"When March Went Mad:" Fourth Excerpt

As N.C. State gets ready for the championship game, Valvano delivers a memorable talk

Posted 12:00 a.m. Dec 6, 2007 — Updated 4:00 p.m. Dec 10, 2007

Tim Peeler

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.”

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