The very fact that you're reading this humble blog, begun amidst considerable uncertainty and without guarantee of a long and prosperous future, speaks volumes about your love of basketball and your passion for Seattle University.
You don't need to wonder, then, why the very fact of this website's existence marks the dawn of a new era in this city's rich collegiate basketball history.
Seattle? Rich college basketball history? Without question.
This is far more than The City The Sonics Forgot. Moreover, the foremost urban center in the Pacific Northwest owns a basketball heritage that transcends the Seattle University program itself.
Seattle, you see, isn't just the place where the Chieftains - as they were formerly known - left a large imprint on the college basketball world. This isn't just the city where the O'Brien brothers, Eddie and Johnny, made magic in the early 1950s, or where Elgin Baylor led Seattle U. to the 1958 Final Four before losing the title game to Kentucky and coach Adolph Rupp's "Fiddlin' Five. Seattle has played host to other great moments in college basketball's glorious past.
The Emerald City witnessed the only loss of the 1966 Texas Western basketball team, the group that gave college athletics its Jackie Robinson moment. Yes, before coach Don Haskins sent shockwaves through the sport by using an all-black starting five to upend lily-white Kentucky (there's Adolph Rupp again!) in that year's NCAA championship game, the Miners met their match in a late-season contest at the Seattle Center Coliseum. Behind 23 points from the legendary Tom Workman, Seattle U. knocked Texas Western from the ranks of the unbeaten, 74-72.
Weirdly, the loss might have been the best thing that could have happened to the Miners, who were already emotionally burdened to begin with. No longer under pressure to maintain a perfect record in addition to breaking racial barriers, Haskins's roster rolled through the NCAA Tournament to win the school's only national basketball championship. Without their late-season stop in Seattle, the Miners might not have struck gold a few weeks later against King Kentucky, who lorded itself over the rest of college basketball at the time.
Seattle is also the city that, in the Kingdome days, welcomed the college basketball world to three soaring spectacles. The Kingdome (it's greatly missed by this college basketball fan) allowed Seattle to host the Final Four in its new and super-sized incarnation. Through 1981, the Final Four was almost entirely the province of conventional arenas (with the exception of the Houston Astrodome in 1971), but when a guy named Michael Jordan led North Carolina past Georgetown for the 1982 title in one of the sport's greatest games of all time, a crowd of 61,612 was watching in the Louisiana Superdome. A corner had been turned in the sport's evolution.
Ever since the 1982 title game, college basketball's season-ending party has become a dome-based event for the most part. Seattle capitalized on that emergent reality by snagging the 1984, 1989 and 1995 Final Fours, each of which added to the city's place in college hoops lore.
The 1984 title game, between Hakeem Olajuwon's Houston Cougars and Patrick Ewing's Georgetown Hoyas, matched two of basketball's greatest players a full 10 years before the two men reunited to contest the 1994 NBA championship. The first NCAA final at the Kingdome, won 84-75 by Georgetown, also marked the first time that an African-American head coach (GU's John Thompson) had won a Division I-A men's basketball crown. The win by the Hoyas also provided television viewers one of the most indelible images in the sport's history: Thompson hugging point guard Fred Brown, the same man who - two years earlier in New Orleans - threw an errant last-second pass to North Carolina's James Worthy, sealing Georgetown's doom in the process.
The 1989 Final Four made Seattle the site of a sweetly satisfying little-guy-makes-good scenario, on two different levels. Rumeal Robinson, Michigan's diminutive but fearless point guard, made two free throws with three seconds left in overtime to give the Wolverines a heartstopping 80-79 win over Seton Hall in the championship game. Michigan's smallest guy on the court was the hero, but it was Michigan's main man off the court who stood particularly tall in his moment of triumph.
Steve Fisher, an assistant for UM during the 1989 season, took over the head coaching position just before the NCAA Tournament when school athletic director (and football legend) Bo Schembechler fired coach Bill Frieder, who was about to take the Arizona State job. Schembechler wanted "a Michigan man" to coach Michigan, and he didn't want anyone with split loyalties coaching the Maize and Blue in the Big Dance. Fisher, a folksy, aw-shucks figure unaccustomed to the spotlight, promptly guided his team to the national championship in his first six games as the Wolverines' head coach. When Michigan seized the moment in Seattle 21 years ago, Steve Fisher's coaching career took off.
In 1995, another landmark event occurred at a Seattle-based Final Four: UCLA, the most successful program in the sport as far as national titles are concerned, completed the road back to the winner's circle with an 89-78 victory over Arkansas. UCLA has regained relevance and prominence in recent seasons under Ben Howland, but that 1995 title marks the only year since John Wooden's 1975 retirement that the Bruins have claimed the top spot in college basketball.
Before you think that the Final Four came to Seattle only during the Kingdome era, think again. One other crown jewel in the city's scholastic hoops history was forged in 1952. It's true: In the days when the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) was more important than the NCAA Tournament, the NCAA brought the Final Four to Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the University of Washington. In the championship game, Kansas defeated St. John's, 80-63. The game itself might have been unremarkable, but the presence of one player on the Kansas roster imbued the event with a sizable amount of historical staying power.
Dean Smith played for that Kansas team, coached by Jayhawk legend Phog Allen. Five decades before protege Roy Williams would leave Kansas for the North Carolina program Smith led to sustained heights, Smith wore KU colors and led another basketball powerhouse to the mountaintop.
In Seattle.
You can see that Seattle and college basketball go together, and for reasons that go beyond Seattle University. But now that the Redhawks have hired go-getter Cameron Dollar as their men's coach, and have tabbed decorated women's coach Joan Bonvicini as the architect of a rebuilding project, it's clear that Seattle U. is intent on sharing the turf currently occupied by that other mid-major in the Northwest: Gonzaga.
What better way to mark the beginning of a new era in the life of Seattle University basketball - men and women alike - than to cover this program as it returns to Division I competition. Yes, the transition to D-I began last year, but the Dollar Days and the Bonvicini Blueprint didn't exist in the 2008-09 campaign.
Seattle U's push toward renewed prominence begins this season, and while our place as an unproven blog won't allow us full inside access to coaches and players, we're going to give you as much meat-and-potatoes basketball analysis as we possibly can.
One note worth mentioning is that our beat reporter, Nick Cannata-Bowman, is a member of SU's Class of 2011. Nick is a journalism student who will be working primarily for The Spectator, Seattle U's student newspaper, but he'll be able to take his Spectator reportage and more fully unpack it in these cyber-pages. It's also important to say that Nick will be earning internship credits toward his journalism degree by helping us at SU Basket Blog. We're proud to be able to help a Seattle University journalism student, and give a forward nudge to a burgeoning career, as part of our larger endeavor here.
Onward and upward! The women begin their regular season at home tonight against UC-Davis, while the men begin their trek tomorrow against an NCAA Tournament team, the Cowboys of Oklahoma State under rising head coach Travis Ford.
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Finally, a word about the site itself: Bear with us as we work on formatting and layout issues. The first few weeks will tell us what we need to do and how we can fix the rough edges that are sure to persist for awhile, as we find our bearings and merge basketball coverage (which we know a lot about) with a crisp visual presentation (which we can envision, but are still trying to create in precise detail). Never hesitate to give feedback on matters of basketball content, technology, and anything else under the sun as SU Basket Blog begins the journey through mystery, murkiness, and unknown destinations in the months ahead. A link to my e-mail address appears in the upper left-hand corner of the page.
Welcome aboard!
Gratefully,
Matt Zemek - Editor and Publisher
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