Kentucky's No. 1 Team

By Tom Callahan

Of all the final games in sports, none delivers on its annual promises more consistently than college basketball's national championship. Another stirring finish last week carried Louisville over Duke, 72-69, by the caprice in the fading seconds of a Cardinal shot so badly missed that only another Louisville man was in a position to jump for the ball: 6-ft. 9-in. Freshman Pervis Ellison.

As wiry as a mouth full of braces, three days shy of 19, Ellison instantly followed the shot into the basket and before long followed the basket to the foul line. Two calm free throws topped off his 25-point performance, good for the Most Valuable Player trophy, and the Cardinals' second title of the '80s. "What's the MVP," Ellison asked beautifully, "when you've got the national championship?" Not since the '50s and Bill Mlkvy, Temple's renowned "Owl-Without-a-Vowel," has basketball identified a hero as charmingly as "Never Nervous" Pervis. At the same time, not since UCLA and John Wooden have a team and a coach been as consonant as the University of Louisville and Denny Crum.

A pup out of Wooden, Crum both played and coached for the retired architect of ten National Collegiate Athletic Association championships, including every one of them from 1967 to 1973. When Crum left UCLA for Louisville 15 years ago, his avowed plan was to win enough games so that, upon Wooden's valedictory, he could return to a complete acclaim. The winning has come easier than the acclaim.

With six appearances in the Final Four, he has now pulled abreast of the University of Kentucky's fabled Adolph Rupp, a mean truth to many of the college-basketball fans "out in the state." Everywhere but Louisville, and sometimes in Louisville, the Cardinals are still referred to as "the blackbirds." While U.K. broke its color line way back in 1970, the Wildcat affirmative-action program pales in contrast to U.L.'s. It is conceivable that Duke had more rooters in the state of Kentucky than in both of the Carolinas.

By the same token, or at least a similar one, some of Duke's regular supporters brought an elitism to Dallas that had shades of racism. A popular parable: if a high school basketball player asked about his "boards" replies "I average eight rebounds a game," he is a better candidate to attend Louisville than Duke. Certainly Duke is an excellent school (Richard Nixon's law alma mater), but Louisville must be meeting some standard of education. Ellison became the center of the team only after the incumbent was declared academically ineligible.

Another thing, considering the rate at which the Cardinals have been succeeding, it seems unlikely that jealous rivals would permit even the common crimes of college sports to go on there unreported. Throughout the Final Four, whistles were blowing all over Texas about some sin or other of the Longhorns. Crum, 49, who eventually rejected an offer to return to UCLA, is three seasons into a ten-year agreement calling for a $1 million bonus if he completes the contract unencumbered by N.C.A.A. probation.

This long-term security lets him play the harshest schedule in the country. Early season records and wire-service rankings are balms to coaches' egos, and certainly these things are pertinent to the awards that Crum never wins. But they concern him less than toughening his team for the tournament. At a glance the Cardinals may look undisciplined, but Duke will agree now that this would not be a way of describing their defense. "Coach Crum doesn't try to squeeze your individual talent out of you," Guard Milt Wagner says, "but he'll make you control it." The beginning of each half was lit with the bright movements of the Duke guard Johnny Dawkins, but by the game's final seven minutes all of the Blue Devils were puffing to get a shot and even Dawkins' jumper was suddenly an inch or so short.

Being an old UCLA man, Crum is sensitive to the talk of dynasty that naturally ensued. What he calls "today's balance of talent" was demonstrated throughout the 64-team tournament by such disparate institutions as Cleveland State and the Naval Academy. "Everybody has good coaches, and everybody has good players," says Crum. "Think of Virginia with Ralph Sampson, Houston with Akeem Olajuwon and Georgetown with Patrick Ewing. All together, they totaled one championship. If you played this year's tournament over from the very beginning, you might have four different teams here." Or three different teams and Louisville.

Crum can fish his own pond on the sprawling horse and cattle farm he has settled in the bluegrass. But he never stops casting for players. When Larry Bird was a high school senior, no argument Crum's recruiters tried on Bird could get him to consider Louisville. So one day the coach went off uninvited to French Lick, Ind., and not surprisingly encountered Bird on a basketball court. "If I beat you in a game of h-o-r-s-e," Crum issued a plain challenge, "you have to visit Louisville." Bird agreed. Quickly, Crum attempted his specialty corner shot, a long one from behind the backboard that tends to amaze his players. He missed it. Bird made five of them straight and a half-courter for punctuation. But Crum could smile that day, and still does. "What did I have to lose?" he says. It wasn't for the national championship.