Loyola and Hank Gathers

Jerry Tarkanian

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 | 10:36 a.m.

Many people have asked me about that Hank Gathers team at Loyola Marymount, and it’s appropriate to talk about that with the NCAA tournament right around the corner.

Before we played them in 1990 for the right to go to the Final Four, I was cheering like hell for them. I wanted Loyola to win so badly, but my assistants wanted Alabama to beat Loyola.

They didn’t want to play Loyola. I said, Man, I want to play Loyola real bad. I thought Alabama was really good, but the Tide lost that game, 62-60, because they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, attack that press.

They’d get through a 2-on-1 or a 3-on-1, and hold the ball. Their games were low scoring.

Two weeks earlier, Gathers tragically died two hours after collapsing during a West Coast Conference tournament game. His teammate and good friend Bo Kimble shot free throws with his left hand in memory of Hank.

The night Loyola beat Alabama, I went to our hotel and – Lois can verify this … I never talked of us winning. Never. In any game. But I said, Unless something goes wrong, we’re going to kill Loyola.

Lois said, Never say that! Don’t talk like that! But I thought we couldn’t lose. They’d full-court press us and they thought they could out-run us. It wasn’t a man press, it was a zone press.

Larry Johnson took it out, as far as making the inbounds pass after they made a basket, all year for us. He made good decisions. His first pass was high to David Butler. Nobody was as tall as David. Larry always threw perfect passes.

Then David would kick it to Greg Anthony, and Anderson Hunt and Stacey Augmon ran the lanes. We had them down 30 points at the half and won, 131-101.

A week later we beat Duke for the national title in Denver.

Stacey scored something like 36 against Loyola and Anderson had about 32. Layups. And they never came out of the press. No way they could beat us.

They couldn’t press us and they couldn’t pretend like they could, unless something really went wrong. It was the most confidence I’ve ever had going into a game.

I remember on the bus, there was no talking. We’d go to a game, and there never, ever was talking on the bus. But we went by the hotel where Loyola was staying and Greg Anthony shouts out, We’re going to wake them up!

Loyola was living the dream. That was their motto all along. Greg said we’re going to bring them out of that dream and wake them up. We really did.

They had a center from the Bay Area who said we recruited him. He didn’t want to go to UNLV, he said, because he wanted to go to Loyola. But we never recruited him.

Anyway, he said Loyola thinks it can run with us. But it’s like a fighter. A fighter think he can fight, but once he gets into the ring he finds out he can’t last the whole way.

Someone asked Larry Johnson about that. He said, “They can’t last more than two or three rounds,” something like that. “I used to be a fighter and nobody went past the second round with me.” I loved that statement from Larry.

I didn’t really know Hank. Their coach, Paul Westhead, was a good guy. Their whole thing was letting you score and beating you back down court and hitting 3-point shots.

Well, you know, we were running all year and didn’t want to change our game. We weren’t going to slow our game because we were playing Loyola.

In the second round in Long Beach, Loyola beat Michigan, the defending NCAA champion, 149-115. That shook up the whole country.

It shook my assistants. They really wanted to play Alabama, which had upset Arizona in the second round and had Robert Horry. They had some players.

But we were a solid team. We weren’t a gimmick team. We didn’t beat anyone with gimmicks. We just beat them by playing basketball. We were solid all around.

We were a great running team, we could play in the half court and we were so unselfish, and it was a great defensive team.

It was so tragic about Hank.

We beat Loyola, 102-91, in the Preseason NIT earlier that season at our place in Larry’s first game at UNLV. We would have beaten them in the NCAAs, anyway. They couldn’t have beaten us with the type of defense they played.

I’ll talk more about the tournament next time. By the way, I’ll be at the sports book at the Palazzo for the first round.