Florida's NCAA basketball victory

A team game after all

ROBERT LISS

What gets called March Madness is by now such an ingrained cultural ritual that it has begun to seem that there could be nothing new, with the National Basketball Association snatching up high school talent like Cleveland’s LeBron James before it even reaches the collegiate ranks. Yet the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s tournament might have taken a different trajectory this year, it seemed, as the NBA’s new rule prohibiting high school players from going directly into the pros was being piloted on a class that featured not only the heralded seven-foot-one-inch Greg Oden of Ohio State— thought certain to become one of the all-time great centers— but also a host of other players so talented as to make the freshman class of 2006-07 perhaps the strongest ever.

The presence of these talented underclassman-student-athletes-despite themselves (to paraphrase Molière) had made the pre-tournament season an unusually interesting one, with the near-certainty that these players would very likely be on view for just one year in college. It was almost reminiscent of “the old days”— before all the televised intersectional clashes, before conferences could send more than one team to The Dance— when basketball fanatics like me had to scurry and hustle to see guys play in college, so as to make a judgment (there weren’t a thousand magazines to make one’s job easy) as to how someone might fare in the pros.

There were plenty of great players, actually, and several near-great teams. But only the two eventual finalists, Ohio State and Florida, ever seemed capable of true domination, and both had stumbled unaccountably on their way to Atlanta, where it had long seemed to me only proper that they should stage their rematch for all the marbles. The Ohio State Buckeyes had nearly been eliminated early by Xavier, barely managing to send a seemingly lost contest into overtime with a last-second three-pointer that tied matters at 62-62.

Shades of the Super Bowl: An ad-fest for restless gamblers

Having decided that Ohio State and Florida— the two teams I picked as finalists— could only truly be challenged by each other, I found the prelims of this year’s tourney of limited interest: staged, oddly upset-free, now more than ever like the Super Bowl, a hard-edged ad fest for restless would-be gamblers. I awaited my expected final with no clear preference in mind. But, somehow, when it arrived, at its usual time (but, as never before, during daylight savings time), with the relish of anticipation that only an expected culture clash can inspire. This was not quite Kentucky-Texas Western in 1966 (when an all-black team beat a white racist coach), but the prospect of seeing Oden’s massive frame battling a great five-man team put older fans in mind of 1957, when Wilt Chamberlain battled unbeaten North Carolina through three overtimes.

Florida 2006 championship starting five was back by team decision, by commitment; by contrast, Ohio State, the historic Buckeyes, was the beneficiary of a controversial rule hypocritically mandating education while actually moving to restrict the income of talented minors. Whatever one thinks of NBA Commissioner David Stern’s decision to spurn 18-year-olds, one had to thank him for helping create a great foil for Florida, for whom coach Billy Donovan was inspiration enough. Had a defending champion ever returned its starting five and not made it back all the way?

That these two schools had battled for the national championship in football less than 90 days earlier only sweetened the pot. On the court too, these teams had met before, two days before Christmas, and would now reprise on the eve of Passover, to see if the 26-point drubbing Florida had administered might be reversed— or at least mitigated— by the absence of home court advantage, and the presence of Oden’s restored right hand.

The day of the crew-cut throwback

Florida sought to achieve two great distinctions: a repeat on court and twin titles in the two big revenue sports (football and basketball) in 2007. If the Gators were a throwback group, then Billy Donovan— appearing in the title game for the third time in 11 years— was fittingly their coach, looking to be the first to join a select group of repeaters since Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski in 1992, and to become the first ever to do with the exact same personnel.

The college three-point shot was celebrating its 21st birthday, and the crew-cut Billy D was a perfect symbol for its maturity. Donovan is a kind of latter-day Al McGuire (who similarly often found one white guard to play with an otherwise all-black starting five), schooled under Rick Pitino, with a father resembling a younger California’s Pete Newell. What better dynasty coach? As a player in 1987, Donovan spearheaded Rick Pitino’s undermanned Providence squad’s exploitation of the new three-point rules to crash the Final Four party at which no one expected them.

A face worthy of Old Man River

This game had story-lines: not just Florida, but Ohio State too, might not have been there, at least not its core, under ordinary circumstances. The Buckeyes’ coach, Thad Matta, was a relative unknown, faceless, coaching in Oden a center with an elongated frame and an ageless face, a face seeming to carry hundreds of years of Mississippi history, the lines a frame for huge furrows in cotton fields, the cheekbones arranged for ships to carry cargo down the Delta. Patient and impassive, Oden appears to endure premature fame well, as if from time immemorial. The Buckeyes were on a 22-game win streak. Their brash (unschooled?) players were cocky, talking unnecessary trash, saying Florida was only good, but they were great.

As the game wore on, it became clear that by contrast, Ohio State was a bunch of individuals, an arsenal of impressive weaponry orchestrated by Mike Conley but not cohesive among themselves. With Conley in early foul trouble, a 17-13 game suddenly became 33-22, after Florida hit three straight threes, four in the course of a 16-9 spree. Gradually, emerged that this was no ordinary team, these returning Florida veterans. Their sixth man, the gigantic Chuck Richards, had shot 19-for-21 in the tourney.

To dominate, like Wilt Chamberlain

Oden’s freshman season had been eventful, whereas it was supposed to have been great: He had injured his right wrist so badly that he felt impelled to develop a left-handed free throw, one that he was able to make with far greater regularity than the giants whose company he will keep on all-time great lists could with any one of the myriad methods forced upon them by unemployed gurus and assistant coaches.

Oden, announcer Clark Kellogg told us with the halftime margin 40-29, had done his part; but his part should be to dominate! Oden had twenty-five points and twelve rebounds, but he was no Wilt. Chamberlain was so strong, so in control of his body.

Five Florida returnees beat the Ohio State kids. So now that four of them are leaving for the pros, would coach Donovan defect to Kentucky, where he was an assistant from 1989-94, where his coach Pitino left, perhaps to face Pitino in a Kentucky-Louisville final some year soon? A nice scenario, but even better to have stayed at Florida when his boys left home.