Originally Posted by
Kedsy
I think DarkstarWahoo was talking about Duke fans not liking Sampson, not Virginia fans.
Virginia made the Final Four in 1981, Sampson's sophomore season.
A bit late to this discussion, but it brought up a bit of a painful memory.
I was a student at BYU in 1981. BYU is the team that Virginia beat to get to the Final Four.
The prior two games for BYU had been simply amazing. The first of those prior two was against a strong UCLA squad. The main thing I remember about that game was that at halftime Danny Ainge had outscored the entire UCLA team. I'm not going to look it up, and I'm not sure my memory is 100% on this one, but I think Ainge had 25 points at halftime, and UCLA had 24.
The second of those games was against Notre Dame. In that particular game, BYU went down by one point with about six seconds left to play. Ainge took the inbounds pass very close to the opposing baseline and proceeded to drive all the way to the rim, launching a finger roll shot that went maybe 2 inches above the outstreched hands of Orlando Woolridge and through the hoop at the buzzer, giving BYU the win. This play was shown over and over again for several years. That was a fantastic ND team that featured Kelly Tripucka, Orlando Woolridge, John Paxson, and Joe Kleine, among others. There is a YouTube video with that buzzer beater that is well worth the watch.
(On a personal and kind of humorous note, at the time I was involved in the musical "Hello, Dolly" and we had a performance that day. We were not pleased at all about the timing, but we did what we could do. The game was on the television in the green room. There are two things I remember about that performance. 1) There is a scene where we are sitting at a table in a restaurant; we were not the focus of attention, but we were told to pretend we were talking and enjoying ourselves. My friend had a radio in his pocket and a single earbud, in the ear away from the audience. Throughout the entire scene, he was telling me updates on the score of the game. We had a very animated "fake discussion" going on. 2) We went to the greenroom near the end of the performance, and it was also very near the end of the game. As they inbounded the ball to Ainge, they called us up for the finale. We stood in front of the tv for those 6 seconds and watched the amazing coast-to-coast buzzer beater, and then ran up the stairs and onto the stage for the final number. After the show, the director told us that she had never seen such passion as she saw in that final number that day! She said it was amazing. Little did she know that the reason there was so much energy in that number is because we had just watched our team make it to the Elite Eight on a breathtaking buzzer beater!)
The win over ND was perhaps the greatest victory in BYU basketball history.
In the game against Virginia, as I recall, we held our own for the first half and pretty far into the second half, but Sampson was just too much for us to overcome, and we ended up losing 74-60. My recollection is that the game was closer than the final score makes it seem, but it could be that it got away from us in the last 4 or 5 minutes. I can't remember it clearly and it's a painful memory, and I'm too lazy to look it up.
Sorry for all the personal stuff and for such a long post. I have some pretty vivid memories about the 1981 tournament.
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust