SI Vault: 1979 Sooners article

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http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1094703/index.htm

if this has been posted before, ?.



Buffalo, N.Y.? Deerfield Beach, Fla.? Lima, Ohio? Bloomington, Indianapolis and Merrillville, Ind.? Why, those can't be the hometowns of Oklahoma Sooners. Sooners are supposed to come from places like Hooks, Texas or Dallas, or right there at home in Norman. And they run a wishbone, not a fast break. And win Heisman Trophies, not basketball games. Wrong.

Aaron Curry, Al Beal, John McCullough, Terry Stotts, Raymond Whitley and Cary Carrabine came from those un-Soonerlike places, and they play basketball. Played it well enough, in fact, from November through February to win 17 games and give Oklahoma its first Big Eight championship in 30 years. And then last week in Kansas City, just to show that the regular-season title was no fluke, Oklahoma came into Kemper Arena arid won the Big Eight postseason championship as well.

The regular-season championship notwithstanding, few folks figured the Sooners had a chance. After all, Big Eight basketball supremacy belonged to Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri, which had divvied up every title since 1966. Then there was the fact that even though Oklahoma had 10 Big Eight wins, the Sooners had split with Missouri and had been beaten twice by Kansas. Moreover, Missouri, Kansas and Kansas State had young teams that were improving week to week.

"Traditionally, the league is thought of as those three," said Dave Bliss, the Oklahoma coach. "But there's parity now because a while ago the football schools realized that they could make money in basketball." Indeed, new facilities have been built recently at Oklahoma, Colorado, Iowa State and Nebraska, enabling former Big Eight basketball have-nots to upgrade programs and attract quality recruits who might have looked elsewhere.

Bliss, 35, a prot�g� of Indiana's Bobby Knight, is largely responsible for Oklahoma's success. He came to Norman from Indiana four years ago, so steeped in Knight's beliefs that his conversation is still sprinkled with phrases such as "I learned this from Bobby" or "Knight taught me this." Ten years ago, when Bliss was a freshman coach at Cornell, Knight phoned him and persuaded him to join the Army so that he could work with Knight as an assistant at West Point. But after basic training at Fort Dix, Bliss unexpectedly received orders to report to quartermaster school at Fort Lee, Va. After a frantic call to Knight, the orders were countermanded and Bliss was off to West Point. As a taskmaster, Bliss rates himself about knee high to Knight. But then, Bliss has angrily ejected a player from practice "for playing like a patsy" on more than one occasion. And early this season, thinking that his players appeared a bit out of shape, he summoned them at 6 a.m. one day for a brisk four-mile run. "The main thing I learned from Bobby," he says, "is that good players take you farther."

Indeed, good players have taken Oklahoma a far piece. And they had to come from pretty far away to do it. Of Bliss' six regulars, none grew up any closer to Norman than Bloomington, Ind., 800 miles distant. The roster lists no one from the state of Oklahoma. Stotts, a 6'8" dead-eye shooter who averages 15 points a game, is the Bloomington player. Or at least he played there for two years. As a high school sophomore, Stotts played in Guam, where his father coaches basketball at the university. Beal, the center, is a 6'9", 215-pound package from Deerfield Beach, with hands dangling near his knees and legs that give leap a new meaning in Big Eight basketball. The guards are Curry, from Buffalo, an ace defender; Carrabine, from Merrillville, a three-year starter switched to sixth man this season; and Raymond Whitley, from Indianapolis, who forced Carrabine to the bench. At point guard, Whitley orchestrates the four-corner offense and handles the press with a quickness that belies the fact that he is 6'3" and was a standout forward at Manual High. Back then, both Indiana and North Carolina State people visited him often, but Whitley discovered that Knight and Norm Sloan had more desirable recruits. "They jacked him around," Bliss says. "I needed him badly and told him with us he'd play right away."

McCullough, from Lima, and the leading Sooner scorer the past three seasons, was scarcely recruited. Five years ago Bliss was scouting a blue-chipper named Butch Carter for Knight. Carter was a natural, but Bliss couldn't help notice McCullough diving after loose balls even though his team was behind by 30 points. He is a career 49% shooter, the Big Eight MVP and Oklahoma's No. 3 alltime scorer behind Alvan Adams and Don Sidle.

In the semifinals, McCullough canned seven of 10 shots and all five Oklahoma starters were in double figures as the Sooners beat Kansas State 72-68. It was their fourth win over the Wildcats this season, a landmark of sorts because it was the first time in Jack Hartman's nine years at Kansas State that the Wildcats failed to beat each conference team at least once. "I'm happy just to be in the final," Bliss said. "There's not a hair of difference between the four of us."

In the other semifinal, Kansas eliminated Missouri 76-73, silencing critics who had been groaning all year that the Jayhawks had peaked in the preseason polls. With an all-conference guard in Darnell Valentine, and 7'1" Center Paul Mokeski, who had outplayed UCLA's David Greenwood in last year's Western Regional, Kansas had been picked high by both the AP and UPI. Obviously the pollsters were also impressed with Coach Ted Owens' much-publicized follow-the-sun recruiting trip last March in which, by utilizing a Learjet, he signed blue-chip recruits Tony Guy in Maryland, David Magley in Indiana and Mark Snow in California in a single day. But right off, the chemistry went sour. With five seniors gone, the new faces and the old did not blend well. Valentine concentrated on shooting and the fast break, and Mokeski all too often was far from the action. Over a dismal stretch in December and January, the Jayhawks lost six of 11, including one game by 23 points at Oklahoma and three of four in the conference, which dropped them into seventh place.

But following a 96-69 loss at Kansas State, Owens cracked down, ordering Valentine to stop forcing fast breaks and feed the ball to Mokeski. As a result, Mokeski's rebounding improved vastly, his scoring went from 10 a game to more than 17 and the team shooting percentage soared. Kansas won eight of its last 12 games, three of the losses coming by two points each. And among the wins was a 74-62 victory over Oklahoma. No wonder Kansas fans poured into Kemper Arena expecting a championship.
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But it was not to be. Beal dominated the boards and Oklahoma drilled in 52% of its shots from the floor. With 8:07 left, Kansas trailed by just 59-53, thanks largely to Mokeski's scrambling for points underneath and torrid outside shooting by Magley, who finished with 16 points. But then Whitley drove for a basket that made it 61-53, Beal slam-dunked off a lob feed from McCullough and Kansas was finished. Whitley scored 22 points, broke the Kansas press wide open and was mainly responsible for holding Valentine to seven points. Beal had 23 points, 22 rebounds and five blocked shots. With :06 left, it was 80-65 and Bliss jumped to his feet, arms raised high, and spun excitedly toward the bench. "We...are...the...Big...Eight...champs," he yelled, pausing between words.

True, even if he had to go outside the Big Eight to pull it off.
 
It was their fourth win over the Wildcats this season, a landmark of sorts because it was the first time in Jack Hartman's nine years at Kansas State that the Wildcats failed to beat each conference team at least once.

we used to be God.
 
I've got that issue somewhere. That was during my junior year at OU. I knew most of those guys, including the coaches. I was in Bliss' Theory of Basketball class that semester also.

While none of those guys made it big in the NBA, they were successful in various walks of life. McCullough has done fairly well in college coaching, both for men's teams and women's teams, and Stotts did coach in the NBA for a time.

I also have a couple of those '79 games on tape (the OU-KSU game to end the regular season, which OU won to clinch the regular season title outright; and the OU-Texas game from the NCAA tournament). Even 30 years later, it's still fun to relive those moments - especially the KSU home finale. Many of us students rushed the court and celebrated with the team.

About the only downer since then is trying to figure out what became of Bliss in his older age. The guy I knew from my student days is not the same guy who pulled what he did at Baylor.
 
About the only downer since then is trying to figure out what became of Bliss in his older age. The guy I knew from my student days is not the same guy who pulled what he did at Baylor.

that's what my dad said. he was a big fan of Bliss back then and we still have the season tickets in LE3 my dad bought when he was just out of law school and i was a wee pup. i remember that year, and i actually remember reading that SI back as a kid when i read SI religiously, even though i was 8 maybe. i put up the DO sportpage pics of the win over KSU and Mizzou on my wall in my room.

Bliss had some good teams at SMU as well.
 
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that's what my dad said. he was a big fan of Bliss back then and we still have the season tickets in LE3 my dad bought when he was just out of law school and i was a wee pup. i remember that year, and i actually remember reading that SI back as a kid when i read SI religiously, even though i was 8 maybe. i put up the DO sportpage pics of the win over KSU and Mizzou on my wall in my room.

Bliss had some good teams at SMU as well.


I have a commemorative glass from the '79 season. It has reproductions of some of the newspaper headlines and photos from that year. I wish I could remember where I got it.

Bliss used to make personal appearances at frat houses and dorms when he was at OU, to drum up interest. At one of the student gatherings in my freshman year, he asked if anyone had attended an OU-Texas game in '75-76 (when neither team was very good). Someone raised their hand, and he reached into his wallet and gave them a refund. He made it to my frat house every year that I was there.

Sometimes I think he started compromising his original ethics while at SMU - even though they never got busted for basketball. At UNM, he had some really good teams also, but he never really won over a segment of the fan base that loved basketball coach/pornstar lookalike Norm Ellenberger. Never mind that Ellenberger's massive cheating almost got them the death penalty in 1980. To some, he was "doing what needed to be done." Sometimes I think Bliss saw how beloved the slimy Ellenberger was and started thinking maybe it was worth the risk to bend a few rules.

It didn't help that he got crosswise with many writers here (and some of those clowns loved Ellenberger as well) in his first season. One local hack, in particular, just relished trying to run him out of town - and he finally got his wish in '99. Same guy (and some of his "old guard" compadres) just had a field day with the Baylor stuff. They also had an ally in one of the players he inherited in '88, a Spicoli-type slacker, who pretty much danced on the grave of Patrick Dennehy because it "got" Bliss.

Still, I can't believe the same guy who graduated almost all of his players at OU and who had such good guys (with a couple of exceptions) in the program at OU let himself turn into someone who pulled what he did in Waco.
 
On a happier note, I loved this pull-quote from the article. I remember seeing Whitley torch the much-hated (in Norman) Valentine in January of '79 also:

"Whitley scored 22 points, broke the Kansas press wide open and was mainly responsible for holding Valentine to seven points. " :clap
 
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