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Ode to an NCAA basketball champion
BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

WHEN I MOVED TO the area in 1984, one my main reasons for coming here was that Boston seemed to be such a great sports town. In upstate New York, where I grew up, sports fans did not really have a pro team to call their own, since my hometown was nestled equidistant between the two Empire State "metropolises," New York and Buffalo. Central New Yorkers were either Yankees fans or Mets fans; Jets fans, Giants fans, or Bills fans; Rangers fans, Islanders fans, or Sabres fans; and Knicks fans or Nets fans. And as this transplanted New Yorker became accustomed to the fanaticism that is the New England sports aficionado, I slowly lost my allegiances to the New York teams that I grew up loving so much — in my case, the Mets, Rangers, and Knicks (I was an LA Rams fan in football; don’t ask me why).

Yet my devotion to one particular New York–based team never wavered. It survived and even thrived despite endless winters of disappointment and heartbreak. The Mets won the World Series in 1986, and I didn’t care. The Rangers won their first Stanley Cup in 54 years in 1994, and it hardly mattered a whit. Even the Rams won a Super Bowl in 1999, and it barely registered, because my attentions became focused on the New England teams and the one holdover from my youth: Syracuse University.

I didn’t go to Syracuse, but I doubt my fidelity to its sports teams would have been any less rabid if I'd attended the upstate New York school. For Central New Yorkers, Syracuse has always been pretty much the only game in town. No other pantheon of higher learning north of the Big Apple has such a national standing in the primary college sports, and therefore Syracuse University can glean its support from all corners of the state. While universities like Cornell, Colgate, and RPI offer high-profile Division I hockey programs, only Syracuse plays a top-level national schedule in such marquee sports as football, basketball, and lacrosse.

For college sports fans in upstate New York, Syracuse is, frankly, all they’ve got. But what they now have is the long-awaited jewel in the crown: an NCAA Men’s College Basketball Championship to go along with SU’s eight lacrosse national titles and sole football crown (1959). By defeating the University of Kansas in Monday night’s NCAA title game, 81-78, the Orangemen finally gave their long-suffering hoop fans the prize they had so long craved.

Being a Syracuse basketball fan has not been easy over the years, let me tell ya. Under coach Jim Boeheim, who has overseen the men’s program for the past 27 seasons, the Orange have been consistently topflight, but they always manage to confound and ultimately disappoint. The city of Syracuse itself is not the most picturesque urban area, to put it mildly, and the winters are downright brutal. While the city of Buffalo, two hours to the west on the New York State Thruway, garners most of the headlines regarding annual snowfall and the "Lake effect" off of Lake Ontario, residents of Syracuse and the surrounding area routinely suffer through five-month winters and yearly 10- to 15-foot cumulative snowfalls. The only thing the city and university have that makes it relatively easy to lure recruits to play for the team is the spectacular Carrier Dome, the massive arena named for a local air-conditioning manufacturer. The 23-year-old megaplex holds 50,000 for football and upwards of 35,000 for basketball (a huge curtain blocks off one-third of the interior for hoop games). With few exceptions, there is no greater home-court hoop advantage in the land than the sight of 33,000-plus orange-clad fans screaming their lungs out at the Carrier Dome (as evidenced by the Orangemen’s undefeated record at home this past season).

The team under Boeheim’s guidance has had its share of controversies and tales of woe. It has been widely documented that the school has not graduated a single black basketball player in the past 10 years, and Syracuse’s lack of focus on this issue has drawn deserved criticism from many circles, although it is certainly not the only university guilty of this kind of educational fraud. In addition, while the team has gained a lot of success on the courts over the year, it has included on its rosters its fair share of villainous and borderline criminal components. And while many of its alumni have made it to the NBA, most turn out to be journeymen at best. Guys like Dwayne "Pearl" Washington, Derrick Coleman, Billy Owens, Sherman Douglas, Rony Seikaly, and John Wallace were local gods when they headlined Syracuse’s teams in the ’80s, but none was able to duplicate his collegiate success at the next level.

The 2003 Final Four just completed marked the third time the Orangemen had reached the championship game. Their first chance for glory, in 1987, was derailed by the team’s seemingly annual bugaboo: poor free-throw shooting. Key misses from the stripe late in the 1987 title game against Indiana allowed the Hoosiers to stay close, culminating with freshman Keith Smart’s jumper from the corner with four seconds left that gave Bobby Knight’s squad the 87-86 victory. In 1996, Syracuse surprisingly advanced to the championship game against Rick Pitino’s Kentucky juggernaut, where the Orange fought valiantly but ultimately fell, 76-87. In between was the ignominious debacle of 1991, when the Orangemen, seeded second in the tournament, became the first team to ever lose to a 15 seed in the first round, falling to Richmond, 73-69.

As a result, Syracuse basketball fans just never know what they’re going to get. It could be a team that early on this season beat national powers like BC, UConn, Missouri, and Pitt, or it could be the squad that goes and loses to Rutgers (then 8-9, 0-5 in the Big East), as the Orange did on January 29.

The NCAA Tournament is always a crapshoot for the Orange, and this year was no different. While the opener, against Manhattan, seemed like a sure W, the remaining games appeared like they could have gone either way. After Syracuse did indeed defeat Manhattan at the FleetCenter in Boston, it went up against Eddie Sutton’s always-tough Oklahoma State club, and despite a 17-point first-half deficit, the third-seeded Orange ultimately emerged victorious, 78-66.

In the round of the Sweet Sixteen, Syracuse was fortunate to find that the number-two seed, ACC regular-season champion Wake Forest, had already been ousted at the hands of Auburn. It also had to be delighted that the regional semis and final would be held in — where else but upstate New York? — Albany, New York’s state capital. With practically a home-court advantage against the 10th-seeded Tigers, it was Syracuse’s turn to build the 17-point first-half lead, but it nearly all slipped away in the second half before the Orange escaped with a 79-78 victory.

At this point of the tournament, having reached the Elite Eight, Syracuse had to know that it would more than likely be facing three number-one seeds in a row if it wanted to win it all, and if not for the Jayhawks’ upset of Arizona in the other bracket (and Marquette’s dispatching of Kentucky), that’s exactly what would have happened. As it turned out, SU did have to play two top seeds back-to-back — Oklahoma out of the East and Texas from the South regional — and miraculously beat them both to advance to Monday night’s title game against Kansas, the number-two seed from the West.

The pundits all had picked against the Orangemen against Texas, and though they were proven wrong, the experts had become distracted and bedazzled by the Jayhawks’ 94-61 blitzing of Marquette in Saturday’s other semifinal, thus leading the scribes to an almost unanimous leaning toward Kansas winning the national championship. Roy Williams’s club, after all, was the more "experienced" of the two teams, particularly since Syracuse started only one senior and was anchored by two freshmen and a sophomore.

I had a good feeling about the Orangemen’s chances that day, and I speak specifically as a fan, and not as a supposedly unbiased journalist. Prior to the tournament, I had written about the miraculous run of the 1983 North Carolina Wolfpack (please insert link to the March 17th column here), the Cardiac Kids that barely made the NCAA tourney field in the first place, yet stunned the hoop world with their remarkable run and eventual upset of top-seeded Houston in the title game. In the locker room prior to the finale, coach Jim Valvano reminded his troops that they had beaten the #5-, #4-, #3-, and #2-seeded teams in the nation to get to that point; only the #1 seed remained.

Twenty years later, Syracuse strangely enough faced a similar situation. The Orange had beaten the Big 12’s fifth-place team, Missouri (22-11), during the regular season, and had toppled fourth-place Oklahoma State (22-10), third-place Oklahoma (27-7), and second-place Texas (26-7) in the tournament to reach the championship game against — you guessed it — the Big 12’s regular-season champion, Kansas (30-7). In addition, the Jayhawks’ impressive pasting of Marquette in the semis Saturday reminded many of the Cougars’ 1983 semifinal dismantling of Louisville, which made the NC State-Georgia semifinal game seem like jayvee. And while this time, the Washington Post’s Dave Kindred did not write, "Trees will tap dance, elephants will ride in the Indianapolis 500, and Orson Welles will skip breakfast, lunch and dinner before State [Syracuse] finds a way to beat Houston [Kansas]," Dick Vitale, Digger Phelps, and most of the other big names in the college-basketball media community made it clear that it was Kansas’s game to lose.

Since Monday’s game was played in the Louisiana Superdome, where Smart hit the jumper to beat the Orange in 1987, it seemed proper that Boeheim’s redemption would come here, just as it did for New England’s Patriots, who had lost both of their two Super Bowl appearances in the Big Easy before stunning the Rams in the same city in 2002 to capture their first championship.

It played out the way that Syracuse fans hoped it would, yet of course it couldn’t be done the easy way. Syracuse built an 18-point first-half lead, saw it shrink to 10 at halftime, allowed the Jayhawks to come back to within five, extended the lead back to 10, and then allowed some shoddy free-throw shooting in the final minute to give Kansas a shot in the final seconds to tie with a three-pointer.

This time, Indiana’s Smart wasn’t there to hit it from the corner again, nor was Kentucky’s Antoine Walker there to get the rebound and get fouled on the put-back. There would be no goats or villains or underachievers in orange on this night.

And there would be no heartbreak for Syracuse Nation, as the ghosts that had haunted and taunted the program for as long as anyone could remember instead played ethereal havoc with the Jayhawks’ free-throw shooting, as the NCAA runners-up converted just 12 of 30 from the stripe in falling, 81-78.

Five, four, three, two, and then #1 from the Big 12 were put to rest, and Jim Boeheim, like Jim Valvano 20 years earlier, guided a long shot to the pinnacle of college basketball, and spring finally dawned on the Orangemen’s storied program.

For upstate–New York basketball fans, who have endured one of the gloomiest winters in history these past six months, it offered up the chance to look to the heavens and toast their favorite sons, for a moment forgetting the tortures and calamities of the past, and instead getting the opportunity to proclaim to the world:

"FINALLY!"

Sporting Eye runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com, and Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com

 

Issue Date: April 11, 2003
"Sporting Eye" archives: 2002

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