Bruin Undoin'

By BILL PLASCHKE

Jan. 19, 1999 12 AM PT

Twenty-five years, really?” said Digger Phelps. “Hmmmm.”

Then he laughed, loudly, richly, his delight soaring across the country, across the decades.

No matter how much time passes, some things are still just plain unbelievable.

Notre Dame 71, UCLA 70.

The ending of a record 88-game winning streak.

The beginning of the end of an era.

“How am I doing? A lot worse than you are,” said Bill Walton. “Twenty-five years ago was one of the bleakest days of my life.”

Then he groaned, heavily.

No matter how much time passes, some things are still just plain lousy.

Notre Dame 71, UCLA 70.

An 12-0 Irish run in the last 3 minutes 7 seconds.

Five missed shots by UCLA in the final 11 seconds.

“Twenty-five years?” said Dwight Clay, laughing like his coach. “No way it’s been that long.”

Not for him, this Notre Dame guard who made the fall-away jump shot from the right corner with 29 seconds remaining to give the Irish the victory on Jan. 19, 1974.

Every day, Clay said, somebody asks him about the shot. He has a photograph of it hanging in his trophy room. He has his uniform in a drawer.

Today, as a 45-year-old banker in Pittsburgh, it gives him eternal youth.

“I play guard for the Allegheny Old-Timers,” he said. “And lemme tell you, I’m a marked man.”

Notre Dame 71, UCLA 70.

Neither school nor their fans will ever forget it.

In a strange way, nobody wants to.

“You believe you can do something, and you sell it to your kids, and you see what happens,” Phelps said.

Now it was Walton who was laughing.

“That was the only day Digger worked in his life . . . now he’s trying to transform it into the presidency of the United States,” he said. “I think Digger is still driving those referees from the game around in his car. Still buying them drinks.”

It was the top-ranked and seven-time defending national champions playing at the upstart No. 2 school with a hotshot coach and a mystical reputation.

It was the holders of the now-unbreakable 88-game streak playing the last team to have beaten them, in the last place that they lost.

It was a game featuring eight future NBA players and the best college coach in history.

It was a game that could not possibly have lived up to the hype, yet exceeded it.

It was so big, it was actually nine games.

The Book Game

After having lost by 58 points to UCLA in his first season at Notre Dame two years earlier, Phelps vowed to learn more about basketball’s greatest program.

So he bought a book, “UCLA Basketball: The Real Story” by H. Anthony Medley.

While reading it, Phelps learned about John Wooden’s philosophy on timeouts.

Wooden hated using them because he believed UCLA should always be in better condition than the other team and a timeout would only give the other guys a chance to regroup.

“I put that in the back of my mind, for when I would play him again,” Phelps said.

Did he ever.

The Head Game

The day before UCLA arrived in South Bend, Phelps finished practice by directing his team to form a circle under each basket.

He told them to hoist captains Gary Novak and John Shumate on their shoulders.

He handed each of the captains a pair of scissors, then told them to practice cutting down the nets in anticipation of victory.

“We thought he had lost his mind,” said guard Gary Brokaw.

Phelps soon thought they had lost their minds.

“One of the guys actually started cutting,” Phelps said. “I yelled, ‘No, no, not now! We do it for real tomorrow.’ ”

They all laughed. But not really.

“Coach Phelps, he made us believe,” Brokaw said.

The Back Game

A couple of weeks before the game, Walton suffered what was reported as a bruised back against Washington State.

He says now he actually suffered a broken bone.

He had not played since. He didn’t have to play at Notre Dame.

But he remembers, as a freshman (not eligible to play in those days), watching Austin Carr score 46 points against the Bruins in South Bend in 1971, the Bruins’ previous loss.

“[Greg] Lee, [Keith] Wilkes and I were sitting around the dorm room, watching that game,” Walton remembered. “We looked at each other and said, ‘We will never let that happen again.’ ”

So on that February afternoon in 1974, in front of 11,343 screaming and jeering fans, Walton stuffed himself into a corset and painfully took the floor.

“No way I was missing that,” he said. “Absolutely no way.”

The Mouth Game

Walton looked strong, Wilkes and Dave Meyers were hot early and the Bruins twice ran to 17-point leads in the first half.

According to at least one witness, UCLA was talking as hard as it played.

“That team had halos around its head, so nobody knew how much trash they talked,” Clay remembered. “In the first part of that game, it was vicious.”

Clay said one of the Bruins would shout, “Deal with it!” after every big play.

“They even said stuff about our mamas,” he said. “It was actually hilarious.”

Not to Wooden.

Even 25 years later, he acknowledges, “We had a couple of players--I won’t mention names--who were a little overconfident.”

The Inner Game

With 3:22 remaining, the Bruins led, 70-59, and Phelps was nearly out of cards.

He pulled out his last one.

He called time out and ordered a defensive change in his ineffective full-court press.

He told Shumate to take Brokaw’s place in front of Walton while guarding against the inbounds pass.

Shumate, at 6-9, was five inches taller than Brokaw.

“They’d been dumping it to Walton all day, I figured, this was our only chance to trick them, get some momentum,” Phelps said.

When Shumate scored over Walton on their first possession after the timeout, they tried it.

Sure enough, Tommy Curtis wasn’t looking, tried to dump the inbounds pass again, Shumate grabbed it and laid it in, cutting the lead to seven.

Five seconds later, Adrian Dantley stole and scored, cutting the lead to five with 2:22 left.

“Suddenly, we had that emotion, we felt we could win,” Phelps said.

The Timeout Game

Phelps did not alter his strategy or ease up his pressure one bit during the last two minutes. He remembered the book.

“I knew Coach Wooden wouldn’t call a timeout, so we kept after them, hoping to wear them down,” he said.

It worked. Curtis was called for traveling, and Brokaw responded with a 15-footer to close the gap to three.

Meyers missed a shot, and Brokaw made a 12-foot jumper to close the gap to 70-69.

At this point, a weary Walton looked over toward Wooden as if pleading for a timeout.

“Yeah, I wanted him to call one,” Walton said. “But I knew what he would say. He would say, ‘Bill, we don’t call timeouts. This is UCLA.’ ”

On UCLA’s next possession, Wilkes was called for charging.

The Bruins led by one point with 45 seconds remaining, but the Irish had the ball.

The crowd roared, creating a frenzy that carried the home team with it.

“Sure it was loud,” Walton said. “The school was just starting to become coed, so you had a bunch of sex-starved students whose only goal in life was to beat the golden boys from Southern California.”

And still UCLA called no timeout.

The Help Game

Clay had not scored a point in the second half. Brokaw had scored 25 in the game.

So when Brokaw received the pass on the final Irish possession, he was not surprised to see Curtis cheating off Clay to guard him.

“So I just threw it over there,” Brokaw said.

Clay caught it in the corner and threw up about a 20-footer in one motion.

With 29 seconds left, it swished.

The Irish led by one.

Finally, a UCLA timeout.

The End Game

After the timeout, Curtis missed a jump shot. Then weary Walton missed a follow. Then the Bruins missed three tips.

And Shumate finally grabbed the rebound, and that was that.

The Bruins had been officially 88ed.

Yes, Notre Dame cut down the nets.

But no, Shumate did not get a chance to use what he practiced. He was smothered under the crowd that had rushed the floor. He never got near the net.

That crowd included excited sportswriters who leaped over the press table to join the celebration.

By 11 p.m., the five main bars in downtown South Bend had run out of beer.

The Blame Game

In contrast to today’s sports climate, perhaps the most amazing thing about the UCLA loss was what happened afterward.

The Bruins didn’t point any fingers.

There could have been at least one foul in those final four tips, but they never said a word about the officiating.

They could have blamed Walton’s bad back for slowing him down in the final minutes, or Curtis’ recklessness for allowing Clay to roam free, or the fiery crowd for distracting them.

But Wooden ordered them to say nothing bad, so they did not.

And a day later, at a Los Angeles luncheon, Wooden took the blame.

Perhaps his words are worth repeating today:

“We lacked something in those last minutes, which we’d always been credited for having--our poise. I know I was guilty. I permitted myself to become complacent, perhaps more than I should have. I thought we had it safely in hand.”

Twenty-five years later, on the matter of not calling timeouts, he is still taking the blame.

“I probably was wrong,” he said. “I was due for the criticism.”

Walton respectfully said that Wooden is pointing at the wrong person.

“It was our fault,” Walton said. “Our winning streak was great, but we should have won 105 straight. We made too many mistakes.

“We let Coach Wooden and UCLA down. We embarrassed ourselves and our university.”

Whereas Phelps said he never experienced a greater win, Wooden said he experienced far worse defeats, even during that 1973-74 season.

Later that year, of course, they blew more big leads and were eliminated by North Carolina State in two overtimes in the national semifinals.

Wooden led the Bruins to his final national title a year later before retiring.

But on that January afternoon when five Midwestern kids beat the Southern Californians, some say the Notre Dame victory marked the beginning of the end of West Coast basketball domination.

Before that game, 20 of the first 35 NCAA basketball champions had come from west of the Mississippi river.

Since, only six of the 24 champions have been from there.

As for any further meaning, well, Digger Phelps said the game has lived 25 years as a testament.

“If you work hard and prepare and believe, you can do anything you want,” he said.

Bill Walton says it has lived as, well, something else.

“Every time I tried to discipline my kids when they were growing up, they would look back at me,” he said, groaning again. “And they would say, ‘Fine, I’m going to Notre Dame.’ ”

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Winning Streaks

Longest running streaks in major sports:

88: College Basketball UCLA (1971-74)

33: NBA Lakers (1971-72)

18: NFL Denver: (1997-98)

San Francisco: (1989-90)

Miami: (1972-73) and Chicago: (1933-34, 1941-42)

47: College Football Oklahoma (1953-57)

26: Baseball New York Giants (1916)

17: NHL Pittsburgh (1992-93)