By the time the team got home on Monday, Final Four Fever was rampant on campus. Trainer Max Crowder, the only person who had also been associated with the ’63, ’64, and ’66 Final Four Duke teams, remembers the campus as accepting those trips with little fanfare.
“Those teams expected to go,” he said. “They were very good and in those days you only had to win two games in the tournament to be in the Final Four. People were happy to be going but it wasn’t like it was in ’78 when the whole thing came from out of nowhere.”
This was the Impossible Dream come true. “I think the fact that everyone knew that Duke had been good but had lost that luster added to the whole thing,” said Ray Jones, the only member of the coaching staff who had ever been to the NCAA’s before. “It was as if something that had been lost had been miraculously found. There was a feeling of vindication, a feeling of relief and a feeling of joy all at once.”
The players felt all of this. Spring had arrived at Duke and the campus was at its most beautiful. It was the new birth of spring and the new birth of Duke basketball. It was a great place to be and a great time to be there. “If you ever in your life thought you had died and gone to heaven it was that week,” Bender said. “It would have been very easy for us to kind of get carried away with the wonder of it all but the fact that we were playing Notre Dame gave us focus. Other than Carolina, they were the team we would want most to beat. For a lot of reasons.”
Carolina was long gone from the tournament, losing to San Francisco in the first round of the West Regional. But Notre Dame was still very much alive and most people were already ballyhooing a Notre Dame-Kentucky matchup for the national title.
Like Foster, Digger Phelps was coaching in the Final Four for the first time. But his nationwide persona was much different from Foster’s. Seven years earlier, at the age of twenty-nine, he had coached a Fordham team that had captured New York City in much the same way that Duke was now winning over the nation. The Rams went 26–3 that year, reached the NCAA round of sixteen, and made Phelps into a celebrity. He was hired to coach Notre Dame at age thirty and went about building the Irish into a national power, simultaneously building himself into one of the big names in coaching.
In 1974, Notre Dame ended UCLA’s eighty-eight-game winning streak on national television. Phelps was the next anointed coach, a man who would start winning national championships shortly and keep on winning them. Notre Dame won a lot of games but kept coming up short in the NCAA Tournament.
Then came the recruiting battle for Banks. When Banks opted to keep his word to Duke, Phelps shrugged and said, “They won the battle, but we won the war,” a reference to the fact that Notre Dame had signed Kelly Tripucka and Tracy Jackson, two players almost as highly regarded as Banks. Both had been recruited by Duke. Banks remembered that comment. The coaches did too, and they all remembered the Knights of Columbus scene, Wenzel most of all.
That wasn’t all. During the regular season, Notre Dame had beaten Maryland, hardly a major achievement considering the fact that the Terrapins ended up sixth in the ACC. Nonetheless, Digger couldn’t resist a jibe. “What’s the big deal about the ACC?” he said. “I don’t see what’s so tough about the ACC.”
Add all of that to the fact that NBC seemed to have turned its national game of the week into the Notre Dame game of the week and Duke had every incentive one could need going into the game. There were even individual grudges. Goetsch had played against Notre Dame center Bill Laimbeer in high school and thought he was an obnoxious lout.
“It was all there for us,” Wenzel said. “As a staff, we really wanted Digger. We all thought he was an arrogant asshole. The players had heard over and over again how great Notre Dame was and how they were going to bury us. Notre Dame was the national team back then, on TV all the time. They had all the glamor. Our attitude was that we were going to go out there and show people that we were not only just as good as they were, but better than they were. It was like a mission. In a lot of ways, it was very easy to coach that week—which was a good thing because we were all nervous as cats.”
Except for Foster. He seemed to sense that if he came across to the players as nervous, they would begin to believe that it was all too big for them to handle. Practices that week were very businesslike. If the rest of the campus was going crazy, that was fine. When it was time to go to the gym, Foster wanted everyone thinking about the next game.
“He never talked to us about where we were,” Dennard said. “He talked about Notre Dame and what we had to do to beat them. There were never any speeches about this being a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or anything like that. It was just a game we had to play and we would win if we did what we were supposed to.”
On Thursday, the students came out to send the team off—the first pep rally in memory at Duke. The team arrived in St. Louis to find the weather cold and their hotel a long way from downtown. “We spent a lot of time in our rooms that weekend,” Gminski said. “The coaches didn’t want us getting caught up in everything. When it was time to play, we were ready.”
What they weren’t ready for was walking on the court to practice on Friday afternoon. The St. Louis Arena, which had been bought by Ralston-Purina and renamed the Checkerdome, seats twenty thousand people for basketball. “It made the Greensboro Coliseum look small,” Gminski said. And, the place was, if not filled, damn crowded—especially for a practice.
“We were all freaking out,” Gminski said. “All these people were there just to watch us practice. You could look into the crowd and see all sorts of famous coaches and you realized they were all there to watch you. That was when it hit us that this was really the big time now.”
Only Bender had been through this before. But two years earlier, with Indiana, he had been a benchwarmer, more a privileged tourist than a participant. Now, he was a key player and his dad, as an ex-coach, was sitting in the stands with all the other coaches watching his son.
“I have one memory of that practice,” Bender said. “We had just run a drill and Bill called us into a huddle. Just as he did, Gene let go with one of his farts. A big one. Bill stepped into the huddle, realized what had happened and said, ‘Other end.’ I had this vision of all the coaches sitting up there taking notes on how this Final Four team ran practice: ‘Run drill, huddle up, go to other end.’ Little did they know why we had done that.”
For Foster, after years of sitting in the stands watching Final Four practices, this was a special time.
“One of the nice things about that year was that I really did enjoy, at least then, what we were accomplishing,” he said. “I was still wound up, still getting tight for every game like I always did, but I was able to look around a little and know that something very good was happening.”
The national media certainly understood that. By now, Duke was becoming America’s Team. Notre Dame was almost passé; a lot of reporters had tired of Phelps’s act. Duke was a genuine Cinderella, last in its own conference only one year ago, now playing in the Final Four—with two freshman forwards and a sophomore center who was younger than the two freshmen. Foster was witty and low-key, not caught up in the notion that he was the biggest story around the way Phelps seemed to be.
That night, Foster learned that he and his long-time friend, Texas Coach Abe Lemons, had been named the national co-coaches of the year by the Coaches’ Association. “It was one of the few times in our marriage I can remember him waking me up to tell me something,” Shirley Foster said. “He just said very quietly, ‘Guess who got coach of the year?’ It was about as excited as I’ve ever seen him. It meant so much coming from the other coaches.”
Saturday was an ugly day, cold and rainy. The Duke players had been hoping for snow but they decided the lousy weather was enough of an omen. They were happy to be playing the first game, a 12:30 P.M. Central Time tip-off. Waiting any longer than that would have been unbearable. “I can never remember being so wound up to play a game,” said Scott Goetsch. “I was ready to fight somebody or something.”
More than anything, Goetsch was ready to fight Laimbeer. His teammates remember him sitting on the bench during the early minutes of the game saying, “Laimbeer sucks,” over and over again. When his turn came to spell Gminski midway through the half, Goetsch took a pass on his first possession and hit a jump shot right in Laimbeer’s face. For emphasis, he pointed at him as if to say, “In your face.” When the two of them began jostling for position at the other end, Goetsch, after a quick check to make sure the referees weren’t looking, crashed an elbow into Laimbeer’s head. The Duke bench went wild.
“We were all screaming,” Gminski said. “None of us had ever seen the Fonz like this. We were never nervous that day after that, we were all just so fired up.”
They certainly didn’t play nervous. That morning, no less a person than Howard Cosell had done his national radio commentary on the ascension of Digger Phelps to coaching greatness, noting that once Notre Dame had pushed Duke aside, Phelps would meet his greatest challenge in the final against Kentucky.
Duke had other ideas. From the start, the Blue Devils were playing Villanova again, racing the ball up the floor, taking quick shots that Notre Dame couldn’t defense, controlling the boards. Gminski was making the Irish big men look silly—aided and abetted by Goetsch; Banks was completely outplaying Tripucka; Harrell and Bender were driving Notre Dame point guard Rich Branning nuts.
Late in the half, with the Blue Devils up by eight, Bender took an outlet pass from Gminski and spotted Banks flying up the right side of the floor. Bender was barely beyond the top of the key at the Duke end of the floor when he whipped a rising line drive pass toward Banks. It was an impossible pass, thrown too hard and too soon. “When I threw it,” Bender said, “I thought it was in the fourth row.”
So did everyone else in the building. Except Banks. He raced toward the basket, leaped in the air, caught it with one hand and in the same motion scooped it into the basket. The Checkerdome exploded. This was a brand of cerebral basketball you just didn’t see at the Final Four. There was too much pressure to even attempt a play like that, much less convert it.
A few seconds later, Dennard, scrambling after a loose ball, went flying into press row. He pulled himself up into a sitting position, looked down at the reporters staring at him and said, “Ain’t this fun?”
Oh, was it fun. They were running and jumping and playing like they had never played before. With the entire nation watching! And they were doing it to Notre Dame! “We were two feet off the floor the whole first half,” Bender said. “We were flying.”
They flew to halftime leading 43–29. This was stunning. Didn’t they know they were too young? Didn’t they know this was Digger’s time to shine? They knew none of this. All they knew was this was fun.
But Notre Dame was not going to die easily. It was too good and too experienced a team to do that. In the second half, the Irish began to find the range with their jump shots, especially guard Donald (Duck) Williams. Then Tracy Jackson came off the bench and hit five of six shots, all of them with someone in his face. Notre Dame’s size began to wear Duke down. The lead whittled. Ten. Eight. Six. Four. The clock was moving in slow motion, or so it seemed.
“We got tired,” Spanarkel said. “We were so wound up in that first half that we were bound to run out of gas a little. Notre Dame got hot, we got tired, and then we got a little nervous. We were thinking we couldn’t blow the lead but every time we looked at the clock it seemed like there was an eternity to play.”
One more Williams jump shot sliced the lead to 88–86 with twenty seconds left. Notre Dame trapped off the inbounds pass. The ball came loose and suddenly it was in Williams’s hands again. He was more open than he had been the entire half. Spanarkel’s heart sank. “If he ties it there,” he said, “we’re in trouble.”
Williams shot spun around the rim and off. None of Duke’s big men were under the basket because they had been deployed down-court to try to break the press. Spanarkel looked up and saw Laimbeer, looking like a lion about to pounce on a piece of meat, reaching for the ball. If he got it, it was an easy dunk. “I knew I couldn’t get both hands on the ball,” he said. “I just wanted to try to tip it away from him, get it out in the open court and give the other guys a chance to get back.”
This was the kind of Spanarkel play that always went unnoticed. Just before Laimbeer could snatch the ball, he lunged and tipped it over his head. Everyone raced for it. The quickest player on the court got to it—John Harrell.
“As soon as I got to it, my first thought was to get it over midcourt and out of danger,” he said. “I thought after that, one pass, maybe two and we would run out the clock.” Harrell never got a chance to move, though. Branning, understanding time was running out, fouled him as soon as he picked up the ball. Nine seconds were left.
Phelps called time-out to give Harrell a chance to think about the situation. Harrell expected this. He had scored just four points in the game, though he and Bender had been nearly flawless running the offense, getting the ball to the Big Three. He was an excellent free throw shooter—83 percent for the season—but he had never been asked to go to the line with a spot in the national championship game at stake.
In the huddle, Foster talked as if Harrell had already made the two foul shots. He wanted everyone to know where their man was as the players lined up. Without saying it, that was Foster’s way of being prepared for a miss. He didn’t want Notre Dame to be able to push the ball downcourt for an easy shot because his players didn’t know who they were guarding. But he never said that. He knew, in all likelihood, Phelps would call time again if Harrell missed, to set up a play. So, he talked only about playing defense with a four-point lead.
Harrell wasn’t really listening. “I knew I had one thing to do and that was make the shots, especially the first one,” he said. “Ever since I started shooting foul shots when I was nine years old I always tried to do everything the same way every time. The same number of dribbles, the same time holding the ball, even the same breathing. It’s almost like meditation for me. I just wanted to be sure I had my mind focused on the things I did every time up there. I didn’t want to think about anything else.”
The teams came back on the floor with the Checkerdome tingling with tension. There was no three-point shot then, so if Harrell made the first shot, Notre Dame would be virtually dead. If he missed, overtime seemed more than possible, given the way the Irish had been scoring during the last five minutes of the game.
“It was one of those times when you can feel your heart pounding,” Spanarkel said. “It’s so damn close, but it can get away real quick too.”
Foster, whose blazer and checked pants had become the subject of national newspaper stories with each passing victory, crouched in front of the bench. He, too, could feel his heart pounding. The assistants sat behind him, all eyes on Harrell. Even Jones, for once, was quiet. At the end of the bench Rob Hardy, remembering a foul shooting lesson he had learned years ago in camp, kept murmuring, “school’s out, school’s out,” over and over. It had become his good luck charm.
Harrell walked to the line, watched by twenty million people. He was a long way from his father’s carport now. He took the ball, dribbled it twice, picked it up and stared briefly at the basket. The ball came off his right hand, fluttering as it always did like a knuckleball because it had no backspin.
Swish.
Spanarkel wanted to hug Harrell on the spot but he knew that wouldn’t do. Instead, he clapped him on the rear end and, in very un-Spanarkel-like fashion, shook his fist gleefully. Foster never moved. He was frozen, knowing in his mind that it was over and yet afraid that if he allowed himself to think that, it wouldn’t be. The Duke people, who were seated at the end of the arena where Harrell was shooting, were hugging one another in the stands.
“The minute the ball was out of my hand I knew it was good,” Harrell said. “By the time it dropped through I wanted to jump straight up into the air. All the basketball I’ve played in my life, the best moment for me was when that shot dropped through.”
The second one was easy. The Irish raced the ball downcourt hoping to score quickly and call one last time-out. Williams fired. The ball hit the back of the rim and went high into the air. Gminski couldn’t grab it so he tapped it back, away from the basket. It landed right in Bender’s hands with two seconds left. He was dribbling right toward the Duke bench when he heard the buzzer and began jumping in the air for joy.
Now they didn’t have to hold back. While Foster went to shake hands with Phelps, Bender leaped into Wenzel’s arms. Spanarkel grabbed Harrell, while Goetz, at last satisfied with Gminski, charged his protégé, who had been extraordinary with 29 points.
And in the middle of it all were Banks and Dennard, arms wrapped around each other, Dennard with his head buried on Banks’s shoulder while Banks hugged him so tightly Dennard thought he might break. Each of them was thinking back to the hot nights in the I.M. building, the September days in Card Gym and all the promises they had made to one another. Their hug was long and lingering and the NBC cameras caught it. Right then and there, Duke became America’s Team.
This was what sports was supposed to be all about: kids working together toward a goal and then reveling in achieving it. The fact that Dennard was white and Banks was black made the picture, both on television that day and in newspapers around the country the next morning, that much more riveting. The genuine feeling between them moved NBC’s Dick Enberg to say simply, “There’s a moment that gives you chills.”
For Duke, winning the national championship could not have been more emotional than this. The game had been brutally physical; the ending wrenching and draining. Almost no one had expected them to beat Notre Dame and they had done it. They had won the war; not Phelps. Banks, with 22 points and 12 rebounds, had made it clear that Tripucka and Jackson were nice players, but there was only one Tinker Bell, only one Superman. They were so thrilled that if the NCAA officials hadn’t stepped in, they might have gone ahead and cut the nets down right there.
Wenzel sprinted to the locker room ahead of everyone else, not wanting to change the ritual now. When the players came through the door it was staring at them on the blackboard: “2.” Even Morrison and Gray were caught up in this celebration. Standing at his locker right by the door Gray couldn’t help but shout, “What do you think about the ACC now, Digger?”
Just as he finished his sentence, the door opened and there stood Phelps. Always a gracious loser, he had stopped to congratulate the players. Gray was embarrassed. “Coach, I’m sorry,” he said.
“Perfectly all right,” Phelps said. “You won. You can say anything you want to say.”
Even then, they really didn’t understand what they had done. Harrell, sitting in front of his locker, looked up and saw dozens of reporters heading for him. “My first thought was to look to see if Mike, Gene, or Jimmy was standing next to me,” he said. “I figured they wanted to use my space to get close enough to talk to them.”
Not this time. They all wanted to know the Johnny Gun story. Harrell didn’t understand that making two free throws on this stage was different from making them anywhere else. “I know it now,” he said. “My mother still has scrapbooks at home filled with stories about that one game. It was incredible.” Perhaps the most emotional person in the locker room that afternoon was Ray Jones. “Because of my height, I always wondered if I would get a chance to coach in the big time,” he said. “I thought it was possible I would be buried all my life. Now, I was with a team that was going to play for the national championship. I walked out of the locker room and just burst into tears. It was about as proud a moment as I’ve ever had in my life.”
Foster felt proud, but also relieved. As he walked back onto the floor to watch the Kentucky–Arkansas game, his friend Abe Lemons grabbed him. “It’s a damn good thing you won that game, Foster,” he said. “Because if you’da lost, there were two hundred coaches ready to come out of the stands and kick your ass for letting that son of a bitch [Phelps] into the final.”
Lemons was joking … sort of.
The players stayed to watch the first half of the second game. Dennard had gotten his hands on an Arkansas hog hat—the one with the pig snout that you stick on top of your head—and was walking around yelling, “Whoo-pig-sooey,” the Arkansas battle cry.
Arkansas had a remarkable team, led by their six-four “triplets,” Sidney Moncrief, Ron Brewer, and Marvin Delph. They were coached, ironically, by Eddie Sutton, who would become Kentucky’s coach seven years later and eventually resign after getting caught up in the swirling scandal that was bound to catch up with Kentucky’s program sooner or later. Unfortunately for Sutton, it would be later. This was sooner and Kentucky won an excellent basketball game, 65–61.
Now, there really were two left: Duke and Kentucky.
Perhaps never in the history of the NCAA basketball tournament have two teams that were so radically different met in the final. Kentucky was the ultimate basketball factory. There was no business bigger or more important in the state of Kentucky than Kentucky basketball. People there honestly thought their program incomparable, even though Adolph Rupp had won the last of his four national titles in 1958 and UCLA had won ten of them in the ensuing twenty years.
Joe B. Hall, Rupp’s successor, was a bland, humorless man who could keep the Kentucky fans happy only by winning the national championship. He had come close in 1975, finishing second to John Wooden’s last UCLA team, but he had not yet won. Now, the four freshmen who had been key players on that ’75 team—Jack Givens, Rick Robey, Mike Phillips, and James Lee—were seniors. Kyle Macy, who had gone to Purdue after Bender decided to go to Indiana, had transferred to Kentucky and was the starting point guard. Truman Claytor and Jay Shidler shared the shooting guard spot. Givens, Robey, and Phillips—the latter two both 6–10—started up front, with Lee the first man off the bench.
It was a deep, experienced team that had started the season as the favorite for the national title. The Wildcats had remained No. 1 almost the entire season and would enter the championship game with a 29–2 record. They were very honest about the fact that only a national title would make their season a success. They said that the season hadn’t been any fun because they had a job to do, period. Their theme was “Season Without Joy.” It fit.
Their opponents in the championship game didn’t know about any of this. They had started the season hoping to get out of last place in the ACC. Kentucky’s senior class averaged 56 points and 22 rebounds per game. Duke’s senior class—Bell—had a total of 25 points and 12 rebounds for the season.
The Blue Devils were Cinderella; the Wildcats were the ugly sisters. Hall was the wicked witch; Foster was Prince Charming. The press conferences the next day reinforced the stereotypes. The Duke kids—the five starters and Bender—kept making faces at each other, saying funny things and making fun of one another. “It was one of those deals where years later you look back at pictures and say, ‘No, we didn’t act like that,’ ” Dennard said. “But we did. To us, the whole thing was a hoot.”
The laughs stopped when Kentucky entered the room. The Wildcat players were as grim-faced as the Duke players had been loose. “We know if we lose,” Robey said, speaking for everyone, “we go home labeled as failures.”
Looking back, the Duke players are unanimous in saying this was the difference in the game: “We wanted to win,” Hardy said, “they had to win. We went in with the attitude that this was only the beginning for us. They knew that this was the end.”
The Duke kids were already heroes; Kentucky still faced the possibility of ending up as goats. “I think we went out to play them thinking we couldn’t lose,” Gminski said. “We had already won our national championship just by being there. It wasn’t that we weren’t intense or didn’t play hard. We did. But they were on a mission. We weren’t.”
At the time though, that feeling seemed to make sense. The coaches had watched their team win seven straight pressure-packed games without getting tight. They saw no reason to make them tight now. There was no reason to mess with success: Foster would wear the blazer and the checked pants again and the players would go through their “joke, joke, joke,” routine at pregame meal.
“If it ain’t broke,” Bender said, “why fix it?”
But even though the routine was exactly the same, the players were smart enough to figure out—at last—where they were. Notre Dame had been a vendetta and that had kept them from thinking about everything else that was at stake. But now, as Sunday became Monday, all of them were beginning to understand just how small a number “2” was when 273 had started.
As Bill Foster got ready to attempt to sleep that night, Shirley Foster sat up in bed reading an NCAA program. “You know, Bill,” she said, “a lot of the national championship games the last few years have been routs.”
Foster groaned. He wasn’t going to sleep much anyway and now his wife had given him one more thing to worry about. His mind filled with visions of Robey, Phillips, Givens, and Macy. They had come so far, he thought. “Well,” he finally told himself, “everything you could possibly ask for has happened so far. If it can just happen right for one more day.…”