Only its parents and a few thousand onlookers attended the Big Ten men’s basketball tournament’s birth on March 5, 1998. A sparse crowd turned out to see eighth-seeded Minnesota and ninth-seeded Northwestern, with a combined 9-23 conference record, tip off at lunchtime at the United Center.
Early in the game, fiery former Northwestern coach Kevin O’Neill began berating his players, as he was wont to do when things went wrong, which was often. O’Neill’s profanity floated across acres of empty seats in the mezzanine, where an usher asked no one in particular, “Can he say that?”
It was an inauspicious beginning. Minnesota coach Clem Haskins, who had voted against the tourney, wasn’t enthused by the Golden Gophers’ 64-56 victory. “You play a regular season; that’s enough basketball for us,” Haskins said.
Haskins and then-Indiana coach Bob Knight were the only coaches to oppose the tourney.
Knight eventually was fired for violating his school’s behavior policy. Haskins was dismissed for his role in one of the worst academic fraud scandals in NCAA history.
Coincidence?
Knight and Haskins may be long gone, but the Big Ten tournament is here to stay, even if it may not be staying here. The event moves to Indianapolis next year and returns to Chicago in 2005. After that the conference will entertain bids from other cities, though it may continue to rotate between Indy and Chicago.
In its first year the tourney was as much a curiosity as a must-see sports event. For the players the main attraction may have been the chance to play in the home of the Bulls, who were about to complete a second NBA title three-peat. A training room was set up in the Bulls’ dressing room, and many players wandered in to genuflect at Michael Jordan’s locker.
But it didn’t take long for the tournament to establish its own identity. Despite early skepticism, it has blossomed beyond the reckoning of even its most strident supporters, including Commissioner Jim Delany, who persuaded conference presidents to adopt it.
“What did we expect?” Delany said. “We didn’t know what to expect because we were so wedded to the double round-robin (schedule). In Year 1 it was good, I would say. In Year 2 it got better. I thought our Year 3 tournament was phenomenal.”
In Year 4 the tournament set an attendance record, averaging nearly 22,000 fans per session at the United Center. When the event moved to Indianapolis’ Conseco Fieldhouse for its fifth anniversary last March, only the Thursday morning session failed to attract a full house.
The tourney produces a windfall of about $500,000 per school, although some could make more with the conference home game they sacrificed to make the tourney possible. The tournament has become a national TV fixture, with CBS broadcasting the semifinals and finals this year. And the Big Ten has performed far better in the NCAA tournament since it began its own postseason playoff.
For all its apparent benefits, the tourney wasn’t an immediate hit. Midwesterners often greet change with suspicion; for most of the last century, the Big Ten champion had been forged across a winter-long round-robin competition.
The tourney introduced the possibility that a team could dog it for two months, then catch fire in one weekend and snare the league’s automatic NCAA berth.
Coaches from rival conferences couldn’t understand why the Big Ten resisted a concept nearly everyone else embraced.
“What were those [also-ran] teams doing when halfway through the season they had nothing to play for?” said Ohio State coach Jim O’Brien, who coached Boston College in the Big East tourney. “How do you keep those guys interested? At least you can look forward to the potential of getting to the [conference] tournament and doing something.”
Potential–that’s what the Big Ten tourney sells to fans and players alike. And hope. Don’t forget hope.
“You pack for four days and you hope that you get to wear all the clothing that’s in your luggage,” said Iowa coach Steve Alford, whose sixth-seeded Hawkeyes did just that in 2001.
The tourney required a new mind-set in a league whose battles had long been waged in raucous on-campus arenas.
“A first-round game that starts at 11 in the morning, you can still hear the ball bounce,” Delany said. “Our people had never understood that two Big Ten teams could play where you could hear the ball bounce. It’s sort of eerie.
“It’s a lot like an 11 o’clock [NCAA tourney] game up in Albany, N.Y. It’s not the hostile environment you find away from home, and it’s not the comfortable environment you find at home.”
Perhaps that explains the Big Ten’s vastly improved NCAA tourney performance in the last five years. The league is 54-28 (.659) in the NCAAs since the Big Ten tourney’s inception, and it has sent six teams to the Final Four; in the five years before the conference tourney, the league went 26-26 (.500) in the NCAAs with only two Final Four berths.
Some might say the Big Ten simply has better teams. But it’s hard to argue with the numbers.
“In that five-year period, I don’t know that anybody has been more successful than the Big Ten in postseason play,” Delany said. “Now, is that directly tied to the [Big Ten] tournament? The two events are sitting next to each other.
“I doubt if it’s causative, because before we had the tournament, we still had the most appearances in the history of the NCAAs, the most Final Four appearances, the second-most wins [behind the Atlantic Coast Conference] and the second-most national championships other than Conference UCLA.”
The mighty Bruins, of course, won 11 national titles without playing in a conference tournament.
But the Big Ten tourney isn’t merely a method to prepare teams for the NCAAs. It has also produced games that will, in time, become part of the conference’s lore.
The first thriller came on opening day, when Wisconsin forward Maurice Linton, a Thornwood High School product, nailed a 9-foot turnaround in the waning seconds to beat Penn State 52-51.
In the next round, the tourney produced its first marquee matchup: Purdue-Indiana, the Big Ten’s signature hoops rivalry. The building was electrified when the Hoosiers and Boilermakers took the floor for pregame warmups before their Friday night quarterfinal; some who attended the Bulls-Utah NBA Finals a few months later swore the building wasn’t as loud as it was when Purdue and IU tangled. “A madhouse,” is how former IU guard Charlie Miller described it.
The Boilermakers nipped IU 76-71, confirming Knight’s suspicion that this tourney was a rotten idea.
As Delany and Associate Commissioner Mark Rudner ate lunch down the street from conference headquarters in Park Ridge last week, they reminisced about some of the tourney’s memorable games.
“I thought the Indiana-Iowa game last year [the ninth-seeded Hawkeyes upset No. 4 IU 62-60 in Conseco Fieldhouse]–is there one that was better than that?” Delany said. “Was that classic?”
Said Rudner: “I might argue the Illinois-Indiana game two years ago here [fourth-seeded Indiana upset the top-seeded Fighting Illini 58-56]. We had to open up standing-room-only tickets, and the whole city of Chicago was talking about it.”
In 1999, 11th-seeded Illinois made the tourney’s first Cinderella run, reeling off three straight wins before running out of gas against top-seeded Michigan State in the final. Two years later, sixth-seeded Iowa became the first and only school to win the tourney out of the Thursday bracket.
The Hawkeyes did it behind unheralded Brody Boyd, a 5-foot-11-inch guard from Dugger, Ind. The fact that his heroics came against his homestate Hoosiers only added to the legend. Boyd and the ninth-seeded Hawkeyes will try to repeat the feat this week.
“This is a conference that has as much tradition as any other,” Delany said. “But it didn’t have a tournament tradition. It needed that. It needs to have the recollections and memories.”
More memories will be made this week. The Big Ten isn’t highly rated nationally, but it’s balanced; the worst team, Penn State, knocked off the best team, Wisconsin. Any of seven or eight teams has a realistic shot at leaving town with the trophy Sunday night.
“You have new life,” Purdue coach Gene Keady said. “The Big Ten tournament’s just fun.”
Tournament history
2002 FINAL
#2 Ohio State 81, #9 Iowa 64
Most outstanding player
Boban Savovic, Ohio State
2001 FINAL
#6 Iowa 63, #4 Indiana 61
Most outstanding player
Reggie Evans, Iowa
2000 FINAL
#2 Michigan State 76, #4 Illinois 61
Most outstanding player
Morris Peterson, Michigan State
1999 FINAL
#1 Michigan State 67, #11 Illinois 50
Most outstanding player
Mateen Cleaves, Michigan State
1998 FINAL
#4 Michigan 76, #3 Purdue 67
Most outstanding player
Robert Traylor, Michigan
