SPORTS FINAL FOUR FEVER

SPECTATORS ATTENDING the NCAA Final Four at Reunion Arena late this month will have something in common with their heroes on the court: like the teams competing for college basketball’s national championship, they will have paid the price to be there. As early as last Christmas, the street price for one book of NCAA tickets-good for two semifinal games as well as the championship-bordered on the outrageous.

I responded to a Dallas Morning News classified ad that read “NCAA Tickets Available.” The guy on the other end of the line wanted $500 a book for what otherwise could be called the cheap seats. I hung up.

The guy who answered the second number offered me a book in the nosebleed section for $350, not exactly a cheap thrill. The lower level? That would cost $850 a book and was a bargain, he said, since the same seat might cost $1,500 or more come tournament time. I knew then I’d be watching the Final Four on CBS.

The NCAA Final Four has become one of the toughest tickets in sports. The NCAA received 38,395 requests for seats available through a lottery at forty-six dollars each. Mail orders poured in from each of the fifty states, plus Canada. England, and Puerto Rico. The 1,008 people who had their names drawn in the lottery claimed roughly 3.500 of the 16,300 seats available under the NCAA set-up at Reunion.

Most of the other 12,800 seats were already reserved. Each college that reaches the Final Four gets 1,700 books to distribute to assorted VIPs and sugar daddies. SMU, the host school for the tournament, gets roughly 1,200 books. The NCAA and CBS take about 2,000 books for corporate sponsors, advertisers, and general PR purposes.

Another 2,600 books go to the members of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, which holds its convention here the same week. (You’ll know the coaches have arrived when you notice grown men scribbling Xs and Os on napkins and place-mats in restaurants around town.) Throw in the media horde descending on Dallas and Reunion will quickly fill to capacity.

One reason for all the hoopla is the red glare of network television. CBS forked over $93 million to televise the Final Four for three years ending in 1987. The network gets its money back and then some by selling commercial time during the tournament telecasts; a thirty-second spot during the ’85 championship game sold for a cool $250,000. (Now you understand the genesis of the term “TV timeout”)

Who’s watching the Final Four? More and more viewers, that’s who. The ratings for the NCAA championship game have been “trending upward,” in TV jargon, over the past few years. The A.C. Nielsen people estimated a record 31 million viewers watched the Georgetown and Villanova final last year. Only the ’79 championship game, which matched household names Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, pulled a higher rating and share, though fewer households had televisions back then.

Another barometer of Final Four mania is the media intensity. By New Year’s Eve, requests for press credentials in Dallas had exceeded 1,000. including national and international media. Locally, The Dallas Morning News hired a basketball junkie named Joe Rhodes to spend five months on the road filing college basketball stories twice a week, and the Dallas Times Herald had sports staffers reporting from points along the “Road to the Final Four.”



IT WASN’T ALWAYS this way. For years, the NCAA championship was played in relative obscurity. The tournament was won . by teams little-known outside America’s heartland, coached by people with names like Adolph and Phog and Branch. It didn’t become Big Time until the mid-Sixties, when John Wooden turned the NCAA into the UCLA Invitational.

UCLA had the best coach and it had the best players, a parade of All-Americans with names like Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton. The only suspense was whether Wooden would hold his rolled-up game program in his left hand or right hand; the outcome of the tournament was a lock.

Sportswriters dubbed Wooden the “Wizard of Westwood” and here’s why: his teams broke the rhythm of Jazzy Cazzie Russell (Michigan, ’65); turned Rick Mount into a bricklayer (Purdue, ’70); imploded skyscrapers Artis Gilmore and Pembrooke Burrows III (Jacksonville. ’70); and sent Larry Kenon, the erstwhile Doctor K, straight to the sickbed (Memphis State. ’73). UCLA’s best trick, though, was making Houston’s Player-of-the-Year Elvin Hayes disappear in the NCAA semifinals in ’68. A whiz of a Wiz, Wooden was.

After the UCLA era ended in the mid-Seventies, college basketball received a boost from jive-talkin’, street-walkin’ Al McGuire, whose Marquette team won the ’77 NCAA championship. The native New Yorker promptly retired to the broadcast booth where he showed he could talk an even better game than he coached.

McGuire described the thrill of victory as “seashells and balloons.” Losers went to “Tap City.” Fancy plays were “French pastries,” the big guys in the middle were “aircraft carriers,” a team’s main strength its “Blue Plate Special.” A growing audience rdllied around a man who also had the nerve to violate a broadcasting booth tenet: Do Not Second-Guess The Coaches. When McGuire wasn’t poking fun at their wardrobes-three-piece, doubleknit suits clung to the coaching ranks-he was poking holes in their strategy. NBC later paired McGuire with basketball nomad Billy Packer, and the duo’s penchant for friendly arguments on everything from bench strategy to officials’ calls to team ratings enlivened many a college telecast imperiled by the kill-the-clock, four-corners offense.



NCAA RULEMAKERS did their part to spur excitement in college hoops in the late Seventies by restoring the slam dunk, which had been banned shortly after Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) matriculated at UCLA. The rule reversal was long overdue, since not allowing basketball players to dunk was the equivalent of restricting NFL quarterbacks to throwing passes shorter than twenty yards, or forcing cleanup hitters to choke up on the bat.

With dunking again permitted, college basketball took a leap in popularity. Michigan State won the championship in ’79 thanks to Greg Kelser’s resounding dunks on lob passes from Magic Johnson. The next year, Louisville won with a lineup called the “Doctors of Dunk,” the chief surgeon being one Darrell Griffith.

The monster dunk-off in NCAA history came at the ’83 Final Four when Houston’s Phi Slama Jama fraternity stuffed Louisville’s leapers. Unfortunately for Southwest Conference fans. Guy Lewis’ Cougars were not permitted to dunk their free throws. Houston’s misses from the foul line handed North Carolina State the title.

Another policy change that heightened national interest in the Final Four was the expansion of the tournament field. From twenty-four teams two decades ago and thirty-two teams one decade ago. the NCAA field subsequently ballooned to its current size of sixty-four hopefuls. (A slight misnomer, since many of the sixty-four teams are, in fact, hopeless.)

A larger field not only means more teams competing for the NCAA title, but more games for CBS to broadcast. Like the song says, money changes everything. The down side to expansion is that teams like North Carolina Slate (’83) and Villanova (’85) lose ten or more times during the season and still steal the championship. Call them dynas-ties-for-a-month.

But the major reason why scalpers willpocket four-figure sums for seats to TheFinal Four in Dallas is this: the winner willbe the bona fide national champion. TheNCAA tournament leaves no room for ifs,buts, or what-might-have-beens. Unlike college football, where seldom does a seasonpass without a dispute over which team isreally Number One, college basketball settles its championship on the court. Andsports fans will pay whatever price they mustto be there.