Virginia beat duke 109-66 in the 1983 ACC tournament. After the game UVA Coach Terry Holland complained that Jay Bilas threw an elbow at Ralph Sampson. Coach K said that it was Sampson who threw the elbow and what’s more, it was bad form to bitch about it after your team won by 43 points. As John Feinstein wrote in A March to Madness, Coach K vowed to “never forget” that loss and then proceeded to beat Virginia 16 straight times over the course of following seven years.
So maybe when Coach K complained about the court storming after the game he was feeling a bit of that history, but I think his point is apt. It is dangerous for the losing team and the fans (anyone who remember’s Kermit Washington’s punch knows how dangerous very large, adrenaline-filled athletes can be) particularly when the team involved is as unpopular as Duke.
And is it really a court storming occasion for any major conference team to win a regular season game against anyone save the Miami Heat? The act almost always seems desparate these days, a self-conscious admission of inferiority made spastically explicit. Just as players need to act like they’ve been there before when they do unremarkable things (like score), so do fans.
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