The Day the Music Died... (NCAA Tournament)

I originally wrote this post the day before the Tourney started. We are now at the Sweet 16. This is shaping up to be something special...Go St. Marys (Catholic Team)!

Maybe this is what Don McLean had in mind. With the Big Dance just hours away, I was left wondering what happened to college basketball. I may be alone on this island, but again, what happened?

As a young boy growing up in the 70's I remember when the NCAA Tournament came on after the 11 pm news. Yes! The 11 o'clock news. My dad was a "sports dad" so we were allowed to stay up and watch the Tournament. I don't remember any of the UCLA Dynasty ... maybe it never happened. The first one I remember was the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers. That team was led by Quin Buckner & Kent Benson. I was 12. We are a Catholic family so naturally we grew up rooting for Catholic teams, and, yes, we were USF Dons fans. The Dons were a West Coast power during that era. During that same time we also rooted for a Notre Dame team with Tripucka, Woolridge and Jackson. As I entered the 80's, I began to follow a De Paul team that was coming off a final four appearance with a freshman led team in 1979. The next four years they entered the Tournament as a #1 seed only to get knocked off in their first game. I was rooting for some of the greatest under achievers of all time. Keeping up with that Catholic theme, I was in college basketball purgatory.

Little did I know that during the 1977 season, a seed was planted deep within me and I was moving toward the Dark Side. There was this shark (Tark) that bit me. His UNLV Running Rebels played a wide open run and gun style game, and with Reggie Theus went to the Final Four. In 1987, UNLV once again made the Final Four led by Armon Gilliam and Freddie Banks. That seed continued to grow and started to blossom. By the time the 1989-1990 regular season started, I was breathing heavy and wore a black mask. I was "UNLV Vador." This was a magical time for college basketball, not just because we had the most exciting college basketball team of all time. Yes! UNLV was! They had a cast of characters named Johnson, Augmon, Butler, Hunt and Anthony. Once again, that "Catholic thing" kept coming up. After the passing of Hank Gathers, I began to pull for a Cinderella team that every expert and my paper boy predicted was going to be bounced in the 1st round. That team was the Loyola Marymount Lions (LMU).

Bo Kimbo & Co. won their first 3 games to make it to the Regional Final. The Regional Final pitted Good against Evil, Catholics against Sinners, Road Runner against Wiley Coyote. Yes, it was UNLV vs. LMU. There now seemed to be a struggle for my college basketball soul. What was I going to do? I pulled the "Hank 44" tape off the back of my 1-yr-old daughter's sneakers and I went with UNLV. Yes! Vegas baby! Sin City! I never looked back! UNLV beat Duke by 30 in the championship game. I finally reached the mountain top as a fan. I finally had a team that won it all. Yes, you can say that I danced with the college basketball devil. That is when it started to change for the worse. By the end of the 90's it seemed like everyone in high school declared for the NBA ... including my 30-yr-old paper boy.

You see, between 1976 and 1997 college basketball went from obscurity to one of the greatest sporting events of all time. We had teams like the "Basketeers" (Arkansas), Phi Slama Jama (Houston), Lethal Weapon Three (Georgia Tech), and even the Fab Five (Michigan).

There were characters that seemed to come from Marvel comics. Magic (Ervin), the Muffin Man (Mark Aguire), Sky Walker (Kenny), The Dream (Hakeem), The Glide (Drexler), The Rocket (Foster), Dr. Dunkenstein (Griffith), and we even had a Kid (Jason) and this Bird (Larry), to name a few.

We had the greatest coaches of all time: Knight, Brown, Tarkanian, Olson, Carnaseca, Thompson, Heathcote, Crum, Valvano, Richardson, McGuire, Boeheim, Miller, Lewis and those other two guys from Carolina and Duke that I will not mention.

This was a game that you could root for a team and your favorite players for 3 to 4 years. Jordan, Worthy and Perkins at UNC; Aguirre & Terry Cummings at De Paul; Hakeem & Drexler at Houston; Ewing, Morning, Mutombo and Iverson at Georgetown; Johnson & Augmon at Unlv. You also had players named Moncrief, Thomas, Sampson, Payton, Alford, Smart, Price, Malone, Stockton, Pippin; Elliot, Shaw, Bird, McHale, Parrish, Mullin, Richmond, T Hardaway, Robinson, and Duncan.

I lived through the greatest time for college basketball and young people will never know what March Madness was really about. For all the old guys, as you watch this watered down beer of an event, take time out to raise your glass to toast what once was the NCAA Tournament.

The "Wise Guy"