Paul Jones

Paul Jones is the voice of the Raptors on the FAN 590 and writes regularly for Sportsnet.ca.

Georgetown's Patrick Ewing.

It has been 25 years since the greatest upset in NCAA basketball championship history.

With all due respect to North Carolina State and its victory over Houston in 1983, Villanova’s 66-64 win over Georgetown on April 1, 1985 to this day still has people shaking their heads. It was no April Fools joke. Two decades later for those worshippers of the religion that is college hoops, they can vividly recall the details of where they were, and who they watched the game with.

For some, it holds a high ranking along with other milestone moments in their respective lives.

The Georgetown Hoyas were the Goliath toward which there was no ambiguity. Like other dynasty teams in professional sports, the New York Yankees, the Montreal Canadiens, the Dallas Cowboys, the Boston Celtics or Los Angeles Lakers, you either cheered for them or rooted against them to the point where your favourite team became the team that they were playing against in that particular game.

But there was an added variable that may have sharpened the divide because John Thompson, a large African-American man, was leading a predominantly African-American team. While some claimed Thompson was intimidating his players and overzealous in his coaching, the counter argument was that he was raising men by instilling discipline to deal with basketball and life’s realities that would follow after graduation.

After all, wasn’t Bob Knight doing the same thing at Indiana?

It was a decade when attitude and having a swagger were the prevailing trends. In fact, the conference in which the Hoyas played, the then relatively new Big East, was all about toughness and attitude.

"It was a hoop junkies’ delight. Every night you faced a formidable foe, and at least one star that was NBA bound," said Leo Rautins, the MVP of the Big East Tournament in 1981 and current Raptors broadcaster.

"Whether it was brawling with Georgetown and their gang mentality, facing BC’s traps that steered you into one of many dead spots at Conte Forum, or battling St. John’s at the Garden, every time you stepped on the floor, you knew it was going to be a war."

In the eyes of many, no team in the country was more bellicose than Georgetown. Thompson made the rules and if you were going to be around his team, it was his way or no way. "Hoya Paranoia" as it was aptly named since they seemingly wouldn’t conform to expected norms for fear of not doing it their own way. Thompson’s teams rarely spoke to the media. They stayed in hotels secluded from other teams and in the process avoided any kind of tournament headquarters or kick off banquets.

That "paranoia" gave rise to an us against the world mentality, and when combined with a tough, disciplined, and inexorable style of play, there was a mystique around the team.

Georgetown, led by Patrick Ewing, intimidated its opponents on the court and eventually the opposition caved in and succumbed to the unrelenting pressure defense that seemed to start when the opposition got off the bus. In every game there was a devastating run that knocked the opposition out. Their offense was in part their defense as they forced turnovers, got out on the break and then did it again.

In the national semi-final, St. John’s, another Big East team that had actually beaten Georgetown earlier in the season, fell to the Hoyas. Many felt that that game was in fact the de facto title game and the winner of the Villanova/Memphis State semi-final was merely to determine who would be the answer to the trivia question.

But in the championship game that at Rupp Arena in Lexington Kentucky, when the Hoyas turned up the pressure to try and apply its vaunted run, ‘Nova responded.

"At some point in the game they would go on a run and shut us down for like eight minutes," said current Philadelphia 76ers broadcaster, former Raptor and Most Outstanding Player of the 1985 Final Four, Ed Pinckney. "It was all about weathering the storm and it never came. Eventually, it turned into our game."

Rollie Massimino’s Wildcats, who some say only got into the tournament because that was the first year it was expanded to 64 teams, dictated the tempo of the title game. With two other senior leaders, Gary McLain and Dwayne McClain, ‘Nova had gathered confidence on the tournament trail.

They had beaten Dayton, Michigan, Maryland (with All-American Len Bias), and North Carolina to get to the Final Four and they knew what to expect with a couple of their conference brethren rounding out college hoops biggest spectacle.

"We had played them (Georgetown) for four years and beaten them every year in conference games except for that year," remarked Pinckney. "We weren’t afraid of them because Gary and Dwayne knew Patrick from all-star games as high schoolers and (former Hoya) Fred Brown (who gave away the 1982 NCAA title with a critical turnover) went to my high school and I felt like I knew their whole team."

Harold Jensen came off the Villanova bench and made shots that night. You could hear people saying to themselves, "who is this guy?" Finally, Georgetown took the lead late in the second half and with no shot clock they decided to slow it down. But Hoya forward Bill Martin turned the ball over on a bad pass and Villanova came back up court, moved the ball well, and Jensen made a jumper to give the Wildcats the lead for good.

It came out almost two years later that the man who handled the Georgetown pressure that night with adept ball handling, Gary McLain, was using drugs, cocaine to be specific, during his time at Villanova. He said that he was under the influence during the semi-final win as well as later in the year when the team went to meet President Ronald Reagan at the Whitehouse as they were honoured for winning the title. He maintains though that he was not under the influence of any drugs during the dramatic upset over Georgetown.

I watched that game with friends like many others waiting for Georgetown to break it open the way they had in previous games. Their recipe was simple. Score, press, create a turnover and score again. Repeat two or three times in succession and wait for a wilting opponent to call a timeout. Use the recipe again a few more times just for good measure and it was over. But Villanova, who came in to the tournament as a No. 8 seed, never faltered. With no shot clock ‘Nova held the ball, shortened the game and made shots. They were 22-of-28 from the floor, including an unbelievable nine-of-10 in the second half.

The Wildcats 78.6 per cent shooting is still a record for best shooting percentage in a championship game.

There will never be another game like it.

Perhaps it was only my perspective as a college basketball fan when most of my friends were hockey crazy, but it was almost fairy-tale like and I couldn’t impress upon people enough what had just happened. The script was complete with a Villanova good luck charm, Jake Nevin, a retired trainer sitting in a wheel chair at the end of the Wildcat bench suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) that would claim his life eight months later. Villanova players cried tears of joy after the game.

There have been reunions celebrating the win. Dwayne McClain returned to Philadelphia and was working in advertising after playing basketball for years in Australia. Gary McLain was a motivational speaker sponsored by a company owned by recording artist Jay-Z. Harold Jensen is a big-time businessman and president of the Alumni Association at Villanova. The list goes on.

As a former assistant on Jay Wright’s staff at Villanova, Pinckney was jokingly teased by parents in the Washington D.C. area when he came to recruit their children to Villanova to play ball. Patrick Ewing says he changes the channel every time it comes up on some classic sports station. Pinckney and I have talked about it many times in many places from the back of the Raptor charter in 1995 to phone calls in Florida.

In fact, I will try to chat with him Saturday in Philadelphia as Toronto plays the Sixers, and with any luck it will be part of the pre-game show on The Fan590.

But Pinckney says discussion of the game or its outcome have never once come up in his conversations with Hoya players who were on that team including Michael Jackson, the lightning quick Georgetown point guard who was a teammate in Sacramento, or the aforementioned Ewing who he speaks with occasionally about coaching big men (Ewing is currently an assistant coach with the Orlando Magic tutoring Dwight Howard).

Georgetown and Villanova have been back to the Final Four only once since 1985, but not at the same time. It will never happen again and if I didn’t see it, and someone told me the score I would surely have laughed knowing the date on which the game was played.

Yes, the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.