Upstart Florida team looks eerily familiar
When I see this season’s Florida Gulf Coast basketball team, I see the Jacksonville basketball team of 1969-70. They even play in the same conference, something called the Atlantic Sun. Twenty bucks and the home edition of “Jeopardy!” if you can name all 10 members.
Small schools from Florida. Upstarts. Freewheelers. Wild hair. Always being hassled by The Man, or Charles Barkley back in the studio.
The Florida Gulf Coast coach has a beautiful wife, who has appeared on the cover of Maxim magazine in a bikini.
Jacksonville’s coach had a beautiful wife, too, but Maxim magazine wasn’t around in 1970. And so Dale Williams, wife of Dolphins coach Joe Williams — “she was the only outwardly outstanding thing about him, and they lived in what sounded like a fishing camp cabin in the swamps outside Tallahassee” is how Sport magazine described their union — was just another pretty face in the crowd.
(Joe Williams wore a white blazer, red shirt, blue bell-bottoms and sort of looked like Chris Isaak, the singer.)
Jacksonville had Pembrook Burrows III, who stood 7 feet and to this day has one of the coolest names in college basketball history. With a name like that, Pembrook Burrows III should have been in the rhythm section for Sly and the Family Stone. Boom shaka-laka-laka.
Florida Gulf Coast has Filip Cvjeticanin, which would be a pretty cool name, too, if you didn’t have to sound it out phonetically.
Jacksonville also had a 7-2 guy named Artis Gilmore. Florida Gulf Coast does not have anybody with a name like Artis Gilmore, or anybody who could play like him.
During his Jacksonville career, Gilmore averaged 22.7 rebounds, which is ridiculous, and still a record. Plus, he looked badder than Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction.” It was a devastating combination.
Jacksonville was so awesome that season I even remember the guys without Afros. The guards on this mod squad were Rex Morgan, drafted by the Celtics, and little Vaughn Wedeking of Evansville, Ind., who would become a veterinarian and was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009, a few months before he died.
It was during the 1969-70 season that Jacksonville became the first team in NCAA history to average more than 100 points per game. Mind you, this was long before the 3-point shot.
You weren’t allowed to dunk during the Age of Aquarius (thanks, Big Lew), so Jacksonville wore these funky green and gold uniforms, with tiny Gwen Stefani-style shorts, with “JACKSONVILLE” spelled out in a semicircle on front of their jerseys, under the number, like a smiley face.
Playing then as an independent, Jacksonville lost only once during the regular season, to Florida State, and then beat the Seminoles in a rematch. Jacksonville won the Mideast Region by beating Western Kentucky, 109-96; Iowa, 104-103; and Kentucky, 106-100; and then it beat St. Bonaventure, which was without its injured star, Bob Lanier, in the national semifinals, which is what the Final Four was called before TV money changed everything.
I don’t recall watching the St. Bonaventure game, because that was when the national semifinals were played on Thursday night, and NBC was showing “Daniel Boone,” “Ironside,” “Dragnet” and “The Dean Martin Show” instead.
So two days later, on a Saturday afternoon in Maryland, Jacksonville became the smallest school to ever play for the NCAA championship, against invincible UCLA.
I remember Curt Gowdy, wrapped in a bright red sports jacket, the style and hue evoking a real estate salesman, saying he thought little Jacksonville with the big Afros had a chance, because Big Lew Alcindor had gone to the NBA and had changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Jacksonville led almost the entire first half before Johnny Wooden, as he then was called, made one of his famous coaching adjustments, which in this case was to tell his forward Sidney Wicks to jump higher than Artis Gilmore.
Wicks blocked one of Gilmore’s shots, and then another one, and maybe one or two after that. And then it was all over.
I was 13 when Sidney Wicks stuffed Artis Gilmore’s shot — the term “rejection” had not yet been minted — and soon I would start noticing girls, or that it was baseball season, or that most guys in my neighborhood did not wear dashikis.
And so I would forget about Artis Gilmore and Pembrook Burrows III, at least until last weekend, when this little school from Florida, this loosey-goosey bunch with the cryptic letters FGCU on the front of its shirts — and the coach with the supermodel wife — would come out of the sun, the Atlantic Sun, to knock off Georgetown and San Diego State.
Then, except for the volume of outrageous dunks and TV timeouts, and the paucity of giant Afros and Fess Parker promos, it all looked familiar.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski
