want the ACC to win every year!

Any brat UNC fan that wants to make stupid snippy comments like the first one needs to just deal with it. State's title that year was one for the ages, and is ranked as one of the absolute greatest upsets of all time. Due to that win, the modern NCAA tournament came of age. March Madness became a national phenomenon, not just a regional one as it had been up to then. That game transcended from just being a title game into one of the greatest sports stories of all time. How many times has that game been a motivator for unsung teams in the tournament to knock off huge favorites? No way to tell exactly, but many, I'm sure. Because of that game, and the upsets that followed for years, the tourney has an allure that is not found in any other sport, thanks in large part what the Pack was able to pull off that year. And some snooty UNC fans have to bad mouth it or dismiss it. I feel sorry for some of you snotty brats.

OK, I finally got around to reading every word of the story. It is well written. I had forgotten that Houston was so cocky...a fatal flaw in all sports. Look forward to the rest of the story, even though we know the ending. It's a good one.

Great story. Great history. Great moment. What a great contribution Jim made to NC State. May he rest in peace.

God bless.

Ellyn...fine, now just chill a little.

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