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Even better than the glory days
Suddenly basketball is wild and wonderful in West Virginia again
Thursday, March 24, 2005

Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette
WVU coach John Beilein directs his players during practice -- Beilein's bunch rekindles memories of those halcyon days of hoops.

Yet Fred Schaus maintains he never saw a West By-God Virginia victory like last Saturday night's. It was a victory that propelled the Mountaineers into the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA tournament, where they go against Texas Tech and the infamous coach Bobby Knight at 9:40 p.m. today in Albuquerque, N. M.

"Some great players are going to get mad at me," the 79-year-old coach began the other day. "I think they feel the same way I do, though.

"We had a lot of great wins here. But of all the wins that I coached, there was none equal to or surpassing that win Saturday. Just incredible."

Suddenly basketball is wild and wonderful in West Virginia once again.

"The excitement is unbelievable," said Kevin Berry, the assistant director of the university's alumni association. "The fans have fallen in love with this Mountaineer team."

It's all because Coach John Beilein and his bunch of team-first Mountaineers upended fifth-ranked Wake Forest in double overtime Saturday -- their fifth win in 11 dizzying days of the postseason, stretching from the Big East Conference Tournament in New York City, where they lost in the final, to their opening two rounds of the NCAA tournament at Cleveland.

The Mountaineers practiced yesterday in Albuquerque, where seventh-seed WVU (23-10) plays sixth-seed Texas Tech (22-10) tonight in the University of New Mexico gym known as The Pit.

They carry with them a flag from the mountaintops of a basketball program that had traversed more valleys than peaks in the intervening decades since West Virginia won the title of the then-prestigious 1942 National Invitation Tournament, finished as the 1959 NCAA runner-up, set loose such homegrowns as Jerry West, Hot Rod Hundley and Rod Thorn upon the hoops planet.

West, now the Memphis Grizzlies general manager whose silhouette adorns the NBA logo, saw the Mountaineers flourish while scouting the Big East tournament. West, Hundley -- a Utah Jazz broadcaster -- and Thorn talk often about their old school.

"I think that's one of the three or four best NCAA games I've ever seen," Thorn said by telephone from his New Jersey Nets president's office. He watched his alma mater's 111-105 double-overtime triumph from his nearby home with his recently surgically repaired knee elevated -- though it was difficult to remain stationary with all the televised excitement. "The ebb and flow of that game. The great plays made by both teams continuously. ... It was just an incredible game.

"It's great to see a team that is a team that plays together, that's really unselfish and never gives up. I think Coach Beilein has done a wonderful job."

To be fair, the Mountaineers under Gale Catlett reached this same NCAA round -- known as the Sweet 16 -- just seven years ago, in the 1998 tournament.

"The atmosphere, it's abuzz," Lester Rowe said from his Petroplus & Associates commercial real estate office on the other end of University Avenue from the Coliseum, where he played from 1982-85 as a Mountaineers standout and where he coached for a half-dozen seasons, including 1998, beside Catlett. "Everywhere you go, people are asking where you are watching the game. Right now, you want to just enjoy the ride this team has provided for us."

"This," concluded Schaus, the former head coach (146-37 in a half-dozen seasons before he left to coach the Los Angeles Lakers) and former athletic director long retired to nearby Cheat Lake, "is something special for West Virginia, the university and the ballclub."



The current WVU team set Big East records for endurance, winning on three consecutive days in Madison Square Garden before losing on the fourth day to Syracuse in the championship game. Then it continued the startling ascent with NCAA victories over 10th-seed Creighton last Thursday, in a frenetic finish that saw Tyrone Sally block a shot at one end and dunk for the victory at the other, 63-61, and then Saturday over second-seed Wake Forest in the double-overtime thriller that saw three players on each side foul out.

Doubters may remain, but not among the program's followers.

WVU faithful made the 3 1/2-hour drive north by northwest and bought up maybe half the seats in Cleveland State's Wolstein Center last Saturday. Some 600 of them have purchased tickets to the game in Albuquerque this weekend.

A chartered plane was scheduled to leave nearby Clarksburg/Bridgeport airport this morning with 135 fans as part of a WVU Alumni Association package. Grads in Arizona, California, Colorado and Texas also were convening in New Mexico. They planned a Mountaineers pep rally at the team hotel, the Sheraton Old Town, at 5 p.m. today, Albuquerque time.

It wasn't always that way this up-down-up season. A 10-0 start, crafted completely in nonconference competition, gave the Mountaineers not only a Top 25 ranking but also their best beginning since West's 1959-60 team opened with that same record. What followed was a return to Earth with a thud: seven losses in their next nine games. Near the end of that skid, only 8,510 patrons showed at the 14,000-seat Coliseum for a Jan. 19 loss to Notre Dame.

Then a wacky thing happened. The Mountaineers won six of seven games leading into the regular-season finale at Seton Hall, where a loss left them, in Beilein's words, with an "end-of-the-world feeling." Their world rocked in postseason, giving them victories in nine of their past 11 games and 11 of their past 14.

"It was fun to watch them develop," said Schaus, who, despite his low blood pressure and balky back missed only one home game, taking his usual perch with his wife, Barbara, behind a railing. "Maybe a lot of people were about to give up on them. But they didn't give up, and the coaches wouldn't let them give up."

In this, the 50th anniversary of their inaugural NCAA berth, the Mountaineers have harked to West Virginia's hoops-heaven days of yore: back when the 1942 team was ending Long Island's 42-game winning streak with an NIT championship victory; back when Schaus and Hundley made the NCAAs from 1955-57; back when West, who came from Chelyan, W.Va., was leading the next three teams to records of 26-2 and a No. 1 ranking, 29-5 and the school's only Final Four appearance, and 26-5; back when Thorn continued the tradition of winning and NCAA appearances through the early 1960s.

Beilein's bunch rekindles memories of those halcyon days of hoops, yet forward Kevin Pittsnogle, the only West Virginian on the roster, considers any such talk premature.

"It's hard to compare to the teams West played on -- they were some good teams," said the tattooed Pittsnogle, a junior from Martinsburg who admits he knew nothing of the program's past until he arrived on campus and saw the trophies, saw the Jerry West room with the display that reverently includes a stained-glass depiction of the All-American and 1960 U.S. Olympic team captain. "They went to Elite Eights, championship games. It's tough to compare us to that.

"Yeah, let us get something first."

The buzz isn't quantifiable in this town of 26,809, with the most school colors displayed on the main-drag High Street being the lovely blue prom gown in Coni & Franc's dress shop window. Oh, the Flying Fish & Co. on Van Voorhis Road has "Go Mounties" on its sign, and the Patteson Drive Eat'n Park board reads "Let's Go Mountaineers." Otherwise, it's all talk.

Like at Gene's, the South Park neighborhood landmark where even West has been known to stop by and sup on the hot dogs and Bar-B-Qs advertised on the sign out front. Tuesday afternoon, a visitor heard considerable WVU basketball talk inside the 12-stool, four-booth, four-table hangout: "I'm saying he still ought to put Pittsnogle on the floor with Fischer ... " offered a patron who declined to give his name.

"They're diehard fans," said Mike Madden, a Penn Hills native exiled to Morgantown 18 years ago and sitting Tuesday with his regular Gene's cohorts at the end of the bar. "They expect the best. But they didn't expect them to beat Wake."

"That was probably the best basketball game I've ever watched in my life," continued Joe Travinski, who grew up during the Mountaineers' glory years. "I watched Jerry West play. It was a different style. You didn't have the 3-pointers. You didn't have the dunk. It's nowhere near the same game.

"Just a lot more exciting now."
03-24-2005 09:20 AM
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