SI Article on Men's Hoops: 3/11/1985
If anyone's counting down the seconds between now and 6:30PM ET, you may find this article from the SI archives interesting: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1119209/index.htm
If you can get past the writing style of Curry Kirkpatrick, I think you'll find this a good read. I forgot how good Gary Grant was.
It truly was one hellofa team.
And unfortunately.....coke is one hellofa drug.
"With the exception of Northwestern and Wisconsin, any of the Big Ten teams can beat anybody in the country on a given night," said Iowa coach George Raveling.
I'd like to hear a coach say something like that today
If you drop acid first the article flows quite nicely.
Loved that team...probably even loved that article back then (I was young).
But...the 'Rines? That never caught on? Imagine.
Then like my 4-year old, I had to break down Wolverines syllable by syllable before I could fit "'Rines" together. I am officially afraid to peek at any more Curry Kirkpatrick pieces.
It is funny the article references Frieder's "duck walk". My dad was a childhood friend of Frieder back in Saginaw and played lots of ball with him. He says Frieder's nickname back then was "The Duck" because he ran like a duck up and down the court.
That was a truly awesome backcourt.
Phenomenal college point guard. He was an Olympian in 1988, wasn't he?
I was always surprised he didn't do more with the Clippers. He was part of that very brief resurgence when they had Danny Manning and Ken Norman and *I think* Ron Harper.
Michigan had oodles and oodles of talent, even after losing Eric Turner and Tim McCormick. Rumors were pretty strong even back in '85 that M Bball players were getting "taken care of". Pre Ed Martin mind you. Stories about Butch Wade, sauntering out to his Lincloln donned in his fur coat after games, raised a few eyebrows.
Richard Rellford liked to talk the talk but never really walked the walk. His comments in this article are annoying. I recall a Rellford quote in the paper from back in the day, something along the lines of, "basically I can get a 3 point play anytime I want". Yeah okay Richard.
All in all they were a really fun team to watch, until the NCAA tourney that is. Frieder's teams always seemed to under perform in the Big Dance.
Oh gawd that article's prose was so floridly purple that I half-expected lilacs to sprout from my monitor.
choked big time that year in the tourny. freshman jitters. he seemed afraid of everything after having such a good frosh year. it took leslie rockymore to come off the bench to save the day against fairly ridiculous, avoiding probably the biggest upset in ncaa tournament history.
there was also a nice no-call against tarpley when he had 4 fouls to keep him in the game with a ton of time left.
Ouch - that was a painful read. Tarpley was amazing and was the player that turned out to be way better than advertised. I would love to have somebody like him manning the middle again.
Tarpley was his own worst enemy. Who knows how good he could have been if he hadn't gotten into hard drugs?
Good find!
...at Michigan. Good times. I liked how the author had to explain that "hood" was slang for neighborhood.
My, time flies when you're having fun.
good post and a fun read...doesn't seem that long ago