Latest / The Right Time with Bomani Jones / Howard Bryant on Duke vs UNLV 1991: The Upset That Changed College Basketball | 03.31
Transcript
- 0:05Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the right time, a wave original.
- 0:09Speaker 1: My name is Beaumont Jones. Thanks for listening wherever you
- 0:12Speaker 1: get your podcast. Thanks for watching us on YouTube. Subscribe, like,
- 0:16Speaker 1: rate us, review us, give us five stars. You only
- 0:19Speaker 1: give us four stars. I'm inclined to believe you are
- 0:21Speaker 1: a hater. It is Time Machine Tuesday. Got my man
- 0:26Speaker 1: Howard Bryant on with us, and we are going to
- 0:29Speaker 1: look back on.
- 0:30Speaker 2: What, quite honestly... and I don't even really.
- 0:33Speaker 1: Feel bad about putting it in these terms, but it
- 0:38Speaker 1: was a really sad day for black America. And it
- 0:42Speaker 1: was when Christian Laettner, Coach K, Bobby Hurley, and now, yeah,
- 0:47Speaker 1: Grant Hill, you are in the nim part of it.
- 0:50Speaker 1: You hadn't really made your mark quite so much yet.
- 0:55Speaker 1: They defeated UNLV in the national semifinal round of the
- 0:59Speaker 1: NCAA tournament 35 years ago. It is, as crazy as
- 1:05Speaker 1: it sounds, considering it was Duke, for those of you
- 1:07Speaker 1: who can't imagine this, it is maybe the biggest basketball
- 1:11Speaker 1: upset of my lifetime in the NCAA tournament. You can
- 1:14Speaker 1: have Villanova-Georgetown on this list, but this was a huge
- 1:18Speaker 1: shock when it happened. It was a cultural touchstone moment
- 1:24Speaker 1: when it happened, and I'm still not over it. But first, Howard,
- 1:30Speaker 1: I feel like, you know, We like to set the
- 1:32Speaker 1: scene on these things to get people to understand a
- 1:34Speaker 1: little bit about, you know, for those who weren't there,
- 1:35Speaker 1: some of the context of it. And I think this
- 1:38Speaker 1: is truly fair to say that there were no two
- 1:41Speaker 1: programs in college basketball less like one another in 1991
- 1:45Speaker 1: than Duke. and UNLV right like they're both kind of
- 1:50Speaker 1: relatively nouveau riche because UNLV had a claim to be
- 1:53Speaker 1: a legitimate power at that point right like 1991 is
- 1:56Speaker 1: their third final four or maybe the fourth but Tarkanian
- 2:00Speaker 1: takes the job in the 70s and UNLV is a
- 2:02Speaker 1: team you got to think about all the time at
- 2:04Speaker 1: a school that literally just popped up out of nowhere
- 2:07Speaker 1: in the desert and they decided they wanted to have
- 2:09Speaker 1: a basketball program to make to get attention to the
- 2:12Speaker 1: school and that worked then you had Duke which had
- 2:15Speaker 1: They had a strong program. They went to Final Fours
- 2:18Speaker 1: in the 1970s, Championship.
- 2:20Speaker 2: Game in 1978.
- 2:21Speaker 1: Kind of fell off, but Mike Krzyzewski turned it into
- 2:23Speaker 1: something different. In 1991, they by then have been to
- 2:29Speaker 1: five Final Fours. That's their fifth Final Four in the
- 2:31Speaker 1: previous six years. UNLV, though, they had different boys than Duke.
- 2:38Speaker 2: Is that a fair way to put it?
- 2:39Speaker 3: That's a very fair way to put it. It's fascinating
- 2:44Speaker 3: when we think about what that time period was because
- 2:48Speaker 3: there were so many premises that no longer apply. And
- 2:52Speaker 3: that's why this game was so important. This idea, even
- 2:57Speaker 3: in 1991, 30, 35 years ago, that there was something
- 3:01Speaker 3: elevated about college basketball. There was something legitimate about college basketball.
- 3:06Speaker 3: There was something aspirational about college basketball. It wasn't just
- 3:11Speaker 3: a sport. It was still under that pipeline of the
- 3:15Speaker 3: molding of young men, the pathway to something better, even
- 3:20Speaker 3: if you weren't going to be a professional athlete, that
- 3:22Speaker 3: there was some form of nobility to the sport. And
- 3:25Speaker 3: of course, whenever you have that, now you start bringing
- 3:27Speaker 3: up all the socioeconomic stuff. You start bringing in who
- 3:29Speaker 3: gets to play. You start bringing in the elite versus
- 3:33Speaker 3: the street teams and all that. And UNLV really was...
- 3:40Speaker 3: to me at least, that first team where you were like,
- 3:46Speaker 3: are any of these guys eligible to be admitted into
- 3:50Speaker 3: a university without basketball? Without basketball? This is a real
- 3:55Speaker 3: touchstone moment. This is the, you know, and especially against
- 3:58Speaker 3: a team like Duke where, you know, where these guys
- 4:02Speaker 3: are supposed to, you know, they're the elite citizens in
- 4:06Speaker 3: addition to being basketball players. They, you know, they're the,
- 4:09Speaker 3: they're the leaders. And, and this was the first, I mean,
- 4:13Speaker 3: obviously Georgetown was the first one. Georgetown was the first
- 4:16Speaker 3: team of my lifetime. When you start thinking about when
- 4:19Speaker 3: did you start watching college basketball? Georgetown was the first
- 4:21Speaker 3: one where like that was black America's team.
- 4:24Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 4:25Speaker 3: You know, when it came to, okay, who's wearing the
- 4:27Speaker 3: starter jackets, UNLV was second. Yeah.
- 4:30Speaker 1: And it's funny because John Thompson had a clear mission
- 4:34Speaker 1: at Georgetown of I'm going to get people into Georgetown
- 4:37Speaker 1: that wouldn't get into Georgetown otherwise, right? And that's not
- 4:41Speaker 1: to say that they can't perform at Georgetown, but he was,
- 4:45Speaker 1: and I think the university, I've not read the particulars
- 4:49Speaker 1: on this, but I think that they would admit this
- 4:50Speaker 1: to a degree that I think that Temple would admit this,
- 4:52Speaker 1: which was they let John Thompson and John Chaney do
- 4:55Speaker 1: a little bit of their cultural outreach, right? That was
- 4:59Speaker 1: their give back, was this basketball team. And they created
- 5:02Speaker 1: a brand that, as we've talked about many times, I
- 5:05Speaker 1: grew up thinking that Georgetown was an HBCU.
- 5:07Speaker 3: So did I.
- 5:08Speaker 2: I don't know why I didn't.
- 5:10Speaker 1: Think Temple was an HBCU, because they had volleyball lines
- 5:14Speaker 1: on the court. But with those coaches and those teams,
- 5:17Speaker 1: I really thought that those were black schools.
- 5:20Speaker 2: But there was a difference.
- 5:22Speaker 3: Temple was way more black than Georgetown. When you walk
- 5:25Speaker 3: on Temple's campus, you saw black students as well. The
- 5:28Speaker 3: thing about Georgetown was when you walked on Georgetown's campus,
- 5:31Speaker 3: the only black people you saw was the basketball team.
- 5:34Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's wild, because all I knew about Georgetown.
- 5:36Speaker 2: Was the basketball team, right?
- 5:38Speaker 3: 100%.
- 5:38Speaker 2: But their mission was a little different, right?
- 5:42Speaker 1: Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV, is it fair to say that,
- 5:48Speaker 1: I don't know, to call them the first renegade program
- 5:51Speaker 1: is maybe going too far, because there's always been programs
- 5:53Speaker 1: that played a little loose with it, but It was
- 5:55Speaker 1: a program in the image of Las Vegas in the
- 5:57Speaker 1: sense that the story that goes basically that D'Arcani was
- 6:01Speaker 1: the coach at Long Beach State, and that's where he
- 6:03Speaker 1: realized that playing fair was for suckers.
- 6:06Speaker 3: Yeah, he was Calipari before Calipari.
- 6:08Speaker 1: Yeah, but he looked over at UCLA and could see
- 6:12Speaker 1: how the sausage was being made over there.
- 6:15Speaker 2: And he was like, brother, what are we talking about, right?
- 6:17Speaker 1: So he takes this job at UNLV, and I contend
- 6:21Speaker 1: just about every college basketball program is as discerning as
- 6:26Speaker 1: it has to be to get the players that they
- 6:28Speaker 1: want to have. You can look at the players that
- 6:30Speaker 1: John Calipari had at Kentucky. They are not the same
- 6:33Speaker 1: as the players that he was playing at Memphis and
- 6:36Speaker 1: not the same as the players that he was playing
- 6:38Speaker 1: when he was at UMass, right? The top-notch programs, I'll
- 6:44Speaker 1: use this phrasing, don't have to take nearly as many chances.
- 6:48Speaker 1: Jerry Tarkanian, That was all the chances, baby. They were
- 6:52Speaker 1: taking them all. And what I always thought interesting about
- 6:55Speaker 1: him is he was also doing it within the idea
- 6:59Speaker 1: and paradigm of I am using college sports to improve
- 7:03Speaker 1: their lives, which I think is incontrovertibly true, was something
- 7:08Speaker 1: that he did. These guys did wind up going to
- 7:10Speaker 1: college and going to places they would not have gone
- 7:14Speaker 1: to otherwise if not for him. But nobody was running
- 7:18Speaker 1: a Father Flanagan operation. quite like TARC was.
- 7:21Speaker 3: And especially the hypocrisies of it. I think one of
- 7:24Speaker 3: the things that I actually really did sort of appreciate
- 7:26Speaker 3: about TARC was when you're at Long Beach State and
- 7:31Speaker 3: you're watching UCLA operate, you're recognizing that UCLA is operating
- 7:38Speaker 3: and still receiving dispensation for doing some of the same
- 7:41Speaker 3: underhanded stuff that other folks are being castigated for. And so...
- 7:46Speaker 3: That recognition that playing by the rules is for suckers
- 7:49Speaker 3: is absolutely accurate from the standpoint of who's making the rules.
- 7:54Speaker 3: Because the leaders, the UCLA's and the Duke's and the
- 7:57Speaker 3: North Carolina's and all of those, you know, it's not
- 8:02Speaker 3: as though they're doing it the right way. Right. Not
- 8:06Speaker 3: always doing it the right way. When I look at TARC,
- 8:10Speaker 3: I see Barry Switzer.
- 8:11Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
- 8:13Speaker 3: I see the guy who's just street smart enough to
- 8:17Speaker 3: know how the game works. He's no dummy. He recognizes
- 8:21Speaker 3: it and he's like, come and get me. And I
- 8:26Speaker 3: think he's also, along with Switzer, one of those coaches,
- 8:29Speaker 3: one of those renegade coaches, not where he was the
- 8:32Speaker 3: first guy who was doing the stuff. He was the
- 8:35Speaker 3: guy that the industry was like, we got to stop
- 8:40Speaker 3: this guy. What he's doing is bad for everybody. So
- 8:43Speaker 3: he becomes the flashpoint for something that has been going
- 8:48Speaker 3: on for a very, very long time, but he's moving
- 8:52Speaker 3: into legitimate spaces at the top of the game and
- 8:56Speaker 3: making everybody else really, really nervous.
- 8:59Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is also before Las Vegas became seen
- 9:02Speaker 1: as being a little bit more family friendly.
- 9:04Speaker 2: And this is, this was Las Vegas.
- 9:07Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
- 9:08Speaker 1: Like the area around campus, the college town in this
- 9:12Speaker 1: case is Las Vegas, right? Like if you've ever landed
- 9:15Speaker 1: in Vegas and you take your cab to the Strip,
- 9:18Speaker 1: You see UNLV right there.
- 9:20Speaker 2: Like that's that's the scene that's around. That is New Haven.
- 9:24Speaker 2: That is Cambridge.
- 9:25Speaker 3: Where are we going after class? Right.
- 9:28Speaker 2: What are we doing on your recruiting visit?
- 9:30Speaker 3: Right.
- 9:30Speaker 2: That's right. It is Las Vegas. So all of that
- 9:32Speaker 2: is surrounding that.
- 9:34Speaker 1: And then you have Duke, which was the Boston Celtics,
- 9:38Speaker 1: the Utah Jazz and the Phoenix Suns, a college basketball
- 9:42Speaker 1: all rolled into one. The first superstar of the K-era
- 9:46Speaker 1: is Johnny Dawkins. That's how you wind up with these
- 9:48Speaker 1: confused African-Americans who were Duke fans, right?
- 9:50Speaker 2: A lot of them got on board with him, right?
- 9:53Speaker 4: Like that was one of them yeah yeah man they
- 9:57Speaker 4: was with that like that was the thing but then
- 9:59Speaker 4: as it went it just got to be tough because
- 10:02Speaker 4: it wasn't so much they had all them white dudes
- 10:04Speaker 4: is that the announcers were very obviously cheering for them
- 10:07Speaker 4: like yeah you you could not ignore that fact but
- 10:10Speaker 4: they got to the championship game in 1986 where i
- 10:12Speaker 4: think they went into the tournament the number team in
- 10:13Speaker 4: the country they lost to louisville which was quietly a
- 10:17Speaker 4: black people team that we don't talk about on the
- 10:19Speaker 4: list of black people teams but.
- 10:21Speaker 3: They because of that denny that denny crumb thing.
- 10:23Speaker 1: Yeah man denny crumb maybe they they they had that
- 10:26Speaker 1: right um duke is on this run going through all
- 10:29Speaker 1: these final fours and if you watch game theory with
- 10:31Speaker 1: beaumont jones you'll see me talk about this all the
- 10:35Speaker 1: teams that black people love duke they was legend killers.
- 10:42Speaker 1: They got Georgetown in 88. Louisville's the only one that
- 10:46Speaker 1: really held down the fort for La Gente, you know
- 10:49Speaker 1: what I mean?
- 10:52Speaker 2: They got Arkansas out of there in 1990.
- 10:55Speaker 1: Georgia Tech kind of fit the bill, you know what
- 10:57Speaker 1: I'm saying? That was another program where it's like, huh, engineers,
- 11:01Speaker 1: you say? But Duke got them out of it.
- 11:06Speaker 2: I mean, look, Duke was just beating black people. This
- 11:10Speaker 2: was what it was.
- 11:11Speaker 1: And the announcers were cheering them all, but they could
- 11:13Speaker 1: never get over the top. They never could. And so
- 11:15Speaker 1: they played this game in a championship in 1990. Well, actually,
- 11:19Speaker 1: let me stop there because I think there's another part
- 11:21Speaker 1: of it, too, that is forgotten is that North Carolina
- 11:25Speaker 1: was also like in the green book for black people
- 11:28Speaker 1: as programs. Dean Smith basically integrated the Atlantic Coast Conference unilaterally.
- 11:33Speaker 1: And Duke was the antithesis of that also. They were
- 11:36Speaker 1: on the wrong side of all of it.
- 11:39Speaker 3: That's what's really interesting too about when you think about
- 11:41Speaker 3: it if you're of a certain age, depending on your fandom.
- 11:44Speaker 3: I was Georgetown, Georgetown, Georgetown, Georgetown, Georgetown. And then because
- 11:49Speaker 3: when I was in high school, I was a guard.
- 11:51Speaker 3: Of course, you saw Dawkins and Amaker. And I told
- 11:53Speaker 3: Tommy Amaker this. I was like, that was my team.
- 11:56Speaker 3: And then as you get older, Now you start to
- 12:00Speaker 3: see all the other elements. Like when you're in high school,
- 12:02Speaker 3: it's just basketball. I didn't know anything about Duke. I
- 12:04Speaker 3: didn't even know where Duke was. And then when you
- 12:07Speaker 3: get into your 20s and stuff, you start learning about class.
- 12:11Speaker 3: And now you're taking all those classes and you're like, oh,
- 12:15Speaker 3: I was rooting for Duke. maybe kind of for the
- 12:17Speaker 3: wrong team. I'm learning all kinds of things that these
- 12:22Speaker 3: things run a little bit counter to my personal values.
- 12:24Speaker 3: I didn't even know, I didn't care. I didn't know
- 12:26Speaker 3: the difference between a public and a private university. Like
- 12:29Speaker 3: these things weren't, I was just a basketball fan. I
- 12:32Speaker 3: watched Tommy Amaker threw an alley-oop to Johnny Dawkins, who
- 12:36Speaker 3: was 6'2, over David Robinson in the tournament. I was like,
- 12:39Speaker 3: I like that. I'll take that. And then now you
- 12:43Speaker 3: start to get, by the time you get to 90,
- 12:45Speaker 3: especially the 90 championship game. Now you're looking at other things.
- 12:50Speaker 3: Now you start looking at, you know, it's almost like.
- 12:52Speaker 1: I want to say one thing right fast for the
- 12:54Speaker 1: people who don't know. Howard Bryant, an alumnus of Temple University,
- 12:59Speaker 1: and in the middle of this awakening, Duke beat Temple
- 13:02Speaker 1: in the Elite Eight in 1988.
- 13:04Speaker 3: When we were finally the number one, and only time
- 13:07Speaker 3: we were the number one team in the country, at
- 13:10Speaker 3: the Meadowlands, trying to get Coach Chaney to his first
- 13:13Speaker 3: ever Final Four. And Mark Macon shot six for 29.
- 13:18Speaker 3: And still only lost that game by seven points.
- 13:21Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 13:22Speaker 3: Lost 88-81, and Billy King shut down Macon, and let's
- 13:27Speaker 3: not talk about this. Okay.
- 13:29Speaker 2: Just needed to give context. Just needed to give some context.
- 13:31Speaker 3: But what I was saying was, by the time you
- 13:33Speaker 3: get to 90, now all of a sudden you've got
- 13:36Speaker 3: that Catholics versus convicts thing going on, where now everybody's
- 13:40Speaker 3: talking about it's race, it's class, it's not just basketball anymore.
- 13:44Speaker 3: And one of the interesting things about that time period too,
- 13:46Speaker 3: is you're talking about John Thompson, Georgetown, you're talking about
- 13:49Speaker 3: Nolan Richardson, you're talking, this is also, let us also
- 13:52Speaker 3: not forget an extremely important figure during this time period,
- 13:56Speaker 3: and that's Al Campanus. So three years earlier, you've got
- 14:00Speaker 3: Al Campanus on Nightline talking about the 40th anniversary of
- 14:03Speaker 3: Jackie Robinson. And that's where he famously says, you know,
- 14:06Speaker 3: that blacks aren't meant to be coaches and executives because
- 14:10Speaker 3: they lack the necessity. So this is a really, really
- 14:13Speaker 3: important time in discussing the competency of black coaches. The NFL,
- 14:19Speaker 3: that year, 1990, that was the first year. They had
- 14:22Speaker 3: just hired Art Schell. It was the first black coach
- 14:26Speaker 3: in the NFL since 1922? Wayne Fonce was right there.
- 14:31Speaker 2: Wayne Fonce was right there. Wayne Fonce was right there.
- 14:33Speaker 3: Wayne Fonce, Cape Verdean, but still.
- 14:35Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, that's how they get you.
- 14:42Speaker 3: Just providing a few things. But this is a time period.
- 14:48Speaker 3: This is the precursor to the Oscars so white and
- 14:53Speaker 3: the BLMs and all of the things that would come later.
- 14:56Speaker 3: This was the first one where everyone's talking about, how
- 14:58Speaker 3: come we don't have any Black coaches? And you've got
- 15:01Speaker 3: John Thompson, who had finally won in 84. How come
- 15:04Speaker 3: we don't? Why don't we have these things? And this
- 15:06Speaker 3: is also happening at the exact same time, too. of
- 15:09Speaker 3: Prop 48 and Prop 42. So one of the fascinating
- 15:12Speaker 3: things about this time period is, especially when we're talking
- 15:16Speaker 3: about it in 2026, is education was actually an issue
- 15:22Speaker 3: back then. You're actually really having a conversation about we
- 15:26Speaker 3: are still here to educate. It's not just basketball. It's
- 15:30Speaker 3: not just the money. It's not all of those things.
- 15:33Speaker 3: It's happening. All of these things, it's a sort of
- 15:35Speaker 3: a perfect storm. You've got Prop 48, which came in
- 15:37Speaker 3: with the NCAA regulations that you had to have a
- 15:39Speaker 3: 2.0 and a 700 SAT, which John Thompson and Nolan
- 15:43Speaker 3: Richardson and those guys in Cheney were going off on
- 15:45Speaker 3: because they thought it was anti-Black. Then they doubled down.
- 15:50Speaker 3: That was 86. Then they doubled down in 1989 with
- 15:52Speaker 3: Prop 42, which was to say, you can't even have
- 15:55Speaker 3: a scholarship. You're not even eligible for a scholarship if
- 15:58Speaker 3: you don't have these numbers, which, of course, Cheney And
- 16:00Speaker 3: Richardson and Thompson, especially Thompson, went wild on as well.
- 16:03Speaker 3: It's like, okay, so you want the talent, but you're
- 16:08Speaker 3: also trying to prevent, you know, you're also trying to
- 16:11Speaker 3: get rid of certain people you don't want them to play.
- 16:14Speaker 3: And so all of these things are happening at the
- 16:16Speaker 3: same time. And here comes, you know, Southern Ivy League
- 16:20Speaker 3: Duke taking, you know, beginning to make its ascendancy into
- 16:23Speaker 3: the top of the game. A lot of different social
- 16:25Speaker 3: factors taking place. And we're not even talking about the
- 16:28Speaker 3: basketball yet.
- 16:29Speaker 2: Yeah, like it's in.
- 16:33Speaker 1: People have to understand at that time, this is the
- 16:37Speaker 1: 80s or when college, the blackening of college basketball really happens.
- 16:40Speaker 2: Like I was joking on Monday.
- 16:41Speaker 1: Talking about how I saw Nebraska had five white dudes
- 16:43Speaker 1: on the floor in that game.
- 16:44Speaker 2: I had never seen that in a real game before.
- 16:46Speaker 2: That was not you.
- 16:48Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 16:48Speaker 2: I saw BYU with five black dudes on the floor.
- 16:52Speaker 3: And have five black dudes on the court in the
- 16:54Speaker 3: five decades previous.
- 16:56Speaker 2: Yes, like it's wild times, right?
- 16:59Speaker 1: But the idea that obviously there have been a lot
- 17:02Speaker 1: of great black college basketball players, number one pick always was, dot, dot, dot.
- 17:05Speaker 1: But there were different programs, had different racial profiles, and
- 17:09Speaker 1: just about every team had some white dudes on it, right?
- 17:12Speaker 2: That's right.
- 17:12Speaker 3: Even Georgetown, at the end of the bench. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 17:15Speaker 2: But just about.
- 17:16Speaker 1: Everybody had some white dudes in the rotation. And also,
- 17:19Speaker 1: I always used to say, as the years went on,
- 17:21Speaker 1: the true strength of your college basketball program, you were
- 17:24Speaker 1: as good as the white dudes that you could attract. Like,
- 17:26Speaker 1: if you could still get super cold white dudes, that's
- 17:28Speaker 1: when you had a problem. I'm not just talking about,
- 17:31Speaker 1: you know, the dude that can stand over there in
- 17:32Speaker 1: the corner. You know, you're going to get you some
- 17:34Speaker 1: white dudes. Man, Jerry Tarkanian had no time for that.
- 17:38Speaker 1: He was not even wasting his time thinking he was
- 17:40Speaker 1: going to get them white dudes to go over there. Like,
- 17:42Speaker 1: Larry Johnson and Christian Laettner are not of the same age.
- 17:46Speaker 1: place right Bobby Hurley is a bit more of a
- 17:49Speaker 1: working class guy but the other thing that was the
- 17:51Speaker 1: other thing about Duke with the program though is that
- 17:53Speaker 1: they had a bunch of dudes that look like they
- 17:55Speaker 1: would go to Duke yes they did like like like
- 17:58Speaker 1: that was that was what the game was they had
- 18:00Speaker 1: and so 1990 they were the Dodgers.
- 18:03Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 18:04Speaker 3: They were the Dodgers of the 70s that we don't
- 18:06Speaker 3: just play the game. We play the game the right way.
- 18:08Speaker 3: We're the clean cut. They're doing, there was an optics
- 18:10Speaker 3: thing going on about how they were presenting. Yeah.
- 18:13Speaker 1: And they're very self-aware about it because when it changed
- 18:16Speaker 1: at the end of the first decade of the 21st century,
- 18:19Speaker 1: it's because they were conscious that it didn't play anymore.
- 18:22Speaker 3: That's right.
- 18:23Speaker 1: They knew they had a thing that was working for them.
- 18:26Speaker 1: And so they play against UNLV in 1990. And look,
- 18:29Speaker 1: that 1990 UNLV team was very good. and thought of,
- 18:34Speaker 1: they had already beat America's sweetheart Loyola Marymount by 30
- 18:38Speaker 1: points in the Elite Eight.
- 18:39Speaker 2: Somebody had to do it. You know what I mean?
- 18:42Speaker 1: If you weren't there, it was a very sad thing.
- 18:44Speaker 1: But they went ahead and they decided to do that.
- 18:48Speaker 1: But they actually were losing at the half to Georgia
- 18:52Speaker 1: Tech in that game in the semifinal in 1990 with
- 18:55Speaker 1: Kenny Anderson and Dennis Scott and Brian Oliver. They came
- 18:58Speaker 1: back and win that. They play in Duke and it
- 19:00Speaker 1: was a close game in the first half in 1990.
- 19:03Speaker 1: And then I think it was after the first TV timeout,
- 19:06Speaker 1: it was over. It was an ass whooping that was
- 19:09Speaker 1: indelible in your mind because it always felt like if
- 19:12Speaker 1: the game, Matt, Duke was going to win, right? No
- 19:15Speaker 1: matter what, the refs was going to cheat or something
- 19:16Speaker 1: like that. Dude, Duke could have had seven players on
- 19:19Speaker 1: the floor, man. They still would have got beat by 30.
- 19:23Speaker 1: That game was seminal to me for a couple of reasons.
- 19:28Speaker 1: The first was the final score.
- 19:31Speaker 3: One, if you're a college basketball fan of the 80s,
- 19:33Speaker 3: and even today still, you top 100 points in 40 minutes,
- 19:37Speaker 3: you're doing something.
- 19:38Speaker 2: Yeah, keep in mind it was a 45-second shot clock
- 19:40Speaker 2: in that time.
- 19:41Speaker 3: And also the other thing to remember, and that's what
- 19:43Speaker 3: I mean about some of this stuff is so foundational
- 19:46Speaker 3: and we don't think about it anymore because it's all over.
- 19:49Speaker 3: is that that was also, there were two things taking
- 19:52Speaker 3: place during that time period too. One, you were in,
- 19:55Speaker 3: I think the shot clock was only five years old.
- 19:58Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 19:59Speaker 3: Because I still remember that 39-36 Georgetown SMU game where
- 20:05Speaker 3: you just held the ball. If you had a five
- 20:06Speaker 3: point lead with 10 minutes left, you just held the
- 20:08Speaker 3: ball for 10 minutes. And then they start bringing in,
- 20:11Speaker 3: I think the Big East had a 30-second shot clock
- 20:14Speaker 3: and the National was 45 seconds. And so all the
- 20:16Speaker 3: different conferences had different shot clocks. The other thing to
- 20:19Speaker 3: remember is that that was, I think, the second year
- 20:22Speaker 3: or the third year, if 87 might have been the
- 20:24Speaker 3: first year, of the 19-foot-9 three-point line. 19-9 for three points?
- 20:30Speaker 3: And so the whole thing, everything is happening during that
- 20:33Speaker 3: time period where it really is a very underrated event.
- 20:38Speaker 3: transitional period in the sport.
- 20:41Speaker 1: Yeah, everything is changing. And these dudes were just beating
- 20:45Speaker 1: them down the floor, right?
- 20:47Speaker 3: And I was going to say, Bo, I don't mean
- 20:48Speaker 3: to interrupt. There's one last, I forgot a piece I
- 20:50Speaker 3: was going to say too. And the reason why that
- 20:52Speaker 3: game was so wild to me, it wasn't just the
- 20:54Speaker 3: final score. It was also the fact that this was
- 20:57Speaker 3: one of those mandate games. It was like, oh, this
- 21:00Speaker 3: is what the future is going to look like. Because
- 21:03Speaker 3: Duke got rolled. They got rolled in so many ways
- 21:08Speaker 3: where you looked at that and you go, these guys
- 21:12Speaker 3: are playing a different style of basketball. It wasn't like
- 21:14Speaker 3: NBA basketball, but what it was, it was close enough
- 21:17Speaker 3: and athletic enough, and it did something that should have
- 21:21Speaker 3: happened three years It should have happened six years earlier,
- 21:25Speaker 3: seven years earlier, but it didn't because Phi Slamma Jamma lost.
- 21:29Speaker 3: There was this idea that you could still be athletic
- 21:32Speaker 3: in college basketball. You could still, you know, you could
- 21:34Speaker 3: try that Tarkanian stuff. But when the real teams came
- 21:38Speaker 3: and played the real fundamental basketball and when they really
- 21:41Speaker 3: did all the textbook stuff, your athleticism was going to lose.
- 21:45Speaker 3: Not that night.
- 21:47Speaker 2: Yeah, well, a key is.
- 21:49Speaker 1: Jerry Tarkanian was a much better basketball coach than Guy V.
- 21:52Speaker 2: Lewis was. That's right.
- 21:54Speaker 1: That's the part that it comes down to, that Tark
- 21:57Speaker 1: was interesting because he had a signature style of play
- 22:01Speaker 1: that was based on clear strategy, like the amoeba defense.
- 22:04Speaker 2: It was a thing, right?
- 22:06Speaker 1: I don't know if he was the greatest offensive tactician necessarily,
- 22:08Speaker 1: but it was a defense begets offense sort of situation.
- 22:12Speaker 3: That's when they play defense.
- 22:14Speaker 2: Right.
- 22:14Speaker 1: That was a coach that was there. Because look, that
- 22:17Speaker 1: UNLV team, What it didn't have was a lot of size, right? Like,
- 22:21Speaker 1: its best player was 6'5 Larry Johnson at power forward,
- 22:26Speaker 1: and there is no way that we could.
- 22:28Speaker 2: Possibly explain to you what a monster. Like, it wasn't
- 22:31Speaker 2: Charles Barkley, right? There's only one of those, but it
- 22:35Speaker 2: felt similar.
- 22:36Speaker 1: Like, it was a suddenness to the way that he
- 22:38Speaker 1: played at that height, an explosion of what he was
- 22:42Speaker 1: able to do.
- 22:43Speaker 2: Ooh, boy.
- 22:45Speaker 3: And also had... Stacey Ogman, who was one of one
- 22:49Speaker 3: of those precursors to positionless basketball. He's actually, you know,
- 22:54Speaker 3: in a lot of ways, he was your second point
- 22:55Speaker 3: guard on that team at six, seven with all the
- 22:57Speaker 3: long arms and the defense and the whole thing. He's
- 23:00Speaker 3: he's in that Pippen mode. Right. You can just once again,
- 23:03Speaker 3: you can start seeing the game change.
- 23:05Speaker 2: Right.
- 23:06Speaker 1: Point guard is Greg Anthony. I mean, he's a 10
- 23:09Speaker 1: year NBA vet. Anderson Hunt at two guard, which doesn't
- 23:13Speaker 1: mean anything now, but at the time sure seemed like
- 23:15Speaker 1: a big deal.
- 23:16Speaker 2: And a very good player.
- 23:17Speaker 1: He was the most outstanding player in the 1990 tournament
- 23:20Speaker 1: because he was one of the first of those guys
- 23:22Speaker 1: right there on that wing in that 19-9, like hitting
- 23:25Speaker 1: those shots. And look, Duke, the 1990 team.
- 23:29Speaker 2: Was young when you look back on it. It's a
- 23:31Speaker 2: freshman Bobby Hurley.
- 23:32Speaker 3: Youngest team.
- 23:33Speaker 2: Sophomore Christian Laettner.
- 23:34Speaker 3: It's the youngest team in the Final Four.
- 23:36Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like senior Al Abdel Nabi, like the guys
- 23:39Speaker 1: that are, Danny Ferry had left off the team before,
- 23:41Speaker 1: like the guys that are leaving are not that important.
- 23:43Speaker 1: It's the foundation of obviously what becomes a back-to-back championship
- 23:46Speaker 1: team But they were not ready for that game.
- 23:49Speaker 3: Grant Hill was a freshman. Yeah.
- 23:52Speaker 2: No, Grant Hill, 90. Grant Hill isn't even there.
- 23:54Speaker 3: Oh, 90. I'm sorry. I'm thinking of 91. 90.
- 23:55Speaker 2: He's not even there. Yeah, 90, he's not even there.
- 23:59Speaker 1: But this led to something that you talked about in
- 24:01Speaker 1: our phone conversations about this, which was, The question was
- 24:04Speaker 1: coming up about Duke, like, okay, yeah, you've made four
- 24:07Speaker 1: Final Fours in five years, but you're going to win
- 24:08Speaker 1: or what? Like, now they were getting squeezed for the fact.
- 24:13Speaker 1: Forget about how incredible it was that they could win
- 24:15Speaker 1: that many games at all. The squeeze had become– keeping
- 24:18Speaker 1: in mind that while they're making those Final Fours, Carolina's
- 24:20Speaker 1: made none. Carolina hasn't been to a Final Four at
- 24:23Speaker 1: this point since 1982, and Duke is now four out
- 24:26Speaker 1: of five years.
- 24:27Speaker 3: That's right. And also, by the time you get– after
- 24:30Speaker 3: that game, when we talk the 91 game we're going
- 24:32Speaker 3: to talk about– the vaunted Duke team that is inevitable now,
- 24:37Speaker 3: that we all hate now, that always finds a way
- 24:39Speaker 3: to win now, they had lost four out of five
- 24:43Speaker 3: to the eventual national champion. Yeah. Right. So they, it
- 24:47Speaker 3: was sort of like, okay, when are y'all going to
- 24:49Speaker 3: do it? When are you going to win? And it's
- 24:51Speaker 3: wild to think about Mike Krzyzewski as the guy under
- 24:56Speaker 3: pressure to produce and Are you, you know, to ask
- 25:01Speaker 3: the question of Mike Krzyzewski, are you actually a winner?
- 25:04Speaker 3: And I think about this when you go back to
- 25:05Speaker 3: those time periods because it was such a different period
- 25:10Speaker 3: that in today's game, his job would be in jeopardy.
- 25:19Speaker 3: You lose four times to the eventual champion, people would
- 25:23Speaker 3: look at you like you're the problem. Yeah.
- 25:26Speaker 1: And look, coming up next, we're going to get to
- 25:27Speaker 1: that game in 1991.
- 25:29Speaker 2: And, well, yeah, we'll get there. Coming up next.
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- 28:02Speaker 1: Terms and conditions may apply. All right, we are back
- 28:06Speaker 1: with Howard Bryant. So the thing about that 1991 UNLV team.
- 28:10Speaker 2: Rock stars.
- 28:11Speaker 1: Everybody came back. Like they win a national championship. Larry Johnson, back.
- 28:16Speaker 1: Stacey Augman, back. Anderson Hunt, back. Greg Anthony, back. And
- 28:22Speaker 1: they were playing in a backwater conference, the Big West, right?
- 28:25Speaker 1: The Big West was not really a thing.
- 28:27Speaker 3: They weren't in the Big West back then. They were
- 28:28Speaker 3: in the PCAA, I think.
- 28:30Speaker 2: No, they were in the Big West.
- 28:30Speaker 3: Was it Big West 91?
- 28:31Speaker 2: Yeah, they were in the Big West. My apologies. But
- 28:34Speaker 2: they still set up a good non-conference schedule.
- 28:37Speaker 1: They have the game at Barnhill Arena, number one versus two.
- 28:41Speaker 1: Number two, UNLV against Arkansas, where Ty Day and Larry
- 28:45Speaker 1: Johnson get into a fight there. Because Arkansas had been
- 28:47Speaker 1: to the Final Four that year before. That was an
- 28:50Speaker 1: up-and-down game, boy. That was one of those, it was
- 28:52Speaker 1: like 100-something to 90-something. type of games, 40 minutes of hell.
- 28:56Speaker 1: So they run in the press. They are similar personalities,
- 29:00Speaker 1: similar archetypes. Because Nolan Richardson was like, who's in Memphis?
- 29:04Speaker 1: Come on down or come on over here and let's go.
- 29:07Speaker 1: I remember that game being such a big deal. That
- 29:11Speaker 1: to me is like maybe at that point, the blackest
- 29:13Speaker 1: college basketball game that there had ever been.
- 29:16Speaker 3: Yeah. And once again, the underrated piece of those teams was,
- 29:21Speaker 3: And this is where I sort of separate Georgetown, because
- 29:24Speaker 3: Georgetown was a defensive team that had very questionable offense.
- 29:28Speaker 3: I mean, until they got Iverson, they were never, Georgetown
- 29:31Speaker 3: was never, there was never a Thompson team that was
- 29:33Speaker 3: offense first. No. But with Nolan's teams and with Tark's teams,
- 29:39Speaker 3: you got all that. defensive intensity, but they can put
- 29:42Speaker 3: the ball in the basket too.
- 29:43Speaker 2: Yes.
- 29:44Speaker 5: Yes.
- 29:44Speaker 1: And they had guys like Lee Mayberry was the first
- 29:46Speaker 1: round pick. Todd Day was the first round pick. Like
- 29:49Speaker 1: that was a game. UNLV won that, but UNLV ran
- 29:52Speaker 1: through their schedule. They were from, they were the national
- 29:55Speaker 1: champions from day one. It felt like wire to wire.
- 29:58Speaker 1: We knew which way this was going to go. There
- 30:00Speaker 1: weren't even really a lot of close games along the way.
- 30:03Speaker 1: Like when they had won the championship in 90, they
- 30:05Speaker 1: lost games in conference, right? Like those, you know, those
- 30:07Speaker 1: kinds of things can happen. That did not happen in this. Meanwhile,
- 30:10Speaker 1: Duke is playing in, I mean, 1990s ACC basketball is
- 30:15Speaker 1: some like, these are the glory days type of situation there.
- 30:19Speaker 1: There's a lot of guys in that conference. You got
- 30:22Speaker 1: Kenny Anderson. coming back for his sophomore year. North Carolina
- 30:26Speaker 1: with what turned out to be its first team to
- 30:28Speaker 1: go to the Final Four in nine years. NC State,
- 30:32Speaker 1: I think you got Rodney Monroe and Chris Corchiani were there.
- 30:38Speaker 2: It was the gold standard conference of college basketball at
- 30:42Speaker 2: this point.
- 30:42Speaker 3: 100%. And I think that that was the other piece
- 30:48Speaker 3: of it when you think about or at least what
- 30:53Speaker 3: I was thinking about Vegas, was the way that you
- 30:58Speaker 3: follow up a championship. They're undefeated. They were on the
- 31:03Speaker 3: verge of making you rethink everything you thought you knew
- 31:09Speaker 3: about college basketball. They were crushing everybody. And they were
- 31:13Speaker 3: crushing everybody. And by the way, underneath all of that
- 31:16Speaker 3: was Tarkus Dirty.
- 31:18Speaker 2: Yes.
- 31:19Speaker 3: And so you've got this, there's an Oakland Raiders bad
- 31:23Speaker 3: boy thing going on here where it's like, oh, we're
- 31:25Speaker 3: going to have to contend with these guys at the
- 31:26Speaker 3: top of the game. In a lot of ways, Fab
- 31:30Speaker 3: Five and before the Fab Five, right? Yes.
- 31:33Speaker 2: And the Fab Five will tell you that.
- 31:35Speaker 3: And they were blackening the game up and the coaches
- 31:38Speaker 3: were exploiting that because the biggest thing that we didn't
- 31:44Speaker 3: talk about That was the most important thing in 1991
- 31:49Speaker 3: when you're Duke walking out of there after they got
- 31:52Speaker 3: beat 103 to 73 in a championship game was we're
- 31:56Speaker 3: afraid of them. They're too fast. They're too black. They're
- 32:02Speaker 3: too athletic. They're too everything. They're doing too many things
- 32:08Speaker 3: that escape the rules of college basketball. Because let's also
- 32:12Speaker 3: not forget back then, it's a lot different today. But
- 32:15Speaker 3: back then, one of the other things about college basketball
- 32:18Speaker 3: was the officiating was part of officiating was still was
- 32:21Speaker 3: also teaching. Back then, when you watch the college basketball game,
- 32:25Speaker 3: my goodness, they called every damn infraction. Right. I mean,
- 32:29Speaker 3: I believe a travel back then was one and a
- 32:31Speaker 3: half steps in college where it's two steps in the pros. Today,
- 32:33Speaker 3: it doesn't really matter. And so they were really, really
- 32:39Speaker 3: structuring the game in a very traditional way. And Vegas
- 32:44Speaker 3: blew everybody's doors off. And so the thing that if
- 32:47Speaker 3: you're Duke going into that tournament in 91, and I'm
- 32:51Speaker 3: one of the forwards on that team, Brian Davis had
- 32:54Speaker 3: said it too, that we have to prove that we're
- 32:57Speaker 3: not afraid of them. And it's a certain type of fear.
- 33:01Speaker 3: There's the type of fear when you just know the
- 33:05Speaker 3: other team's better than you. And then there's the type
- 33:08Speaker 3: of fear where you are racially and emotionally intimidated by them.
- 33:13Speaker 3: They were playing a black game. And Krzyzewski and those
- 33:17Speaker 3: guys knew that we're emotionally afraid of this. And that's
- 33:23Speaker 3: a different type of fear.
- 33:24Speaker 1: And somewhat, I don't even think ironic is the right word,
- 33:27Speaker 1: but I think you'll understand what I mean. The brand
- 33:31Speaker 1: of what they were doing was pushing back against this.
- 33:33Speaker 1: This was a stand in a lot of ways.
- 33:37Speaker 3: You know what this was, Beau? This was, in a
- 33:39Speaker 3: lot of ways, whether people want to admit it or not,
- 33:42Speaker 3: This was one of those unfortunately yet necessary racial referendums
- 33:48Speaker 3: in sports about who gets to play and who doesn't
- 33:51Speaker 3: play and who dominates and who teaches and who doesn't,
- 33:53Speaker 3: who's legit and who's not. This is 1977 NBA Finals.
- 33:58Speaker 3: This is the do it the right way trailblazers against
- 34:01Speaker 3: the freewheeling 76ers. Yeah.
- 34:04Speaker 1: And then you get to this Final Four, which even
- 34:07Speaker 1: in real time was a legendary Final Four of sorts.
- 34:09Speaker 1: In the end, it turns out, it's four hall of
- 34:12Speaker 1: fame coaches, but it was Carolina's return to the final four.
- 34:15Speaker 1: It was Roy Williams at Kansas first final four. So
- 34:18Speaker 1: you had on one side of the bracket, you had
- 34:20Speaker 1: Carolina and Kansas, this weird incestuous pair of college basketball
- 34:24Speaker 1: programs that sends people back and forth all through their history.
- 34:28Speaker 3: That's right.
- 34:29Speaker 2: It's a lot. Dean Smith is a guy from Kansas.
- 34:31Speaker 1: Roy Williams is the guy that coached Kansas from North Carolina,
- 34:34Speaker 1: Larry Brown, North Carolina guy who coached at Kansas wins. And,
- 34:38Speaker 1: They play in the 1957, the Will Chamberlain game. They
- 34:42Speaker 1: overlap a lot. Anyway, but the big thing is Roy Williams,
- 34:46Speaker 1: Dean Smith, is basically his dad.
- 34:48Speaker 3: That's right.
- 34:48Speaker 1: And he's coaching in that game. And then on the
- 34:50Speaker 1: other side, you have this rematch of UNLV and Duke,
- 34:54Speaker 1: and the media sold this one a lot harder because
- 34:57Speaker 1: they had a lot more time to prepare for it.
- 34:59Speaker 1: It kind of happened haphazardly in 1990 because there was
- 35:02Speaker 1: no guarantee you were going to get that game. You
- 35:03Speaker 1: had a week going in where it was absolutely black hat,
- 35:06Speaker 1: white hat game going into that.
- 35:10Speaker 3: And Vegas is, by the way, and also, by the way,
- 35:12Speaker 3: and Vegas is also going after UCLA's records. They're undefeated. Yes.
- 35:17Speaker 3: And there hasn't been an undefeated team since Bobby Knight
- 35:21Speaker 3: in 76. Right. And so there's a lot on the
- 35:24Speaker 3: line for UNLV.
- 35:26Speaker 5: Yeah.
- 35:26Speaker 2: And they felt... Just in total in that game, it did.
- 35:31Speaker 1: Not feel going into it like Duke had a chance
- 35:34Speaker 1: just because they had been outclassed so thoroughly.
- 35:37Speaker 2: But they did.
- 35:38Speaker 1: I mentioned him in the NIM part of this, but
- 35:40Speaker 1: they did add Grant Hill. And that was important, particularly
- 35:44Speaker 1: in a game where what we learned as the game
- 35:46Speaker 1: went on that was important for UNLV was what they
- 35:48Speaker 1: didn't have was depth.
- 35:50Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 35:51Speaker 2: And Greg Anthony in foul trouble was a big deal.
- 35:55Speaker 3: And fouled out. Yep. with five minutes to go. They
- 35:58Speaker 3: were leading when he filed out of that game. Going
- 36:01Speaker 3: into that game, there were a couple of things too
- 36:03Speaker 3: at work that were really important. And that intimidation factor,
- 36:07Speaker 3: and I went and re-watched the game on YouTube just
- 36:11Speaker 3: to make sure my memories were accurate. And one of
- 36:14Speaker 3: the things, two things really jumped out at me. The
- 36:17Speaker 3: first thing was just the journalism. Watching the game in 1991,
- 36:25Speaker 3: James Brown was a sideline reporter for CBS. Billy Packer
- 36:30Speaker 3: and Jim Nance were on the call. It wasn't dominated.
- 36:35Speaker 3: The conversations and the discussion around the game was still
- 36:40Speaker 3: dominated by professional reporters and not ex-players. So there's a
- 36:45Speaker 3: lot of, it has a different feel to it. The
- 36:48Speaker 3: other thing that hit me about that too in watching
- 36:52Speaker 3: these teams go at each other was that the amount
- 36:55Speaker 3: of time that they emphasized on intimidation. There's a code
- 37:01Speaker 3: word in there. There's a lot of code in there
- 37:04Speaker 3: that you're talking about making sure that McCaffrey and Laettner
- 37:09Speaker 3: and Hurley aren't intimidated by Augman and Johnson and George Ackles.
- 37:14Speaker 2: That was a Billy Packer special, that game.
- 37:16Speaker 3: Exactly right. That was right in his wheelhouse. And it
- 37:20Speaker 3: really does sort of underscore that they're fighting for the
- 37:23Speaker 3: soul at a sport. right then and there. And what
- 37:29Speaker 3: I thought was fascinating about watching that game was the
- 37:32Speaker 3: number of, and Leslie Visser was another sideline reporter on that.
- 37:37Speaker 3: What I found fascinating about that was the number of
- 37:40Speaker 3: quotes that they, times that they had quoted Krzyzewski in
- 37:43Speaker 3: the timeouts talking about how, because Duke hung in there.
- 37:46Speaker 3: It was a two-point game. You know, the largest lead
- 37:48Speaker 3: in the game was two or three points, four points,
- 37:50Speaker 3: you know, here and there, five points. It was not,
- 37:53Speaker 3: nobody went on a big run in that game. especially
- 37:56Speaker 3: in the first half. And Krzyzewski is imploring his team.
- 38:00Speaker 3: It's almost like Rocky IV. He's just a man, right?
- 38:05Speaker 3: It's like, in other words, you don't have to be
- 38:06Speaker 3: afraid of these Black dudes. They're just people. And we're
- 38:10Speaker 3: going to beat them. And we're beating them. And so
- 38:12Speaker 3: you could tell that a lot of Krzyzewski's coaching was
- 38:18Speaker 3: to demystify this idea of Black athletic invincibility.
- 38:25Speaker 1: And look, man, the thing about Krzyzewski is he sees
- 38:28Speaker 1: himself as a tough guy. He is a Bob Knight disciple.
- 38:35Speaker 1: He went to West Point. He grew up Polish kid
- 38:37Speaker 1: on the south side of Chicago. The idea of being
- 38:40Speaker 1: pushed around by anybody is antithetical to his very being
- 38:45Speaker 1: and very existence. And what wound up happening with that
- 38:48Speaker 1: UNLV team, it's steal those dudes. And so Christian Laitner,
- 38:51Speaker 1: who's now a junior by the end becomes as unflappable
- 38:55Speaker 1: as a college basketball player had ever been. But you
- 38:58Speaker 1: are absolutely right. The idea was you can't be scared
- 39:01Speaker 1: of those black dudes. And they're like, but we, we,
- 39:05Speaker 1: I ain't gonna lie, man.
- 39:05Speaker 3: We kind of are afraid of them.
- 39:08Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
- 39:09Speaker 3: And Larry Johnson has gold teeth.
- 39:11Speaker 2: That's what I was about to say. You see that
- 39:12Speaker 2: gold tooth? It's right there.
- 39:15Speaker 1: You're telling me I don't really understand what you're even
- 39:17Speaker 1: talking about right now, man.
- 39:21Speaker 3: That's right. And underneath all of that is this idea
- 39:24Speaker 3: that these guys aren't really college students. They're not students.
- 39:29Speaker 3: They're not you know, they're not, this is not a
- 39:32Speaker 3: molders of men game that these guys, dare you say
- 39:36Speaker 3: the word thug, right? This is where it's all happening.
- 39:39Speaker 3: And let's also not forget underneath all of that, the
- 39:41Speaker 3: NCAA is looking very deeply into Jerry Tarkadian every chance
- 39:45Speaker 3: it gets.
- 39:46Speaker 1: Yes, at every turn. It is a legal battle that
- 39:48Speaker 1: went on for a very long time. We have landmark
- 39:51Speaker 1: legal decisions that come.
- 39:54Speaker 2: Out of this.
- 39:55Speaker 1: But in the end, you watched this game more recently
- 39:57Speaker 1: than I did. Duke just kind of won, right? Oh,
- 40:02Speaker 1: so the fix. Yeah, we can bring this up now.
- 40:05Speaker 3: Yes.
- 40:05Speaker 1: It was so implausible to us that Duke could win
- 40:08Speaker 1: that game that we widely believed that the.
- 40:12Speaker 2: Game was fixed.
- 40:14Speaker 3: Widely believe that the game was fixed.
- 40:16Speaker 1: Now, keep it in mind, there were also, like, pictures
- 40:18Speaker 1: of UNLV players in a hot tub with a man
- 40:21Speaker 1: who was referred to as the fixer. So I don't
- 40:25Speaker 1: want to pretend as though, like, there's no reason that
- 40:27Speaker 1: it might have come up in conversation.
- 40:29Speaker 3: Is that Moses Scurry in the hot tub with the fixer?
- 40:32Speaker 2: I think it is. Moses Scurry, and I can't remember
- 40:34Speaker 2: who the other dude was.
- 40:36Speaker 3: Yep. And also, yeah, and also there were those plays
- 40:41Speaker 3: that kind of got circled. You know, did Larry Johnson
- 40:45Speaker 3: hesitate on a shot that he could have made? All
- 40:48Speaker 3: of it. And so the reason why I went and
- 40:51Speaker 3: watched this game wasn't just to make sure that my
- 40:52Speaker 3: recollections were accurate. It was also to go look at
- 40:56Speaker 3: those plays again. I was like, let me go see
- 40:58Speaker 3: if I'm going to do a little eight men out
- 40:59Speaker 3: and start circling plays. And you know what I discovered
- 41:02Speaker 3: about that game? Duke won the game. Really? That what
- 41:08Speaker 3: I saw in that, I saw there's one.
- 41:12Speaker 3: Clear comp to me in that game and maybe two
- 41:16Speaker 3: if i can think about another one but there's one
- 41:19Speaker 3: that really really really jumps out at me that's the
- 41:22Speaker 3: 07 super bowl all over again that is giant that
- 41:26Speaker 3: is giants patriots where everything is on the line and
- 41:29Speaker 3: you could tell that unlv is like what do you
- 41:33Speaker 3: mean we're losing i mean like the game's tied like
- 41:35Speaker 3: the game's you.
- 41:36Speaker 2: Know we we.
- 41:39Speaker 3: They hadn't trailed in the second half but twice all season.
- 41:44Speaker 3: One was to Georgia Tech and the other one was,
- 41:46Speaker 3: I think, Ball State maybe or something like that. They
- 41:48Speaker 3: really hadn't been– they killed everybody so badly. And it
- 41:54Speaker 3: reminded me of what John McEnroe used to tell me
- 41:56Speaker 3: about pressure when he said– I never forgot this. It's really,
- 42:00Speaker 3: really great. Pressure is the possibility you could lose. And
- 42:07Speaker 3: now you start watching that game. It's a two-point game
- 42:10Speaker 3: at the half. And all of a sudden, these guys
- 42:13Speaker 3: didn't buck. They're still here. And then on top of that,
- 42:19Speaker 3: Greg Anthony gets into foul trouble. They're up three, and
- 42:23Speaker 3: it looks like they're starting to pull away. About five
- 42:24Speaker 3: minutes left. Here they come. Six minutes left. Greg Anthony
- 42:27Speaker 3: goes in for a layup that would have given them
- 42:28Speaker 3: a five-point lead. They call a charge, which wouldn't be
- 42:32Speaker 3: called a charge today. And The whole game changes. And
- 42:39Speaker 3: suddenly it's not the game that you thought it was.
- 42:43Speaker 3: And now Anderson Hunt has to play point guard and
- 42:45Speaker 3: all of the stuff is. And you can tell by
- 42:48Speaker 3: looking at them when they're passing the ball around, they
- 42:50Speaker 3: don't know what to do because they just got hit.
- 42:54Speaker 3: And you could tell that it was like, holy shit,
- 42:56Speaker 3: this whole thing's falling apart. We might we might not win.
- 43:00Speaker 3: And that to me, when you watch that game is
- 43:03Speaker 3: the real, like we're supposed, they never went on the
- 43:06Speaker 3: 10-0 run. They never went on the 18-0. They never
- 43:09Speaker 3: got going. That they played a game in the mud
- 43:13Speaker 3: and never got out of the mud and didn't quite
- 43:15Speaker 3: know how to close.
- 43:17Speaker 2: And I think.
- 43:20Speaker 1: There's something I think interesting to me about that game
- 43:23Speaker 1: for UNLV that I view very similarly to the January
- 43:25Speaker 1: 1987 Fiesta Bowl with Penn State and Miami. which is,
- 43:30Speaker 1: and people say they don't do this on purpose, and
- 43:32Speaker 1: it's true, but I think it's one of those moments
- 43:35Speaker 1: where you remember, oh, yeah, these guys are 20 and
- 43:39Speaker 1: 21 years old.
- 43:40Speaker 3: That's right.
- 43:41Speaker 2: Right?
- 43:41Speaker 1: Like, the most humanizing element of college sports are those moments.
- 43:47Speaker 2: Where you realize, oh, that's right.
- 43:49Speaker 3: They're just kids.
- 43:50Speaker 2: They're just kids.
- 43:51Speaker 3: You know?
- 43:51Speaker 1: And that is, like, seeing Michael Irvin and Alonzo Highsmith
- 43:55Speaker 1: and Melvin Bratton and all those guys bawling on the
- 43:57Speaker 1: sidelines after they'd been truly obnoxious for all this time
- 44:01Speaker 1: when they were on top.
- 44:02Speaker 2: And then it gets to the end and it's like,
- 44:04Speaker 2: oh yeah, that's right. That's where they are in this.
- 44:08Speaker 1: And with UNLV trying to get a shot off on
- 44:11Speaker 1: that last possession, they choked.
- 44:13Speaker 3: Didn't even have a play. Yeah. Didn't know where to go.
- 44:16Speaker 3: Anderson Hunt went for the win. And Larry Johnson, that
- 44:19Speaker 3: shot that he supposedly held up, they got, so to
- 44:22Speaker 3: set up, they've got the lead and Duke comes back
- 44:27Speaker 3: and ties it. And Laettner hits two free throws to
- 44:31Speaker 3: give him the two-point lead with 12.7 seconds left. 12.7
- 44:35Speaker 3: seconds left is a lifetime in basketball. And back then,
- 44:42Speaker 3: NBA rules are not the same as college rules back then.
- 44:45Speaker 3: Back then, you couldn't take the ball out at half court.
- 44:48Speaker 3: So you had to take the ball out from your
- 44:49Speaker 3: own basket. But still, 12.7 seconds is plenty of time
- 44:53Speaker 3: to get what you want. And by the time UNLV
- 44:58Speaker 3: got the ball over half court. They were like, oh shit,
- 45:02Speaker 3: we're going to lose. Larry Johnson's got a kind of
- 45:05Speaker 3: set up three, but it's not a wide open. The
- 45:08Speaker 3: way people talked about that, it was like he had
- 45:10Speaker 3: pulled a Ben Simmons or something. He had a 10
- 45:12Speaker 3: footer and decided not to shoot and kicked it out.
- 45:15Speaker 2: By the way, people were using this as fixed evidence.
- 45:17Speaker 1: Exactly.
- 45:17Speaker 3: This was the shot that Larry Johnson, it was a
- 45:20Speaker 3: three point from the elbow. It's like a 22 foot shot.
- 45:23Speaker 3: maybe little inside, but it was a three point shot.
- 45:25Speaker 3: He didn't take it. He had a guy pretty, you know,
- 45:27Speaker 3: rushing out at him. I was like, that's the fix.
- 45:29Speaker 3: It was so different from what I remembered it, the
- 45:32Speaker 3: conversation to be. And then they kick it back out
- 45:36Speaker 3: and Anderson Hunt takes a desperation three with two guys
- 45:39Speaker 3: on them and they, you know, it's a brick and
- 45:40Speaker 3: they lose the game. But to me, there were two
- 45:45Speaker 3: things that really jumped out watching that game. The first
- 45:48Speaker 3: was that Duke didn't fold it's like what you know
- 45:50Speaker 3: the you the bully took a swing and they didn't
- 45:53Speaker 3: go anywhere like okay we here to play they were
- 45:54Speaker 3: here to play that's the first thing the second thing
- 45:58Speaker 3: was how different the game of basketball is played you
- 46:03Speaker 3: go back and hop on youtube and watch that game
- 46:06Speaker 3: that shit is packed in the paint i mean it
- 46:09Speaker 3: is detroit pistons packed in the paint like everybody is
- 46:13Speaker 3: on top of each other and today the game is
- 46:15Speaker 3: so spaced and there's movement and there's flow and guys
- 46:18Speaker 3: you know There's open shots. There were no open shots
- 46:21Speaker 3: in that game, in that second half of that game.
- 46:23Speaker 3: It was, it was straight up hardcore basketball, old school
- 46:27Speaker 3: basketball where you're like on each other defensively. And, you know, and,
- 46:32Speaker 3: and by that point, you know, the biggest piece of
- 46:37Speaker 3: it was that your best player, national player of the
- 46:39Speaker 3: year material, Larry Johnson, they didn't give him the ball
- 46:42Speaker 3: in the second half. He had a little tiny run
- 46:44Speaker 3: with about seven minutes left, but for the most part,
- 46:47Speaker 3: neither he nor Stacey Ogden did anything in the second half. So,
- 46:51Speaker 3: and at the same time, Kristen Leitner had 20 in
- 46:53Speaker 3: the first, like those guys, it was a battle. It
- 46:55Speaker 3: was a really, really great game. And, and then of
- 47:00Speaker 3: course the, the, the last thing about it was your,
- 47:04Speaker 3: you know, your point guard fouls out and you didn't
- 47:06Speaker 3: really know what to do. Yeah.
- 47:07Speaker 2: He's the only guy that can run the offense.
- 47:09Speaker 3: That's right.
- 47:10Speaker 1: Like that was the thing is that once he went down,
- 47:13Speaker 1: That's when it fell apart.
- 47:15Speaker 2: He doesn't fall out, they win that game.
- 47:17Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
- 47:19Speaker 2: Here's the fun part on this. This game led to
- 47:24Speaker 2: the building.
- 47:26Speaker 1: Honestly, I don't think there's been anything like it since then,
- 47:28Speaker 1: which is the building of the legend of Christian Leitner.
- 47:31Speaker 3: This is where it starts.
- 47:33Speaker 1: This is where it starts. Like, this is the big win.
- 47:35Speaker 1: I mean, he went to four Final Fours, won two
- 47:38Speaker 1: national championships. And what this was, and there are a
- 47:41Speaker 1: couple that it guided from him along the way, I suppose.
- 47:43Speaker 1: But the big thing is, this is the beginning of Christian.
- 47:46Speaker 2: Like, you fully understand it.
- 47:48Speaker 1: Christian Laettner gave it to every one of the top
- 47:53Speaker 1: players of his era.
- 47:54Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 47:55Speaker 2: In some cases, multiple times.
- 47:58Speaker 1: Shaq got it multiple times from him, home and on
- 48:01Speaker 1: the road. Fab Five got it home, road, and neutral site.
- 48:06Speaker 1: He gave it to everybody.
- 48:09Speaker 3: Yeah. One thing about that game, though, that I also,
- 48:12Speaker 3: and I do want to go back to that, but
- 48:13Speaker 3: one thing about this game, too, that I thought was
- 48:15Speaker 3: interesting was my recollection was also that it was Bobby
- 48:21Speaker 3: Hurley giving him the business, too, and it wasn't.
- 48:24Speaker 5: Oh.
- 48:25Speaker 3: It wasn't. Anderson Hunt And Greg Anthony ate his lunch.
- 48:32Speaker 3: That was a guard run offense. And Anderson Hunt and
- 48:38Speaker 3: Greg Anthony, they killed Bobby Hurley. They killed him. They
- 48:41Speaker 3: hunted Bobby Hurley. They were looking for where he was.
- 48:44Speaker 3: And he couldn't hang with them. He couldn't hang with them.
- 48:47Speaker 3: But Leitner could in the front court. Yeah. And that
- 48:50Speaker 3: was the difference. And that was also, when you think
- 48:52Speaker 3: about it, this is really, and you can go back.
- 48:56Speaker 3: when you think about like when we were talking about
- 48:58Speaker 3: some of the social racial stuff of it too like
- 49:00Speaker 3: where was the creation of like of white duke it's
- 49:04Speaker 3: a later.
- 49:05Speaker 2: Yeah because well with a dash of fairy and fairy.
- 49:09Speaker 3: But the 86 team had mark allery and jay billis
- 49:12Speaker 3: and those guys but it had dawkins and amaker right
- 49:14Speaker 3: right and also because they didn't win okay they got Ferry,
- 49:19Speaker 3: but they didn't win. Yeah. You know, and nobody would
- 49:22Speaker 3: have said, Oh, you put Danny Ferry up against Shaq.
- 49:25Speaker 3: And I mean, it's not, it wasn't the same Leitner
- 49:27Speaker 3: because of who he was given the business to.
- 49:30Speaker 4: Yes.
- 49:31Speaker 3: Emboldens the whole thing in a way that has always
- 49:33Speaker 3: driven me crazy in terms of our, our discussion. It's like, okay.
- 49:40Speaker 3: white great player suddenly comes with implications right it's not
- 49:45Speaker 3: just that he's a great player and he did his
- 49:47Speaker 3: thing it's like he's the standard.
- 49:49Speaker 1: Now yeah and it may and it required them to
- 49:52Speaker 1: do some obviously hypocritical things because layton was such a
- 49:54Speaker 1: jerk that's right right like like like that was the
- 49:57Speaker 1: part of it it was like i mean he stepped
- 49:59Speaker 1: on somebody in the lead eight round and they did
- 50:03Speaker 1: not throw him out of the game, which allowed him
- 50:05Speaker 1: to continue having what one might argue was the greatest
- 50:09Speaker 1: game anybody's ever played in the history of college basketball.
- 50:12Speaker 3: And there was a moment in that game too, where
- 50:14Speaker 3: Grant Hill pops Greg Anthony in the face with his shoulder,
- 50:20Speaker 3: which was once again, like, I don't, I don't want
- 50:22Speaker 3: to overstate this as once again, Duke had to prove
- 50:26Speaker 3: they weren't punks. Yeah. Right. And Billy Packer in that
- 50:30Speaker 3: game goes, he needs to get thrown out of the
- 50:32Speaker 3: game for that. And I'm thinking, imagine Grant Hill getting
- 50:36Speaker 3: thrown out in the first half of that semifinal. And
- 50:41Speaker 3: then they went back and said, oh, no, I really
- 50:43Speaker 3: don't think so. On second thought, he hit him with
- 50:45Speaker 3: the shoulder, not the forearm. But it was still very
- 50:47Speaker 3: much a you can't intimidate us moment.
- 50:53Speaker 1: If they needed to prove to anybody they weren't soft,
- 50:55Speaker 1: they needed to prove it to that man over there
- 50:57Speaker 1: screaming at them in that suit.
- 50:58Speaker 3: That's right.
- 50:59Speaker 2: Because he didn't believe him. Unless y'all want to walk home.
- 51:02Speaker 3: That's right. And then a couple plays later, Larry Johnson
- 51:07Speaker 3: walks by Grant Hill and gives him a shoulder to
- 51:09Speaker 3: the face. I'm like, oh, they balling right now. This
- 51:13Speaker 3: is a territorial game. Right? This is a territorial game.
- 51:17Speaker 3: And I loved it because I was like, ooh. These
- 51:21Speaker 3: are all things like, when I watched that game, I
- 51:22Speaker 3: was what? I was 22 years old. So now you
- 51:25Speaker 3: look at it with different eyes and you go, oh, man,
- 51:27Speaker 3: there was a lot at stake here. These guys were trying–
- 51:29Speaker 3: It was an alpha game. It was an alpha game.
- 51:32Speaker 3: And for Krzyzewski as well, to prove once again. Like
- 51:35Speaker 3: I said, because you've got to remember him. He's probably
- 51:39Speaker 3: at the sidelines also thinking at some point, when am
- 51:42Speaker 3: I going to get one of these? And is Tarkanian
- 51:43Speaker 3: going to roll me again two years in a row? Right.
- 51:47Speaker 1: I mean, this is a milestone moment in the history
- 51:51Speaker 1: of college basketball.
- 51:52Speaker 3: 100%.
- 51:53Speaker 2: Like this whole thing. Like I said.
- 51:56Speaker 1: Laettner did not beat the Fab Five in those three locations.
- 51:59Speaker 1: He simply beat them on the road and on the
- 52:01Speaker 1: neutral site. The next year, Fab Five came to Cameron.
- 52:05Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, after Laettner graduated and then won there,
- 52:08Speaker 1: Jalen Rose said Krzyzewski beat him four times in that
- 52:11Speaker 1: whole career. They gave it to Temple. They gave it
- 52:14Speaker 1: to Arkansas. They gave it to Georgetown. Anybody that had.
- 52:17Speaker 2: A whiff of it, they was like, hey, we got
- 52:19Speaker 2: something for all of y'all. Like, this was... You're right.
- 52:25Speaker 1: I think your point is a great one that this
- 52:27Speaker 1: is really kind of the building of the idea of
- 52:29Speaker 1: Duke being white. And then it kind of got reinforced
- 52:32Speaker 1: in the aughts because that 99 Duke team, which I
- 52:35Speaker 1: contend is the best team Chesky ever had. And I
- 52:37Speaker 1: don't know if any white dudes got any minutes on
- 52:39Speaker 1: that one. That's Eldon Brand, Corey McGeady, William Avery, Trajan Langdon.
- 52:43Speaker 2: Woo!
- 52:43Speaker 1: Because that was when it was coming off after his
- 52:46Speaker 1: back had messed up.
- 52:48Speaker 2: And when Duke needs to recover.
- 52:50Speaker 3: They can recover.
- 52:51Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't really get so caught up. being stuff
- 52:55Speaker 1: they care about otherwise.
- 52:56Speaker 3: You know where they're looking for players.
- 52:58Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, hey, man, we ain't got time
- 53:00Speaker 2: to play with y'all no more.
- 53:01Speaker 3: Come on.
- 53:01Speaker 2: Yeah, you with the shady head, you coach. Yeah, come
- 53:04Speaker 2: on down, partner.
- 53:05Speaker 3: Duke as villain starts here. Yes. You know? And also
- 53:11Speaker 3: Duke as hero starts here.
- 53:13Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess it depends on what, because they been
- 53:15Speaker 1: villains in our house. You know, my daddy was the
- 53:17Speaker 1: head of the game. You know what I'm saying? Maybe
- 53:18Speaker 1: just mug people a little long time to get wise.
- 53:21Speaker 2: We was on it.
- 53:22Speaker 3: We saw it. We saw it. Yeah. I mean, I,
- 53:23Speaker 3: and I love that because I, like I said, I
- 53:26Speaker 3: remember it's easy to like a team and it's easy
- 53:30Speaker 3: to take a team in whatever direction you want to
- 53:34Speaker 3: take them when they don't win.
- 53:36Speaker 5: Yeah.
- 53:37Speaker 3: And then once they win, now you start looking at
- 53:39Speaker 3: all of it differently. You know, it was kind of
- 53:42Speaker 3: cute when Tom Brady won his underdogs and they beat
- 53:44Speaker 3: the Rams and then it wasn't cute in five years later.
- 53:48Speaker 3: It doesn't get, you know, because now, now the lens changes, right?
- 53:52Speaker 3: And I think that what is fascinating about that game
- 53:55Speaker 3: is that you can do this. You can circle seminal
- 53:59Speaker 3: games and moments that sort of shift the balance and
- 54:03Speaker 3: shift where things are going. And I think, like I said,
- 54:05Speaker 3: in rewatching that game, the illusion or just the idea
- 54:16Speaker 3: of education is on top of this too, because let's
- 54:19Speaker 3: not forget, Nobody would question Duke as an academic institution.
- 54:23Speaker 3: People questioned UNLV because it didn't even exist in 1975, right?
- 54:26Speaker 3: So it was like, this ain't even a real school.
- 54:32Speaker 3: So all of those different things, when you take all
- 54:34Speaker 3: of those elements and you put them on the basketball
- 54:37Speaker 3: court at an extremely high level with extremely high stakes,
- 54:41Speaker 3: you got something remarkable. And that was a remarkable game.
- 54:45Speaker 1: That is Howard Bryant. Check out Kings and Pawns. I
- 54:49Speaker 1: still got my copy right here for you guys to
- 54:51Speaker 1: see here. It is an excellent book that I still
- 54:54Speaker 1: highly recommend you go check out. Kings and Pawns on
- 54:57Speaker 1: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson.
- 54:59Speaker 2: Give this a look. My brother, I appreciate you.
- 55:02Speaker 3: My pleasure. This was fun. Like I said, I love
- 55:04Speaker 3: I've just forgotten all about all of that. And it's
- 55:07Speaker 3: I think it is like I remember like I had
- 55:10Speaker 3: a girlfriend who used to just laugh at me like
- 55:12Speaker 3: because I used to watch, you know, espn classic and
- 55:15Speaker 3: stuff like did the score change no when was the
- 55:18Speaker 3: game 30 years ago why are you watching it but
- 55:22Speaker 3: it was fascinating watching this basketball because it's not the
- 55:26Speaker 3: same basketball that we see today.
- 55:28Speaker 1: Nah man it's a different game brother i appreciate you
- 55:30Speaker 1: and ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for joining
- 55:33Speaker 1: us here on the right time We do this four
- 55:35Speaker 1: days a week. Ryan Brumley handles everything behind the scenes.
- 55:37Speaker 1: Thank you, sir. Hit the voicemail line 323-596-7767. Remember, follow
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- 55:47Speaker 1: us five stars. You only give us four stars. I'm
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- 55:53Speaker 2: Take it easy.