INTERESTING STUFF 

1998-99

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UConn goes from underdogs to top dogs - 1999
By Paul Attner
The Sporting News

His is a generation of gym rats, of rumpled clothes and long tales, of bus rides and cheap motels and cafeteria food and inadequate gyms and even worse budgets. He talks in a lingo reflective of another time, when coaches didn't wear $500 suits and assistant coaches didn't look like fancy-car salesmen and domes didn't host the Final Four.

He speaks too fast and his skin is thin and his emotions rage for all to see. He can be charming and churlish, funny and biting, but always, always, he is a basketball man. And so on Monday night, as his team cut down the nets and people rushed to hug him and shake his hand and join him in a tear or two, there was meaning to this championship for Connecticut that only Jim Calhoun can understand.

For 33 years, from high school to a no-name program at Northeastern to what once was a second-tier school in the Big East, Calhoun worked as hard as only few people can. His teams reflect his ethic; their relentless defense and up-tempo offense are creations of a guy not satisfied with a decent day's work. He always wants more, from himself, from his players, from his program.

But until Monday night, despite the success his work has realized in 12 years at Connecticut, the basketball man had not been completely satisfied. In his world, fulfillment is measured only by a national championship. The other stuff--the six Big East regular-season titles, four Big East tourney crowns, the 554 career victories, the 25 NCAA wins, the knowledge he was among the best there is at his job--felt good. But not good enough. There was not enough success. Not until Monday night.

Now, at 56, the big Irishman with the Boston accent has a game film to relish, to switch on anytime he begins doubting himself, to recall when he can't sleep. Best of all, it came in a way only he can appreciate the most, as an underdog, in a heavyweight battle with a revered opponent so decisively favored to win this title that its talents became almost Herculean in nature.

"I've always been a Don Quixote kind of character," Calhoun once said. "I've always been the underdog. It's the way I've always thought of myself."

So, the stage couldn't have been more appropriate for him. Duke somehow was a nine-point favorite against a team that had lost only twice and, like the Blue Devils, had been ranked No. 1 at times this season. Duke was being given too much credit, Connecticut not enough. And now, with a 77-74 victory that no one can take away from him, Calhoun can dare dream the dream he has always wanted to envision.

"I'm no better coach than I was three weeks ago or no worse," Calhoun says. "That's what this means to me. All I had to do was be true to my kids and coach the best I could and that's what I've done. Tomorrow, you'll hear a loud yes, that would be me.

"But I didn't need to get to the Final Four to think that I could coach basketball. That's how I feel." But Calhoun is soft-peddling this accomplishment. The victory came about because his players executed a wonderfully conceived game plan that was crafted by a basketball man who knows how to coach. Really coach.

At the same time, reject any notion this was a mighty upset. This was not another North Carolina State beating Houston in 1983, not another Villanova beating Georgetown in 1985, not even close. It will be portrayed that way, but don't buy the fluff. This Final Four showed Duke was much more mortal than our rush-to-judgment society was willing to portray. The invincible Blue Devils were fortunate to beat Michigan State in Saturday's semifinal game. If the Spartans had a pure shooter, they would have been playing in the final.

But Duke was not as fortunate Monday night. Connecticut had that pure scorer in Richard Hamilton, and his game-high 27 points not only earned him the most outstanding player honor of the Final Four but also, ultimately, the championship for the Huskies. He was the one player Duke could not solve, the one player on his team who refused to stagger under the intense pressure of the final moments. He poked the air out of Duke's inflated balloon and reinforced the notion that games, not press clippings, determine titles.

In the process, these teams gave us a contest to relish. This was fun. The play was hard, it was clean, and it was on an impressive level that can be produced only by finely tuned teams.

Almost from the start, it was obvious there was little to separate these teams. It was a game that needed to be decided at the end, and it was. The outcome hung on the final 34 seconds, during which UConn's pudgy point guard Khalid El-Amin badly missed a leaner with his team up by one, only to have Trajan Langdon try to spin into the lane for a final game winner that never was taken. Instead, he lost his balance and was rightfully called for traveling. El-Amin subsequently made two foul shots to begin the Connecticut celebration.

Hamilton's presence is significant for more than points, however. His decision last offseason to return is the only reason Connecticut now is celebrating its first championship. Already a dominant player as a sophomore, he easily could have joined the NBA, and his decision wouldn't have been doubted. And without him, the four returning Huskies starters would not have been good enough to even reach the Final Four, much less finish No. 1.

This, unfortunately, is how too many basketball championships will be decided in the future. The success of programs will depend not just on recruiting high school blue-chippers but also on sweet-talking key players to remain in school.

"I think the big factors on me staying were that the coach always told me that we won the Big East championship but we never won a national championship," says Hamilton, the best pure scorer in the college game. "I kind of thought about what he said. I told myself, 'I don't want to end my (career) on a low note.' The only thing that I could do about it was to come back and play."

Hamilton's low note was losing last year in the regional finals to North Carolina, another frustration for both Calhoun and the Huskies, who heard much too loudly questions about whether they ever could get to a Final Four, much less finish No. 1, after also dropping regional final games in 1990 (to Duke) and '95 (Florida). Their presence in this tournament had become an annual event, just as their exodus before the Final Four had become an unwanted trend. Not even UConn greats Ray Allen, Donyell Marshall, Chris Smith and Scott Burrell could deliver a Final Four berth.

So Hamilton came back to share this burden of expectations with his coach, which immediately made Connecticut an elite contender and earned it TSN's preseason No. 1 ranking, same as Duke became a favorite because its two best players--Langdon and Elton Brand--chose to stay around. Indeed, no Blue Devil ever has left early for the NBA, a significant achievement that schools such as North Carolina, Kentucky and Kansas can only gaze upon with envy. So a full-strength Duke and a full-strength Connecticut dominated a season in which underclassmen who could have threatened this success--players such as Paul Pierce, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Mike Bibby, Ron Mercer and Nazr Mohammed--instead wore pro uniforms. But that is college basketball in 1999: the contenders and, ultimately, the title winners are determined year to year in large part by which stars stay and which stars leave. And the teams that best survive the exodus wind up competing against a diminished pool of adversaries--and the result is a record that inflates their true talent.

"You don't have the dominant college players staying in school for very long," Florida coach Billy Donovan says. "Before, the guys who were hardship were the only ones who would leave, like a (Syracuse's) Pearl Washington. Now you have guys going directly from high school to the pros, and the ones who go to college stay only one or two years. It's hard to become as good as you think you would be if all your best players never left."

That is why coach Mike Krzyzewski kept tossing up a caution sign to those who rushed to overly optimistic judgments about his team. "We are still very young," he kept saying, because he knows his team, with only one senior starter (Langdon) and with budding freshman superstar forward Corey Maggette waiting to take center stage, is at least a year from being historically better--but only if Brand chooses to stay in Durham, N.C., for his junior year as he says he will. With Brand, TSN's Player of the Year, Duke once again risks another season of unfair expectations--and unrealistic evaluations.

This Blue Devil team, which was on a 32-game winning skein, is good, very good. A win Monday night would have set the NCAA single-season victory record, but Duke must settle for a 37-2 mark. But it always was ridiculous to tout them as one of the best ever, to dare put them in the same sentence with the likes of the Walton and Abdul-Jabbar-led UCLA teams, the undefeated 1976 Indiana team, the 1982 North Carolina team that featured Michael Jordan, James Worthy and Sam Perkins, the 1956 San Francisco team of Bill Russell, the 1974 North Carolina State team of David Thompson and Tom Burleson. This edition of Duke doesn't even beat Krzyzewski's 1992 championship squad of Grant Hill, Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner. They never were a threat to these great squads, nor is Connecticut.

Like Duke, the Huskies represent what this unsettled era of college basketball is all about, a wandering time bereft of dominant big men and filled with great swings created because elite players use higher education as a cup of coffee on their way to the gourmet meal that awaits them in the NBA. Connecticut finished 34-2, is fun to watch, a team for its time.

But not for all-time.

So let's look at them and their coach in a fair context. If you want to build a college winner, look at the Huskies. They have a pure ballhandler in El-Amin, a wicked scorer in Hamilton, a defensive specialist in guard Ricky Moore, a banger at center who can rebound and set picks in Jake Voskuhl and a complementary power forward in Kevin Freeman. Plus Calhoun and his staff have recruited so well that the resulting depth allows them to pound opponents, wear them out and dazzle them with quickness and knock them out with spurts.

It is entertaining basketball, the kind we wish every team would play. There is no stall in Calhoun, no deliberate approach, no run down the clock. He is too aggressive, too impatient, too knowledgeable about what works and what attracts the best recruits to do anything else. And when he gets players, he coaches the heck out of them, improving them through a combination of love and plodding, leaving a lingering feeling of love that is so enduring some of his former stars like Allen came to Monday's game to lend him support.

This is the Calhoun who could reflect, even in his proudest moments, on what he calls the cruelty of college basketball, when the jobs of many coaches are determined "by three weeks of March madness," who understands how "when it ends (in the tournament with a loss), it doesn't just slowly end. The curtain gets drawn, the band marches on and you look through a grayish curtain and things go on without you and emotionally it is tough to take."

Until now, he had never been able to march with that band. Yet, as much as he loves the game, he still is more than the game. He became close friends with a team manager, a man named Joe McGinn, who suffered from kidney disease and died of a heart attack two weeks before Calhoun's first Final Four game. "I learned true courage from Joe," says Calhoun, who once had to persuade McGinn to have his legs amputated. And you thought coaching was difficult. A picture of McGinn was in the locker of every Huskies player at this tournament. When Calhoun cut the final strand off the nets Monday night at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla., he put one back on the rim. For McGinn.

His friend would be proud of what Calhoun and his players accomplished. This was no fluke, this win over Duke. The Huskies were the superior team the whole game, not by much, but enough to force the Blue Devils to spend so much energy trying to catch up, much less gain control. It was a situation foreign to Duke, which had crushed so many opponents this season that anything less than a 10-point victory was considered close.

Calhoun knew he couldn't match shooting depth with Duke, and he had no one as good inside as Brand, the 260-pounder of the large posterior and power moves. But the Huskies possessed superior quickness and a player in Hamilton capable of dominating.

So Connecticut came out with a wondrous game plan. In the first half, whenever Brand touched the ball in the low post, he was double-teamed aggressively, so much so he was negated. Duke adjusted in the second half, when Brand scored 10 points and singlehandedly willed his team back into the contest with a four-minute display of incredible defense. But he never controlled the game. On offense, the Huskies spread the floor and dared the Blue Devils to challenge them, as they knew they would, with a tight man-to-man. Calhoun, who had been taking notes on Duke the whole season, particularly since its only loss to Cincinnati in November in the Great Alaska Shootout, bet his team's quickness would overwhelm his foe and result in open shots.

He was right. "No one broke us down on defense like they did," said forward Chris Carrawell, Duke's best defender. Hamilton, who was guarded by Carrawell, benefited from a ton of screens, but especially in the second half when he rolled up 16 points, he could have scored at will in the open court. He was just too much for Carrawell. Maybe Duke could have survived even Hamilton, if Moore hadn't made up for El-Amin's subpar showing with an unexpected 13 first-half points, or if the Huskies didn't handle them on the boards, 41-31, or if they struggled too frequently to find open shots against a superior defensive team.

Yet Duke still hung in, relying on Brand and some long-range sniping from Langdon and an improved defense the final 10 minutes. The Blue Devils trailed, 73-68, with 3:38 left, only to close to 73-72 on a Langdon 3-pointer. El-Amin, who had been hindered by foul trouble and over-dribbling, got loose to sink a leaning six-footer against a defense that inexplicably allowed him to drive off a double team. But Duke playmaker William Avery was fouled, and he made both free throws with 54 seconds to go. After a Connecticut time- out, El-Amin, not Hamilton, put up the pressure shot. It was a horrid attempt, which Duke rebounded.

The Blue Devils should have called time out but Krzyzewski declined, explaining that his players knew what to run and that a stoppage of play would allow Connecticut to regroup. Instead, he called for the ball to be in Langdon's hands. "Absolutely, I want Trajan Langdon to take that shot," said Krzyzewski, who was trying to win his first title since posting back-to-back crowns in 1991 and '92. "Win or lose with Trajan Langdon." Langdon squared up on the tenacious Moore and tried to beat him on a drive. But Moore is quicker and wouldn't allow Langdon to get free. Langdon then tried to spin for a mid-lane one-hander but stumbled and traveled. El-Amin was fouled on the ensuing out of bounds play and made his free throws to increase the final lead to three. The Blue Devils had one last chance to tie with a 3-pointer, but Langdon stumbled and fell as he crossed midcourt as the final seconds expired.

"We've certainly rebounded better, and they kept constant pressure on us," said Krzyzewski, whose spread offense didn't set enough picks to free up his outside shooters. "It is a constant pressure. You're a possession down and they come down and score and we didn't get a stop. And now we have to score to keep it a one possession game. That's pressure."

It is a pressure Duke really hasn't felt all year, a pressure the Huskies have dealt with before, a pressure a basketball man like Calhoun prepares for his entire career. He had convinced himself and his team that Connecticut could win this game long before Monday night. Years of scouting and analyzing talent and dissecting tape provided him with unique instincts. He just needed the chance to prove he was right, that his team had the guts and talent and, most important, quickness, to prevail.

He got his shot. And now he knows, really knows, what it means to be successful.