Butler’s unlikely run to a second straight Final Four is just the latest in a series of recent reminders of what was, at least for my generation, college basketball’s golden age.
That would be the late 1980s to early 1990s era in which the college game was full of teams you could latch on to and, at least in my case, watch them grow as you did the same.
My buddy Chris was the star shooting guard on our high school team, and his house’s property backed up to the park where we both learned the game. If he saw me out there shooting, he’d hop the fence behind his house and join in, and we’d spend lazy Saturday afternoons imitating the college stars of the day and recapping the most recent games we watched.
I had a huge VHS collection of great college basketball games and watched them with a toddler’s devotion to “Sponge Bob,” repeatedly viewing games to which I already knew the outcome for no particular reason. That is, other than the fact that I was a sports-obsessed teen who just couldn’t shake the notion that what we were seeing in college basketball was a special time in sports that was worth capturing on a worn-out VCR.
It’s partly amusing and partly validating to find out, some 20 years later, that much of the sporting world felt the same way. Just a few weeks ago, ESPN’s “Fab Five” movie generated quite a bit of buzz about that time period in college hoops. HBO kept the conversation going with “Running Rebels of UNLV,” a one-hour look at the historic 1990-91 clubs. My buddies and I would go on road trips to watch these UNLV clubs play on opposing courts in the Big West.
Moreover, Fox Sports a couple of years ago did a documentary on the 1992 Kentucky team that fell victim to Christian Laettner’s historic Elite Eight buzzer-beater. Wildcats fans seem to have more adulation for this club, because of its “everyman” appeal with guys like Richie Farmer and John Pelphrey, than they do for any of KU’s championship teams. HBO also aired a documentary on the North Carolina-Duke rivalry that focused heavily on the golden era.
So, who has been left out of the conversation? Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can’t deny that the Laettner-Hurley Duke clubs deserve their part in the game’s lore. The aforementioned UNLV and Fab Five clubs have been given their due as well.
Here are a few others that come to mind: Lou Henson’s super-talented Illinois clubs with guys like Nick Anderson and Kendall Gill, who reached a Final Four but never won a title. The Todd Day-Lee Mayberry Arkansas clubs that tried desperately to steal some of UNLV’s thunder to no avail, before winning a title with Corliss Williamson and Scotty Thurman in 1994.
The Eric Montross-Hubert Davis team that beat the Fab Five in 1992 seems to go a tad unappreciated, as do Bob Knight’s Indiana clubs that were led by schoolboy stars such as Damon Bailey and Eric Anderson.
Speaking of Knight, it was a little disappointing to see his response last night when asked about Butler. His response: “Can you imagine what they would be like with (Gordon) Hayward?”
No, all we can do is just that, imagine, and it makes no difference, anyway. The truth is, Butler may or may not be where it is today if it had Hayward. You never know, the Bulldogs might have deferred to him too often, and we might not have seen the progression of guys like Shelvin Mack and Matt Howard that have made this team special.
(For what it’s worth, I wish Hayward had returned but understood why he went; his stock was never going to be higher and he ended up a lottery pick in a somewhat mediocre draft.)
Still, Knight’s comment struck me as a tad untimely and disrespectful to this year’s Butler squad, which has earned another Final Four trip entirely on its own merits. Knight should have known better … after all, teams like Butler are the ones that make us remember and talk about teams once coached by him.