Purdue guard Tony Jones, his team down by one, rushed the ball up the court, and to the right of the circle. When he reached the circle, he spotted a lane to the basket and drove for it as the last seconds ticked down in the Boilermakers` game with Texas.
”I saw him going toward the middle, saw the force he was going with, and thought he would lay the ball in,” Longhorn center Panama Myers would say later. ”I took the chance that he might pass off to my man, but then he laid the ball up in a way I could block it.”
Myers did block Jones` layup, blocked it cleanly, and his teammate Courtney Jeans grabbed the ball and cradled it as the clock ran down from :02 to :01 to :00. Then he fell to the court exhausted and happy. He and his Longhorns had held on to defeat Purdue 73-72 in their Midwest Regional game at the Hoosier Dome on Sunday.
”That final play didn`t beat us,” Boilermakers coach Gene Keady later raged in an expletive-filled critique of the officiating. ”It`s all bull. Three charges they didn`t call. You run a program, you don`t cheat, you graduate all your kids, you do things right”-and here he pounded the table-” and the damn referees are all the same. It gets old. I`m tired of it. We`ve got good kids who work hard, and they`re in there crying their eyes out because some guys (don`t) understand the game.”
The game, and the officiating, deserved better than that, but there were reasons for Keady`s frustration. For this was a game his team controlled, usually led, and had won, yet a game it contrived to lose by making but a single field goal in its final seven minutes.
Purdue led then 64-56, and-more importantly-had Texas playing at a pace slower than the Longhorns prefer. Jones was handling the high-scoring Travis Mays (5 of 14 for 16 points), forward Ryan Berning was doing the same to Lance Blanks (6 of 16 for 19), and Texas-as a team-was shooting a mere 39 percent
(22 of 56).
Stephen Scheffler (18 points), in contrast, was then the only Boilermaker below 50 percent, and when Jimmy Oliver (11 points) banked home a jumper to give them their eight-point lead, this game appeared to be theirs.
But then, so slowly, it started slipping away, slipping away first with a pair of Benford Williams` (12 points) free throws.
A terrible shot by Woody Austin (15 points), a turnover and a pair of missed free throws by Jones, those were the results of Purdue`s next three possessions, and now Texas was behind by one after baskets by Joey Wright (20 points) and Williams.
”Until then,” Texas coach Tom Penders said later, ”they`d controlled the game, had it at a Big-10 tempo. We`re not used to that, and it took us time to get rolling.”
”What happened,” said Jones, ”is they turned their defense up a notch, and we were standing around.”
Wright, brilliant all afternoon, finished off this 13-4 Texas run with a short jumper from the lane, and now-with 2:56 remaining-the Longhorns led by one and this game was headed for its dramatic finish.
Austin hit a pair of free throws, then Williams got a layup. Scheffler hit a pair of free throws, and then, with 49 seconds left, Mays fumbled the ball out of bounds.
Jones, his team up by one, now missed a three, and then, with 10 seconds remaining, Mays went up among three Boilermakers and launched a shot. It was blocked, but Mays grabbed it and went up again, and this time he was fouled by Oliver.
”You`re going to be shooting these kinds of shots for the next 10 years,” Penders said to Mays after Purdue called time.
”I`ll knock them down for you, coach,” Mays replied, and then he went out and did just that.
Myers` block made them stand up, and with that the Longhorns were on their way to Dallas and a regional semifinal meeting with Xavier.
”We didn`t say we were happy to be here. We wanted to win,” Penders was declaring minutes later.
”Now that we`ve beaten a great team from the best conference in the country, we have confidence we can beat anybody.”
