It’s not always winners you recall
One of the nifty elements at any state basketball tournament are the occasional halftime introductions of championship teams from 25 years ago.
This year, as has been the case the last three years, the boys from Albuquerque Academy will stand at the center of Bob King Court, as their 1992 group is commemorated.
Having covered all six of Academy’s championship teams extensively, from 19891994, there always will be fond memories of that dynasty, and of the players and coaches who made it possible.
But this year, in particular, I won’t be thinking as much about those 1992 Chargers as I will the team Academy beat in the final that day: The Zuni Thunderbirds. Here today, on the eve of this year’s second week of the playoffs, I want to tell you about the one team — regardless of sport or gender — that has lingered with me more than any other in my entire career. And that is Zuni. Let my try and explain. You have to understand first off, in the early 1990s, how state tournament brackets were arranged. Ten teams qualified — the top two teams from each of five districts. There were two pre-playoff games — one of them involving Academy, which didn’t even win its district that season in what was then Class 3A, the second-largest division.
The state took four of the five district runners-up (this was done on a rotating basis from year to year) and assigned them to the play-in games. If memory serves, those teams, and those games, weren’t even officially considered part of the state tournament in 1992. (As a sidebar, and to age your author, in 1992 you could see players’ knees. Soon we may not even be able to see their ankles.)
A magical week
There always was one quarterfinal game that paired two district champions. In 1992, that was Zuni and Portales.
The Journal rankings leading up to state, which was a single week then, had Academy at No. 1, Portales at
No. 2 and Capital at No. 3.
Zuni was unranked. An afterthought. A team everyone expected to make a quick exit.
But the T-Birds and their energetic “rez ball” style, led by a wonderfully named guard named Kollin Bobelu, upset Portales at a jam-packed and deafening Tingley Coliseum — yes, there used to be state basketball games at Tingley, and yes, it was just as awful as you probably imagine it was — 74-70 very, very late on a Thursday night.
Zuni was down 14 points in that game with 5½ minutes left. This was a humongous, and stirring, upset.
The following night, Zuni took its road show to the Pit and upped the ante.
On that Friday, the Thunderbirds rallied from 16 points down to knock off Capital 69-60, in front of a raucous crowd we estimated at 11,000 fans. By then, the love affair was in full bloom.
“Our practices are three hours long,” Zuni coach Waldo Gutierrez said after that game. “We go up and down, up and down. If they’re about to barf up a lung, we give them a breather. Then we get to it again.” That brings us to Academy. As remarkable as that dynasty was, that Saturday afternoon at the Pit was probably the only day in that entire six years that I found myself (wishfully) thinking about how magnificent a story it would be if someone actually took them down. A team nobody saw coming.
This was the very specific pull of these Thunderbirds, who I promise you nobody saw coming that week. Maybe not even Zuni itself.
Aftermath
That humble, overachieving Zuni group embodied everything that was, and is, special about our state tournament. This was a team clearly less talented as the ones they had toppled on Thursday and Friday, and a team, on paper, that wasn’t capable of firing a torpedo that could sink this highly polished Chargers machine.
But after what happened Thursday and Friday, it was difficult not to let that exact thought creep into your head. What if?
Of course, the anticlimactic end to Zuni’s basketball week was a 66-51 loss to Academy in the final. On that day, the Chargers became the first boys basketball team in the state’s history to win four consecutive titles.
There was no shame whatsoever in this loss for Zuni, which had never played for a state championship before that day and hasn’t really come close to playing for one since.
In fact, in the moments that followed the final buzzer, there were two indelible images — and sounds — that have never left me. Those two images became the genesis for the column you are now reading.
The first one was in plain sight for everyone. As those Thunderbirds went out to collect their red trophy, the Zuni fans stood, showered those boys with overwhelming love and, by the thousands, roared their thunderous approval. You’ve rarely, if ever, heard such vocal admiration for a team that didn’t win a championship. It still moves me, even to this day.
Then there was another moment, one that almost nobody witnessed.
Those Zuni players ran up from the Pit floor, screaming their lungs out, as joyous as any players I’ve ever seen going up that ramp, and I’ve seen more than a few. A remarkably emotional display by those kids.
The moral of the story? Losers at the state tournament don’t always shed tears.
“We came out of nowhere; no one knew who we were,” Zuni post Darius Johnson said after the Academy loss. “We stunned everyone. We went from nothing to something.”
That team, and that pueblo community, won my heart — broke it a little, too — during those three days in March of 1992. And as we welcome the next batch of dreamers into our back yard starting Tuesday, I am thinking back with affection of those Zuni Thunderbirds, and hoping that maybe in some corner of the Pit, they will gather this week and enjoy a quiet anniversary reunion of their own.