The Imperfect Game

The anniversary of Princeton's historic win over UCLA in the 1996 NCAA tournament was yesterday. 

In a perfect world, as TigerBlog said last week, the anniversary would have fallen on a weekday, so he could have written about it on the actual day it happened.

Oh well. 

Today will see the debut of a three-part video series on the 1996 men's basketball run that TB began to chronicle last week. If you think TB has spent too much time on this, you have to understand just how historically significant that week was.

It did all sorts of things.

It wedged Princeton, and Gabe Lewullis, indelibly into the history of March Madness. It gave Princeton an NCAA tournament win after the four near-misses of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

And, perhaps most importantly, it was that win over UCLA, which only happened after the win over Penn in the playoff game, that secured Pete Carril's place in the Hall of Fame. It's easy to think of Carril as a Hall-of-Famer, which he certainly is and earned. 

What's easy to forget is that it might not have happened had Princeton not won that UCLA game in his final season. That win started a "Carril to the Hall of Fame" groundswell that didn't previously exist prior to that.

Two years later, Carril was in. 

Also, in the long history of Princeton Athletics, that stretch by the men's basketball team has a very unique place as one of the great moments any Princeton team has achieved. 

TB hasn't seen the final version yet of the video series that is being produced by his colleague Cody Chrusciel. He does know that Cody has gotten some pretty good interviews (including, you know, TB), and he's very excited to see it when it comes out.

As far as the UCLA game itself, there's not a lot that happened there that you don't already know. 

The myth is that Princeton played a perfect game. That was hardly the case. 

Princeton, in fact, shot just 37 percent from the field for the game and 29.6 percent from three-point range. The Tigers were outrebounded 31-21.

So how did the Tigers win? 

They did so in three ways. 

First, they got UCLA to play a completely imperfect game. The Bruins jumped out to a 7-0 lead, and it looked like it was going to be a rout. Only everything changed after that. UCLA, the defending champ, became tentative. 

TB saw a quote from Sydney Johnson after the game in which he said that UCLA seemed to stop attacking after that. 

Second, Princeton took care of the ball. The Tigers had a huge advantage in the most important stat of the night - the Tigers had 15 assists (on 17 baskets) and just eight turnovers, while UCLA turned it over 16 times and had only six assists. 

Lastly, Princeton executed best when it was necessary. As a result, the Tigers finished the game on a 9-0 run, turning a 41-34 deficit into the 43-41 win. Each Princeton player on the court (Johnson, Mitch Henderson, Chris Doyal, Steve Goodrich and Gabe Lewullis) had a huge contribution during that run, even before Lewullis scored the game-winner from Goodrich on the classic play.

Princeton was in UCLA's head for the final 35 minutes of the game, and even after. In fact, there were UCLA players quoted afterwards as saying they had no idea how they lost the game.

TigerBlog has a binder from those days 25 years ago, one that includes a series of newspaper clips from the local writers who were there and from others around the country. 

Even now, a quarter-century later, it bothers him a bit to read the "Brains Over Bruins" headline and the plethora of stories that can be summed up this way: "The brainiac non-athletic Princeton team out-thought the much more athletic UCLA team." It shortchanges everyone who was in the game, on both sides. 

Unfortunately, there were also about a million such stories written after the game. 

There's only a slight hint of that in THIS piece, written by the Philadelphia Inquirer's Bob Ford, one of the very best sportswriters TB has ever read. This story is really, really good at bringing back what that night was like. 

TB enjoyed reading it, though he didn't need any reminders of what it was like that night in Indianapolis. 

He remembers it vividly, and he's sure he always will. 

It was an imperfect game, one with a perfect ending.