Here’s hoping Tubby returns Tech to backboard-breaking days

Published 4:05 pm Wednesday, April 3, 2013

“Oh, look at Ham! That’s one way to bring the house down! Bring the rim down!”

— CBS announcer’s call during 1996 Texas Tech vs. North Carolina Round of 32 NCAA Tournament game.

Ask a Texas Tech men’s basketball fan what their favorite memory is and many will immediately recall Ham’s backboard breaking dunk.

Darvin Ham forever put Texas Tech on ‘Best of’ lists with this memorable glass shattering play vs. North Carolina in the second round of the 1996 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

I know I will never forget it.

I was a junior at Tech that year. The Red Raiders had amassed a 30-2 record, Southwest Conference championship and top-three seed in the NCAA Tournament.

Tech went on to lose to Allen Iverson and Georgetown in the Sweet 16, but it almost didn’t matter. Tech basketball had arrived on the national scene and nothing could change that.

We were VERY wrong.

Since that memorable year of 1996, the Red Raiders have had five head coaches (James Dickey, Bob Knight, Pat Knight, Billy Gilispie, Chris Walker) and made the NCAA tournament four times — all of them under Bob Knight.

Tournament wins combined?

— Three.

So, when new Texas Tech basketball coach Tubby Smith talks about regularly getting the Red Raiders to the NCAA Tournament, pardon me if I feel a little giddy.

Smith comes to Lubbock after being the head men’s coach at Minnesota. In six seasons with the Gophers, he led them to three NCAA Tournament appearances and achieved the program’s first tournament win this year since 1997.

He was fired.

Apparently Minnesota athletic director Norwood Teague felt that wasn’t good enough to keep his job.

Uh … Coach Smith, if you can reproduce that at Texas Tech, fans might want to erect a statue in front of United Spirit Arena in your honor.

That is how much we thirst for a competitive men’s basketball team.

I haven’t even mentioned Smith’s career coaching record yet, which like Bobby Knight before him, makes me wonder how Tech was able to coax him to coming to the South Plains of Texas.

Like Knight, Smith has won a national championship (1998). In 22 years of coaching at Tulsa, Georgia, Kentucky and Minnesota, his teams have made the NCAA Tournament 17 times!

Yes, interim coach Chris Walker was put in an impossible situation with the resignation in September of Billy Gillispie. Walker did what he could; the Red Raiders finishing 11-20 overall and 3-15 in Big 12 play.

But now Smith is in the captain’s seat and there is a buzz around Texas Tech. Smith has turned around programs before, and unlike Gillispie, whose act of stretching NCAA regulations by exceeding practice times and alienating his players wore thin with Gillispie ultimately resigning.

Turning back the clock to 1996, a week before Ham’s dunk I remember counting down the seconds in a sold-out Reunion Arena in Dallas as Texas Tech survived a second-half three-point assault from Texas’ Reggie Freeman (finished with six of them, 32 points) to defeat the Longhorns and win the final Southwest Conference men’s title after also clinching the regular-season title.

Tech hasn’t done that since. The Red Raiders reached the finals of the Big 12 tourney in 2005. But that’s it.

Smith has the unenviable task of turning around a Tech team that has gone 13-55 in Big 12 play since 2010.

But quotes like this are bringing me back to 1996.

“We expect to (make the NCAA Tournament) as well,” Smith said. “It’s my goal to build this program into one of the top programs, not just in the Big 12, but in the country.”

Music to my ears.