WE see the same scenes year after year, March after March, and it can be easy to grow immune to them. CBS trains its cameras on a handful of basketball teams, and we get to be Big Brother, watching their reactions. The small schools always respond joyously. The top seeds play it cool. The spurned shake their heads.
And then there was Sunday night, with 64 of the 65 teams already announced, when Greg Gumbel revealed the final invite. And it was a few seconds later when we saw the first true upset of March. We saw the Baylor Bears looking as happy, as triumphant, as any team will across the next three weeks, including the ones who’ll cut down nets and hoist trophies.
“It’s like when you’re a parent, and you see your sons and your daughters acting happy,” Baylor coach Scott Drew said yesterday, his voice still landscaped by his own celebrations. “That’s what gets you the most.”
We hear all the time about how sports, and how this tournament, is a haven for redemption, for second chances. Baylor proves that. Because there never may have been a team, or a school, that suffered such profound self-inflicted wounds.
And lived to tell about it. Lived to thrive, in fact.
“The great thing,” said Drew, “is that when you have so much work to do at a place, the way we had so much work to do here, you can never worry about second-guessing yourself because your time is so monopolized, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
The wreckage Drew inherited when he left Valparaiso in the summer of 2003 was so vast, so repulsive, that few could understand why he’d even consider the job.
Former coach Dave Bliss had overseen one of the most surreal collegiate calamities of all time. One player, Patrick Dennehy, had been murdered. Another player, Carlton Dotson, wound up pleading guilty to the killing, and is serving 35 years. And then it turned out Bliss, one of the real beauties to ever work a sideline, had tried to engineer a cover-up, painting Dennehy as a drug dealer, a scam that unfurled when an assistant taped the whole sinister plot.
There isn’t another school that can point to that kind of apocalypse, not St. John’s with Mike Jarvis’ unscrupulous reign, not St. Bonaventure and its welding-certificate/player walk- out exacta, not even SMU football, which had its season canceled in 1987 and still hasn’t recovered 21 years later.
The NCAA considered a death-penalty judgment against Baylor, wound up forcing the Bears to cancel its entire non-conference schedule two seasons ago. The day that news broke, on June 28, 2005, is the day Drew remembers as rock- bottom. He’d already tried to clear the graveyard of the ghosts, he’d recruited kids willing to buy into his fresh approach, and now they were forced to pay for Bliss’ sins, all of them.
“Telling our guys, having to look them in the eye, that was the worst of it,” said Drew, who developed his coaching chops working under his father, Homer, at Valpo. “That put us so far behind that by the time we did start playing it was like having to open your Christmas presents in February and then being disappointed with what you got.”
In some ways, that 4-13 record might have been just as astonishing as the 21-10 mark they have now.
Now here they are, just two years later, a No. 11 seed, a date Thursday with Purdue in the West Region. They are led by guard Curtis Jerrells, one of six regulars who go back to that abbreviated 2005-06 season, who knew all about the darkness. And now get to see what the other side looks like. They aren’t the best team in the brackets. But they are the best story.
“I don’t see how anybody outside could totally appreciate how devastated and how far down it was here,” former Baylor football coach Grant Teaff said earlier this winter, and he’s right.
But now everyone can see the Bears rise. Before the first ball has been tipped, the tournament has its first winner.