RE: Maryland @ JMU this Saturday
In a paywall, but will post "part" of WP article this morning.
The Maryland men’s basketball team will play James Madison for only the second time on Saturday in Harrisonburg. Derrick Lewis remembers the meeting 33 years ago well, and not only because he registered the first triple-double in Terps program history in Maryland’s 90-76 win.
“This wasn’t a basketball gym it was a fraternity house,” The Post’s Sally Jenkins wrote in her recap of the game, held at JMU’s Convocation Center on Jan. 28, 1987. “Toilet paper flew across the court, the crowd hurled insults, and the band was swinging. But Maryland — led splendidly by Derrick Lewis — overcame all that to get its first road victory of the season.”
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Lewis, who played center for Maryland, recalls the hurling of toilet paper, which resulted in a technical foul. He won’t soon forget the hostile crowd of 7,612 that, Jenkins wrote, created a noise level “higher than at some Atlantic Coast Conference games.” What Lewis remembers best, however, is the kid in the lobby of Maryland’s team hotel who lit a fire inside him long before he stepped on the court.
“I’m still a little bit irritated about it,” Lewis, 54, said in a phone interview this week. “It was unbelievable to me. We arrived at the hotel to check in, and a little kid, probably about 9 or 10, he’s there with, probably, his dad. Kids don’t have filters, so he says, ‘Is that the team we’re going to beat tomorrow?’ Well, we were the only ones playing tomorrow. His dad said, ‘Yeah, that’s the team from Maryland.’ That got me pissed off right there. I couldn’t walk through the door that night my head was so big. This was not going to happen.”
Maryland was coming off an embarrassing, 14-point defeated four days earlier at Old Dominion, which had lost its previous 10 games. JMU of the Colonial Athletic Association was 14-4 after three straight wins and perhaps sensed an opportunity to kick 5-7 Maryland and first-year coach Bob Wade while they were down. The Terps had reached the second round of the NCAA tournament the previous season, but they were a young team still reeling in the aftermath of Len Bias’s death from a cocaine overdose seven months earlier.
“We were going to be the sacrificial lamb in their eyes,” said Lewis, the only upperclassman in the Terps’ starting lineup. “This was the year to pick Maryland off. They had a good record and good players, but there was no way we were going to come and lay down and lose to James Madison. In that era, you would look at the schedule and say there was no way you were going to lose to a team from a certain conference. That’s just how it was. It wasn’t being rude, that was just the mind-set that players had.”
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Lewis said the crowd, which taunted the Terps with chants of “Say no to drugs!” at one point, was more rambunctious than the ones Maryland typically encountered at Duke.
“I said to Dave Dickerson or John Johnson, ‘They’re throwing toilet paper at us because they think we’re soft, so what are we going to do about it?’" Lewis recalled.
Lewis did plenty, finishing with a career-high 29 pts, 23 bounds and 12 blks.
“Statistically, it was my best game overall, but I could have played better,” he told reporters afterward. “I took some bad shots from way outside in the first half because they were packing back in a zone.”
“We did what we wanted to do, the difference was Lewis,” Dukes Coach John Thurston said. “When a guy is knocking them in the seats … ”
After the win, Lewis looked for the kid and his dad from the hotel in the stands.
“I couldn’t find them, but I said, ‘I hope they’re here,’” Lewis said. “That ruffled my feathers a little bit. I’m still heated about that. To this day, I still can’t believe that it happened. I was determined that night to do whatever I could to win that game, because it was going to be a long bus trip back if we lost.”
Maryland lost its next six games, all against ACC foes. The Terps finished the year 9-17 and 0-14 in conference play, but returned to the NCAA tournament in Lewis’s senior season, after which he enjoyed a 17-year pro career, mainly in France.
When his playing days were over, Lewis spent 12 years as a teacher at Archbishop Spalding High School in Severn, including six years as the boys’ basketball coach. For the past year, he’s taught physical education to K-8 students at Excel Academy Public Charter School in Prince George’s County.
“Zoom and P.E., it’s an oxymoron,” said Lewis, who has been forced to cancel his basketball camps due to the novel coronavirus. “It’s just different.”
The Maryland-JMU rematch, more than three decades in the making, was hastily scheduled after the Terps’ Tuesday game against Towson was canceled due to a positive coronavirus test in the Tigers’ program. Saturday’s 3 p.m. contest will be broadcast on NBC Sports Washington, with JMU alum Steve Buckhantz on the call. The scene will be a bit different from the last time these schools met: The Convocation Center closed last season and only 250 people will be allowed inside the sparkling new Atlantic Union Bank Center under pandemic protocols.
Lewis will be watching. If he had any eligibility left, he would be happy to make the trip and provide Maryland some frontcourt depth.
“I could play another game right now if we played Jame Madison,” he said. “That whole town thought they were going to win.”
(This post was last modified: 12-04-2020 10:52 AM by Dukester.)
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Maryland @ JMU this Saturday
