When time out was called with 3 minutes 58 seconds remaining in Saturday’s game, the vastly outnumbered Indiana fans in the crowd of 14,123 in Purdue’s Mackey Arena headed for the exits.
They weren’t gluttons for punishment.
The Hoosier players weren’t so fortunate. They had to hang around while Purdue put the finishing touches on a 69-47 flogging and then take a dressing-room tongue-lashing from coach Mike Davis.
“I’m going to pray a lot tonight,” Davis said after the lopsided game. “God is going to have to forgive me for some of the things I said to them. It doesn’t make sense. You come in and play Purdue in a great rivalry game and you don’t play like you’re supposed to.
“Purdue was great. They played clean, they played physical and they were well prepared. They took us out of everything. They won the game in every area.”
It was by far the worst beating of the season for 14th-ranked Indiana (14-4, 4-2 Big Ten), which had defeated the Boilermakers 66-63 on Dec. 14 in Indianapolis’ RCA Dome in what was designated as a non-conference game.
In that game, the Hoosiers got 13 points from freshman guard Bracey Wright, 16 points and 12 rebounds from 6-foot-9-inch senior forward Jeff Newton, and 11 points and 14 rebounds from 6-11 center George Leach.
This time Newton was held to seven points and nine rebounds, while Leach failed to score and had only four rebounds. Wright sat out his fourth straight game because of a back injury.
“Newton and Leach played like high school players,” Davis said. “Chris Booker (Purdue’s 6-10 junior) and those guys had a lot to do with that.
“Today we proved we need Wright. He wanted to play. [But I didn’t want to] take the chance of him reinjuring his back.”
The dominant player Saturday was Purdue senior guard Kenneth Lowe. He sank his first six field-goal attempts, including three three-pointers, and wound up scoring 17 of his 19 points in the first half as the Boilermakers (12-4 overall, 4-1) surged to a 37-25 lead.
“We seemed to take a lot of energy from the crowd,” Purdue coach Gene Keady said. “Kenny Lowe got us going in the first half. He made some huge shots and they generated so much energy. We came out in the second half and played better than we did in the first, which I didn’t think was possible.”
Lowe’s main collaborators in the victory were junior guard Willie Deane and Booker. Deane scored nine points in each half and grabbed a team-high eight rebounds, while Booker had 13 points, six rebounds and two of Purdue’s eight blocked shots.
The constantly harassed Hoosiers shot only 29.3 percent. Purdue shot a modest 42.1 percent but outrebounded Indiana 40-33, scoring 14 second-chance points to Indiana’s six.
“We were a lot more focused in what we had to do as far as our defensive assignments and how to play them than in the game in the RCA Dome,” Booker said.
