The Last Great Game

How the 1992 Duke and Kentucky teams took a trip into college basketball immortality.

An unforgettable moment in college basketball stands poised for a new wave of nostalgia when March Madness returns in a couple of months.

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In the weeks ahead, even the most casual fan will find it all but impossible to avoid highlight clips showing Grant Hill throwing a 75-foot inbounds strike to Christian Laettner, who caught the ball, dribbled once, and sank the winning shot, all in 2.1 seconds.

The 104-103 overtime victory sent Duke to the Final Four and an eventual second straight national championship, but few people remember any of those subsequent games. Instead, Laettner?s last-second jump shot against Kentucky looms above anything else that occurred in the 1992 NCAA tournament, or almost any other moment in the rich lore of brackets and buzzer-beaters.

Many have billed it the greatest college basketball game in history. Twenty years later, it comes under closer inspection in The Last Great Game, veteran sportswriter Gene Wojciechowski?s account of the players, coaches, and even referees on the court that day at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. Wojciechowski offers a nice blend of past and present perspectives as he tells the story of how an unlikely classic came to be, how it played out, and how it lives on. Like many other sports books, this one bears a subtitle that lacks merit (?Duke vs. Kentucky and the 2.1 Seconds that Changed Basketball?), since there is little evidence that basketball itself was changed by the game. It is more than enough that the game was marvelous, memorable, and changed ? or at least enhanced ? the lives of so many of the participants.

But those are minor complaints in a book that is both fun and thorough without getting tedious.

Sportswriters and fans, not to mention ESPN and the other networks that show the endless series of major pro and college sporting events, seem prone to overhyping every player and every game in the current era of infinite highlight loops, constant analysis, and screen-bottom scrolls. So much so that even a game from 1992 ? the regional final between defending national champion Duke and heavy underdog Kentucky ? feels quaint by comparison.

To be sure, the climactic Hill-Laettner clip of what many believe is the greatest game ever played is familiar even to those fans who were too young or weren?t even alive at the time, but, by today?s standards, the reaction was tame. ESPN didn?t dub it an ?Instant Classic? and replay the game multiple times during the following week, though it did, of course, show the highlights on ?SportsCenter? in constant rotation. No Twitter tag was created labeling it ?#grtstgmevr? and clips of Laettner?s shot weren?t swapped instantly on iPhones in the minutes and hours after the game ended.

Those things didn?t happen because the technology didn?t exist, but the prevalence of such accoutrements today makes it all the harder to discern what is memorable because of accomplishment and what is memorable because of mere ubiquity. Such are the concerns of the modern sports fan and opinion makers, often left to ponder how each generation?s subsequent media age shapes the eternal debates: the best plays, the best players, the best games, the best moments, and so on.

In the case of Duke-Kentucky, there is no need for second-guessing. Take, for instance, the opinion of Len Elmore, the CBS analyst who called the game that day. Elmore told Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan Duke-Kentucky was the greatest game the sport had ever seen and he should know. Elmore played for Maryland in the 1974 Atlantic Coast Conference championship against North Carolina State, the previous consensus standard-bearer.

Wojciechowski makes the book richer by taking time to establish what is much less obvious today than it was in 1992: Kentucky basketball was on the edge of oblivion. A series of recruiting scandals and other misdeeds left the program in tatters, forced out coach Eddie Sutton, and convinced many players to transfer to other schools to avoid NCAA penalties sure to be imposed on the team.

Sports Illustrated all but declared the program dead three years before the overtime regional final against Duke nearly put Kentucky in the Final Four. Before and after that shameful period, the Wildcats have been ? along with UCLA, Kansas, North Carolina, and a few others ? among the most dominant teams in college basketball. (The Wildcats reached the Final Four last season and currently rank among the top 10 teams in the country.)

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/vIBKYxVdNl0/The-Last-Great-Game

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