AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2007 > March > 27 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USHistory of hoops strong in Atlanta
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
College basketball tournaments have been finding their way to Atlanta since the 1920s, when the original Southern Conference teams poured into town by train or bus and put on their show at the then-stylish, now old and creaky, Municipal Auditorium. (Yep, it’s still there, serving some kind of purpose to Georgia State University.) About 5,000 saw the championship game in 1927. Vanderbilt beat Georgia.
Basketball was more or less a second cousin to football in those times. Often, the coach was a football assistant who wanted to pick up some extra cash during the winter. A basketball coach was seldom ever fired. Teams often were dominated by football players, staying in condition during the winter.
Winning wasn’t important enough to make life so miserable for the coach, as in the case of Tubby Smith at Kentucky, that he chose to get out of town. (And in passing, let me say that if I had to hire a basketball coach today, Tubby Smith would be at the top of my list.)
We leap forward now to 1977. Tom Cousins has built a palace (somewhat) and called it The Omni. Atlanta had reached Final Four status. The combatants were UNLV, Marquette, North Carolina and UNC-Charlotte, and of these four, UNLV appeared most fearsome. Jerry Tarkanian and his coaches paced the sideline in garments that made you wonder who was driving the getaway car. As was, the Rebels got away early, cut down by the Tar Heels. Marquette won the final and Al McGuire wept — for joy.
March Madness in Atlanta:
Check out the AJC’s Final Four pageWe move now into another century, yea, leap forward in style. The Georgia Dome is in place. Atlanta can now seat 40,000 guests at a basketball game, and there’s nothing the NCAA likes better than the sound of ca-ching. It will allow beer to be advertised on television — “drink responsibly” — but won’t sell the stuff at the games. The Final Four came in 2002, and Maryland won, and five years later it’s back again.
The first official championship — not yet known as Final Four — was played at Northwestern in 1939, with an audience of 5,500. They saw Oregon beat Ohio State. You see, the NCAA was getting a late start. A New York sportswriter named Ned Irish had started the National Invitation Tournament, played in Madison Square Garden, and the winner was generally recognized as the national champion. The NCAA, in its belated wisdom, decided this was too good a thing to leave in the hands of a mere sportswriter. Hence, here came their own championship version, and when it became the Final Four, I can’t say, but there are those in our world who consider it the major sports event in the country. Just shows you what a little effective copy-catting can do, and a lot of geographical skewing.
For instance, how do you like the idea of Western Kentucky playing in the Northwest, or Holy Cross all way out to Idaho? Say this, though, what they’ve done is lessen the margin between the haves and have-nots. Note Winthrop College, once a school for young women, taking out Notre Dame.
What else they have done is make this game impossible to officiate. But for a couple of tweaks, one involving a seriously debated call, the other a missed free throw, you might have a Final Four without Ohio State and Georgetown. Xavier had the Buckeyes on the ropes, ahead by two with four seconds to play and its leading scorer at the foul line for two. Justin Cage made the first. Make the second, let Ohio State have its 3-pointer. Game’s over. But Cage clanks the second, Ohio State ties and wins in overtime. Crushing.
Now, the other was a traveling call that wasn’t made against Jeff Green of Georgetown. Vanderbilt has a one-point lead in the dying seconds, Green pivots, banks in the winning field goal, but did he travel? Clark Kellogg and Billy Packer, two TV analysts, went at it with opposing views in a CBS interview. Kellogg said, “It was a walk. I thought he traveled.”
Packer said he didn’t think he did. “And I stand by my opinion. Three officials on the floor, three sets of eyes, and they didn’t call it.”
Otherwise, you’d probably have two Tennessee teams in one final, Vanderbilt against Memphis, not nearly as stirring as Ohio State against Georgetown. But that’s the short distance between being a winner and a loser in this game, how many calls were missed, how many critical free throws were missed, and how many coaches went home in tears. But not Tubby Smith. He went all the way to Minnesota. He beat the Wildcats browbeaters to the punch, and good for him.
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