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Topic: Anyone remember the "Mardi Gras" miracle
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Jarcat
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Member # 95
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posted 02-21-2019 05:31 PM
Great read for those who remember. Long but worth the time:
Travis Ford is poring over some final intel in his hotel room, looking for any edge that his Saint Louis Billikens might use the next night at George Washington. Louisville, an old rival from his playing days at Kentucky, is on TV putting a most unlikely beatdown on No. 2 Duke. The Cardinals build a 23-point lead on the visiting Blue Devils with less than 10 minutes to play. But Ford doesn’t turn it off. Hey, he knows better than anyone that stranger things have happened.
Duke freshman Cam Reddish drains 3s, his classmate Zion Williamson gets three the hard way and as Louisville’s lead steadily dwindles, Ford slips further and further back in time.
Ford is transported almost exactly 25 years into the past, to Feb. 15, 1994, when he and Kentucky climbed out of an even larger hole, storming back from 31 down with 15:34 to play to win 99-95 at LSU. That was a Tuesday night too – Fat Tuesday – forever labeling the Wildcats’ comeback the Mardi Gras Miracle. So as Reddish hits two late free throws to give Duke a 71-69 lead and Williamson grabs one last rebound to seal the win, Ford is flush with technicolor memories of Baton Rouge.
“Oh, absolutely,” Ford tells The Athletic, when asked if the Duke game stirred up nostalgia. “It was pretty much the same. So many things have to go your way, but first and foremost is the mentality of your team. Forget the physical, because the mental will control the physical at that point.
“Our style of play was, ‘Don’t look at the scoreboard,’” he explains. “We could be up 20 or down 20 and it was always, ‘Just worry about the next play and play hard.’ That’s a credit to how Coach Pitino trained us. So we kind of were trained for that moment.”
Having Rick Pitino guide you helps, but so does hitting a bunch of 3-pointers. Duke made four of them — all by Reddish — in the final 9:07 last week; Kentucky made a dozen 3s in the second half against LSU a quarter-century ago. Walter McCarty, a 6-foot-10 sophomore forward who averaged just 5.7 points per game that season, scored 23 points and hit four treys that night, including the go-head 3-pointer in the left corner, directly in front of the Cats’ bench, with 19 seconds left. It was UK’s first lead since 1-0.
“You gotta have some pros out there to do something like that,” says Tony Delk, while on the road to cover his next game for the SEC Network. “You don’t come back like that just by, like, being in the zone. You need guys who can make plays for themselves. You gotta have some pros. That’s what Duke has, and that’s what we had – three or four guys who could make a play when everything breaks down. That’s a game-changer.”
Delk, McCarty and Rodrick Rhodes were future first-round NBA draft picks — as are Williamson, Reddish and R.J. Barrett — and the Wildcats had three other former Parade All-Americans, including Ford, who refused to lose that night in Baton Rouge.
“What people forget is we were on a two-game losing streak,” says Ford, “and you can’t go back to Lexington with three losses in a row. They’ll close the airport down and veer us off to somewhere else. So yeah, I told those guys, ‘I don’t care how long this game takes, if we have to play another game right after this, we gotta get a win before we go back there. So we better figure this out.’ ”
Losing to LSU that night would’ve been particularly embarrassing because the Tigers were 11-9 at the time (and would not win another game) while Kentucky was 18-5 and ranked 11th (and would go on to win 27 games and the SEC tournament). But LSU freshman guard Ronnie Henderson hit 6 of 7 3s to open the game – he made eight total from beyond the arc – and the Tigers led 48-32 by halftime. At the break, the Wildcats were shooting just 39 percent from the field and their starters had scored just nine points.
“Coach had a lot of choice words for us,” Delk says. “‘You better transfer, and you better transfer, and you better transfer.’ I didn’t play well that game, so I might’ve been the main culprit. I know he said to me, ‘You better get your transcript ready, because you might not want to be a Wildcat after tonight. You might want to go back home to Memphis.’ “
Ford remembers Rhodes “losing his mind” in the halftime locker room and Pitino being similarly apoplectic.
“It was brutal,” Ford says. “I don’t want to say it was like a morgue, because it was more like chaos.”
Ford scored 10 points with 12 assists in the comeback win. (Jed Jacobsohn/Allsport)
But that hysteria didn’t snap Kentucky out of its fog. LSU launched an 18-0 run early in the second half to take its largest lead of the game, 68-37, with 15:34 remaining. LSU, it seemed, simply had Kentucky’s number that night.
“Everybody accentuates the comeback,” says former Tigers coach Dale Brown, now 83 and as tired as ever of talking about that night. “It was obviously one of the great comebacks of all time, but what they don’t accentuate is: How did we get that 31-point lead anyway? Didn’t Kentucky have a bunch of NBA guys on that team? And didn’t we have very limited talent on that team?”
He isn’t wrong. So how did LSU get up 31 on those Wildcats? We’ll let Brown answer his own question with an even deeper history lesson: “We all forget they’re teenagers and basketball is hard to figure. We played Kentucky in 1977-78 and they were the No. 1 team in the nation and went on to win the national championship – and we beat them by one point in overtime with all five of our starters fouled out. How do you explain that?”
But more specific to that night in 1994, Brown simply says: “We shot extremely well for a little more than a half.”
Once the lead was extended to 31, Pitino went back on the offensive with his shell-shocked players.
“He gave us the speech: ‘Tomorrow is going to be the worst day of your life,’” Delk says. “That probably meant instead of watching film and then practicing, we would’ve used all four hours on the court and had no legs for days. I remember thinking, ‘Man, we at least gotta make this game respectable. We gotta get it under 20.’
“We never thought we’d come back. Best-case scenario, we’d get it to single digits and Coach P would’ve thought, ‘At least they fought,’ and not kill us the next day.”
Ford remembers that the “worst day of your life” was a common threat from Pitino that he would often back up, not like a few other toothless ones. “He’d fire assistants at halftime when things weren’t going well,” Ford says. “But that was all motivational, and that man knew how to motivate.”
A hail of Kentucky 3-pointers and a slew of LSU turnovers and missed freebies opened the door for the comeback. The Cats launched a 24-4 run, and when reserve Chris Harrison got it to 72-61 with 9:46 to go, one of the announcers asked, “What’s the sound of Cats clawing back?”
Jeff Brassow hit two of his four 3-pointers in short order and a McCarty steal and slam on a smothering full-court press pushed Kentucky from thinking “Let’s make it respectable” to “We can win this.” With 6:25 remaining, the visitors still trailed by three buckets.
“It probably wasn’t until we got it to eight that we said, ‘Oh, gosh, we have a chance.’ You finally looked up at the score and thought, ‘Wait a second,’” Ford says. “Kind of like the Duke game the other night. If you can hit single digits with at least three minutes to go, you start adding up possessions and realize you can do this. And it wouldn’t be a miracle.”
As Duke surged last week, most of the Cardinals looked like they wanted no part of touching the ball down the stretch – and fumbled it away when they did. Likewise, Ford and Delk remember how LSU buckled. The Tigers missed 11 of 12 free throws over the final 12 minutes.
“The pressure was mounting because you’re at home,” Delk says. “The lead is under 10, its five, it’s four … and you’ve given your all, but we’re still coming. Coach P did a great job making sure we were the best-conditioned athletes in the world, and you would have to be to make that comeback at that pace, playing that pressing style.”
Pitino’s threats worked during the comeback. (Al Bello/Allsport)
Two more Brassow 3-pointers got Kentucky to 93-90 in the final two minutes. After the first, a camera caught Brown squatting and wiping sweat from his forehead. A Delk trey at 1:40 made it 95-93 LSU. The Wildcats made 12 of 15 shots from inside the arc and 12 of 23 from outside it in the second half.
“It was like Halley’s Comet,” Brown says. “They were throwing them up from long, long, long range — deep corner, deep wing, top of the circle — and we just couldn’t do anything to stop them. Rick Pitino was really ahead of the whole pack with that. He went to a 3-point offense when most of us were still too conservative, thinking, ‘That’s not basketball.”
But it was certainly Kentucky basketball. When Delk drove and kicked it out to McCarty for the go-ahead 3 with 19 seconds remaining, the whole bench stood up and yelled, “Shoot it!” And after Ford iced the game with two free throws to give Kentucky a four-point lead with 2.2 ticks remaining, the party was on.
“It was one of the best postgame locker rooms I’ve ever been a part of,” says Ford, who played on three teams that won the SEC tournament and went to two Elite Eights and the 1993 Final Four. “It was insane. Guys jumping, hollering. I think it hit us pretty fast what we’d just done. To this day, that’s the one game everybody always brings up to me. ‘How did that happen?’ ”
Delk is always proud to answer that one.
“We were courageous that night,” he says. “We did not quit. We did not give up. And I will always say, from that game on, when somebody gets down big, ‘There’s still a chance.’ ”
Brown knows that all too well. Kind enough to take a phone call from The Athletic last week that he didn’t really want to take, but ornery enough to give terse answers for seven minutes before abruptly hanging up: “I’m getting another call.” Click. There would be no follow-up. But he did leave some parting perspective about being on the wrong end of the biggest second-half comeback in college basketball history.
“I don’t know if this is a made-up story or if it’s actually real,” Brown says. “But there’s a coach who came home and was complaining. ‘I can’t believe we lost in overtime, on a last-second shot.’ And his son says, ‘Dad, there are a billion people in China who don’t even know we played tonight.’ Is that a made-up quote or did that actually happen? Anyway, you get the point. Life goes on.”
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The truth is out there
Posts: 3014 | From: Lexington, KY | Registered: Sep 1999
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SCWC
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Member # 2464
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posted 02-21-2019 06:19 PM
That article sure does bring back some fond memories of Kentucky basketball. I remember it just like it was yesterday.
Posts: 17777 | From: Myrtle Beach, SC | Registered: Jun 2005
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rlt4uk
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Member # 3194
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posted 02-21-2019 06:52 PM
I remember it too, like it was yesterday. The range of emotions I went through was unbelievable, from anger to elation. What a ride.
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Bleeding Blue in south Alabama. Kentucky born, Kentucky bred,I'll be kentucky until i'm dead!
Posts: 9795 | From: enterprise, al 36330 | Registered: Sep 2010
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