Loyola-Chicago’s run to the Final Four this year has been the talk of the tournament. It is their first time getting there since their legendary national championship in 1963, and that was quite significant for reasons having little to do with the game. There was a lot more to the championship game that year, as is often the case.
In Madness: The Ten Most Memorable NCAA Basketball Finals, Mark Mehler and Charles Paikert use ten significant national championship games as a jumping-off point to talk about college basketball history. The games are memorable, but the stories behind them tell why they were memorable and more.
We won’t forget many of these games for a variety of reasons. I have watched every one since 1986, when a freshman named Pervis Ellison led Louisville past Duke, and the best one in my time came in 2016, when Villanova won on a buzzer-beater just seconds after a very tough game-tying three-pointer. Most have been games worth remembering to at least some degree, and while neither of those two are detailed in this book, a few that I have seen are.
The book’s title may tell you it is about a number of national championship games, and while it does that, it goes much deeper and isn’t a bad starting point to learn about college basketball history. The authors chose ten games that stand out for several reasons they explain in the foreward, and in each case, the game was bigger than just the game. In light of that, some chapters are lighter on game details than others, but that works well.
In fact, one of the games they share at the end that did not make the cut is the 2016 game. There was not much of a story behind that game, and there was an additional obstacle – Jay Wright was working on his own book at the time. While it had a memorable ending, it did not fit with the ones highlighted.
The authors had this idea a long time ago, but were not able to get it all the way up the chain at a publisher they were in contact with. Through some good fortune, they met someone at another publisher and got to work. Mehler said it did not take long for them to identify the ten games.
Loyola’s national championship was significant for reasons similar to that of Texas Western’s championship a few years later, which is also detailed in the book. But while the latter has been detailed greatly, including with the movie and book Glory Road, there hasn’t been nearly as much about Loyola’s run in 1963, although one can make a case that it was more significant, especially given the chronological order of them. The reason: the Game of Change, which came before the national title game (a regional semifinal).
The authors detail how Loyola was scheduled to play Mississippi State, but that game was not a guarantee to happen. The state of Mississippi was against their all-white teams playing against integrated teams, but Mississippi State coach James “Babe” McCarthy wanted to play and had some people in his corner. They went to great lengths to get out of Mississippi to East Lansing, Michigan, where the game was to be played, and upon returning home were largely greeted like heroes despite losing. Meanwhile, Loyola received hate mail directly in their dorms, despite the best efforts of coach George Ireland to intercept them.
The game itself was significant as well, with the Ramblers beating Cincinnati for the national championship at the buzzer, but in a relative sense it was anticlimactic given the Game of Change.
Mehler said writing about Texas Western was challenging on a couple of fronts. One, as noted, it has been extensively covered already, so part of the idea was to find an angle that had not been explored. A lot of energy is spent dealing with myths and/or minor inaccuracies that are out there about that team and the game. In addition, the game itself was not all that memorable strictly from a basketball standpoint.
Also among the games covered is North Carolina State’s championship in 1983, which Mehler said is his favorite and where a couple of goals were met. One was telling the story of how Jim Valvano was the perfect fit in Raleigh, something they have seemingly been looking for ever since, as he was a charismatic guy who loved the attention and had an amazing bond with his players. In addition, everything was different after the 1983 national title; all of what was there was gone and replaced with inflated expectations. The authors also made a point of giving Houston coach Guy Lewis some of the acclaim he deserved since he was not thought of as a great coach despite winning nearly 600 games in 30 years, and at a time when fewer games were played than today.
Chapters devoted to other games touch on various aspects of history that will be of interest to readers. There is 1975, John Wooden’s last championship and one preceded by knowledge that he would retire after the game. The one from a few years later, when Larry Bird and Magic Johnson led their teams into the 1979 title game, is also featured. There is 1982, when North Carolina beat Georgetown in a game sealed by an unforgettable turnover as Georgetown’s Fred Brown passed the ball right to North Carolina’s James Worthy. There is 1985, when Villanova beat Georgetown in what has long been called “the perfect game”, with much written about that Villanova team off the court. The 1989 title game between Michigan and Seton Hall is one I remember, with an unlikely hero in the sense that Rumeal Robinson was not a good free throw shooter. Michigan comes in again with the 1993 championship game and Chris Webber’s infamous timeout that they did not have. And at the end, the authors go back to 1957, when Wilt Chamberlain and Kansas couldn’t quite pull it off against North Carolina.
The book is a relatively easy read, and you can sense that while the focus is first on national championship games, the aim is to tell much more than that. As someone who has seen less than half of the games on the list, this served as a nice educational piece for exactly that reason. And at a time like this, it fits right in, and that would be true even if Loyola was not the story of the current NCAA Tournament and trying to make more history.
