Two minutes, 14 seconds left in the 2008 national championship college basketball game in San Antonio.
Kansas—where I went to journalism grad school—trails Memphis by 9 points.
“Hey, Q,” I say to my buddy Quang X. Pham, a UCLA grad sitting behind me. “You wanna bail early and beat the crowd?”
His reply is unprintable in a family blog, but basically he says we’re staying till the end.
I don’t want to leave to beat the crowd. I want to avoid watching my team lose. I’d been so tight and tense throughout the game that the prospect of witnessing an “L” in a game for all the marbles just distresses, drains and depresses me.
So we stick around. And if you pay even the slightest attention to sports, you know that KU ties the game on a 3-pointer with 2 seconds left, then wins in overtime, 75-68.
The roar when Mario Chalmers hits the 3 shakes the 44,000-seat Alamodome; it is the loudest noise I’ve ever heard indoors. It’s the basketball equivalent of the tornado that blew Dorothy and Toto to Oz.
As the Jayhawk band rips out the fight song and red-and-blue-clad fans hymn “Rock… Chalk… Jayhawk…K…U…” (a chant which even Kansas fans don’t know the origin of) and confetti and sparkles drizzle from the top of the dome and players pull on national championship caps and T-shirts while waiting to cut down the nets and I call the Sun-Star copy desk so KU grad Kate Shipley can hear the joyous Jayhawks…
As all that and more are going on, I hug Quang and thank him for making sure we got here.
What a weekend!
The Monday night championship game wasn’t the first time I offered to leave early. After UCLA lost Saturday night to Memphis, and we were walking back to the car, I told Quang that if he needed to get back to his wife Shannon and daughter Willow, and to his CEO job in Southern California, we could leave Sunday, even though Kansas was still in the hunt.
His reply was roughly the same as on Monday night. So we stayed.
Highlights of One of the Top 5 Things Ever to Happen to Me:
--Watching Quang Monday afternoon play four 4-on-4 games in a huge auditorium decked out with everything hoops—from the pickup games to free throw shooting to college and NBA legend Hakeem Olujawon signing autographs. Q was schooling guys half his age with an array of fakes, pumps, drives and 3s that pushed his team to three Ws and only one L. And this, mind you, after he’d run 40 minutes that morning from our motel. “Somebody’s gotta represent the Bruins!” I said, and he did—while wearfing running shoes vs. high-top sneakers for his opponents.
--Saturday morning before the semifinals that evening, we spent at my nephew David Dixon’s house in Austin. Also present at the fancy brunch he and wife Susan threw were my sister Jeannine (looking jaunty in a sailor’s cap to cover her chemo coif); gentle first cousin Gery and Saint Gayle; their son Richard, wife Kendra and son Austin (these people are from TEXAS); cousin Angela and her Main Squeeze Moe; David’s daughter Lesley and her beau Brian; and my buddy from the Vietnam War, Jimmy Womack, who had the cojones to show up wearing his North Carolina jersey. So three of the Final 4 were chowed down on quiche (real men do to eat it), fruit, Bloody Marys, mimosas and chocolate cake.
--Sunday night Q and I decided to get the famous River Walk for supper, after he again turned down my sensible-sounding-but-silly proposal to walk next door and eat at Benihana. We had a couple margaritas (salt/on the rocks) with our Tex-Mex at Casa Rio and were taking a nice post-prandial stroll along the river when Bam! Quang sees Kevin, a guy he worked with 12 years ago in Southern California; Kevin’s entertaining a client, Bob, who used to run middle-distance for Drake University in Iowa. Small-World-Department: Quang and I played 2-on-2 against Kevin and another of their colleagues outdoors in the mid-‘90s (and won, as I began to frequently point out to Kevin). Even Smaller-World Department: Bob had been driving from Omaha to Topeka about three weeks earlier when he heard on the radio about this journalist in California getting Tased while reporting a story. I told him he was sitting next to the dude (since our reporter who did it with me, Scott Jason, was back in Merced)—and the Iowan could not believe it. Smaller-Still-World-Department: Keith and Tim and another Bob, who’d sat with us Saturday night at the games and with whom Quang played golf that morning, showed up. So all five of us toasted to a special event: my birthday! Can you dig that? My birthday fell on Final 4 Weekend?! Soon a mariachi band was singing “Happy birthday, dear Pancho!” next to the table. Of course, we left the car in the parking garage and cabbed it back to the motel.
--At the UCLA party before the semis, Quang heard Bruin grad and Oscar-winning actor Tim Robbins (“Mystic River”) exhort the crowd, then I snapped a photo of him with Ed O’Bannon, star of UCLA’s last national championship team in 1995. As I was standing in line to get a T-shirt, this classic California blonde turned around and almost bumped into me. She looked up and said, “Oh my!” I shrugged and got my T-shirt. She was standing nearby, so I shambled over, bent down and without looking at her asked her whys she’d said that. “Because you’re cute,” she said, then asking if she could put an “I LOVE U—CLA” sticker on me. She could, and did. I didn’t have any of my cards with me, so I borrowed one of Q’s and wrote my name and e-dress on the back. Terry, if you read this, I’m still out here! Same e-mail!
--Talk about cell phone karma. On Saturday I heard from Greg, my best friend from high school with whom I played ball four years; he and wife Marlene (we’ve known each other since second grade) were heading to Ireland for a lovely 12-day holiday—except there are avid KU fans, live in Lawrence and would miss the entire tournament while on the Emerald Isle; Brad, a/k/a “Mr. Basketball” when we lived in Tokyo and he worked for the CIA when he wasn’t arranging pickup games on the embassy courts; Larry, another buddy from Vietnam (we won the battalion championship together over there), calling from Tucson and he didn’t know I was at the game; neither did Sandi, a New Mexico nurse whom I once took to Europe; son Nao in SoCal DID know and was stoked for his old man to be there; Riggo, my Gulf War pard, knew we were there and was elated KU beat Carolina; and on Monday Eddie Joe, whom I played with five years with in Japan, told me exactly how we could beat Memphis (and we did—by making them MAKE free throws when it counted—except they missed); and Mike Hedges, with whom I once played 3-on-3 in Sarajevo during the Balkan civil war; he’s a Kentucky fanatic, but switched allegiance to anybody who could beat the Tarheels. Talking to all of ‘em--that is just a lot of roundball karma…
--San Antonio seemed an ideal venue for the Final 4. Chief among its assets are the folks who live there, who seemed uniformly nice; second is the delightful mix of old (the Alamo) and new (River Walk); third is that nothing’s too far from anything else.
--Finally, Quang himself. I’ve always known he’s somebody I’d want at my back. Now I know we can travel together and still get along. Unlike guests and fish, our friendship didn’t start to stink after three days.
So that’s my Final 4 story.
And I’m stickin’ to it.
Thanks for makin’ me stay, Q!
Rock Chalk!