quote:
UCLA and Lewis Alcindor. John Wooden will never be matched, the Wizard of Westwood was genius leader and motivator.

Stopped when tournament expanded past 64. The game is garbage now.

UCLA, along with all the PCC programs of those days like Oregon, OSU, SoCal, Stanford, etc., all benefited greatly from being the biggest cheating conference in the history of college sports ... bar none, in ALL sports.

And while I agree, The Wizard was great, he really didn't become great until he started signing great players. He went a couple of decades of not being so great until the entire PCC started cheating their assess off.

Still, I remember vividly watching the Game of the Century in the Astrodome between Alcindor and Elvin Hayes ... Hayes had the advantage of the home court crowd for the National Championship, when Houston upset UCLA in that game.

But every South Carolinian old enough to remember ... we all became basketball fans when Frank McGuire arrived in 1964. I was 12 at the time, just old enough to start knowing and understanding college sports. There was no garage, no backyard, no pasture, that did not have a backboard on a wall or a tree where you did not see kids shooting hoops in this state after McGuire arrived. Which is why we still produce so many players these days ... he changed things in this state on so many levels where college basketball was concerned.

Paul Dietzel arrived a year or two later and football really took off then as well ... 1966.

When I say "took off," with regard to both sports and both coaches, it's because they both built things while here, a new arena, an expanded stadium ... the Gamecock club boomed.

But Wooden was a cheater, god bless him, and much as SoCal dominated in baseball back in those days, and Oregon in track, and SoCal in football ... the PCC was the cheatingest conference in the history of college sports and that's why they were eventually forced to disband, as a conference. Which, of course, led eventually to the formation of the PAC-8.