In which the best annual event in American sports tops itself (again)…
Lordy, what a great basketball game, tight and fiercely contested for 40 minutes. Verne Lundquist mentioned this one in the same breath Duke-Kentucky ‘92. That’ll be seen as sacreligious by some, but not me.
I have no idea if tonight’s classic was anywhere near the greatest college game ever, and anyway I’m in the office, where we’re watching but (believe it or not) not utterly glued to the tube for two hours.
But I do know that games that have a Kodak moment at the end, like Grant Hill’s baseball pass and Christian Laettner’s shot, tend to get overrated as time passes.
(CBS’ Seth Davis was on “Pardon the Interruption,” the other day to promote his book about the Bird-Magic 1979 final. He admitted that that game, while perhaps the most important college game ever, wasn’t, “a great game like the 1983 game.”
He was referring to the NC State-Houston final that ended on Lorenzo Charles’ dunk at the buzzer. That game was in fact awful- Jim Valvano’s club fouling intentionally, dribbling the shot clock down and then heaving threes while Houston idiotically played into V’s hands.
The ‘83 Houston-Louisville semifinal, a 94-81 dunkfest, was by light-years the better game, and that was obvious at everybody the time. But people don’t remember that. They remember Valvano running around, looking for someone to hug.)
There was not a lot of defense being played in Duke-Kentucky ‘92, as I sort of vaguely recall it, which led to the teams getting caught up in a shootout and then, granted, making play after play after play. It was a phenomenal game.
But I wonder if what we saw tonight wasn’t better pure basketball, at both ends of the court.
Irrelevant but oddly interesting aside: My brother witnessed Duke-Kentucky ‘92, and the Syracuse-Connecticut six-overtime epic a couple weeks ago, in person. I did not. And I’m the sportswriter. What’s gone wrong here?
Also, if Kentucky doesn’t hire somebody in the next couple days, get ready for a colossal, distracting job-rumor feeding frenzy at the Final Four, and for Jay Wright to be in the middle of it.
This just in: At the moment, Villanova’s a better job than Kentucky.
Postscript: Just found this 2002 list of the 63 greatest games in Big Dance annals. Its author does not consider the Houston-Louisville semi one of the three best games from the ‘83 tournament, since it includes NC State-Houston (#3) and two other games. I mean, come on….
