Even Valvano Couldn't Overshadow Danny and the Miracles

Jim Valvano: The Entertainer.

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© Tim Peeler, 2018

Of course Jim Valvano stole the spotlight.

Here we were in Kansas City for the 50^th anniversary of the NCAA Championship, the tournament the NC State coach and his Wolfpack won five years earlier in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

ACC- and East region-champion Duke was there, with junior Danny Ferry and a team that could win the national title it missed two years earlier. Pac-10- and West region-champion Arizona was there for the first of the program’s four Final Four and Lute Olsen was certain his team had a chance. Big Eight runner-up Kansas was there, with senior Danny Manny having just beaten cross-state rival Kansas State to qualify for its eighth trip to the national semifinals since 1957. And overwhelming favorite Oklahoma was there, with a high-scoring offense that averaged 96.8 points per game. (How good was Oklahoma? It allowed 99 points in a game that season--and won by 52.)

Valvano showed up without his team, which finished second in the ACC that season and lost to Duke in one of the few good games at that year’s ACC tournament in Greensboro. The third-seeded Wolfpack had lost in a huge upset to 14^th-seeded Murray State in the first round of the NCAA’s Midwest region in Lincoln, Nebraska.

That was fortuitous for me, barely three months after graduating from NC State with a degree in English and just two-and-a-half months into my first professional newspaper gig with The Salisbury Post. I switched over to cover Duke at the East Regional in the Meadowlands, where they barely survived against 11^th-seeded Rhode Island, 73-72, then blasted top-seeded Temple, 63-53.

But this was a place where I really didn’t belong. I was too green, too immature, too unprepared. I was dabbling in extended metaphor game stories.

Still, I took my place that Thursday afternoon in the media scrum in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel—the famous one where the walkway collapsed in 1981, killing 114 people and injuring 216 more—waiting for a coach/athletics director in a tailored suit to show up and talk to us.

Valvano, it seemed, was a candidate for the UCLA job, one of his many dalliances with other teams through the years. This one, though, was serious. The Bruins, according to several media reports and the words uttered right out of Dick Vitale’s mouth, were offering a five-year contract for $2.5 million guaranteed, remarkable money for a coach at the time.

Valvano, with a New York heritage and a Hollywood personality, seemed perfect for the job. After all, he had been connected with John Wooden since his time as a player at Rutgers, and the Wizard of Westwood had sent Valvano a hand-written following the ’83 championship. Los Angeles might have been the only place in the world with enough cameras and microphones for Valvano’s taste.

That afternoon, he was playing this dalliance for all he was worth.

Which, apparently, was a lot.

Valvano walked in with Georgia Tech coach Bobby Cremins on their way into the “Golden Salute to the Final Four” gala—surely, Valvano thought the red carpet was just for him—with all the other Division I head and assistant coaches and a slew of folks who paid big money to attend. Cremins giggled out the media’s view as Valvano gave a prerecorded dodge that he perfected years before.

“In a situation like this, it is always the best policy to make comments at the appropriate time,” Valvano told us. “This is not the appropriate time. When that occasion does come up, you know I’m going to have something to say.”

When pressed, Valvano went to one of his standards.

“I have this string in my back and you can pull it again if you want the same answer,” he said.

Valvano went to the gala, hitched a ride to California and met with UCLA officials. Some say he accepted the job. Then he called home to talk to his wife Pam and three daughters. They said he could take the job if he wanted but they were staying put at their home in Cary. They had found a permanent home and didn’t want to leave.

UCLA saved faced by saying it wasn’t willing to pay Valvano’s $500,000 buy-out at NC State, one of those things that can be easily negotiated. The school wanted him badly. Vitale told me years later that the Bruin administration had pulled the necessary strings to secure a sitcom for the coach. (If you’ve ever seen Valvano and Vitale’s appearance on the old Cosby show, you’ll understand why it’s a good thing this never happened.)

By Saturday afternoon, Valvano had put out a statement saying he had withdrawn his name for consideration. UCLA went trolling for both Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Kansas’ Larry Brown, who had already coached the Bruins once, when the Final Four was over. It ended up hiring Pepperdine’s Jim Harrick three weeks later.

With that bit of local news out of the way, I was able to actually cover the events I was there to write about.

Duke played Kansas in the first semifinal, a Danny-vs.-Danny rematch of a game played earlier in the year. The Blue Devils came out nervous, missed their first eight shots and never overcame the 14-0 lead Kansas opened with.. In the nightcap, Oklahoma overwhelmed Arizona to set up only the third championship game ever between two teams from the same conference.

Like this year, the Final Four was played on Easter weekend, so I spent the day at the interminable press conferences. It was a lousy way to celebrate a holiday.

The next day, though, the NCAA gave us tickets to see the Kansas City Royals season-opener against the Toronto Blue Jays, with surly superstar Jorge Bell. He spent all of spring training complaining about being switched from leftfield to designated hitter and made it a national news story.

We did not have good seats at Kauffman Stadium—Heaven was three rows behind us—but we got to see major league history that day as Bell hit four blistering line drives to leftfield, three of which went over the fence to make him the first player in major league history to hit three home runs on opening day. It’s happened three times since then, including Thursday when Chicago White Sox third baseman Matt Davidson hit three out against the Royals, also at Kauffman Stadium.

Danny Manning and Larry Brown.

There was little chance we would see a second miracle that night, because Oklahoma was just too good for Kansas. The Sooners had two eight-point wins over the Jayhawks in the regular season, but the victories were more dominating than the scores showed.

Besides Manning, Kansas had little more than Milt Newton, who had exploded for 20 points against Duke defensive stopper Billy King, and a near-home court advantage, since Kemper is only 40 miles away from Lawrence. Valvano and the Wolfpack knew a little about that, having lost a double-digit second half lead two years before in the Midwest regional final, when crowd at Kemper Arena began screaming in Sensurround: “Rock. Chalk. Jayhawk.”

Even that was unlikely to make this Oz-like fairytale come true.

Except that Manning showed he had better powers than a wizard that night. The current Wake Forest coach scored 31 points and grabbed 18 rebounds, easily one of the best individual performances in the 50 years of NCAA title games. As a team, “Danny and the Miracles” shot 63 percent from the field to easily overcome its 23 turnovers.

It’s hardly remembered in the same way as the Wolfpack’s Cinderella victory over Houston in 1983, or Villanova’s out-of-nowhere win over Georgetown in 1985, but the Jayhawks victory that night 30 years ago still stands out as one of the unlikeliest titles in a decade of upsets.

Maybe that’s an omen for this year’s championship.