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Drama dominated Philly's NCAA title game in 1981

Three men walked into a closet. If that sounds like the setup to a joke, it isn't. Instead, it's the odd beginning to a central moment in one of the most serious episodes in NCAA basketball tournament history.

The story of the 1981 NCAA championship game and the decision to play it at the Spectrum was well-chronicled by the Inquirer.
The story of the 1981 NCAA championship game and the decision to play it at the Spectrum was well-chronicled by the Inquirer.Read moreFile Photo

Three men walked into a closet.

If that sounds like the setup to a joke, it isn't. Instead, it's the odd beginning to a central moment in one of the most serious episodes in NCAA basketball tournament history.

When, on March 30, 1981, Big East commissioner Dave Gavitt huddled in a Spectrum closet with the coaches from that night's national championship game - Indiana's Bob Knight and North Carolina's Dean Smith - they were hoping, amid the mops and brooms, to help the NCAA avoid a public relations mess.

Earlier that Monday afternoon, as he exited a Washington hotel, President Reagan had been shot in an assassination attempt that wounded three others. He'd been rushed to George Washington Hospital, his condition unknown.

With a nationally televised title game scheduled for 8:23 p.m., the NCAA needed to react quickly. Should it cancel? Delay? Reschedule?

"Obviously, this was going to be a big decision, and we wanted to get the information to the coaches quickly," Tom Jernstedt, then the NCAA's liaison to the basketball committee, said Wednesday. "So Dave found this closet. He was very concerned about being confidential."

The claustrophobic South Philly Summit, in the former arena just north of the Wells Fargo Center, where the NCAA East Regional will be contested this weekend, was just one act in a brief but frenetic drama.

Thirty-five years later, with Indiana and North Carolina set for another NCAA tournament showdown here Friday night, that afternoon of angst - for both the nation and the men running the event - may be better recalled than the Hoosiers' 63-50 victory in the ho-hum title game that followed.

Gavitt, the Big East founder who died in 2011, told the Inquirer in 1991 that at one point he might have been responsible for canceling the game.

"Once we were shut inside that closet, I thought, 'Uh-oh, if this doesn't open, there might not be a game tonight,' " he said.

The closet opened. Reagan recovered. And there was a game that night, though that decision would later be booed by many in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

"The games were played, but there was an awful lot of uncertainty before that," said Craig Littlepage, the Cheltenham native who was then an assistant at Virginia, a participant in that night's third-place game.

From 3 p.m. until the decision was made, sometime near 7:45 p.m., officials scurrying around the Spectrum's dark corridors were in the dark.

"This was before social media," said Sean McManus, the CBS Sports chairman who then was an assistant to NBC Sports chief Don Ohlmeyer. "We were dependent on secondhand information."

Until then, Philadelphia's second Final Four in five years had proceeded routinely. Two of the game's marquee programs, Indiana and North Carolina, had advanced, defeating LSU and Virginia, respectively. And, at a Cherry Hill restaurant, the volcanic Knight had one of his occasional eruptions, slam dunking an unruly LSU fan into a trash can.

In a decade filled with memorable title games - North Carolina State-Houston in 1983, Villanova-Georgetown in 1985 - 1981's might seem lackluster. But it did indicate just how much the tournament was growing and changing.

That was the first year the NCAA used RPI ratings, the first year its recently trademarked "Final Four" was used officially for the championship round. It was the last year without a Sunday selection show, the last year NBC, which gave way to CBS in 1982, televised the event.

But what ensured the 1981 Final Four its special place in history was the uncomfortable juxtaposition of national title and national tragedy and how a group of officials - including three men in a closet - tried to balance the two.

McManus was reminded of the 1972 Olympics in Munich, when several Israeli athletes died after being taken hostage by Arab terrorists.

"I recall that day thinking back on '72 when I was with my father during that whole terrible ordeal," said McManus, whose father was ABC's lead Olympic broadcaster, Jim McKay. "It was another example of news invading the world of sports."

Tough call

About 2:30 p.m., as NCAA administrators and the players in that night's 1981 Final Four consolation game, Virginia vs. LSU, were arriving at the arena, news flashed across Spectrum TV monitors.

Outside the Washington Hilton, a deranged gunman trying to impress actress Jodie Foster, had fired six shots, striking Reagan in the chest and wounding, to various degrees of seriousness, his press secretary, a policeman and a Secret Service agent.

Jernstedt learned about the incident as he entered the arena that rainy afternoon. He found Wayne Duke, the Big Ten commissioner who chaired the basketball committee, and the two gathered the rest of the nine-man group, plus Indiana and North Carolina officials.

Duke brought some useful experience to those assembled in a dank basement meeting room. Eighteen years earlier, then a Big Eight administrator, he'd helped determine that a much-anticipated Nebraska-Oklahoma game would be played a day after the Kennedy assassination.

Oklahoma coach "Bud Wilkinson had spoken with Robert Kennedy, who said he thought such a sporting event might help the nation grieve," Duke recalled in a 1991 interview. "But we caught some flak for that."

Now each committee member was assigned a specific task. One was to keep the media informed, another to work with NBC. Gavitt got the coaches.

"Both of them cooperated fully," said Jernstedt. "They said they'd go along with whatever was decided."

The most important assignment, as it turned out, went to Ben Wilcox, North Carolina's NCAA faculty representative. Since Wilcox, a thoracic surgeon, had a medical contact in the White House, he was responsible for monitoring Reagan's condition.

If Reagan had died, the game was off. Short of that, three possibilities remained. They could play the 8:23 p.m. game as scheduled, postpone it a night or cancel it and declare co-champions.

The last possibility was quickly dismissed. The second was problematic since the 76ers had a home playoff game Tuesday night. And the first option grew more complicated when the committee learned the Academy Awards show, also set for national TV that Monday night, had been postponed.

"That absolutely gave us pause," said Jernstedt. "But we didn't know what their sources were, and we felt like we had a very good source in Dr. Wilcox."

Kids wanted to play

At 4:04 p.m., Reagan went into surgery. For several interminable, nerve-racking hours, there were no updates on his condition and, consequently, no progress toward a decision.

Among the most nervous occupants of the Spectrum were NBC officials. The game's fate was in the NCAA's hands, but the network, obviously, had a huge stake.

"In that case, we had almost no say at all," recalled McManus. "We were deferring to the NCAA. We obviously didn't want to be in a position where we were a party to something inappropriate. We were in a wait-and-see situation. The NCAA asked us to be flexible."

Meanwhile, at 5:30, the last ever third-place game was played before a tiny crowd.

"We had gotten word in mid-afternoon. Then there was some concern about whether the game was going to be played or not," Littlepage said of the contest his Cavaliers won, 78-74. "We ended up playing it, and we were happy to be playing. Kids want to play games. Except for the uncertainty about the president, there wasn't anything unusual about it."

Near 7 p.m., Wilcox reached his White House contact. The news was encouraging.

"He said he'd been told President Reagan was stable and in good condition," recalled Jernstedt. "And when he told us that the president had even used that old W.C. Fields line, 'All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia,' we thought that was a good sign and very appropriate for this occasion."

As their players were loosening up on the court, Knight and Smith got the word from Gavitt. The game would begin at 8:30.

Before it did, the Spectrum's public address announcer informed the late-arriving, sold-out crowd that Reagan's prognosis was good. The ovation, one sportswriter noted, was the weekend's loudest.

Broadcasters Dick Enberg and Al McGuire each told their NBC audience they thought the decision to play was a mistake. So did pregame host Bryant Gumbel.

"We'd hoped they would postpone the game 24 hours," Enberg said in a muted opening.

The following day, in newspapers here and elsewhere, the NCAA and NBC got blamed for, among other shortcomings, being greedy and myopic.

Apparently, the nation had little trouble transferring its interest from a tragedy to a game. Ratings for NBC's telecast were up nearly 5 percent from 1980.

After his team had won a second national title in five years, both in the Spectrum, Knight began his news conference with a remark that echoed Reagan's from a few hours earlier.

"My first thoughts," he said, "will be when will the NCAA basketball tournament come back to Philadelphia?"

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz