NC State upends UCLA in Double OT in the 1973-74 National Semi-final game, en route to the National Championship:
This is why they play the games…. you never know what will happen until they actually suit up and go at it. UCLA came into this National semi-final game as the favorite, ranking No. 1 and with a 38-game tournament winning streak, along with an astounding 7 straight championships. They had the player… three-time player of the year Bill Walton, playing out his final year, and the Dean of all coaches… in the words of the immortal Curt Gowdy… “Johnny Wooden”… sitting there overseeing his troops… nervous and uptight as hell, and punishing his rolled up program with a clenched fist. But NC State had the intangibles — they had the big man, 7 foot plus Burleson, little Monte Towe, and the incredible skywalker, David Thompson… along with the home crowd at Greensboro, North Carolina.
Things looked pretty good for the Bruins, when they went up by 11 points midway through the 2nd half. The Alpha wolf, Thompson, with that amazing 44 inch vertical, was missing consistently, and Walton and Co. were generally finding their pre-ordaiined spots on the court and having their way. But Norm Sloane never looked too nervous, sitting there rather relaxed and cozy in his red, plaid blazer, and that seemed to reassure his guys, allowing them to stay calm, giving them a belief that if they had faith, all would be fine in the end… and it was.
NC State fought its way back, slowly but surely, tying things up with about 4 minutes left, then took the air out of the ball by going “four corners”, and it was hello to overtime.
The first OT was merely a warm-up for things to come. Hardly anything happened, and then things got really interesting. In the second extra session, we saw UCLA’s weaknesses, lack of a true point guard, combined with shoddy ball handling and loose passing, came back to bite it badly. Wooden watched in apparent horror as passes were thrown away, foul shots were missed, and 7 point lead in double OT evaporated. Thompson, Burleson and Towe all stepped up, and with less than two minutes left, the Bruins were only up by one. However, it still didn’t look that good for NC State when Burleson missed a foul shot that would have tied things up, followed by Tim Stoddard’s fouling out, which put the Bruins’ “Spider” Dave Meyers on the line.
But when Meyers unexpectedly bricked his own freebie, Thompson skied for the rebound over Walton and proceeded to hammer home a tough bank shot at the other end, which gave NC State the lead it would never relinquish. Then, Keith “Silk” Wilkes committed an offensive foul fighting for a rebound after a miss from Greg Lee (why did Walton pass up the winning shot), and DT, the youngest of 11 children, made his shots from the line, and it was over.
Yes, in sports, nothing lasts forever, and in this case, the basketball gods had seemed to decide that it was time for UCLA’s hegemony to take a back seat to a more inspirational winner. While UCLA would come back to win one more in 1975, the Wooden era of total dominance was officially over.
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