Famous overnight

[AP photo: 1998] Valparaiso guard Bryce Drew is hugged by coach (and father) Homer Drew after Bryce hit a game-winning 3-pointer in the final second to lift the 13th-seeded Crusaders to a 70-69 victory over No. 4 Mississippi.

Many unlikely heroes have emerged from the early rounds of the NCAA Tournament. Their one shining moment remains vivid -- even decades later. Here are five examples.

By BRUCE LOWITT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 20, 2003

Fennis Dembo, Wyoming, 1987

Reggie Miller was going to be the star of this game. There was no doubt in Fennis Dembo's mind. And, yes, Miller did become a star. But for 40 minutes Dembo was a supernova, lighting up UCLA and the college basketball universe.

"I had met Reggie the summer before that in Colorado Springs when we were trying out for the world championship team," said Dembo, a 6-foot-6 guard for 12th-seeded Wyoming in the 1987 NCAA Tournament. They hadn't seen each other since then. Miller was an Indiana Pacer later that year, Dembo a Detroit Piston the next season.

But at Salt Lake City in the second round, Dembo had 41 points, 9 rebounds and 6 assists as the Cowboys beat fourth-seeded UCLA 78-68. He was 16-of-16 from the free throw line and 7-of-10 from 3-point range.

Sixteen years later, he rarely talks about that game and is surprised people remember him.

"They're talking about a guy who had a nice college career, no different from any other guy," Fennis Dembo said. "I guess maybe it's the name."

He left Wyoming without a degree and is attending Texas-San Antonio, but taking only two classes. "That's enough for me right now; I'm just cooling out, don't have a job," he said. "I was working with the Birmingham police department and found that's not what I want to be doing. I want to get into coaching. It's time to do something that'll make me happy."

Facing Miller and UCLA, a team with great tradition, all Dembo hoped to do was play a decent game.

"I never could have imagined going out there and playing like that on such a stage. I was thinking more about playing against a guy I respected and just having fun. I didn't really think we could win."

He said he never realized how hot a hand he had against the Bruins. "I'm the type of person, if I know we're going to win, then I keep stats in my head -- points, rebounds, assists, everything. I love stats. ... If I'd thought earlier on we were going to beat UCLA, if I wasn't concentrating on the game so hard, I probably would've gone for 50."

His most vivid recollection, more than any one play, was talking to Miller in the last minute. "I told Reggie, 'Hey, go ahead, go to the next level and do your thing.' It turned out he did his thing, ended up being this great NBA player. That game, that was my last piece of stardom."

The Cowboys' next game was their last. Nevada-las Vegas beat them 92-78 in the West Regional semifinal.

One year later, Dembo was in the NBA. He played in 31 games with the 1988-89 Pistons, averaging 1.2 points. Detroit won the championship. Then he was gone.

"I wasn't really serious," he said. "I thought they were going to prepare me. In the NBA you get prepared yourself and when you come into camp you'd better be ready to fight for some playing time to show you can contribute. ... I got the chance to make every player's ultimate goal, but longevity wasn't in my book."

He played for the CBA's Rapid City (former Tampa Bay) Thillers, then wandered Europe, playing three years in France, then in Spain and Argentina.

"I didn't appreciate it then," Dembo said. "Now when I reflect on it, it was a great experience. Very few people get to see all the people and play in different countries and enjoy Europe. I've had a blessed basketball life."

Mouse McFadden, Cleveland State, 1986

Mouse McFadden calls himself an NBA guy. "I like the big boys," he said. "But there is nothing like March Madness in American sports. Unknown teams never on television. Oh, we know who's supposed to win, but the outcome can always be changed."

The way McFadden changed it in 1986. Scoring a combined 32 points in the first two games of the NCAA Tournament, he propelled 14th-seeded Cleveland State (making its only tournament appearance) past third-seed Indiana 83-79, No. 6 St. Joseph's 75-69 and into the Sweet 16.

"The best time of my college career, without a doubt," McFadden said. "I was the only freshman on the team. Ten games into the season I cracked the starting lineup. And I peaked at the tournament."

Cleveland State was a team with an attitude, champion of the Mid-Continent Conference with a 23-7 record, an at-large berth and the absolute certainty -- if it was invited -- that whomever it would play might just as well stay home.

That's what stands out most in Mouse's memory. "Selection Sunday, that started everything off," he said. "The only thing the NCAA had to do was let us in the tournament."

When they were picked and saw they would be playing the Hoosiers in the first round, "The first thing we all thought was, 'Indiana just lost. They're going to look at little Cleveland State and underestimate us.' It happens a few times each year but back then it almost never happened."

This time it did.

"(Bobby) Knight wasn't prepared for a team pressuring them 94 feet for 40 minutes. ... You know, once you lose in the tournament, you're finished. You want no part of your coach, practice, anything until the next season. But Knight was so (ticked), he made his team practice the rest of the tournament, then they came back the next year and won the championship. We must've really hit a nerve."

Against St. Joe's, McFadden scored 23 points, hitting 10 of 15 shots. "One time I ran by Rodney Blake, their center, he was so mad he yelled, 'Stop that Mouse!' I just laughed. I'm like, 'I'm just this little freshman; this is the best!' "

The run ended in Houston with a 71-70 loss to Navy on David Robinson's basket with just seconds remaining. "I still tease (coach Kevin) Mackey about that one. 'You know, you blew that game for us.' The night before the game he told me, 'Mouse, I know you've got a ton of people here and you're in your hometown, but don't go crazy on me.'

"The first half I was just passing the ball; didn't even shoot. The guys on the bench were yelling, 'What's wrong with you?' But I'm just doing what the coach told me to do. At halftime we were down by like nine points and as I'm running into the locker room I told myself, 'Those are my nine points; that's what I get for listening to the coach.' The second half I had 16. We lost by one."

Three years later, McFadden, undrafted by the NBA, played minor league ball in the United States and Australia. He now is back at his alma mater as marketing and sales director in the athletic department.

Ken McFadden said he is amazed that people still remember him and stop to talk about 1986. Then again, he said, it might have something to do with his nickname, given to him by a track coach before he got into basketball.

"Nicknames really do something for you," he said. "You stand out a little more. If I hadn't been Mouse, I might have been known but not nearly so well known."

Bryce Drew, 1998, Valparaiso

Bryce Drew was the point guard and occasional shooting guard at Valparaiso. The play was called Pacer, and at this moment the operable word was shooting.

The moment was about 1 p.m. in Oklahoma City's Myriad Center in the final 2.5 seconds of the Crusaders' 1998 Midwest Regional first-round game against Mississippi.

Think of it as a basketball version of a football hook-and-ladder, wherein the quarterback throws a pass to a receiver who immediately tosses it to a teammate running past him. In this case, guard Jamie Sykes threw an end-line pass about three-quarters of the court to forward Bill Jenkins, who outleaped two Mississippi defenders and flipped the ball to Drew, sprinting by on the edge of the court.

With one-half second remaining and Valparaiso down by 2, Drew launched the shot from beyond the three-point line, a 23-footer from the sideline, a few steps from where his father, coach Homer Drew, was standing. When it came down, 13th-seeded Valparaiso had a 70-69 victory over the fourth-seeded Rebels.

Homer Drew had drawn up the play he'd purloined from the NBA's Pacers, hence its name. "We'd been working on it all year," his son said. "It worked about half the time in practice -- with no defense. We'd never tried it in a game." At one point late in the season, Bryce said, "I asked my father, 'Why are we working on this? We never use it.' "

But Homer had a good feeling about it as he set up the play during the final timeout. He had seen Bryce make a shot from that distance countless times in practice.

Some of his shots earlier in the game had fallen short. The coach thought this one was short, too. It wasn't. The horn blared. The ball barely grazed the rim as it passed through.

As Bryce Drew sank to the floor his teammates and the crowd exploded. He had lived the dream he'd had since childhood, when he was perhaps 8, listening to the tournament's signature song, One Shining Moment, as highlights flashed by on the television screen.

"We'd never won a game in the NCAA Tournament," he said. "That was the biggest thing; we just wanted to win no matter how it got done. We were six seniors and we'd never won. That was our whole career right then, if you think about it. So we finally did it at the last second of the last opportunity we were ever going to have."

The Crusaders beat Florida State 83-77 in overtime in the second round before the euphoria died with a 74-68 loss to Rhode Island in the regional semifinals.

Drew rode his shot -- and the talent that made him a two-time Mid-Continent Conference Player of the Year -- into the NBA as the Houston Rockets' 1998 first-round draft pick. He now plays for New Orleans.

The shot brought him instant recognition he could never have imagined.

"It's like, whenever I get notoriety, it's not necessarily for me being in the NBA or even for being a first-round pick," he said. "It's more, 'Hey, you're the guy that made that shot.' It's almost always for the Valpo thing. I guess a lot has come from that."

As for himself, Drew said, "I don't really think about it that much, to tell the truth. Around March, when they start showing tournament highlights, it's nice to see. But that was five years ago. I'm sure sooner or later people will start forgetting it."

John Smith, St. Joseph's, 1981

[AP photo: 1981] St. Joseph’s forward John Smith is hugged by teammates and coaches after scoring a layup with seconds remaining to lift the ninth-seeded Hawks to a 49-48 upset victory over No. 1 DePaul.

John Smith was right where he was supposed to be. Somehow he was all alone, unguarded under the basket. Nobody seemed to notice him -- except for teammate Lonnie McFarlan.

One McFarlan pass and Smith layup later, the St. Joseph's Hawks, seeded ninth in the Midwest Region of the 1981 NCAA tournament, had a 49-48 second-round victory over top-ranked, top-seeded DePaul. The Blue demons had received a first-round bye.

"Yes, DePaul was the best team in the country; yes, they had the best player in the country in Mark Aguirre," Smith said. "But we were Philly guys. Reputations don't mean a lot. Resumes don't make it onto the court."

Smith is vice president of a financial services firm in Williamstown, N.J., near Philadelphia. That layup had a profound influence on his life, he said.

"So many people around here are sports people and a lot of sports people are business people and the two have great parallels. If you can overachieve in one venue and have a solid head on your shoulders and are willing to learn, the likelihood is you can achieve in the other area as well. And I think a lot of companies over the years perhaps have given me a chance to talk to them because of that moment.

What amazes him is not that so many people remember the play 22 years later but that "almost to a man, every time somebody comes up to me and talks about it, they also say where they were at that moment. Absolutely incredible."

There was no shot clock then. "If we played our matchup 2-3 zone defense and controlled the tempo, we knew we'd have a shot at beating them," said Smith, then a senior, small forward and team captain.

St. Joe's played a four-corner offense. "All we had to do was get the lead and hold the ball until (DePaul) came out and played us man to man, not stay back in a zone," Smith said. "Obviously if they're in a zone and we miss a few shots they're off and running because they want an up-tempo game and we don't come close to beating them playing their game."

Eight seconds to play, the Blue Demons up 48-47, DePaul's Skip Dillard on the line for a one-and-one. He was a great crunch-time shooter. His nickname was Money.

"He bricks the front one," Smith said. "Bryan (Warrick) rebounds and makes two spectacular crossover dribbles, one between the legs, in the backcourt to elude two defenders. At the same time he's looking up the floor.

"He throws a two-handed chest pass from halfcourt to Lonnie, who's filling his lane down the right side. Lonnie's a freshman. He rises up to shoot the jumper and here I am, coming down my lane. He goes up to shoot and passes it right down to me and I put the ball in with a reverse 360 slam dunk."

Smith paused, then laughed. "That's what I tell my kids. Yeah, it was a layup." His kids know. The youngest is 12, the oldest 18.

Three seconds remained. Smith, getting back on defense, never saw Aguirre pick up the ball and not even inbound it. Then the horn sounded and Smith was mobbed. It was euphoria for a while, he said, "then reality set in. We hadn't won a championship; we'd won the right to keep playing."

St. Joseph's beat Boston College in its regional semifinal in Bloomington, Ind., then was blown out 78-46 by Indiana on the Hoosiers' home court.

Was Smith expecting the pass that led to the shot that changed his life?

"Yes and no," he said. "Yes, because I was wide open; no, because Lonnie had the ball and Lonnie never met a shot he didn't love."

U.S. Reed, Arkansas, 1981

[AP photo: 1981] Arkansas teammates U.S. Reed, left, and Darell Walker raise their arms in victory after Reed sank a last-second shot from mid-court to give the fifth-seeded Razorbacks a 74-73 upset victory over fourth-seed Louisville.

The way U.S. Reed remembers it, Louisville had Denny Crum coaching Derek Smith and Jerry Eaves and the McCrays, Scooter and Rodney. And Reed was an Arkansas Razorback and "we'd made some mistakes near the end of the game and got behind.

"Now it's the end of the game and everybody is looking at one another, trying to figure out what we're doing to do and wondering who was going to take the shot. And suddenly Scott Hastings and Darrell Walker and everybody is looking at me."

Oh, and Louisville was the defending national champion -- but only the No. 4 seed in the NCAA Midwest Regional. The Cardinals had enjoyed a first-round bye. Now it was March 14, 1981, they were up against fifth-seeded Arkansas, leading by a point and Reed had the ball.

He shot it ... from 49 feet away ... an instant before the final horn sounded.

Nothing but net. Arkansas 74, Louisville 73.

"You know, from the time I was a kid, they used to call that a prayer shot. And basically that's what mine was," said Reed, then an Arkansas senior guard, now a minister in Little Rock. "After the game (the media) asked me about it and I said, 'I can't take credit for that shot. That came straight from God.' "

In desperation situations like that, Reed said, coach Eddie Sutton was never down or resigned to defeat.

"It was always, 'We're going to win this game.' And we're looking at him like, 'We are?' 'Yeah, some kind of way we're going to pull it off.' "

Sutton's plan was simple. Arkansas would inbound the ball with five seconds remaining.

"He told me, 'U.S., you get the ball and take it downcourt if you can. If you can't get it there, pass it off to either Scott or Darrell or somebody.' "

Louisville put on a halfcourt press. Reed could barely get it to midcourt. He cut to the right. No one was open and time was running out.

"You know, you take shots, even short shots, and you know if the shot feels good or not."

It felt fine, he said. "The ball went in and there was all this yelling. When I landed after the shot I was standing along press row." He immediately began shaking hands with the writers.

Meanwhile, his teammates were piling on top of each other near midcourt.

"I was nowhere near that and I wasn't going near it either," Reed said. "I'd won some games at Arkansas before; I'd had the experience of being piled on. I didn't need that again. You can get hurt.

"I ran around the court celebrating and went from there right to the dressing room. Besides, some of the Louisville players looked like they wanted to kill me, so I ran away from them, too."

The following week, Louisiana State beat Arkansas 72-56 in the Midwest Regional semifinal. Reed was drafted by the NBA's Kansas City Kings in the fifth round, didn't make the team, kicked around the CBA for a while and retired.

"Not a week goes by that someone doesn't say, 'You're the guy that hit that shot,' or 'I won some money on that shot,' " Reed said.

"I also ran into a guy who said he jumped up and hit his head on a light socket and cut a hole in his head and had to be rushed to the hospital, and another guy who said he had a heart attack and had to be rushed to the hospital. I started thinking, 'Man, I almost killed some people.' "

He said children who weren't born when he made the shot ask him for his autograph, mostly because a parent or grandparent points him out and say he's the guy who made the shot.

"This," Reed said, "is going to follow me to the grave."

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