The Big Dance gets bigger the longer you stay. On Thursday, Georgia State became the 20th No. 14 seed to win a game. On Saturday, it will seek to beat Xavier and do what only two 14th seeds (Cleveland State in 1986 and Chattanooga in 1997) have done — win a second game to reach the Sweet 16.
Never has a No. 14 reached the Elite Eight. But Georgia State guard Kevin Ware, who was a part of Louisville’s 2013 championship run as both player and inspiration, is looking beyond even that.
“It was pretty cool,” Ware said of his memories of the Final Four in Atlanta, which he watched from the bench with his broken leg in a cast. “I’d love to get back to that. I know we have a tough road, but I like our chances.”
Only 24 hours earlier, the Panthers trailed Baylor 56-44 with 2:40 to play. Georgia State scored the next 13 points — R.J. Hunter, the coach’s son, had 12, including the game-winning 30-footer — and went from being an almost complete unknown to the latest rose of spring.
The day after, the assembled media couldn’t get enough of the Panthers, who were, it must be said, eating it up, relishing the attention. Asked how many times he’d seen the replay of his dauntless 3-pointer, R.J. Hunter said: “I YouTube’d it 50 times on my own, and just (from) watching TV around 50 more. Roughly around 100 times.”
Asked how many times the Panthers had viewed the video of their coach falling out of his rolling chair, Ware said: “The (Internet) memes are crazy. I’ve probably seen 100 different memes. They’ve got him falling outside the White House. That’s probably the funniest one.”
Ron Hunter revealed Friday that, in taking his tumble, he cracked the cast on his injured left leg. “My doctor is on the way here,” he said. “I’m getting re-casted today. … When I got to the locker room (after Thursday’s game), I started pulling some of the stuff away and it just opened up, and (athletic trainer Dinika Johnson) looked at it and said, ‘You’re making it worse.’”
Then: “I don’t even know what re-casted means. She said something about a saw.”
Even Johnson is having her impromptu brush with fame. A day after being caught on video trying to lift the fallen coach back into his seat, she was being filmed by ESPN while massaging Ware’s legs. “I turned on my phone this morning,” Johnson said, “and I saw all these text messages. And I thought, ‘What is going on?’”
Having transferred to Georgia State because he wearied of “being famous only because I got hurt,” Ware was enjoying a different strain of sudden stardom. “This is definitely more fun,” he said. “I love being an underdog.”
Fun? No coach since Jim Valvano alit in Albuquerque for the 1983 Final Four — which Valvano’s North Carolina State would win by stunning Houston — has a coach had as much fun with this tournament as Hunter. (Jimmy V’s adieu to the city itself: “My wife is pregnant, even though she doesn’t know it yet, and we’re naming the kid Al B. Querque.”)
Hunter spent Friday’s media session riffing on, of all things, office furniture. “That chair has been secured,” he said of his sideline seat. “That chair has more protection than the president of the United States.” Speaking of whom …
Before the Baylor game, Hunter’s rally-the-troops message was that even President Obama had picked the Bears. “I’m taking back my votes,” he said. Hunter has since received emails suggesting he’d shown disrespect. On Friday he offered an impassioned plea, which culminated thusly:
“I’m looking for Secret Service guys coming to get me. … President Obama, listen, you’re a great President, man. I’m sorry. I did not mean anything. Please get your people off of me. I am so sorry.”
A bit later, Xavier coach Chris Mack was asked how it felt to be playing America’s latest team. “Our guys don’t read USA Today,” Mack sniffed. Then this: “We don’t worry about the nation’s feel-good story. They can find another story after Saturday if we do our job.”
So there’s the matchup: The team with the coach devoid of a sense of humor against the one with the coach in the cast and his chair and his son. Surely even Barack Obama will be a Georgia State fan Saturday.
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