The Billikens Make St. Louis Forget All About the Blues

One week from Sunday, the scholastic college of cardinals known as the NCAA Men’s Basketball Committee will send out little puffs of smoke from the 40th floor of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency and announce the pairings for the 56th NCAA Tournament.

Across the nation college basketball fans, pencils ready, will sit anxiously in front of their televisions and hope for a favorable seed, an easy first-round game or simply an invitation to compete.

It’s the ultimate playground rules for the ultimate playground game. Pick me, and I’ll be your friend forever. Pick me, and my school will reap the rewards of national exposure and all the trimmings that come with it. A committee of nine is responsible for the pairings and for the selection of 34 at-large teams after the automatic qualifiers from 30 conferences.

And on that Sunday, down the road from Kansas City on Interstate 70, the city of St. Louis will be glued to CBS-TV to see how the Billikens of St. Louis University fare.

That there is NCAA Tournament consideration for St. Louis U.--St. Louis Who?--is remarkable, considering that two seasons ago the Billikens were 5-23, players quit at midseason and walk-ons were needed to fill out the roster. A player even walked off the court during a game.

Enter Coach Charlie Spoonhour. Spoonhour has his Billikens 22-3 and 8-3 in the Great Midwest Conference. On Feb. 23, the Billikens finished their home schedule 15-0 with a thrilling 70-67 victory over Cincinnati. Last season, the Billikens were 12-17 with only one regular-season conference victory.

The city of St. Louis, still stinging from an embarrassing rebuke by the NFL on expansion, has embraced the Billikens in unprecedented fashion. Sellout crowds have been the norm since December, and attendance is averaging 13,008. Records have been broken four times this season at 64-year old St. Louis Arena, including the latest, 18,411, who saw the Billikens defeat Cincinnati. Not bad considering Athletic Director Debbie Yow once considered putting up curtains inside the arena to shield empty seats and improve the atmosphere.

If the selection committee picks St. Louis for its first tournament appearance since 1957, the imaginations of Billikens fans will run wild. Because in Spoonhour, St. Louis has a coach who knows how to handle the pressure of big games and who won’t be blinded by the bright lights of the NCAA Tournament. Five times Spoonhour took Southwest Missouri State to the tournament. Although he won only one game, a 65-60 upset of Clemson in 1987, his teams were competitive. Losses to Kansas and Nevada Las Vegas in 1987 and ’88 were by four points.

“Charlie’s had a lot to do with St. Louis’ success this year,” Cincinnati Coach Bob Huggins says. “He’s got good players, but what Charlie does is teach good fundamentals. When guys are sound fundamentally you give them a chance to win, and he gives them a chance to win. Good coaches put guys in position where they can be successful. And Charlie also is a great communicator.”

Other coaches in the Great Midwest, a conference in which St. Louis was once considered to be the doormat, agree that “Spoon” is the tool that turned the tide in St. Louis.

“It’s as dramatic a turnaround as there has been in Division I,” Dayton Coach Jim O’Brien says. “He has basically the same team, but he’s built their confidence.”

Spoonhour had completed his ninth season at Southwest Missouri State when Yow called in April 1992. He was 197-81, and those five NCAA Tournament appearances, including that upset of fourth-seeded Clemson, had put Spoonball on the map.

St. Louis was coming off a 5-23 season under Rich Grawer, its worst record since the 1982-83 season, Grawer’s first. A local high school coach who spent one season as an assistant to Norm Stewart at Missouri, Grawer brought St. Louis back to respectability and isn’t getting the credit he deserves for resurrecting the Billikens’ program. He won 27 games in 1988-89 with Knicks forward Anthony Bonner and had three NIT appearances in 10 seasons--including appearances in the championship game in 1989 and ’90.

After the acrimonious 1991-92 season, Grawer and St. Louis parted. Within days, Spoonhour was hired.

Yow says Spoonhour, who was a perennial front-runner for openings from South Carolina to Kansas, was more than the leading candidate. “He was the choice, as far as I was concerned,” Yow says. “And he was the choice because of his track record--simple, proven achievement and excellence.”

So how was this coach with the homespun charm and the aw-shucks demeanor able to turn around the Billikens so quickly?

“I didn’t, the kids did,” Spoonhour says. “Coaches, Xs and O’s, and all that stuff--it’s pretty much the same. You get kids who decide they’re going to play together. And that they’re going to sublimate a few of their individual goals for team goals, then all of a sudden you’ve got guys who like each other and clap their hands and have a pretty workmanlike attitude towards things, then you win.”

The reality is the Billikens are a collection of 3-point shooters and scrappy defenders, with the tallest starter 6-8 Evan Pederson, a transfer from Northwestern. They also are much deeper team than last season’s. Depth was a glaring weakness in Spoonhour’s first season, and he was quick to address it. The bench averaged 9.1 points per game and 7.4 rebounds per game in ‘92-93. This season, it is averaging 20.3 points and 11.5 rebounds.

The Billikens are also better defensively. St. Louis usually employs an aggressive, man-to-man. Yet Spoonhour also is flexible enough to change the game plan, as he did in the closing moments of the Cincinnati victory when he changed to a 1-1-3 zone, and the Billikens were able to hold off the Bearcats twice in the game’s last minute.

Yet for this season, the foundation was actually laid in the Grawer era. Two of the top three 3-point threats are Erwin Claggett, a 6-1 junior from nearby Venice, Ill., and Scott Highmark, a 6-5 junior from suburban St. Louis, both recruited by Grawer.

Last season St. Louis finished last in the Great Midwest, and this season it was picked to finish sixth in the seven-team conference. Instead, the Billikens have been among the league leaders in a season in which:

They posted the best start in university history at 14-0.

For one week in early February, they were 19-1 and had the best winning percentage in the country.

They have been ranked for the first time since the 1964-65 season.

“I’d like to lie and say, yeah, I knew exactly that this was going to happen and we had this grand plan,” Spoonhour says. “But we’ve never had a grand plan. I know that drives people crazy. The only thing we were trying to do was get better, and we didn’t know how much better we could be.”

St. Louis’ game plan is simple. Play tenacious defense then go down court and get open for the 3-point shot. The Billikens are holding opponents to 70.5 points per game and getting the ball to Claggett, Highmark or H. Waldman--for the “H-bomb” as they’re known when Waldman shoots them. Claggett leads the team with 71 three-pointers and should break the season record of 82. Highmark has 61 and Waldman 46. Claggett’s 3-point shot with 1 minute, 40 seconds remaining sealed the victory over Cincinnati.

And when they get to the NCAA tournament, watch out for Spoonball. In 1989, for example, Spoonhour’s Southwest Missouri State team gave Seton Hall--which would end up in the national championship game--its toughest test, losing by nine in the first round. The Pirates then rolled over Evansville, Indiana, UNLV and Duke by 14, 13, 23 and 27 until losing in overtime to Michigan.

Still, Spoonhour plays it safe.

“It’s more difficult to get overlooked now,” Spoonhour says. “It was difficult for some teams to prepare for (Southwest Missouri) because they knew very little about us and hadn’t seen us.

“This year’s team is a little different. Our team this year is more of an uptempo, score-a-lot-of-points (team). Where we’ll still work hard and still play, I hope, some defense at times, our trademark this year is shooting. And I don’t think we’ll sneak up on anyone because we’ve received so much attention.”