March 21, 2008

From the book:

Thomas reached for a loose ball near the basket and jammed his right thumb. An X-ray just before halftime showed a break on the side of the tip of his thumb. The team doctor said the decision to play or not was up to Thomas. The decision was easy. Thomas was going to play. In a room off to the side, the doctor shot, with a .22-gauge needle, directly into the part of the bone that was broken, a mixture of numbing, fast-acting pain medications Ethyl Chloride, Marcaine and Lidocaine. Thomas looked away.

He came back into the main part of the locker room where his teammates had gathered for halftime. The coaches were still out in the hall. He had his thumb stuck in a cup of ice.

Jason Richards, his roommate and his best friend, looked up at him.

“Is it broken?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Thomas said.

There was a short anxious silence in the room.

Davidson was down by five.

“Are you still going to play?” Jason said.

“Yeah,” Thomas said.

He sat down. His teammates looked at him. All of them, he thought to himself, would do the same thing for him.

People close to the team knew about the injury, but most people did not, and the hope was that opponents wouldn’t, either.

“I’ll be okay,” Thomas told reporters who asked about it.

Thomas got the painkilling shots before the next three games in the tournament. They made his right hand so numb he sometimes had to look down at the ball to make sure he had gotten a rebound. And yet in the Kansas game, midway through the first half, he somehow had made a three-pointer with a hand he couldn’t even feel.

‘Feels like yesterday’

Claire:

The Davidson guys on our row who I know by sight but not by name are murmuring disbelievingly -- this has only happened in dreams, there’s no frickin way it's happening for real right in front of us in a matter of seconds. Years of waiting, years before we were born, before we knew anything about this school that has become our home, suddenly come crashing down into our reality. “Oh my god,” I say to them, searching their eyes with mine and finding the same indescribable emotion, “OH MY GOD.”

A year ago today

Dear America,

It was, up until now, a hopeful but hypothetical conversation. We’ve had it over beers in bars. We’ve had it on cell phones from Boston to San Francisco, from New York to Atlanta, from Charlotte to Tampa. We’ve had it in the fall and in the winter, and in the spring and summer, too. We’ve had it for years.

What if?

What if we won in the tournament?

It’s SUCH a good story, we said to each other -- little school, big dreams, cute town, smart kids. People, we kept saying, WANT to tell this story. They just needed a reason. They needed us to win.

This tournament is a series of finite 40-minute windows of opportunity. Seize one and you earn another. Win and you get another two days of news cycle. Win and you get to tell your story.

You have to understand something about us and our school. I don’t know if it’s Southern gentility or Presbyterian humility, but we’ve always been institutionally reluctant to say, Hey, look, look at us. It’s just not what we’ve done and so it’s not what we do.

But we want so badly for people to know.

So we’ve looked to Bob McKillop and his basketball team.

He went 4-24 in his first season at Davidson. That was 19 years ago. He has taken us from the Southern Conference tournament to the NIT to the NCAAs and now to a win in the NCAAs. He built this. He didn’t leave us when he could have. He has raised his family in a house across the street from campus. His oldest son played for him. His youngest son plays for him now. His daughter went to Davidson and is engaged to a Davidson man. He tears up when he talks about this.

His team went to the NIT in ’94.

His team lost in the conference finals in ’96 after going undefeated in league play. Another NIT.

In ’98, a conference tournament title, a trip to the NCAAs. It seems so, so long ago, but not really, and we were giddy. That felt like this feels. Really it did.

Finally.

There were trips back, in ’02, in ’06, in ’07.

Close, close, close. But never that win.

Now THIS.

Make no mistake: We beat a good team today. This was not about the bounces or the breaks. No. We beat a really good team that played really well because WE played really well.

Because we got a ballsy gutsy late three from Max.

Because we got 13 rebounds from Andrew.

Because we got two huge buckets late from Rossiter.

Because we got nine assists and 15 points from Jason.

And also, of course, because we got 40 from Steph. Not just any 40. An 8-for-10-from-three 40. A 14-for-22 40. A five-steals 40. A first-round-record-setting-40. A forever 40.

But this whole thing is less about how it happened and more about what it means.

After the game, Joey Beeler, the men’s basketball media relations guy, was looking frazzled. His life just got crazy. He said his phone started going off right as the buzzer sounded.

Let it be told.

We are one of the smallest schools in Division I.

We are 1,700 students in Davidson, N.C., just north of Charlotte, that’s it, all undergrad.

We are NOT Davidson University.

We are ranked ninth in the U.S. News and World Report and 23rd in the AP poll.

We keep in touch with our professors after we graduate.

We watch basketball games on grainy Web video from wherever we live.

A couple weeks ago, at the Southern Conference tournament championship game, there was a man with a sign, and the sign said:

YOU

MAKE

US

PROUD

And they do, and in a way that’s much, much more intimate than most other Division I program, and certainly most other programs that are playing this weekend for a spot in the Sweet 16. This program, our program, is now big enough to matter but still small enough to touch.

After the game on Friday, in the locker room, there were the lights, the mics, the pens and the pads, the bigness, and there was Steph, surrounded by a scrum three- and four-deep, saying what he said, tired, happy, the faintest of facial hair, as always, on his chin and his upper lip.

We saw in the peach-fuzzed face of this pretty kid from Charlotte the potential of what happened today.

The hypothetical is no longer hypothetical.

He helped make our conversation real.

Sincerely,

Michael Kruse
Davidson College
Class of 2000

On last March

Bill Self: “When we played Davidson, you could just sense, ‘Let’s get through this one.’ When we played Carolina, it was like, ‘I can’t wait for these next two hours.’”

Terry Holland

On why he wasn’t at any of last year’s tourney games: “It could’ve been a little distracting for Davidson, and it certainly would’ve been distracting for the East Carolina fans. Obviously, my first duty is here and I’ve always tried to make sure that I approach things in a professional way.”

Thinking out loud

Another e-mail:

Or maybe it’s not exhaustion at all. Maybe we as fans know that going to the Sweet Sixteen, or the Elite Eight, or the Final Four is just not something that is going to happen with any regularity for a school like Davidson. So we feel somehow that the magic of the run of ‘08 can’t be duplicated, nor should it be. Do we subconsciously think that a “lesser” NCAA run this year would push the memories of ‘08 out of our minds? Do we not want that to happen? Do we need another year, or two, to revel in the excitement of ‘08? Do we think the magic of the run of ‘08 will be somehow diminished by getting to the same place, or farther, every year?

After Cloud Nine

Claire from her files to my inbox:

APRIL 4, 2008.

April showers have been beating down all night. A bunch of us went to see Leatherheads at Birkdale (in the lobby we saw one kid wearing a Sweet Sixteen shirt and Zach muttered something under his breath about a bandwagon). It was strange to slouch in the dark, quiet, half-empty theater like we might on any other Friday night, our legs slung carelessly over the railing... still not over the last seven days, when most of us had been standing and screaming, half-starved but adrenaline-buzzed in the Cloud Nine storm of fifty thousand people, more than six hundred miles away from this little town where it started oh so quietly.

At the end of the movie, George Clooney’s character huddles with his football team. They’re down, despondent, caked with mud, surely will lose.

“You guys having fun out there?” George asks, with his sparkling trademark grin shining under all that muck.

I have minor convulsions in my seat between Mike and Zach. “THAT’S WHAT BOB ASKED THEM!” I yelp in a whisper, bouncing my legs up and down on the rail.

They smile.

They know.

Reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about of late: 2008 was so special because 2008 was so special. It sounds like a tautology but I think it’s worth some consideration.

Relief?

This showed up today in my inbox:

Extremely interesting feelings on the part of some, me included, and apparently Claire. Not sadness, not disappointment, not anger. Just a sort of relief. I can’t say it is a memory of last year’s physical and mental exhaustion in Detroit. I don’t think I usually remember such things that far in the past.

Maybe it’s a deep, somewhat hidden feeling that this is not a great team. Not even a really solid team. At least on a consistent basis. Spectacular at times. Awful at other times. Maybe in places we don’t want to look we’re relieved these kids won’t have to face the possibility of an ugly beat down when they have one of those awful games.

Delving into why we feel this way might be more difficult than trying to find out why we felt the way we did last March.

Thanks

Sorensen:

Alas, the loss Sunday almost certainly knocks the Wildcats out of the NCAA tournament. Some other team will be this season’s Davidson. But those of us who watched last season, and that was almost all of us, will always remember the original.

Quoting Stephen

The new/old team motto: “It should hurt to play against Davidson College.”

Whelliston

Makes a good point.

Making the argument

Gregg Doyel: Davidson played its way into the 2009 field by nearly playing its way into the 2008 Final Four.

What happened?

Well this is just silly.