Blueprint for Perfection : Fifteen Years Ago, Indiana Embodied Team Play as It Became the Last NCAA Champion to Finish Undefeated

Their names bubble to the surface now because 15 years ago they accomplished what UNLV has not yet done.

Thirty-two times the Indiana Hoosiers walked onto the court that year. Thirty-two times they walked off it with victory clenched in their fists. And if Bobby Knight could have had his way, his 1975-76 team would have been unscored upon, too. Such was--and still is--his quest for perfection.

But 32-0 will have to do, as will the national championship that went with it. No team has duplicated the feat since. Not Dean Smith’s elegant North Carolina teams. Not Denny Crum’s ultra-athletic Louisville squads. Not even Knight himself has managed to re-create such magic.

Instead, a droopy-lidded man who sucks on a wet towel during games is in closest pursuit of the Indiana legacy. Five more victories and Jerry Tarkanian’s UNLV team will nudge Indiana aside and claim history as its own.

If it happens, as many expect it will, then the 1991 Rebels can do what the Hoosiers did on a March night in Philadelphia in 1976. They can laugh and prance and cry tears of joy. They can raise their arms in triumph and point a single finger toward the sky. They even can make a case for being the best team ever. Finishing undefeated gives you that right.

But until then, the moment belongs to the Hoosiers, to those names.

THE FELLAS

The 1976 Indiana team picture:

Front row--Bob Wilkerson, Jim Crews, Scott May, Quinn Buckner, Tom Abernethy, Kent Benson; Second row--Rich Valavicius, Mark Haymore, Scott Eells, Wayne Radford, Bob Bender; Third row--Coach Bobby Knight, assistant coach Harold Andreas, Jim Roberson, Jim Wisman, assistant coach Bob Donewald, assistant coach Bob Weltlich.

Some of them wore Afro haircuts back then, or goofy sideburns, or their socks halfway up their calves (very uncool these days). Knight favored plaid jackets or, at the very least, a loud red sport coat accented by a plaid tie. He looked like Wimp Sanderson’s son.

As for Weltlich, he remembers another important difference between then and now.

“I still had hair,” he said.

Of course, some things never are altered by time. Knight still yells. Players still cower. Knight still teaches. Players still learn.

Or else.

What’s that line from the movie, “Hoosiers”--something about the coach telling his player to guard a man so tight that he will know what kind of gum he chews? The 1976 Indiana team could do that.

Everyone had a role on that team. Deviate from that role and you found yourself confined to the bench forever, or at least until Knight’s temper cooled to a broil.

May, a senior forward, was the scorer, the closest thing to a star in Knight’s system.

“I was to try to get 25 (points) every game if I could, and to rebound,” May said.

Buckner, a senior point guard, was the leader, Knight’s on-court interpreter. A former defensive back in football, Buckner was actually given a similar assignment during games. Knight allowed him to roam the court, to play free safety, in a sense.

“I just did what I did,” Buckner said.

Wilkerson, a senior off-guard, was assigned the other team’s best player. Sometimes if that meant guarding the team’s center, the 6-foot-7 Wilkerson did it, no questions asked.

“Some other guys couldn’t accept that role,” he said. “I could.”

Benson, a junior center, did a little bit of everything: score points, clog the middle, rebound and serve as an enforcer of sorts. Mostly he was supposed to look for May.

Abernethy, a senior forward, was new to the starting lineup. He was told, not asked, to play tenacious defense, get the ball to May and, on occasion, shoot.

The reserves were told to keep their mouths shut, their eyes open and to be ready the moment Knight glared at any one of them.

Said Buckner: “We were a very good unit. The whole was infinitely better than the parts. We weren’t going to beat ourselves.”

It can be argued that they didn’t beat themselves in 1974-75, but that fate did. Almost to a man, every member of the 1975-76 Hoosiers will say that the best team Knight might have ever assembled was the one that posed for a team picture a year earlier.

“Not even close,” said Buckner. “We had the best team in basketball in 1975.”

It was an older, deeper team that included Steve Green, a 6-7 forward who had a particularly sweet outside shot, and John Laskowski, who was built like a tree trunk with elbows. “Super Sub,” is what Wilkerson called him.

Except for an overtime victory against Kansas and a one-point victory against Purdue later in the season, the Hoosiers were never challenged during their regular schedule.

Several weeks before the NCAA tournament, however, May suffered a broken arm. In essence, it was Indiana’s first loss of the season, but not its last. Matched eventually against hated Kentucky in the Mideast Regional final, the Hoosiers lost the game because Knight blundered with his heart. He started May, who was making his first appearance since the injury.

“Unfortunately, it didn’t work,” Weltlich said.

May, clearly ineffective, played seven minutes, scored two points, committed three turnovers and two fouls. Kentucky won, 92-90.

Minutes later, an obsession was born.

“The whole mind set from the time we walked into the locker room in Dayton, having just been beaten by Kentucky, was that from that point on and until the 1976 championship, we would do whatever it took to improve ourselves . . . and come together as a team,” Benson said.

The Hoosiers felt cheated by a broken arm, by Knight’s soft spot for May, by their own inability to compensate for May’s injury.

That summer, almost every returning player remained on the Bloomington campus and trained. When Knight convened practice in the fall he was greeted by a team, said May, “on a mission.”

Knight had that look, too. He had led with his emotions the previous spring and lost. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

“He was driven because he knew how good we could be,” Buckner said.

THE MEAN SEASON

“You could see it from the get-go,” Weltlich said. “Their approach to practice was focused to the point where you would have thought on a daily basis that we were playing actual games.”

The intensity was stunning. Everyone knew exactly what he was supposed to do and did it. If not, Knight would stick a heel in a player’s ego and smash away. And if Knight didn’t, Buckner did.

Of course, no player was spared Knight’s wrath. May had his hair blown back by the mouth that roared. Benson was a frequent victim of the scream sessions. Wilkerson, Abernethy, the reserves . . . they all had “their weeks,” as May put it, where you couldn’t do anything to Knight’s satisfaction: play defense, set a screen, lace your sneakers. Nothing.

The season began with a game against UCLA, the 1975 NCAA champion. Played on a neutral court in St. Louis, the game was supposed to be a matchup of the two best teams in the country. It wasn’t even close.

Gene Bartow’s Bruins talked a good game that evening, but they didn’t play one. About the only thing anyone remembers is the Bruin blustering, the weather and the score--Indiana 84, UCLA 64.

“The game was really over by the half,” Weltlich said. “It was also unseasonably warm that night and the floor was laid over the ice rink in the arena. As the game went on, the floor got very, very wet. It became almost dangerous in the second half. It became two teams trying not to get hurt.”

One game later, the Hoosiers almost lost to Notre Dame. Wilkerson’s defense against the Irish’s Adrian Dantley saved the day in that one.

And after that, Indiana needed overtime to beat Kentucky. In that game, Benson tried to grab a missed shot, but instead punched it straight up and into the basket. A miracle shot.

“We had some luck, I mean, some luck ,” Radford said. “Against Kentucky, we had a last-second tip-in to send it into OT, where we beat them easy. We should have lost. But when we got them into OT they lost their confidence.”

Afterward, Knight reacted with his usual aplomb. You can use your imagination.

The winning streak, close calls or not, began to grow. A two-point victory against Ohio State--Knight loved to beat his alma mater----improved the Hoosier record to 10-0. But it took a missed Buckeye layup in the waning moments to ensure the Indiana victory.

“If he had made the layup, that would have ended it right there,” Radford said.

At one point, Knight began picking on his pride and joy, Buckner. Weltlich insisted that Buckner became a target simply because he wasn’t playing well.

“You didn’t have to serve up any reminders,” he said. “He wasn’t trying to motivate Quinn.”

Tell it to the rest of the team, which was shocked when Knight actually kept Buckner out of the starting lineup for a game or two.

“We thought, ‘Now he’s on Quinn?’ ” May said. “That kind of set the tone and made us wake up. It kind of gave us new life.”

Said Wilkerson: “He’d bench me, he’d bench Buckner. Maybe we didn’t know the reason, but we knew there was one. Of course, we weren’t about to ask.”

Indiana was 17-0 when it played Michigan, Johnny Orr’s team. The Hoosiers were bigger, but the Wolverines were quicker.

With 10 seconds remaining in regulation and the Hoosiers down by two points, Crews tossed the ball in bounds. The play was designed for May, but Michigan had him covered. So Buckner shot . . . and missed. Crews recovered the ball and shot.

“An airball,” he said. “It went completely over the rim.”

Standing under the basket was Benson, who tipped the ball in at the buzzer. In fact, Benson was later sent a photo of the game-tying shot by a fan positioned behind the backboard. In the background is the time clock with 00:01 on it. The ball is on its downward arc.

Crews got nothing. “I didn’t even get an assist,” he said, laughing. “I can’t believe it.”

Indiana finished the rest of the regular season with hardly a scare.

THE TOURNAMENT

The Hoosiers beat St. John’s in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Then they sneaked past Alabama. Then Marquette. Then they blasted the Bruins again in the Final Four semifinals.

“It was almost like (UCLA) felt they had gotten better and we hadn’t since the first game,” Weltlich said.

Final score: Indiana 65, UCLA 51.

The championship game featured the Wolverines again. Twice beaten during the regular season, Michigan was back for a third try at victory.

In the opening minutes of the game, Wilkerson turned to run upcourt. An elbow caught him on the head and he crumpled, out cold with a concussion. He was eased onto a stretcher and taken to a nearby Philadelphia hospital, where he stayed until the next day.

Buckner might have been the spiritual leader of the Hoosiers and May their best player, but Wilkerson was their defensive whiz. Without him, who knew what would happen. Strangely, there were no thoughts of 1975--of May’s broken arm.

“The biggest thing was that we were never really concerned we were going to lose the game,” Abernethy said. “Wilkerson went down, but we never felt a panic.”

Maybe so, but Indiana trailed at halftime, 35-29. Expecting the worst, the Hoosiers braced for a vintage Knight tirade, maybe worse.

Instead . . .

“He comes in the locker room,” said May, “and he says, ‘There’s nothing I can say. If you want to be champions, if you want to accomplish something special, you’ve got 20 minutes to prove it.’

“And then he walked out. It was like, total shock.”

Indiana outscored Michigan in those final 20 minutes, 57-33. It wasn’t enough to simply win--the Hoosiers had a point to prove. They did, 86-68.

IN RETROSPECT

Wilkerson was visited in the hospital that night by Knight and John Havlicek, Knight’s teammate on the 1960 Ohio State national championship team.

“Did we win?” asked Wilkerson, who was still wearing his uniform.

Turns out Wilkerson wouldn’t let the nurses remove his jersey or shorts. So they let him sleep in it.

And if you can believe it, Wilkerson said he still hasn’t seen a replay of his final game.

“Don’t want to, either,” he said.

Today, Wilkerson is an assistant coach at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

Buckner went on to play 10 years in the NBA. He now works as an analyst for CBS and ESPN broadcasts. The only time he sees his former teammates is at an annual golf outing in Bloomington. Even then, they rarely talk about the national championship season.

Benson, who also played in the NBA and now owns numerous businesses--construction, vending, car, marketing--lives in New Castle, Ind. He proudly wears his 1976 championship ring. Engraved on it are the words, “Poise” and “Potential.” It was the story of that team.

May, a former NBA player, is now a Bloomington businessman.

Abernethy works for a marketing company in Indianapolis. He said the season is almost a blur.

“I’ve done an awful lot since then,” he said.

Crews is the coach at Evansville.

Weltlich is the coach at Florida International University.

The day after Indiana won the championship, Weltlich was put in charge of the team’s drive from the Indianapolis airport back to Bloomington. Hoosier fans lined the roads as the buses swept past.

Knight didn’t join the festivities. He went to a high school all-star game.

Radford was the first guy off the bench when Wilkerson went down that night. He missed a wide-open jump shot and Knight yanked him. Radford, who works for a Bloomington company that makes medical products, jokes about it now.

“It was a nice shot,” he said. “If I would have made it, I’d still be playing.”

Thirteen players. One head coach. Three assistants. As UNLV resumes its quest for perfection today, members of that 1975-76 Indiana team wait and wonder. No one will hold a grudge if the Rebels accomplish the improbable.

“If they can pull it off, regardless of who they play, well, undefeated is undefeated,” Wilkerson said. “Maybe 15 years from now, you’ll be talking to them instead of me.”