A Little Nostalgia

Flashback NCS Basketball Tradition28

ESPN Classic will air the 1983 national championship game between North Carolina State and Houston from 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. ET on Friday, April 4. At 8 p.m., ESPN Classic will present a half hour original documentary “ESPN Classic Remembers: NC State Upsets Houston”, which will chronicle the 1983 Wolfpack season. The documentary will re-air at 12:30 a.m. ET on Saturday.

ESPN’s Heather Dinich profiles the oft-forgotten reserve freshman, Ernie Myers, who played only a single minute in that 1983 Championship game but was instrumental in the Pack’s run towards the tournament, filling in for the injured Dereck Whittenburg, who had missed 14 games with a fractured foot.

That one second or that one minute, you can affect the game…If the coach puts you in there for 30 seconds, give it the hardest 30 seconds you ever gave in your life.”

That’s the attitude we were missing this season — that exact attitude we had in our 2007 ACC Tournament run but lost somewhere in between. As for right now, nostalgia is all we have.

About LRM

Charter member of the Lunatic Fringe and a fan, loyal to a fault.

Flashback NCS Basketball Tradition

28 Responses to A Little Nostalgia

  1. Rochester 04/02/2008 at 7:42 AM #

    I just got the DVD of the NC State/Houston game for my birthday this week. I’m looking forward to watching it soon. Hope it’s not another 25 years before we make another great run. How long until Oblinger and Fowler reach retirement age?

  2. packbackr04 04/02/2008 at 8:49 AM #

    Sid needs to have all the players go to the same place on friday and watch this. then they should watch it over and over and over again… all of them together until something clicks.

  3. JimValvano 04/02/2008 at 9:06 AM #

    This is off topic, and in being so…almost sacreligious…so forgive me. Feel free to erase this after you read.

    Tom Crean has been hired as the next head coach of the Indiana Hoosiers.

  4. jimmyS 04/02/2008 at 9:29 AM #

    If you live in Raleigh you can hang out with most of the players on that team — including Ernie Myers. On April 12, starting at 1pm the Raleigh City Museum is honoring the 1983 team and their 25th anniversary. Some of the players will speak at the museum (220 Fayetteville Street) and then everyone will walk over to the “Pit” BBQ in downtown to watch the game (NCSU vs Houston) and enjoy some food. Best of all — it’s a free and anyone can come.

    I’ll be watching the game on ESPN on Friday, but I think it might be fun to watch it with the actual players.

    Here’s the museum’s page –>

    http://www.raleighcitymuseum.org/calendar.shtml

  5. adchappe 04/02/2008 at 9:59 AM #

    I’m not trying to be a negative nancy here…but can we please not talk about the ’83 championship anymore? The rest of the world probably thinks State fans are so lame for always bringing up the fact that we won a national championship 25 years ago. It’s just really played out and makes us look like idiots to keep talking about it. Even though we’ve got the crappiest athletics dept. in the ACC…can we as fans please focus on the recent past…and how to build our program for the future?

    LRM: This was arguably the most-defining moment of our history and it’s an indelible part of our culture, and it just so happens that this weekend concludes the season-long celebration of its 25th anniversary. Or, think about it this way: you’ll never know where you can go unless you’re cognizant of where you’ve been. We’ve got an administration telling us it’s unrealistic and outrageous to expect that we should be able to compete with Carolina and Duke, and yet we can look back to a time when we far exceeded merely competing with either.

    And why should any of us care what the rest of the world thinks about us? We determine our own measure of success, no one else.

  6. haze 04/02/2008 at 11:31 AM #

    For the 25th anniversary, I’m cool with celebrating.

    More generally, I see adchappe’s point. We’ve done so little since ’83 that I feel like we should pay Bruce to come in and sing “Glory Days” during the game viewing.

    On the upside, you can view that NC as a net-present luck valuation of the NC State program. We spent 25yrs of fortune in that one glorious 4wk run to immortality… and I’d do it again! I just hope it wasn’t actually 35yrs of fortune.

  7. xphoenix87 04/02/2008 at 12:16 PM #

    The point that really stood out to me, especially when I look at it in relation to this year’s team, is that Meyers (a highly touted freshman coming in) got a chance to play and he played well, but understood his place and was fine with going back to the bench and getting little PT for the sake of the team. There’s such a sense of entitlement with players today, like they’re owed playing time. What Meyers did by calmly taking a backseat and accepting his role in order to help his team win is something that we rarely see in basketball today. I imagine most of the chemistry issues this year’s team had could have been ironed out with a similar attitude.

  8. Girlfriend in a Coma 04/02/2008 at 12:24 PM #

    I’m with the cats who think we are living in the past too much. 83 was great, but we are totally obsessed with it.

  9. Howler 04/02/2008 at 12:31 PM #

    The last time I saw that game replayed was on ESPN classic a couple of years ago, and the one thing that really struck me is how much the shot clock and three point line have improved the game since then. If I had not had a dog in that fight, I don’t think I would have thought the game was all that exciting until the end.

    These days, I love a close game at the end where you know one team has to give up possession because more than 35 seconds remain.

    Despite that, because it was the Pack, it was the greatest game ever.

  10. LRM 04/02/2008 at 12:47 PM #

    I think the point here is that the Ernie Myers quote shows a championship-winning attitude that we haven’t seen in almost 20 years around here, except for one very brief flash of it for one weekend last March.

    I’ll be the first to admit I live in the past — what other choice do I have? Should I celebrate all four of the NCAAT victories in Herb’s eleven years or the four runners-up we’ve had in the ACCT since 1987?

    I was three years old in ’83 and admittedly, I don’t remember watching this game. But I do know I’m leading a generation that knows of State’s storied past only through legend and I don’t want that get mired in mediocre expectations as we try to get back to a time where NC State basketball matters.

  11. beowolf 04/02/2008 at 1:06 PM #

    The past is the only thing 20 years of inept leadership at NC State can’t take away from us.

  12. MattN 04/02/2008 at 1:19 PM #

    Glory days well they’ll pass you by
    Glory days in the wink of a young girl’s eye
    Glory days, glory days

    *sigh*

  13. Howler 04/02/2008 at 1:21 PM #

    What’s not to love about living in the past? Gas was about a buck a gallon.

  14. BJD95 04/02/2008 at 1:37 PM #

    Amen, beo, amen. It is kind of sad that we are so infauated with such a distant event (my oldest kid is now older than I was at the time), but it’s pretty much all we’ve got until TOB’s efforts finally start paying off.

  15. MrPlywood 04/02/2008 at 2:06 PM #

    Well, my excuse is that ’83 was my final year at State, so my friends and I lived it. It really doesn’t feel like it was 25 years ago. And the other day, as I was entertaining (*cough* boring) my kids with stories of State’s run that year and the ensuing celebrations after every win, it dawned on me that the ’74 championship was only 9 years before that. (Duh). While ’83 was lightning in a bottle, ’74 was the result of a “program”. That team won 32 ACC games in a row, including beating UCLA in the tourney and this one against Maryland:

    http://home.carolina.rr.com/mcguires/greatest_college_basketball_game.htm

    http://www.tbo.com/sports/MGBS2VR9ZYE.html

    Had the team not been penalized in ’73, State would have had a great shot at 2 championships. So fans of my generation have had the best of both worlds – expected domination and unexpected success. Both the Maryland game and the Houston game have been called “the greatest” for one reason or another. And THAT is why I will continue to support State – because I know that either one can happen again.

    To quote David Thompson (in reference to the Maryland game, but appropriate for the entire ’73-’74 season and ’83 run) “Some things are timeless.”

  16. turfpack 04/02/2008 at 8:16 PM #

    It’s a little different for me I was at State in 1983- lived it -had the best time in my life-The most fun was talking crap to the UNX fans after their 1

  17. highstick 04/02/2008 at 9:31 PM #

    What you younger guys don’t realize about the 83 game was how good Houston was! They had “all the names” like UNCX and were expected to just beat the crap out of State with their “run and dunk game”! I watched every one of the NCAA games that State played and would stay up until 3 o’clock in the morning watching them play on the West Coast(during the midst of tax season, meaning I’d sleep for an hour, get up, take a shower and go to work). That run probably was more exciting that 74, although beating in “unbeatable” UCLA team with Bill Walton was very sweet!

    This is why I(and most of us who are old enought to remember) will never accept that State can’t expect to play with the big dogs year in and year out. Nobody, and I mean, nobody was as dominant as UCLA during those years and we played them pretty even the first game and beat ’em the second time around.

  18. cooldrip 04/03/2008 at 3:09 AM #

    The run in ’83 was the most remarkable run through the tourney EVER. Look at the games:

    Pepperdine, double overtime, and if I remember right, we were down 6 in OT. This was before the shot clock or 3 point shot.

    UNLV, a team that I believe was a brief #1 that year and featured Sidney Green, one of the nation’s top players.

    Sweet 16 matchup if I remember was Utah in Salt Lake, or maybe it was Ogden.

    Virginia, with Ralph Sampson, the national player of the year for the third time. And a previous #1 team.

    Georgia, a team that had just beaten the mighty Tarheels in the Elite Eight, ruining our dream matchup in the Final Four.

    And Houston of course, with future Hall of Famers Olojuwan and Drexler.

    Our legacy is overcoming insurmountable odds to achieve the impossible. Think about that run. Think about the team in ’74 that ended UCLA’s run of seven championships. Talking about our remarkable tradition keeps it alive, and reminds those like Fowler of how pathetic our current performance is by comparison.

  19. Wxwolf 04/03/2008 at 7:44 AM #

    ^Ironically, today, the “big dogs” of college basketball 20-30 years ago don’t really exist anymore, in terms of concentrated great talent year after year. We can’t even compete with the watered down version of today’s “great” teams. Sigh.

  20. Mike 04/03/2008 at 8:19 AM #

    The other interesting point in all this – Ernie Myers gets the profile piece. I have not seen it so hard to say what is involved.

    Who is the SID for NC State that supplied the info to ESPN for this piece?

    Who is the SID for State that we continue to see incompetence?

    Who is the SID that continually drinks Fowlup Kool Aid?

    Not knocking on Ernie, but I remember he could go for 30 or he could go 0 for 30, but V always said about him “he is a scorer, not a shooter”.

  21. kyjelly 04/03/2008 at 9:20 AM #

    I hear the cubs are honoring their 1908 world series championship team as well

    LRM: How subtle.

  22. redfred2 04/03/2008 at 5:10 PM #

    I could go on and on for hours as to why, but I’ll spare everyone the time and say that there is NO WAY IN HELL that the ’83 National Championship tournament/season was anywhere close to as exciting as the ’74 season.

    Both were great, don’t get me wrong, but there is something unbelievable about knowing have “IT”, and then being able to rise to the ocassion and prove it to the world, game after game, for an entire season.

  23. redfred2 04/03/2008 at 5:40 PM #

    For those people who are saying that 1983 is history, to just “let it go” and move on, how about telling that to ESPN? They’re the ones who feel it’s special enough to honor it by broadcasting a nationwide TV show about it 25 years later.

    Was that Lee Fowler, or James Oblinger, who posted that comment?

  24. cowdog 04/03/2008 at 7:24 PM #

    Boys and girls, those of us that bring up the glory days in referance to the present do so because we are disgusted by the way State athletics have been managed over a damn good portion of most of our younger writers’ life.

    We are not living in the past by any means. We are quite cognisant of the present and that is exactly why we envoke the past!

  25. Texpack 04/04/2008 at 5:12 AM #

    The ’83 Championship run was an incredible four weekends of basketball. The atmosphere on campus during the run was electric 24/7. The escape against Pepperdine was the best escape of the run. Down 6 with less than a minute and Sidney had fouled out. Whitt actually missed the front end of a 1 & 1 to tie and force the second overtime, but Cozell got the rebound and put back. Every player on that team busted it when they were on the floor.

    The team doesn’t get credit for being as good as they really were because of the slump right after Whitt went down. With a healthy Whitt all year we would have been no lower than a three seed in the tournament. My kids will watch with me again tonight.

    As for the ’74 Championship, the magnitude of knocking off UCLA can’t be appreciated by people who weren’t alive at the time. They were the only team who had ever won the NCAA in my memory at the time and I was 13 years old. All year long you had waited for the one match-up that really mattered and the Pack delivered.

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