Thanks to the power of YouTube, I can watch the game I’m writing about during this entry of the 2020 Twelve Days of Christmas blog series. Twenty-seven years ago, I couldn’t even watch it. In fact, I didn’t see the game until I was 43 years old.
The year was 1993. I was a senior at Burlingame High School. Even though I was fairly certain I’d be attending Kansas State the following August, I was still a Missouri Tiger fan. All these years later, that hasn’t changed. After living in Kansas for most of the last 31 years, it’s what many people know me for.
That season, 1993-94, was one of a handful of magical basketball seasons for Missouri fans. A year after a disappointing 19-14 campaign that ended with a loss to Temple in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, the Tigers went undefeated in the Big Eight, won 28 games and fell one win short of the Final Four.
Along the way, Missouri won at Allen Fieldhouse and Gallagher-Iba Arena, throttled Oklahoma twice and rallied from a double-digit deficit on the road several times. And all of it came out of nowhere.
In its first game of the season, Missouri got absolutely demolished by eventual national champion Arkansas in a 52-point beating. After that clown show, my expectations were low. At best, listening to their games would be a good way to pass the time during those cold winter nights.
In those days, we didn’t have cable. We lived in Kansas, so the only Missouri games on TV were either against Kansas or Kansas State, or Saturday afternoon games on the Phillips 66 Game of the Week.
If I was going to follow a game, it was going to be on the radio. That also came with difficulty. Because we were an hour from Kansas City, which had one station carrying Mizzou broadcasts, I often struggled to get the game in, moving my radio several directions until I got a halfway decent frequency.
As much as I would have loved to watch the games, I’d grown up listening to Kevin Harlan call Missouri games from 1986 to 1989, followed by Mike Kelly, who’s still the play-by-play man 30 years later. In junior high, I’d listen as Doug Smith and Anthony Peeler, among others, battled Stacy King, Mitch Richmond and Danny Manning while shooting at the nerf goal in my brother and I’s room.
I wasn’t playing on the nerf goal by 1993, but I was still listening. If I wasn’t laying on my bed with the game on my small radio, I was driving around Burlingame listening in my car. As I often do nowadays, I made sure I could follow the game some way.
The Braggin’ Rights game is an annual tradition for Missouri and Illinois fans. Back in the day, Illinois was the Tigers’ second-biggest rival behind Kansas. The game was and is played a few days before Christmas every year. It’s been a long, running joke that the game determines if Missouri fans will have a good holiday.
It often has served as a springboard for the rest of the season. That did not appear to be the case in 1993. After being embarrassed at Arkansas, Mizzou barely beat Jackson State, SMU and Coppin State in the weeks leading up to the Dec. 22 game against Illinois, annually played in St. Louis until the COVID era (the game was in Columbia this year).
As I’d done for several years, I planned my schedule around listening to the game. We were on Christmas break, so that was easy enough. I settled in that evening hoping the game would be competitive. Illinois was ranked, Missouri was just surviving. I found a frequency, laid on my bed and hoped for the best.
Missouri got off to a slow start, but rallied behind Jevon Crudup. The Tigers led midway through the second half, then fell apart. Illinois pulled away and led by seven with one minute left. I’d accepted that they weren’t going to win and that it just wasn’t their season.
Then Mark Atkins hit a 3-pointer. And Melvin Booker, the eventual Big Eight player of the year, scored on a put-back to cut the lead to three. After a couple of Shelly Clark free throws, Atkins canned another trey. Suddenly, it was a two-point game.
Kiwane Garris hit a free throw to push the lead back to three, setting the stage for senior LaMont Frazier, who buried a 3-pointer to tie it and force overtime. By this point, I was jumping around my room, causing enough of a ruckus to wake my mother up.
Then came overtime. And then a second overtime. My hopes were dashed again at the end of the latter when Missouri was called for a foul as time expired. Garris, a 91-percent shooter, had two free throws to win the game, only needing to make one.
I can still hear the noise crackling from the radio as fans screamed during Garris’ shots. The first clanged off the rim. Fans began to scream even more loudly as he dribbled a few times before his second shot. The building erupted as his shot bounced off the back of the rim.
It became a game of attrition at that point. Both teams lost multiple players to fouls. In the third overtime, Missouri had several freshmen on the court; names like Kelly Thames, Jason Sutherland and Derek Grimm, who later became very good players in their own right.
Somehow, the Tigers won the game in triple overtime, 108-107. I remember Kelly’s description of Norm Stewart storming the sidelines, willing his team to an improbable win. Mizzou took off from there, winning 19 of the next 20 games, climbing to No. 2 in the national rankings and securing a one seed in the Big Dance.
That game was not on YouTube, at least in its entirety, until April 2020. The Missouri Athletics Department posted it a month into the pandemic, largely because no sports were being played or televised.
Even as I watch this game while typing, I can’t help but think how much more I enjoyed listening to it 27 years ago. I’m sure my wife is relieved we don’t have a nerf goal I can shoot at while listening to it in the background.
Note: A few days after writing this blog, Missouri upset No. 6 Illinois in the annual Braggin’ Rights game, brightening the Christmas season that much more in 2020.
