It’s officially sweater weather. I’m trading in my shorts and sandals for slightly warmer wear. The rich spectrum of fall foliage now lines the streets instead of the skyline, and I actually had frost on my car the other morning. The return of the chill means only one thing.
Basketball is back.
Midnight Madness has come and gone, the last exhibition games are winding down, and I’m seeing less and less of my basketball manager friends. In only four days, our Hoos kick things off at JPJ against the high-octane VMI Keydets.
But this column isn’t about what to watch for this season in Charlottesville. It’s not about how the Hoos will cope in the first season post-Singletary or which young guns and newcomers will contribute the most this year. It almost was, until I checked the schedule for the EA SPORTS Maui Invitational.
I love the Maui Invitational. Coach K and Tom Izzo in Acapulco shirts and leis, the nation’s most elite players squaring off in a gym that’s smaller than the ones most of them had in high school — it’s quite a spectacle and a great kick-off to the season. But there is one game in particular this year that I can’t wait to watch, even if I am rooting for 10 broken legs and a 0-0 tie:
UNC versus Chaminade.
My disdain for both these schools knows almost no bounds. It’s genetic, I guess, something I inherited from Dad. We use “Carolina ref” to express our displeasure with anything from blown calls to bad traffic. Since before I was born, Chaminade has been paired, in my household, with the same epithet Bucky Dent receives in Southie.
Why Chaminade, you ask? (Presumably immediately after “Chami-who?”) What could the Silverswords of the NCAA’s Division II possibly have done to incur such wrath? The answer, my friends, lies way back in 1982.
It was the Year of Ralph. Behind the gargantuan Ralph Sampson, the reigning national Player of the Year and recipient of the Naismith Award, our Hoos had knocked off Patrick Ewing’s Georgetown and the immortal Phi Slama Jama dynasty at Houston. Rick Carlisle and Othell Wilson formed a backcourt duo among the best in the country, quick sharpshooters who kept defenses honest and off of Sampson inside.
Head coach Terry Holland had taken the boys across the Pacific, all the way to Tokyo, to play in an early season tournament that showcased just how good the defending ACC regular-season champions were. On the way back home, they were scheduled for a stop in Hawaii to take on an NAIA team from a school with only 800 students: Chaminade.
In the weeks before the game, university officials had been discussing the envelopment of Chaminade into the University of Hawaii system. But in one night, during the course of one 40-minute game, all that changed.
Sampson had anywhere from 8 inches to a foot on the players covering him. Thing was, there were three or four of them every time he turned around. Chaminade’s “secret weapon” was a Virginia product who had played Sampson in high school. For one perfect storm of a game, the Hoos couldn’t hit their outside shots, and Chaminade couldn’t miss. When all was said and done, Chaminade 77, Virginia 72.
Throughout the years, explanations for what happened that night have trickled in by bits and pieces. One is that Ralph had the flu or some other illness that he’d picked up in Japan. Another says a few players had enjoyed the Hawaiian nightlife a bit too much and were sluggish the next day. Who knows, maybe Holland picked up a cursed Tiki doll on the beach.
Whatever the reasons, whatever the excuse, that game will live in infamy as the greatest upset in the history of college basketball. Watch the Maui tournament. Without fail, they’ll make reference to the biggest win in Chaminade’s history, the game that is the very reason the tournament exists at all.
In terms of purely a basketball game, all history aside, Carolina versus Chaminade shouldn’t be much of a game. UNC has Tyler “Psycho T” Hansbrough, winner of 11 national Player of the Year awards, including the Naismith. Its backcourt is stacked: Bobby Frasor, Danny Green, Wayne Ellington, and Ty Lawson all return from last year’s squad. They’re the first unanimous AP preseason number one ever. They were ACC regular-season champions last year, and everyone expects the same, if not more, from them this year.
Sound familiar?
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