News & Events

Tuesday, November 11, 2008
by: John Paquette

In 1989, the NCAA Championship slipped away from the Pirates by the closest of margins. A look back at the drama of that momentous season.

It can't be 20 years since Seton Hall made it to the Final Four, can it? Twenty years since the Pirates played in the national championship game and lost 80-79 in overtime to Michigan? Since P.J. Carlesimo, the coach with the beard, led the team from the basement to the penthouse, capturing the hearts of New Jersey and the fancy of the college basketball world?
 
Yes, it has been 20 years. Some of today's students weren't even born when the greatest basketball season in Seton Hall history was played. But a lot of Pirate fans remember, and were part of the frenzy. Here is how it happened.
 
A season of optimism
As an assistant athletic director and the team's media liaison, I was fortunate enough to be an insider. The three-week ride in the NCAA Tournament was the craziest time of my professional life, and the most fun.
 
The Final Four season was so amazing on many levels.
 
“Seton Hall's magic run in 1989 was like an ongoing fairy tale,” said Michael Tranghese, who was the associate commissioner for the BIG EAST Conference at the time. (He became commissioner a year later.) “Every time they won, you kept thinking back to where they had been just a few years earlier. It remains as one of the great stories in BIG EAST history.”
 
Reporters who witnessed the team's good nights after what seemed like an endless string of bad nights also were pulled in.
 
“It's still the most fun I've had professionally covering a team,” said Tom Luicci, who reported on the Pirates for The Star-Ledger in Newark. “You didn't want it to end. And for a team that had not had a lot of success, they handled it really well.”
 
The season started with some optimism, but not a barrelful. The Pirates were coming off a 22-13 year and their first NCAA bid in school history. It was quite an accomplishment for a team that finally had started to climb after seasons of mediocrity.
 
Still, most college basketball observers were ready to dismiss the team. Preseason prognosticators had the Pirates in the lower half of the BIG EAST standings, and conference coaches ranked Seton Hall seventh out of nine teams.
 
But Seton Hall's coaches and players felt differently.
 
“All of the guys spent that summer doing the extra work, the extra training,” said John Morton, the team's standout guard. “We were excited that we made the NCAAs and we wanted it to continue. I never played on a team with so much good chemistry.”
 
Tough competition
The season opened in November at the Great Alaska Shootout. The Pirates won their opener over Utah, then knocked off Kentucky and defending NCAA champion Kansas to win the Shootout title. “Walking away from Alaska, I thought, wow, we're going to be good,” said Bruce Hamburger, an assistant coach.
 
In December, the Pirates went to New Orleans and won the Sugar Bowl Classic, defeating Virginia and DePaul with relative ease.
 
The Hall was 12-0, and becoming a hot story. On Jan. 3, Pirate fans filled the Meadowlands arena to capacity for the first time as Seton Hall hosted Georgetown. The team responded with a 94-86 win. “Selling out the Meadowlands was something that a lot of people said we could never do,” said Larry Keating, the athletic director.
 
The Pirates handled the regular BIG EAST season with talent and maturity, finishing in second place with an 11-5 record. Carlesimo was named BIG EAST Coach of the Year for a second straight season, and center Ramon Ramos was named All-BIG EAST First Team and won the conference scholar-athlete award.
 
Seton Hall advanced to the conference semifinals before losing to Syracuse 81-78, they awaited their second NCAA invitation. The Pirates were 26-6 and ranked 11th in the nation at the time.
 
The NCAA Tournament odyssey began in Tucson, Ariz., where the Pirates defeated Southwest Missouri State 60-51 and Evansville 87-73. Everyone notices when you win NCAA games, but Seton Hall was still floating under the national radar.
 
The next stop was Denver for the West Regionals to face Indiana and legendary coach Bobby Knight. Undaunted, the Pirates won 78-65 in convincing fashion.
 
Next up were the UNLV Runnin' Rebels and Coach Jerry Tarkanian, who had the best career coaching record in the nation. Seton Hall held only a four-point lead at halftime, but pulled away in the second half for an 84-61 triumph.
 
The Pirates had just handed Indiana and UNLV their worst NCAA Tournament losses ever, and incredibly, were headed to Seattle for the Final Four.
 
National attention
Seton Hall was due in Seattle just four days later, so it was decided the team would spend a couple of days in Santa Monica, Calif., instead of trekking back to New Jersey. The team decided to let its regular beat reporters know where they would be staying, if the writers agreed not to divulge which hotel.
 
It was a nice plan, but the news was out, and the national media latched on to the Pirates story. The phone in my hotel room rang off the hook for three days.
 
A hotel operator actually called to say he was happy I was checking out.
 
“Every step along the way, the players were so poised and not fazed by what was happening around them,” said Joe Quinlan, who was an assistant Seton Hall athletic director at the time. (He now has the top post.) “We had our academic advisers with us. We had the media attention and, of course, the games. The kids just did what they needed to do.”
 
So much had happened in just a few weeks. Now, the Final Four was here, and there were the Pirates taking the floor in the spacious Kingdome to meet Duke on college basketball's biggest stage.
 
The first several minutes of the game were a nightmare, as Duke exploded to a 26-8 lead. After all the Pirates had accomplished, was it really going to end like this?
 
The answer was a resounding “no.” During a timeout, Carlesimo told his team to forget about the score and just keep playing. It seemed like an impossible charge, but it worked. Led by guard Gerald Greene, the Pirates would not die. They chipped away and cut the deficit to 38-33 by halftime.
 
In many ways, Greene epitomized Seton Hall's rise to prominence. As a freshman and sophomore, he and his teammates absorbed the body blows of BIG EAST competition on a regular basis. Greene, who grew up in Brooklyn, helped the team to a National Invitation Tournament bid as a sophomore, and to the school's first NCAA bid as a junior. Now, he was keeping the Pirates afloat with his talent and his spirit.
 
Seton Hall wore down the Blue Devils in the second half, scoring an amazing 62 points and pulling away for a comfortable 95-78 win. Forwards Andrew Gaze, the Australian Olympian, and Daryll Walker, the steady New York City native, led the way with 20 and 19 points, respectively.
 
Seton Hall was headed to the national championship game. Michigan, fresh from its victory over Illinois, would be the opponent, led by All-American forward Glen Rice.
 
This was college basketball's ultimate game, and Seton Hall would be in it.
 
So close, and yet . . .
The Pirates arrived at the Kingdome late that afternoon and went through their usual pre-game routine. Carlesimo had a practice of walking through the media room before the game to talk to the Pirates local beat reporters.
 
The routine had resulted in wins, so Carlesimo wasn't going to change anything. The national media was wide-eyed, not believing a coach would take time to make casual conversation with reporters before playing for the national championship.
 
The Michigan game started a little like the Duke game. The Pirates fell behind early, then closed the gap until they were down just 37-32 at halftime. Seton Hall grabbed the lead with 2:13 to go, and at the end of regulation play the teams were tied at 71 points each.
 
The Pirates still had gas in their tank for overtime play, as John Morton nailed a goosebump 3-point shot that put Seton Hall ahead 79-76. But at the end, it was a fateful foul call with three seconds left that allowed a Michigan guard named Rumeal Robinson to sink two free throws.
 
The run was over. Michigan had won, 80-79.
 
Morton, by the way, finished with 35 points. No player has scored that many points in a national championship game since that day.
 
After the game, the Pirates would not blame the foul call for their defeat. Their perspective was incredible for a group of college players who had come so close winning the national championship.
 
Greene may have said it best after the game: “It's disappointing to come this far and lose, especially the way we lost. It hurts. But you've got to remember how far we've come. Four years ago no one thought we had a chance at anything like this.”
 
It's been 20 years now. And we remember that chance. It's quite a memory.
 
We're out of space and there are still so many things about the Final Four year that we didn't get to. Like the huge welcome for the team by thousands of Pirate fans at the Recreation Center. And the parade for the team on South Orange Avenue a few days later. (Yes, it really did happen on South Orange Avenue.) Or the Mass in the desert in Arizona. But those stories will have to wait, maybe until the next anniversary of the greatest season in Seton Hall basketball history.
 
John Paquette is associate commissioner of the BIG EAST conference. He worked at Seton Hall as an assistant athletic director from 1986 to 1990.

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