The Thrill Isn’t Gone : 1990 Tournament’s Ecstasy, Agony Linger at Connecticut

A cold New England wind rides through north central Connecticut, scattering yellow leaves and sending the unmistakable message that winter is close behind.

Students on the University of Connecticut campus bundle up against the cold as they walk stiffly into the wind. Heads covered, hands shoved deep into pockets of bulky jackets, they make their way to class.

Many pass the domed structure at one end of the campus, the Gampel Pavilion, known by students as the Conn Dome, where inside the Big East champion Husky basketball team is practicing and the temperature is rising fast.

“Enjoy our win last night, Shawn?” Coach Jim Calhoun asked freshman forward Shawn Ellison.

“Yeah,” said Ellison, who did not play in the Huskies’ one-point exhibition victory over the touring Soviet national team.

“Did you enjoy your view?” Calhoun asked. “Keep playing like you are and it’ll be permanent.”

Lyman DePriest, a 6-foot-5 senior forward, put up a shot and missed.

“Heck,” DePriest said.

“OK, from now on, let’s all yell ‘Heck, heck, heck,’ every time we miss instead of getting back on defense,” Calhoun said.

Three hours later, Calhoun blew his whistle and sat down heavily in a chair at one end of the court. Practice was over for the Huskies, but expectations are running rampant and Calhoun is trying his best to defuse as much as he can.

It’s not an easy job. The Big East coaches have made the Huskies, who were 21-6 last year, the conference favorite, and news-service polls has UConn ranked No. 13 and No. 17.

“We’re not the No. 13 team in the country and we aren’t No. 17, either,” said Calhoun, 48, in his 19th year of Division I college coaching. The 6-5 Calhoun is a golfer, fan of Woody Allen films and a marathon runner.

Calhoun went on to list something else the Huskies aren’t.

“We aren’t the Rockefellers or the Cabot Lodges yet, the aristocrats of college basketball,” he said.

But what about last year?

“We say this to our players all the time: We want to build on last year. We can’t live on last year.”

Around basketball crazy Connecticut, that may be in dispute. Picked near the bottom of the Big East, the Huskies not only finished first, but also won the conference tournament on their way to the No. 1 seeding in the East Regional of the NCAA tournament.

Who will ever forget the play that beat Clemson in the East semifinal at the Meadowlands?

UConn trailed by a point with one second to play when Scott Burrell threw a 90-foot inbounds pass to Tate George, who sank a turnaround jump shot as the game ended for a 71-70 victory.

The play is known simply as “The Shot” among Husky faithful, who were equally stunned by the outcome of the East final when Duke scored on a last-second shot and beat Connecticut in overtime, 79-78, to end the dream season.

Calhoun remains convinced that the Huskies could have won the NCAA title last year.

“I still believe to this day, although we didn’t get a chance to prove it, there wasn’t anyone in the country we couldn’t beat,” he said. “I just knew we were good enough to win the national championship.”

This year, they probably aren’t, for two reasons: Nadev Henefeld and George. Henefeld, the team’s best passer and defender, returned to his native Israel to sign a pro contract with Maccabi of Tel Aviv, and George was a first-round draft choice of the New Jersey Nets.

Henefeld’s loss will be felt the most. A 6-7 forward who could play inside or outside, Henefeld made the Huskies’ full-court pressure work. Calhoun said Henefeld’s defection was a major blow.

“I’ve tried to downplay it to the kids,” Calhoun said. “I’ve told them it presents opportunities for some of them. People do a lot of things with opportunities. Sometimes they blow them, and other times they make the most of them.”

Like last year?

“We were special,” Calhoun said. “We were locked onto the track. We were in a groove all the way.

“This year’s team is fun to coach, too,” he said. “They’re not as good, but it’s fun.”

A sellout crowd at the Hartford Civic Center watched the Huskies take a 19-point lead against the Soviet team, then saw them fall behind, 81-80, with three seconds to play. Calhoun called a timeout and drew an inbounds play, much like the one that beat Clemson.

Burrell, who pitched for the Toronto Blue Jays’ farm club last summer in the Class-A New York-Penn League, would throw the ball in.

Burrell’s pass was caught past midcourt by Murray Williams, who took three dribbles past two Soviet defenders expecting a jump shot and dropped in a layup as the game ended in an 82-81 Connecticut victory.

Afterward, Soviet Coach Vladas Garastas was asked if he knew that Connecticut had done nearly the same thing in the last-second victory over Clemson. Vladas nodded and smiled.

“Sure, everybody know,” Garastas said.

The Clemson game is something Husky fans will never forget, even if Calhoun prefers that they try.

Clemson’s David Yates made a three-pointer for a 70-69 Tiger lead with 12 seconds left. It was Yates’ only basket of the game.

The Huskies moved the ball upcourt quickly. George penetrated the middle, wanting to pass to Chris Smith or John Gwynn, but both were covered. So George took the shot himself, but missed an open 16-foot jumper with five seconds left.

“I almost started crying,” George said. “I think I realized my college career was coming to an end. After that miss, I wanted the ball back in my hands.

“I thought, ‘Well, it’s been a dream season,’ but I was upset that it was going to end like that.”

Clemson’s Sean Tyson rebounded George’s shot and was fouled by Burrell with 1.6 seconds left. Tyson missed the free throw, Burrell rebounded and called time, almost in the same motion. The clock showed :01.0.

“(Calhoun) kept yelling, ‘It’s not over! It’s not over!’ ” Burrell said. “He picked our heads up and said, ‘We’re going to get a shot off.’ I don’t know if I believed him. I thought it was over, to tell you the truth.”

Calhoun drew the play. Burrell would throw the ball to one of the Huskies’ big men past midcourt and he would turn and heave the ball in desperation. But in the huddle, George told Burrell that should pass all the way downcourt.

That’s what happened. Burrell fired a fastball over the outstretched hands of 6-11 Clemsoncenter Elden Campbell. George caught the pass with his back to the basket, whirled as Tyson backed off and lofted the ball at the basket. It fell through.

The play was called “home run,” which is pretty close to what George hit. In the pandemonium afterward, George’s mother cried in the stands, Clemson Coach Cliff Ellis stared in disbelief and George caught Big East Commissioner David Gavitt in a bear hug.

Outgoing Connecticut Gov. William O’Neill was moved to announce that George or possibly Calhoun ought to succeed him in the statehouse.

“The Shot” was seen by rabid Husky fans as the natural progression of the season: a miracle shot by a miracle team.

Calhoun does not ordinarily like the word miracle used in connection with last year’s Husky team.

“To me, miracle means something happened that wasn’t based on fact or substance,” he said. “But that shot, yeah, that was a miracle.”

However, miracles seem to get spread around a little bit. The 17-foot jump shot by Duke’s Christian Laettner that beat Connecticut at the end of overtime might not qualify as a miracle, but it was close enough. Somehow, the Huskies had lost their chance to make the Final Four.

Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. Moments before Laettner’s winning shot, there was George picking off a pass by Bobby Hurley intended for Phil Henderson in front of the Duke bench, but fumbling it out of bounds and then sticking his hands in his mouth in horror.

“When Laettner made it, it was like a curtain had closed,” Calhoun said. “It was a sudden stop. I could still see Tate with the ball, coming to me. He was going to dribble right to me and we were going to dribble to Denver.

“We had the play,” he said. “I could feel the bench behind me, everybody was up. We had the ball stolen. And the game.”

But Huskymania remains.

Reporters from 15 of the state’s 20 daily newspapers covered the exhibition game with the Soviets, which was carried on the 15-station Husky radio network.

The athletic department had to return $250,000 in season ticket requests for the 8,500-seat Gampel Pavilion after cutting off season ticket sales at 6,500. In the Hartford Civic Center, where the Huskies play eight games, season ticket sales have reached 13,100. Three years ago, season tickets in the Civic Center were not even half that.

Connecticut has mailed 100,000 full-color catalogues of Husky merchandise such as T-shirts, hats and sweat shirts, targeting its alumni base, season ticket-holders and boosters. Last year, sales of such merchandise netted more than $125,000.

The Huskies will play their first full season in the new Gampel Pavilion, which opened last January at a cost of $28 million--$22 million from state bonds. And the team that plays there? Well, it considers itself new, too.

“We’re nothing like last year,” Burrell said. “Last year is last year. It’s over. Gone. It’s not the same team. We want to find out what we’re all about this year. We may not be as good as last year, but we don’t ever want to dwell on what happened then because we can never get it back.”

Said Smith: “It’s a feeling that probably won’t ever happen again.”

A streak-shooting 6-2 junior guard from Bridgeport, Smith leads the team. Chosen the most valuable player in last season’s Big East tournament, Smith spent the summer touring with the U.S. national team, played in the Goodwill Games and was a starting guard during the World Championships in Argentina.

He started all eight games in the World Championships and averaged 9.4 points and 1.9 assists as the U.S. won the bronze medal. Smith’s backcourt partner this year is point guard Gilad Katz, a 22-year-old from Tel-Aviv, a member of the Israeli national team who has completed his military service.

The other Huskies who will log most of the playing time are veterans: 6-9 1/2 junior center Rod Sellers, Burrell, Williams, DePriest and John Gwynn coming off the bench. Toraino Walker, a 6-7, 226-pound sophomore, will be back as soon as he makes up incomplete class work.

Even without George, it would have been a complete team if Henefeld were still around. Calhoun fully expected Henefeld to come back for a second and probably final season, but the Huskies’ success combined with Henefeld’s status as Israel’s top player prevented that.

“Nadev had become bigger than life in Israel and here,” Calhoun said. “He had a feel for the game that you could only hope to coach. If we had him back, then the polls would have been right.”

Last year, the Huskies’ average margin of victory was 15 points, best in the nation. This year, Calhoun figures his team is going to have to grind it out, hope for the best and forget about the past.

Calhoun remains a big man in these parts. Last week, he was a guest conductor of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. He began the “William Tell Overture” by blowing his coach’s whistle. A drummer donned a Husky cap.

“I was going to put a Lone Ranger mask on, but, naw, what the heck,” Calhoun said.

University of Connecticut basketball fans share the feeling. Love those Huskies? Still replaying “The Shot?” Well, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger.