A Sports Fan Goes Live (part 1)

Put up or shut up. Instead of just musing about the state of live sports out there beyond the filter of the major media, this Sports Fan decided it was to high time to check out the games people play first hand. No comfy couch. No clicker. No instant replay. Cold turkey.

Truth be told, the decision pretty much made itself when the perfect storm of opportunity presented itself the other day.  Of all the sports that I love to follow, college basketball has a special place in my heart and in the creases of the brain where life experiences are preserved long after you’ve started forgetting what you had for breakfast that morning. You see, sometime in between the reigns of King Tut and Alexander the Great I actually played college basketball, albeit not very well. The Bird in fact thinks that the cause of my chronically sore knees is the pounding that they took from repeated trips up and down the court. I don’t have the heart to tell her that more likely it was the wear and tear from repeatedly rising from the bench and then sitting back down at the conclusion of each timeout. But I digress.

As a big fan of college basketball, I noted with interest that Gonzaga, the #9 team in the country, would soon be heading down the coast to play the southern swing of its West Coast Conference road schedule. Which meant that they would be visiting Loyola Marymount. Imagine that - a Top 10 team in my backyard. I wouldn’t even have to get on a freeway to see them. In fact, I could be on the LMU campus in just three turns once I pulled out of my garage. I had no earthly reason NOT to go.

And so it was that I wandered into the 4,156 seat Gersten Pavilion and found a comfortable vantage point in the wooden bleachers, well in advance of tip-off. Now I hadn’t been in a campus gym in a long, long time (Syracuse’s Carrier Dome doesn’t really count, since its cavernous size enables it to routinely house most of Central New York). But I was struck by how wonderfully familiar it seemed. All of the pre-game sights, sounds and smells were no different than they were back in the day. I even started to feel pre-game butterflies as a purely reflexive reaction.

As I looked around, it reminded me that this place had some significant history of its own. Back in 1980 a young coach named Paul Westhead had led the L.A. Lakers and their rookie guard Earvin “Magic” Johnson to an NBA title. He then succeeded to systematically alienate the entire team to such an extent that he was ousted in a mid-season coup, opening the door for an interim head coach with no previous experience. Guy by the name of Pat Riley. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. It’s too bad my friend Molly The Organizational Development Guru wasn’t around at the time to save Westhead from himself.

Apparently born with a miserable sense of timing, Westhead moved on to the Chicago Bulls where he managed to accrue just 24 wins before being asked to leave. It was that dark time in Chicago just preceeding the arrival of a skinny kid from North Carolina. Guy by the name of Michael Jordan. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

After flopping around basketball for a few more seasons, Westhead returned to Los Angeles and landed at Loyola Marymount, where from 1985-1990 his small-school team rose to national prominence with a run-and-gun style that virtually ignored the concept of playing traditional defense.  At the height of this era, Westhead enticed star USC players Bo Kimble and Hank Gathers into transferring across town, and tiny Gersten Pavilion became the place to be in L.A. For a time even the mighty UCLA took a back seat in SoCal college hoops to LMU. And then tragedy struck.

Well on their way to a third straight NCAA tournament appearance, LMU was comfortably leading a West Coast Conference tournament game when Gathers scored on an alley-oop dunk, turned to head up court, and suddenly fell to the ground. Dead of a massive heart attack. 

In one of the most stirring two-week spans of college basketball history, LMU dedicated its NCAA tournament to their fallen star and proceeded to knock off New Mexico State, defending national champion Michigan (by 34 points, no less), and Alabama before falling to eventual tournament champion UNLV. Gather’s co-star of that team, Bo Kimble, honored his best friend in each of those games by shooting his first foul shot left-handed, as Gathers had done once while trying to break out of a foul-shooting slump. Kimble made each of those three shots in the team’s run to the Elite Eight. It was the farthest that Loyola Marymount would ever advance in the Madness of March.

My visit to Gersten took place almost 20 years to the day that Hank Gathers died, and his presence could still be felt everywhere – from the large “Hank’s House” sign on the wall to the replica #44 jerseys that the cheerleaders, band and pep squad wore. In one of the on-court contests that ran during a time out, the winning fan was thrilled to receive a piece of twine from the net cut down after one of those historic NCAA wins in 1990.

But here’s the thing – in spite of all of that history and all of those big wins, Loyola Marymount had never beaten a ranked team in the 29 years since Gersten Pavilion first opened its doors. And as I watched both teams warm up, I couldn’t help noticing how small LMU looked in comparison to Gonzaga, the #9 team in the nation.

To Be Continued…