Watching West Virginia’s 74-63 victory over Kansas a few weeks ago at the WVU Coliseum - and then seeing WVU erase a five-point deficit with two minutes to go at Texas Tech last Saturday - got me thinking about some of the best basketball victories I’ve seen through the years.

 

The Mountaineers’ win over top-ranked Kansas will probably go down among the better wins I’ve witnessed because it was against the No. 1 team in the country, but considering how poorly Kansas played recently at Oklahoma State and the difficulties the Jayhawks have had on the road in the rough-and-tumble Big 12 this year – I will hit the pause button on this one for a while.

 

But as for these other West Virginia victories, they will stand the test of time for a variety of reasons, some obvious and some perhaps not so obvious:

 

I know Darren Collison didn’t play against West Virginia – something brought up incessantly by those covering the game – but I’m a big fan of underdogs and this underdog West Virginia team was clearly David vs. Goliath when the second-ranked UCLA Bruins came to Morgantown in 2007.

 

According to the graybeards, this game was supposed to have happened back in 1971 when the Coliseum first opened. However, John Wooden allegedly reneged on a promise he made to Red Brown to play in the new arena after Red was talked into having Bucky Waters’ team make the cross country trek out to LA in 1968 to play Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the top-ranked Bruins.

 

Wooden, probably realizing there was no way in the world he was ever going to Morgantown, West Virginia, to play a basketball game, decided to take it easy on the Mountaineers that day:

 

UCLA 95, West Virginia 56

 

Now, hit the fast forward button 39 years.

 

It’s always interesting to gauge the reaction of those from other parts of the country coming to Morgantown for the first time, and predictably, among the game stories I read from Tinsel Town following West Virginia’s 70-65 win over UCLA was one describing the morning drive from the Waterfront Hotel out to the Coliseum like something right out of the movie Apocalypse Now (“The Horror! The Horror!”).

 

Of course, that depiction of Morgantown was coming regardless of the outcome of the game, but when the Bruins lost (for a second time in a row to West Virginia, by the way!) you knew it was going to be multiplied times 10.

 

We saw it before when Sports Illustrated’s Doug Looney once got the red carpet treatment here covering a West Virginia football game in Morgantown, and then afterward unloaded every single Appalachian stereotype he could think of in his game story, or the time a wise-guy Philadelphia reporter covering the 1972 NCAA East Regional at the Coliseum wrote that the only way to get from Pittsburgh to Morgantown was by “swinging on vines.”

 

Come to think of it, back in ’72 he probably had a point, but I digress.

 

Forever etched in my mind were the big threes my hometown guy Teddy “Ballgame” Talkington from New Martinsville, West Virginia, made against all those McDonald’s All-Americans the Bruins had.

 

I sometimes wonder how that LA writer would have described the drive from Ted’s hometown over to Morgantown on Route 7, especially at night when the deer are out. Now that would have been really something!

 

This one gets a 10 out of 10 on the fun meter.

 

Three years removed from John Chaney getting tossed out of a game in Morgantown, the demonstrative Temple coach probably would have favored missing this one, too, had he known in advance the outcome of the game.

 

Also missing was Temple’s shooting accuracy, the Owls bricking 42 of their 59 shot attempts against the Mountaineers in a very rare McGonigle Hall loss. Not only did West Virginia end a long victory drought against top 10-ranked teams, but the win also came on the road against college basketball’s No. 7 team.

 

Back then road games were talked about like some sort of disease, and it didn’t matter where West Virginia went - Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Olean, Kingston, Amherst, New Brunswick … you name it – those were all roads leading to nowhere as far as Mountaineer basketball fans were concerned.

 

For a reason that now escapes me, I was on the trip that night in Philly and what occurred inside McGonigle Hall was actually not the most memorable part of the entire experience.

 

That happened afterward when the team was leaving to return to the hotel. An entire city block near the Temple campus was on fire and West Virginia coach Gale Catlett wanted to give his team a “cultural experience” by getting as close as possible to the blaze. I remember assistant coach Ron Brown even getting out of the bus and having a detailed conversation with one of the city’s first responders, as if they had nothing else better to do.

 

When he returned Brown had this update to report, “They tell me this place could be on fire for a couple of weeks!”

 

Only in Philadelphia!

 

Had it been a better basketball game, I would have easily given this one a 10 out of 10 on the pleasure meter. Still, it’s worth at least a 9.95.

 

Hometown boy Mike Gansey made good by going back to Cleveland and scoring 29 points in front of friends and family as West Virginia upset No. 2-seeded Wake Forest in the second round of the NCAA tournament.

 

Gansey, 175 pounds soaking wet, made drive after drive to the basket against those big 250-pounders Wake Forest had inside, never once backing down. The only thing missing from Gansey’s performance was a girlfriend and a marriage proposal.

 

That was the late Skip Prosser’s best Wake Forest team, led by All-American guard Chris Paul, and the Demon Deacons were probably Final Four bound if not for Gansey’s late-game heroics.

 

There were at least 10 different times during the game when it looked like West Virginia was down for the count, but the sheer will and determination of Gansey and forward Tyrone Sally, who scored 21 points on seven of eight shooting, wouldn’t let it happen.

 

We all remember what tremendous players Gansey and Kevin Pittsnogle were on those outstanding John Beilein Mountaineer teams of the mid-2000s, but people sometimes forget the key role Sally played in West Virginia’s basketball resurgence as well.

 

I recall Beilein once getting choked up - nearly to the point of tears - talking about how far Sally came as a college student toward the end of Tyrone’s senior season in 2005.

 

And if memory serves me correctly, mild-mannered Tyrone, who rarely uttered a word in anger, was one of the players Dan Dakich threated to beat up during his one week running the Mountaineer program in the spring of 2003.

 

This one also gets a 10 out of 10 on the pleasure meter.

 

I had a high school coach who used to quote obscure statistics sometimes when he wanted to make a point to his team. Once, after losing a game because of some boneheaded mistakes we made, he got up in front of everyone and declared, “There are 100 million illiterate people in this country … AND ONE!” he said, looking directly at the team’s biggest offender.

 

When he left the room, the kid he was talking to looked around and asked, “I wonder who the hell he was talking about?”

 

When West Virginia faced Kentucky in the 2010 NCAA Tournament East Regional finals, every conceivable statistic involving the two teams pointed to a Wildcat blowout victory.

 

Before the game, I remember picking up the massive Kentucky basketball fact book the school put out on the press table and thinking the thing was thicker than a New York City phone book, for those of you old enough to remember what phone books are.

 

On Kentucky’s roster that year was the No. 1 player taken in the 2010 NBA draft (John Wall), the No. 5 player taken in the 2010 NBA draft (DeMarcus Cousins), the No. 14 player taken in the 2010 NBA draft (Patrick Patterson), the No. 18 player taken in the 2010 NBA draft (Eric Bledsoe) and the No. 29 player taken in the 2010 NBA draft (Daniel Orton).

 

The Wildcats beat their opponents by an average of 15 points per game and had lost just twice, at South Carolina and at No. 17 Tennessee, heading into the West Virginia game. In fact, I remember running into one West Virginia reporter (who shall remain nameless) in the media room before the game and he remarked, “West Virginia doesn’t have a chance against these guys tonight.”

 

Well, nobody told Joe Mazzulla how good Kentucky was, the guard scoring 17 points mostly on drives to the basket against players twice his size; nobody told Da’Sean Butler how good Kentucky was, the forward scoring 18 points – 12 of those coming from three-point range; and nobody told Devin Ebanks how good Kentucky was, the 6-9 point-forward’s defense out on the perimeter a major reason why Kentucky’s guards shot just 4 of 32 from behind the arc for the game.

 

Incidentally, the stats I just cited are not obscure, or ficitious; just look them up - something we were always too lazy to do when we were in high school.

 

This one gets a 10 out of 10 on the fun meter.

 

This was the game that changed the way people in the state perceived women’s sports at West Virginia University.

 

Occasionally, you would hear some of the older WVU women’s coaches talking about the day they were going to fill up the 14,000-seat Coliseum for their games, the male coaches within earshot doing everything in their power to suppress their laughter.

 

Back then, women’s teams were lucky to get 1,000 fans in the gym for their biggest home games.

 

Well, in 1992 Kittie Blakemore finally did it.

 

The entire state was behind her women’s basketball team that season, the Mountaineers winning 25 regular season games, making their first-ever appearance in the top 25 and having a star player in All-American guard Rosemary Kosiorek.

 

Enthusiasm had reached such a point that the school hastily assembled a radio network to cover the team’s postseason run, with legendary “Voice of the Mountaineers” Jack Fleming describing the action.

 

The Mountaineers’ one-point victory over Clemson came as a result of Jodie Runner’s short jump shot in the lane in the game’s waning seconds. The team was mobbed on the floor by a large contingent of WVU students who made up the 8,268 in attendance that night.

 

The Clemson game demonstrated the far-reaching potential of women’s sports in the state, and for that reason it was probably the most important women’s sporting event in West Virginia University history.

 

One other thing I remember about this game happened the night before during a reception with the Tigers at one of the local hotels. Clemson’s radio announcer gave us a nice little dissertation about the need to change our school logo from the Flying WV to something more recognizable.

 

His suggestion was some sort of emblem like the Tiger paw they use. I'm not kidding.

 

Now, wrap your paws around that one for a few minutes.

 

This one gets a 10 out of 10 on the fun meter, too.

 

If you ever want to needle West Virginia coach Bob Huggins, just mention George Washington guard Pat Tallent, who used to wear out the Mountaineers in the mid-1970s, or the 1998 NCAA tournament second round game against Huggins’ Bearcat team in Boise, Idaho.

 

By the late 1990s, Cincinnati had become a fixture in the NCAA tournament and another deep run in postseason play was expected from the Bearcats in ‘98. West Virginia, meanwhile, had not reached the NCAA tournament Sweet 16 since JFK was president, so getting past Cincinnati was a pretty big deal to Mountaineer hoops fans.

 

It was also a big deal to WVU coach Gale Catlett, who once coached at Cincinnati and was going up against one of the hot, young coaching names in the profession, an alumnus of West Virginia no less.

 

Ask Huggins or any of his Cincinnati players about Jarrod West’s game winning basket, a 30-foot bank shot from straight away, and they will swear that Kenyon Martin got a piece of the ball during its flight toward the rim.

 

Had Martin not touched the basketball, they maintain, West’s shot would have clanked off the backboard with volcanic force.

 

Eighteen years later, you can ask any West Virginia fan about West’s shot and it’s still a swish in their book.

 

As for Catlett, go look at the video of him celebrating West’s game winner on YouTube the next time you have a few minutes to spare. The 58-year-old coach gave a fist pump and you can actually see a little bit of air between his shoes and the floor when he jumped.

 

His teammates swear the Cat never jumped that high when he was a Mountaineer player back in 1963, which was also the last time WVU reached the Sweet 16 before beating Cincinnati.

 

I only give this one a 9.9 out of 10 on the fun meter because I like Huggs.

 

There are a lot of people I know who can’t say anything good at all about Duke. Perhaps it is the result of the phenomenal success Mike Kryzyewski has had, or the incessant pandering Dick Vitale has done on Duke’s behalf through the years.

 

Whatever it is that bothers people about Duke it never really affected me because I’ve always been pretty good at tuning things out, starting with the wife constantly reminding me to take the garbage out on Thursday nights.

 

However, the Dukies were even starting to getting under my skin a little bit when West Virginia played them at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., in an NCAA tournament second-round game in 2008.

 

We were still familiarizing ourselves with Bob Huggins at the time, so when Duke jumped out to an early double-digit lead, thoughts of spring football were already starting to set in. Then Joe Alexander took over in the paint, Alex Ruoff got hot from the outside and Joe Mazzulla slapped the floor before getting down in his defensive stance to mock Duke’s guards.

 

What Mazzulla did provided a shot of adrenaline for everyone wearing the Gold and Blue.

 

West Virginia outscored Duke 44-33 in the second half to knock the Blue Devils out of the NCAA tournament much earlier than their obnoxious fans had anticipated.

 

It was also enjoyable seeing the Richard Nixon of college basketball – Greg Paulus – miss shot after shot from the floor.

 

Speaking of Nixon, don’t ever forget this little Duke factoid: Nixon graduated with honors from Duke Law. So the next time you are around a Blue Devil fan and you are running out of ammo, just bring up Richard Nixon’s Duke Law degree and that will shut them up.

 

This one also gets a 10 out 10 on the fun meter.

 

See you at tonight’s K-State game!