Duke vs. Kentucky, 1992 East Regional final, on ESPN Classic now

(CONTINUED)

Sean Woods fell to the floor, facedown, limbs spread. Finally, with a game in the balance, he had made the play, and for naught. For nearly a minute he lay there, inert. Eventually a security guard came over to be sure he was still breathing.

Thomas Hill stood by the sideline with his hands clasped behind his head, and as he rotated slowly in place, the muscles on his face seemed stretched to the limit. His eyes registered a sort of plaintive horror, as if they had just witnessed something hideous. If there is a continuum between delirium and terror and it loops around and meets somewhere, Hill seemed to occupy a place at that conjunction.

Pelphrey stood motionless, his hand atop his head. It had all happened so fast. We'd no sooner come out of the huddle than the ball was coming through the net, he thought. Wait a minute, he wanted to say. Let's do this again.

Along press row, where malfunctioning phone lines had put normally sour writers in an even more loathsome humor, all cynicism was suspended. "Here we'd been, ragging on the Spectrum," says UPI's Tom Withers, one of the 269 accredited journalists who now had to do the evening's events justice. "And then [For some reason a part of the story is missing here. I think there's an anecdote about Bob Ryan scratching out "GREATEST GAME EVER?" on a pad and holding it up in Cawood Ledford's direction.]

Krzyzewski had felt anger when Woods's shot went in -- "In basketball," he says, "you know you don't bank it in from there" -- and even as Duke set up its inbounds play, his pique lingered. Thus in the moments after Laettner's answer, Krzyzewski first felt vindication. Yes, he thought, throwing down a clipboard. That's the way it should be.

But then the Duke coach saw Farmer in front of him. He remembered the Kentucky seniors from the Tip-Off Classic four years earlier, and he knew how Farmer, more than any of them, was the idol of every mountain kid just now turning on the spigots of grief. "Just looking at his face, there was no way I could be celebrating," Krzyzewski says. "I felt a real sense of guilt, for lack of a better word. Like we were the cause of all this despair." Is this a winning coach's lot? To go from anger to guilt in barely a minute, bypassing entirely the euphoria his own players now indulged in so uninhibitedly?

Krzyzewski went up to Farmer. "Richie, I'm sorry," Krzyzewski said. "I'm so sorry."

Meanwhile Lang found Mashburn. Eventually Laettner found Woods.

"Nice game," Laettner said.

"Nice shot," said Woods.

---

The previous week, at a Holiday Inn in Worcester, Mass., Pitino had watched on TV as freshman forward James Forrest gave Georgia Tech an NCAA second-round victory over Southern Cal in the final second. Forrest's shot was a desperately flung three-pointer, the only one he would make all season. "If I lost a game on a shot like that," Pitino had said, "I don't know what I'd do." Now the Kentucky coach would find out.

Shower, Pitino told his team, and when you come out, I want to see no tears. "Do not," he said, "let two seconds determine your basketball life."

As his players dressed, they were, alas, only crying harder. Pitino produced the cover of the May 29, 1989, issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, the one that was billed "Kentucky's Shame" and reported on the Wildcats' two-year probation. "You've taken Kentucky all the way back from this," he told them.

And his players cried harder still. Pelphrey, true to the stereotype of a redhead's passionate nature, had invested the most and thus gotten fleeced the worst. Reporters found him sobbing against a bathroom stall. Pelphrey is plainspoken, thoughtful, funny -- if he wouldn't talk, no Wildcat would. Could he share his thoughts on the season?

"I'd like to, but I can't . . . talk," he said.

On the team bus Pitino continued his attempts to console the inconsolable. My fault, he said. We should have had a guy on the ball. Now, get your heads up. But whatever he said made things worse. Back in the lobby of the players' hotel, where a knot of red-eyed boosters awaited them, the grief was so universal, so public, that it reminded the coach of visitation at a funeral. It was the uniform they wore, decided Pitino, a Catholic who had been a daily communicant over the final month of the season: "It's like a priestly garment. They overachieve because of it. But it also means they take it so much worse when they lose."

Yet set aside the deflation of the moment, and the Wildcats had won something special -- not absolute victory, to be sure, but something much more than a moral one. "That shot made Duke a winner," Dave Kindred would write in the Lexington Herald-Leader. "And in some wonderful, curious, ennobling way, that one shot also certified Kentucky as a winner. It had been beaten, but by a great team extended to its best work." In its failure this Kentucky team generated for itself in every quarter of the land something the Big Blue, college basketball's IBM, had hitherto never seemed worthy of, not through 1,530 victories and five NCAA titles. This Kentucky team got sympathy.

 

(CONTINUED)

At the Wildcats' awards ceremony a week after the season ended, athletic director C.M. Newton would astonish the seniors by retiring their jerseys. They had done little statistically to warrant a place in the Rupp Arena rafters alongside names like Hagan and Issel and Ramsey. They played only once in the NCAAs and never reached a Final Four. But for restoring honor to the Cats, for turning the tables on adversity, Newton believed it was the right thing to do.

The ceremony included a video with highlights of the final game of their careers. With Laettner's shot in the air, the video mercifully stopped.

---

It is hard to conceive of a more luminous basketball game than the one North Carolina State and Maryland played in 1974, in the final of the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament. In those days only one team from any conference advanced to the NCAAs, and 18 years ago that sole bid went to the Wolfpack for their 103-100 overtime victory. In its report on that game this magazine called it "indescribably delicious." Among the future NBA first-round picks who prodded each other to greater excellence were David Thompson, Tom Burleson, John Lucas and Tom McMillen.

And Len Elmore. "The number of overtimes we played in 1974 continues to increase with the years," he says. "Now people say it was double and triple overtime. It will be the same with this game. People will soon say there were .2 seconds on the clock, and that Laettner made a 30-footer. They'll find a way to make it larger than life.

"I think ours was better for the intensity and the level of talent. But ours didn't end with the drama this one did. Each time you thought someone had put this one away with a big shot, someone came up with something bigger. Laettner's was the ultimate. In our game there wasn't one play you could question."

Here there were two. People won't soon forget the soft-shoe Laettner danced on Timberlake. In Kentucky it has been immortalized by T-shirts reading DUKE NO. 1, only footprints blot out the D and the E, so that it really reads UK NO. 1. And people still ask how Pitino could have failed to put a man on the ball.

"The actual strategy wasn't bad," says Krzyzewski. "I just don't think they could have defended it. The pass and the catch were perfect. If a guy hits a home run or sinks a hole in one, that's one play. But this was two kids making a great play, like Joe Montana and Dwight Clark. When two people make a great play, it's more worthy of disbelief."

Krzyzewski feels so strongly about this that just as he succored Farmer in the game's aftermath, he wishes Pelphrey would pull the covers up against the chill of the Galician night and sleep free of second thoughts. "After the game, people talked about luck and destiny," says Krzyzewski. "I don't know what those things are. I just know that the ball got put in play by our best athlete. Our best player caught it and shot it. I think most people would agree that we're a better basketball team. Not a lot better, but better. So I'd like John Pelphrey to think that the reason his team was in a position to win was because of how they played. Especially John Pelphrey. In other words, he's a winner. He just didn't win that play."

Young athletes are normally ingenuous in outlook and laconic in speech. They tend to prefer the security of cliche and to decline invitations to reflect. But singular circumstances can sometimes fit them with the perspective of those much older. Thirty years from now people will still be walking into the insurance agency Richie Farmer intends to open in Manchester, Ky., and asking him to tell them about that game the Unforgettables played against Duke back in '92. And Farmer will launch into the tale he already has down pat. "You know," he says today, and most surely will say tomorrow, "they say Cawood Ledford is the best recruiter Kentucky's ever had. Listening to Cawood call a loss, you can imagine a tear running down a little boy's cheek, and his mama going over to tell him it'll be all right, and the next day him going out and shooting baskets, because someday he's going to be a Wildcat and it's going to be different. That next time Kentucky's going to win."

Nine days after Duke's win in Philadelphia, Cawood Ledford was in Minneapolis to broadcast, as he customarily did, the Monday-night title game for NCAA Productions. Ledford was packing up his gear following Duke's victory over Michigan when a well-wisher came by to inquire how his final broadcast had gone.

Ledford barely looked up as he answered. "I did my last game a week ago."

 

Goddamn that was good. I just relived the game and the aftermath.

I never saw the footprint shirts. I just saw ones with big red X's through the D and the E.

 

That was f-in excellent.

 

Outstanding stuff. But if I had to one Duke game to keep as a recording, it's still the 79-77 win over Nevada-Las Vegas (hello, Bubbler).

If I had a dime for every a_shole bandwagon UNLV fan I had to deal with the week before (my mother went to Duke for the two people in here who might not know), I'd never have to work again. I saw the '90 championship game slaughter. Every stinking second of it ... all Mom and I could do was watch. Horrifying.

I stayed up all night watching the tape we had of that game. After Duke finished off Kansas to lock up the national title, I couldn't make it to day-after celebration, but Mom did. She brought home four T-shirts. She allowed to pick from one of three shirts and found a fourth. On it said "Duke takes the bite out of Tark's Sharks."

Since we were on Spring Break the week following the Final Four, I wore it to school the next Monday. Every non-Chapel Hill fan and UNLV wagoneer loved it. But those were the tiny minority ... the same a_sholes who were telling me how badly Duke would get killed didn't say a word. Be-yoo-ti-ful.

 

Is that Brook Jacoby?

 

Looks more like the guy who pitches Sprint mobile phones so you can follow your favorite players ... like Peyton Manning. That guy's pretty good ... if you like 6-5, 230-pound quarterbacks ... lazer-rocket arm.

 

If that was Brook Jacoby moving across the street from IJAG in the early '90s, IJAG would be imjustamrsjacoby.

Or Brook would be dead.

There would be no middle ground.

 

I'm a little surprised she isn't imjustamrsmartinez, what with her claim to love Brook's mustache.

 

Angola?

Can you do me a favor? It's really not that much to ask. One small, tiny, easy little favor...






Die.

 

Somebody really needs to find an email address for Brook Jacoby and send him a link to this site.

I was not a fan of either of these teams, but I watched it with a crazed Duke fan. It was the night of our college paper's awards dinner. I was the SE at the time and the Duke fan was our best writer. He kept disappearing to watch the game at the bar. I kept going to get him any time an award came up that he might win.

I can't remember what the big award was called. Basically, it was given to the member of the staff that contributed the most and it NEVER went to anybody in sports. The Duke fan won it. I think I was happier for him than he was for himself. I don't remember any of his speech except the end. "That's it. Thanks. Now I need to get back and watch the game."

Then the entire sports department headed for the bar. I was dumb enough to stand next to the Duke fan for the final seconds. When Laettner made the shot, he started jumping around. He knocked over a table and nailed me in the arm with an elbow.

Fun night.

 

No, this is Brook Jacoby