Still a shining moment: Reminders of Albuquerque, 1983 NCAA title game never get old for NC State star

Apr. 1—"Trees will tap dance, elephants will drive at Indy and Orson Welles will skip lunch before North Carolina State finds a way to beat Houston in the NCAA's college basketball championship game Monday night."

— Dave Kindred, Washington Post

April 4, 1983, is Groundhog Day in the life of Dereck Whittenburg. Now, at 62 — can he be 62? — he goes to work at his alma mater, North Carolina State University, and it is there, once again. Every day. Every day. Every day.

North Carolina State-Houston. The Final Four of 1983. Albuquerque. Taken separately, they are moments in time. In aggregate: the sporting definition of a miracle.

"Could this actually have just happened? It was unbelievable," former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said in Survive and Advance, a beloved ESPN documentary about the '83 N.C. State team. "Like when you're trying to give the definition of unbelievable, you say, 'State beating Houston.' That was unbelievable."

The film, which has become the It's a Wonderful Life meets Brian's Song of sports docs, has lengthened the legend by another few decades. N.C. State's win, and the place where it happened, are now in the land of well-traveled jock lore. Which begs the question: Survive and Advance? From the outside, you'd think it'd be Revive an Old Trance.

But the old story never gets old, not for Whittenburg, and maybe millions of college basketball fans who remember the first weekend of April '83 like it's a wedding anniversary, a first kiss, a moment that seemed to change everything.

Whittenburg, then a cheeky North Carolina State shooting guard whose fateful, 35-foot miss may have been the NCAA tournament's greatest hit, says the daily devotional feels as fresh now as it did on that chilly, windy Albuquerque night all those years ago.

"Something can't get old," he assesses, "when for the last 40 years somebody's reminded you about it every day of your life. I'm not sure how it could get old, you know?"

Surely, by now, you've seen the dimmed-by-time video from the wayback, playback machine: The seconds counting down, the score tied at 52, a desperate Whittenburg hoisting a game-winning attempt over Houston's defense from maybe 35 feet toward the north basket of The Pit.

There were 17,327 fans in University Arena that night, and tens of millions more in front of their TVs, most with their hearts in their throats. As the basketball looped toward the rim, only one human being was not frozen by the moment. His name was Lorenzo Charles. Stunningly, the N.C. state forward caught Whittenburg's short-by-six-inches bomb and nonchalantly dunked it past a transfixed Hakeem Olajuwon.

The rest is history, of course: Houston players falling to the ground in heartbreak, Wolfpack coach Jim Valvano running around The Pit searching for someone to hug, a sporting nation agape at how David could slay Goliath on live TV.

The city

The '83 Final Four was perhaps the rocket engine behind what is now the big business of the NCAA tournament and the even bigger business of college basketball. Oddly, Albuquerque was its launching pad, which is funny when you think about it now because the biggest games in the sport no longer are played in college arenas, let alone far-off places like New Mexico.

Today's championships are won and lost in mammoth metro areas — markets — and 70,000-seat domes. This week's Final Four will be held at NRG Stadium in Houston, which welcomed 74,000 fans the last time the event was in the city. Another change over time? Today's college players are now as likely to be on a payroll as they are in a fraternity.

So, yes, times have changed. But in the life of Whittenburg, whose final shot fell short and yet launched a legend, there are zero degrees of separation between himself and the moment, between his shot and New Mexico.

"I have not been there since, and I'm looking forward to being invited there this year," he said by telephone last week. "I'm going to call the athletic director and say, 'I'm gonna force you to bring me there as a speaker this year,' because I've got a wonderful story to tell about Albuquerque. But have I been there? No."

It may not matter, because the '83 Final Four — the drama, the ecstasy and ultimately, the tragedy of the '83 Wolfpack team — defies location.

Some of it was due to the shocking nature of the victory: Houston's 31-win ballclub, with two future NBA hall of famers and the greatest nickname in college hoops history, Phi Slama Jama, ushered in the era of the highlight. The Cougars were that good. And some of the romance was due to the irrepressible nature of the N.C. State team that entered its own conference tournament at a meek 17-10, yet kept scraping together unlikely wins in final moments to keep moving on.

Since Albuquerque, much of the legacy was kept alive by Whittenburg himself, an executive producer on 2013's Survive and Advance, which traced the arc of the '83 team and life and death of Valvano, who would succumb to cancer only 10 years after his one shining moment.

"I said this to one of my teammates today," said Whittenburg, now associate athletic director for community affairs at N.C. State. "I said that we achieved something that nobody thought could happen. And it was just the way it happened."

New Mexico, of course, had no idea it would be part of this indelible kind of history. But the Albuquerque of '83 had long battled to host the tournament, barely hanging onto the bid in the wake of the devastating Lobogate transcript-fixing scandal of the late 1970s that nearly destroyed the UNM program but not the state's love for basketball.

Then as now, the city had an inferiority complex as the nation's sporting world came to call — concerned it would be forever be branded as a junior varsity backwater if the tournament didn't come off well. Though some arriving fans had to find hotel rooms as far away as Santa Fe and Grants, and New Mexico's springtime weather on Final Four weekend was as mean and unpredictable as a rattlesnake, the tournament — and its hosts — were first class.

Earlier in the week, the Phi Slamma Jammas had commanded attention as no team has in the recent history of the Final Four. Why, the careening Cougars even stole the spotlight from the host city, where under all that howling dust and tumbling tumbleweed beats a hospitality of pure gold. Or at least of silver and turquoise.

— Curry Kirkpatrick, Sports Illustrated

The Leadup

At a good Final Four, you're lucky if the championship game is memorable. N.C. State-Houston checked that box. But a semifinal matchup between Houston and 32-win Louisville still ranks as one of the finest collegiate games ever played. Houston, with a high-flying, dunk-producing lineup that featured Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler but also four or five other players who seemed spring-loaded, finally vanquished the equally dunk-happy Cardinals, 94-81.

The Cougars' performance was so dominant against fearsome Louisville it seemed unimaginable they could lose to N.C. State, which stopped Georgia 67-60 in the other semi.

Valvano seemed stunned by the Cougars as he spoke to the nation's sport's media the day before the game, suggesting he would hold the ball for the next several decades in hopes of blunting Houston's attack. But in Survive and Advance, Whittenburg revealed there would be no such reticence when he spoke to the team before the game.

N.C. State, the team with nothing to lose, was playing to win. Valvano made sure of it.

Whittenburg now notes the pedigree of the Wolfpack, a group that had defeated the nation's best player, 7-foot-4 Virginia center Ralph Sampson, twice that March and had battled with the player who would become the greatest of all time, Michael Jordan of North Carolina, during the wars in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

"Ralph is the three-time player of the year," Whittenburg said. "They've got [Sam] Perkins over there at North Carolina and you had James Worthy the year before. You know, we had great players in that league that stayed [in college] for three and four years. So we knew how good Houston was. We respected them, but we wasn't in awe of them. We wasn't, like, fearful."

The Game

As the game began, the expected Houston blitz never developed. State held a 33-25 halftime lead, thanks in part to Wolfpack guard Terry Gannon drawing a crucial fourth foul on Drexler in the first half.

But in the second half, Houston began to move the ball to Olajuwon, the Nigerian import then known as Akeem Abdul Olajuwon (the back of his jersey simply read "Akeem"). Within a few minutes, he'd changed the game and put the Cougars on the edge of a blowout.

But at that moment, Albuquerque and its mile-high elevation chose its favorite team. Winded by New Mexico's thin air, Olajuwon tired. Houston coach Guy V. Lewis pulled him and ordered his team into a slower-paced offense the Cougars called "locomotion." The strategy proved merely loco, stymying their breakneck runs to the basket and allowing N.C. State to get back into the game in the final moments.

Unlike Olajuwon, the Wolfpack didn't seem bothered by the altitude. But maybe there's a reason. The week before, its two games at the West Regional were in Ogden, Utah, elevation 4,300 feet. That wasn't Albuquerque, but it wasn't the bayou, either.

"We were out west," Whittenburg said, "so we were somewhat acclimated to being out west."

The seconds leading up to the climactic play were not a sonnet. Twice the Cougars nearly swiped the ball. With the ball and the game in his hands, Whittenburg — undone by a surprising Houston trap — barely snatched away a would-be steal by Houston's wickedly athletic Benny Anders.

Desperate, and without a target to pass to, he let fly the potential game-winner.

The rest was ...

"The Space Shuttle From Houston crashed Monday in Albuquerque."

— Bart Ripp, Albuquerque Journal

The legacy

The dunker who grounded the greatest dunking team of all time, Lorenzo Charles, is gone. He died in 2011 when a bus he was driving crashed on Interstate 40 in Raleigh. In one of the many tear-producing moments of Survive and Advance, Whittenburg and his teammates raise a glass to the quiet kid from Brooklyn who brought down the house all those years ago.

If you were in The Pit that night, you can still see Charles dunking and Valvano running. That both are gone is a sobering reminder that for the rest of us, the clock keeps ticking to 00:00.

About the only person time seems to spare is Dereck Whittenburg. He's got a piece of The Pit's floor; he says he presented a plaque to all his surviving teammates for the 40th anniversary of the night no one can forget.

"And I can't wait to present one to Albuquerque," he says with a charge in his voice. "And when I get I get a chance to fly out there, I'm going to do it."