This is the firstof a three-part oral history series on the 1985-86 Louisville Cardinals, who won the school's second national championship and are celebrating the 30th anniversary of their title this week.
To read Part II of the series, click here.
The 1985-86 season started with high expectations for Denny Crum's Louisville. The Cards finished 19-18the prior campaign, reaching the National InvitationTournament semifinals but missing the 20-win mark for the first time in Crum's first 14seasons at U of L.
But Louisvillehad Billy Thompson and Jeff Hall back for their senior years, and star guard Milt Wagner opted to return for another season after breaking his foot in the season opener and missing the entire 1984-85 campaign. Herbert Crook was a sophom*ore, and Mark McSwain and KevinWalls were back to provide some punch off the bench.
That groupformed a talented nucleus, and prizedcenter Pervis Ellison was the crown jewel of a loaded freshman class that included Kenny Payne, Keith Williams and Tony Kimbro.
Louisville began the year ranked as high as No. 1 in theBasketball Timesand No. 9 in the Associated Press preseason poll. The Courier-Journal, in its season preview, claimed Crum's team was "in everybody's top 20," though the coach wasn't sure his team deserved that kind of praise just yet.
"I came back to win the national championship," Wagner said, who could have entered the NBA Draft instead of redshirting and returning.
"I didn’t come back to go to the Final Four. I'd already done the Final Four twice.I knew the guys coming back and the recruiting class we had, and I knew we had a chance to win it all. I wanted to win it."
This is the story of how that season unfolded, how Louisville stumbled out of the gate while Wagner tried to rediscover his timing and shooting touch, and how Crum's talented groupput together arun to a national title, culminating with a 72-69 win over a vaunted Duke squadthat was Mike Krzyzewski's first great team.
As the Final Four begins this weekend in Houston,Crum, his former players and a handful of opponents provided an oral history of Louisville's 1986 title run, pieced together with archived articles from The Courier-Journal.
After back-to-back wins in the Big Apple NIT to open the season, Louisville went to New York for games against No. 5 Kansas and a talented St. John's team, losingboth contests atMadison Square Garden. Wagner was 2 for 15 in the loss to Kansas, and Walter Berry (22 points), Ron Rowan (20 points)and Mark Jackson (17 points, 11 assists) combined to push St. John's past Louisville two days later.
Milt Wagner, senior guard:I started off a little slow. My timing was off. My shooting percentage was off. Everything was off.
Denny Crum, head coach:Milt's footwas healed but the muscles deteriorate, you know?He wasn’t playing really well for us. We knew what he was capable of doing. We felt like he was the missing piece. We just did the best we could do.
But Louisville won the next four games, including a 65-63 victory over rival Indiana, then ranked No. 17. Wagner scored 22 points, and that, he said, is when he finally felt like he was 100 percent.
Wagner: That was the game for me. They came into Freedom Hall. They hadSteve Alford (who had 27 points) and I think I had (22)points. I thought after that game I was getting everything back. It was all a matter of just playing games and repetition. Slowly but surely it started coming back.
U of L's struggles didn't end there. The Cards were 11-6 on Jan. 25. They had played six ranked teams to that point and lost to four of them.
Jeff Hall, senior guard:We were a mediocre team at that point. But we also knew we had the guysto get it going.
Wagner:We had the toughest schedule in the country, so that 11-6 was not your regular 11-6. (Crum)does that on purpose in order to prepare us for tournament time. We took our bumps and bruises.
Kenny Klein, sports information director:We played at Memphis State (on Jan. 9) and it came down to the final possession, and (Crum) drew up a play and we went away from that play and we lost the game (73-71, Memphis State). I remember going in the locker room and Coach Crum gotup there and said,'Let’s talk about this now.' He wasgoing over each guy.
There were guys talking to each other about everything and, coming out of that, there was a little more focus. There was a good little discussion in that locker room. We did lose to NC State (on Feb. 8), but we were pretty good after that. We were pretty tough to beat.
After the loss to Kansas on Jan. 25, the second loss to the Jayhawks of the season, Louisville tore through 15 wins in its next 16 games, claiming the Metro Conference regular-season and tournament titles.
Wagner:You have to understand, for me, I’d been to twoFinal Fours before that year. I understoodthe feeling and the timing of the way we’d get better every year. I knew with all Coach Crum teams, we’d get better as we got closer to tournament time. I thought we were making a run.
Klein:It came down to the last seven seconds, and Andre Turner from Memphis State got fouled and it was a one-and-one. All of Freedom Hall was deathly silent because everybody knew he led the league in free-throw shooting (at 85.4 percent), just ahead of Milt. We go to a timeout and Billy (Thompson) wassaying, 'What do we do?' Coach Crum says to get the ball to Milt. Sure enough, Turnermisses the front end. Billy gets the rebound and throws it to Milt, and he goes down the floor and gets fouled with one second left. Freedom Hall goes from deathly silent to going wild. He makes the first one, tying the game, and steps back off the line andputs both arms up - he was so confident. Then he stepped up and made the second. The place went absolutely nuts.
In the regular-season finale, U of L beat Memphis State, 70-69, thanks to Wagner's late-game free throws.Russ Brown, of The Courier-Journal, wrote that Crum, who had just turned 49, sang "Happy Birthday" to himself after the game.
Louisville got a No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament and was sent to Ogden, Utah, to play 15th-seeded Drexel, which was making its first tournament appearance. On Selection Sunday, Crum called the Automobile Club of Americato find out Ogden's elevation, which was listed at4,300 feet. He was concerned about the impact it could have on his team.
Hall:Only thing I knew was,if we were in Utah, it’s probably good skiing weather, and I don’t even ski.
Wagner:I knew absolutely nothing about the place. (Laughs.) I didn’t know where we were going;I just knew we were going.
Hall:One thing Coach Crum stressed to us is just worry about the game that’s in front of you. You have no way of determining the outcome of the other games. If you’re always looking down the bracket, your total focus isn’t on who you were going to play. We knew the pressure was on us because a 2 is playing a 15. As history goes, you have to be cautious of those 2 and 15 teams playing one another. If you’re not on your game, they can slip in there and beat you.
Drexel led41-40in the first half, but Louisville eventually pulled away, claiming what Brown described as a "deceiving" 20-point win. Thompson had 24 points and 11 rebounds and Mark McSwain added 15 points and eight rebounds off the bench.
The Cards advanced to the second round, where they met seventh-seededBradley, a team with 32 wins and two losses. The Braves had Jim Les and Hersey Hawkins, and ranked as high as ninth in the AP poll. Their coach, Dick Versace, was described by Brown as a dapper guywith "silver hair and a silver-tongued vocabulary."
"It’s a good thing Crum is meeting Versace on the court and not over a Scrabble board,” Brown wrote.Wagner's block with 8:37 left broke a tie and spawned a 27-13 Louisville push to an 82-68 win.
Crum:I thought we beat them fairly easy. On the airplane coming back, I’m sitting on the aisle up front and Herbert Crook comes down and kneels next to meand says, 'Coach, I owe you an apology.'I said, 'What for?' And he said, 'I've played like a dog in this tournament.'I knew he hadn’t played well, but I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms. (Crook averaged eight points and four rebounds a game in Ogden.)
He came back in the next four games, andI think he shot 75 percent from the floor for the rest of the tournament. (Crook averaged 16.5 points and 10.3 rebounds over the next four games.) He told me, 'You don’t have to worry about me anymore. I’m over all that jittery stuff.' And he was. Our forwards both - they were really good. They tried to front us and we’d run high-low and we’d get easy layups on them. They couldn’t guard our post people. We were just quicker and more athletic than they were. We weren’t necessarily better.
Louisville advanced to the Sweet 16 for the 10th time since Crum became the coach in 1971. The Cards would take on third-seeded North Carolina, giants in college basketball that ranked No. 1 in the AP poll for 13 of the 17 weeks of the season. In his point-counterpoint column with Billy Packer, former Marquette coach Al McGuire called the matchup a "real Monday night-type affair." It turned out to be a launching pad for the Cards.
