Jim Mashek

STAR-CROSSED HISTORY SHOULDN’T HAUNT COUGARS IN FINAL FOUR MATCHUP WITH DUKE BLUE DEVILS ON SATURDAY IN SAN ANTONIO

It was a second half that changed the course of University of Houston men’s basketball for years. OK, decades. Maybe indefinitely …

The Cougars have penned an amazing legacy in the city’s game, from the 1960s and the “Game of the Century” in Houston’s Astrodome to the thrilling three-year run of UH’s “Phi Slama Jama” squads to the revival generated by veteran coach Kelvin Sampson over the last 11 years with physical, athletic squads that have made Houston a team to watch in March, and maybe even into April, too.

They’re still waiting to cut down the nets, at the Final Four, but the Cougars aren’t the kind of team that backs down from a challenge.

And they’ve got one on Saturday night, in the Final Four at San Antonio’s hardscrabble Alamodome, the onetime home of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs and a familiar host for Final Fours over the years.

The Dookies.

Duke University.

The blueblood of bluebloods.

All four No. 1 seeds have advanced to this year’s Final Four, with Houston and Duke squaring off in the second game, after the All-SEC matchup between the Florida Gators, a team that’s been on fire for the last month or so, and Bruce Pearl’s Auburn Tigers, an athletic bunch that can win in lots of different ways.

But a familiar bridesmaid, like the Cougars.

Auburn is still looking for its first national championship in men’s basketball.

The Final Four is an unforgiving opportunity, the kind of sporting event that defines the game’s premier programs — see Duke, Kentucky, North Carolina and UCLA — while leaving the losing teams grasping for greatness, having made their mark but unable to complete the deal.

I moved to Metro Houston in November, 1980, a wide-eyed sports scribbler ready to take on my first full-time newspaper job with the Baytown Sun, located in a refinery town in Eastern Harris County.

The late Guy V. Lewis, the Cougars’ head coach for 30 years, had worked the vast Houston Independent School District to recruit the bulk of his UH squads, and it all came together for three memorable years, the 1981-82, 1982-83 and 1983-84 seasons.

I wouldn’t get a chance to cover the Cougars until the 1982-83 season, when I had moved to the Brazosport Facts newspaper, a daily broadsheet in an outpost known as Lake Jackson-Clute-Freeport Texas, where the mosquito was the state bird and everyone and his dog was employed by Dow Chemical.

Yet, it was an hour’s drive away from Houston’s magnificent skyline, even less for the University of Houston, Hofheinz Pavilion and one of the most compelling basketball squads ever conceived.

Phi Slama Jama.

The nickname, coined by Houston Post sportswriter Tommy Bonk, caught on quickly. By the time the Cougars made it to the Southwest Conference Tournament at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, they were a national phenomenon, a group of high-flying, gravity-defying athletes that wasn’t inclined to take prisoners on their way to victory.

They won 26 games in a row before the championship contest that pretty much has defined the program, even 40-plus years later.

You’ve probably seen some footage of the game on television.

North Carolina State, an eight-point underdog, stunned the Cougars, 54-52, in the NCAA Tournament championship game on April 4, 1983, in the thin air of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

(Elevation, 5,300 feet, or roughly 5,300 feet higher than UH’s Cullen Blvd. campus.)

A game the Cougars had no business losing.

A game that made the late Jim Valvano a household name in the Atlantic Coast Conference, a basketball-crazed league that stretched from Atlanta and Clemson, South Carolina all the way to College Park, Maryland, a region that lives and breathes college basketball like few others.

It’s a game that basically haunted the Houston sports scene for decades, at least until the Houston Rockets won a couple NBA championships in the ’90s, followed by the Houston Astros’ two World Series titles more than 20 years later.

North Carolina State 54, Houston 52.

The Cougars used a 17-2 run in the second half to seemingly take control of the game. They went to a semi-delay offense — remember, this was LONG before the shot clock was added for college basketball — and were done in by suspect free-throw shooting.

Valvano and the Wolfpack knew what to do, and knew who to foul, when the game was being decided in the last four or five minutes.

N.C. State became the first NCAA men’s basketball champion with 10 losses in a season, and future NBA star Hakeem Olajuwon, Houston’s 7-foot center, was named the Final Four’s Most Valuable Player, despite playing for the losing team in the championship game.

The Wolfpack fouled UH guard Alvin Franklin, an ultra-quick freshman guard from LaMarque, Texas, with about one minute left in the game, and the score tied at 52. This was long before the “super bonus” concept, which would guarantee TWO free throws after one team collected seven fouls in either half. Franklin looked uncomfortable at the free-throw line, and he short-armed his shot, with N.C. State coming down with the rebound.

(We’ll get to the game’s dramatic finish in a minute …)

Regardless, Metro Houston had fallen in love with this team, and Phi Slama Jama collected 14 dunks in an unforgettable national semifinal against Denny Crum’s Louisville Cardinals. Olajuwon finished with 21 points and 22 rebounds, and future NBA All-Star Clyde Drexler also scored 21 points, as the Cougars raced to a 94-81 victory at The Pit, the un-air-conditioned college gym on the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque.

That highlight-film victory put Houston in the Monday night championship game against underdog North Carolina State, which stopped the University of Georgia, 67-60, in the opening semifinal.

No one was giving the Wolfpack much of a chance, and for good reason.

The Cougars had a collection of talent seldom seen in college basketball. Three of them hailed from Houston ISD schools, Drexler (Sterling High School), colorful forward Larry Micheaux (Worthing High School) and high-scoring swingman Michael Young, who played at Yates High School, walking distance from UH in Houston’s Third Ward.

All-America guard Rob Williams, who played on UH’s Final Four team in 1982, had played high school ball at Houston’s Milby High School. Reid Gettys, a 6-foot-6 point guard from suburban Memorial High School, was getting his feet wet with the Cougars that year, and the aforementioned Alvin Franklin would arrive one year later.

But it was the other two Cougars, in the Phi Slama Jama era, that made this UH bunch a Team For The Ages that couldn’t win a championship game. Loquacious Benny Anders, a cocky 6-foot-5 forward from Bernice, Louisiana, and Hakeem Olajuwon, the import from Lagos, Nigeria, who grew up as a goalkeeper on the soccer field. Anders was Guy Lewis’ live wire off the UH bench, a sixth man who could change a game in an instant.

Anders also was the guy the media was drawn to, after games. He was a quote machine.

“All I get is some serious pine,” Anders told Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick in 1983. “But I got the utensils. I drop a dime on the Big Swahili (Olajuwon), he GOT to put it in the hole.”

UH coach Guy V. Lewis embraced the team’s aggressive, daring game, but North Carolina State was able to dictate the tempo in the championship contest. The Wolfpack watched the Cougars, who hit about 60 percent of their free throws, falter at the line, and in the final seconds, Derreck Whittenburg put up a prayer from just past mid-court, a shot that was short but within range of N.C. State’s Lorenzo Charles.

Charles converted the failed shot into a game-ending dunk, sending Jim Valvano running across the court, looking for someone to hug, while the Cougars were stunned, wondering what went wrong and why.

Clyde Drexler would move on to the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers after that championship game, and Micheaux, aka “Mr. Mean,” graduated that same year, but Lewis and the Cougars would get back to the Final Four, and the championship game, the next year against John Thompson, Patrick Ewing and the rough-and-tumble Georgetown Hoyas.

Georgetown would win that game, 84-75, and the Cougars quickly faded into also-ran status in the swashbuckling Southwest Conference. (Seven or eight schools in Texas, and Arkansas. Do the math.) They’ve toiled in several leagues since then — Conference USA, the American Athletic Conference and now the Big 12 — and they’re knocking on the door, again, against the Dookies.

Kelvin Sampson guided the University of Houston to the Final Four in 2021, when the Cougars got waxed by Baylor, a former Southwest Conference member, to the tune of 78-59. UH has reached the Sweet Sixteen every year since, and this time, the Cougars had to beat Purdue, in Indianapolis, before sending Tennessee back to Rocky Top, 69-50.

Duke is a 5.5-point favorite for the second semifinal against Sampson’s Cougars in San Antonio. That’s a three-hour drive from the UH campus.

Houston is usually at its best, as the underdog. (We certainly know who was favored between UH and N.C. State in 1983.)

Maybe this is the year.

An urban school, with origins as a junior college, takes the title.

Somewhere, Guy V. Lewis is smiling.