They Leave, Champions of the Spirit

I typed this first line left-handed.

Just a little gesture for a little basketball team from a little school down the lane. Bye, guys. Thanks for all the Loyola merriment. You lived, you died, you laughed, you cried. You got through the worst and gave it your best. Thanks, Paul, Bo, Jeff, Per, Tony, Terrell, Tom, Chris, everybody. Many a tear has to fall, but it’s all in the game.

As of tipoff Sunday, only five universities in America had shots at the national championship--Arkansas, Duke, Georgia Tech, Nevada Las Vegas and a 3,700-pupil, parochial institute in LAX’s flight path that was known as “Los Angeles College” when the Jesuit fathers joined the faculty in 1911. Not too shabby, Loyola Marymount. There were 292 Division I schools with basketball teams. You made the final five.

Just not, alas, the capital-F, registered-trademark Final Four. The knockout punch came Sunday, before 14,298 sympathetic witnesses at Oakland Coliseum Arena, when an NBA farm club from Nevada that opened Loyola’s schedule came full circle to close it. The season’s final final score, 131-101, leaves precious little room for complaint about bad calls or bad luck. The better side won. Viva Las Vegas.

The Lions took it hard. Tom Peabody, the battle-scarred, bloody-kneed scrapper from Santa Ana who embodied this team’s inexhaustible hustle, kept his upper lip stiff as long as he could. Finally, everything caught up with him. He broke down. Peabody felt the pang of what he and his teammates had been feeling all along, the private fears, the well-hidden secret.

“We’ve been running scared,” he said.

Had the players convinced their ever-expanding audience that they had put the horror of Hank Gathers’ sudden death behind them? Yes, they had. But it was all an act. A brave front. Their facade was cracked Sunday, when Paul Westhead second-guessed himself for not preparing his players properly, revealing that he simply couldn’t bring himself to show them films of Loyola’s season-opening game against UNLV because Gathers was in them.

The coach thought about taking a team vote. His conscience balked even at that.

“I may have made a technical mistake,” Westhead said, wearing a look of guilt.

If so, it was certainly a human mistake.

And, if it means anything, no game film, no scouting report of any kind could have dramatically altered the course of this West Regional championship game, in which the Runnin’ Rebels of Jerry Tarkanian just kept runnin’ and runnin’ and runnin’. The score was 16-4 before the referees got their whistles wet. Stacey Augmon, Anderson Hunt, Larry Johnson, Greg Anthony, David Butler . . . Well, let’s just say Las Vegas definitely plays five-stud poker.

To lose to such a team is no disgrace. Loyola’s Bo Kimble spoke of “going out with class,” and risked doing otherwise only by drawing technical fouls in each of his last two games. This was hardly the Bo we had come to know. He, too, must have been having more trouble than was visible, keeping his private demons at bay.

It was exactly three weeks ago Sunday that Gathers collapsed, and so much had happened since then. Emotions became askew, and we don’t mean only those of the players. Others got carried away. “Experts” gave opinions on talk shows, proclaiming that Kimble had easily turned himself into an NBA lottery pick, that Jeff Fryer had surely shot his way into the draft’s first round. Neither thing is necessarily true. Fryer can shoot, sure, but he might be fortunate to be drafted at all. Shooters of his size and speed are hardly uncommon.

It wasn’t a Loyola bandwagon that people climbed onto so much as it was a wish-upon-a-star. This was a little made-for-TV-movie of a story, one that touched a number of hearts. Loyola Marymount acquired the public sentiment of an orphanage. It was more than some happy-go-lucky little underdog. It was a basketball team distressed and depressed, showing courage, slaying giants.

Las Vegas was not a villain here--this wasn’t one of those Catholics-vs.-convicts bits--and warrants whatever further success comes its way. OK, so none of Tarkanian’s players have yet been nominated for sainthood. Said Augmon, the junior from Pasadena who grew up nearer Loyola than most of the Lions did: “Remember, they called the Detroit Pistons bad boys, too.”

Kimble doesn’t think of the Rebels as bad. He thinks of them as good. “Since you beat us, you’d better win it all now,” Kimble told a couple of them at day’s end.

Loyola Marymount won just about everything else there was to win. Won games. Won respect. Won friends. The whole team should put the season to rest with a peaceful, easy feeling. Let somebody else run scared for a while. Let the Lions sleep tonight.