A decade later, will history repeat for Tigers?
A decade later, ahead of the most important games of his best season as Georgia Tech’s basketball coach, Josh Pastner’s voice grew animated as soon as he started sifting through the memories of one of his great moments at Memphis.
He still remembers the crowd full of UTEP fans, and the senior-laden opponent, and the deafening noise, and even the El Paso, Texas, police officers and arena ushers yelling at the Memphis bench. But most of all, he remembers what it felt like after it was over on that Saturday in the West Texas desert.
After Memphis erased a 12-point deficit in the final seven minutes. After Joe Jackson hit two free throws with 7.8 seconds left to give the Tigers their first lead of the game. After UTEP missed one final shot at the buzzer to seal a 67-66 win in the 2011 Conference-usa Tournament championship game that gave Memphis the win it needed to reach the NCAA Tournament.
“I went running around like I was Jim Valvano looking for someone to hug because the pressure, the stress,” Pastner said. “It was the greatest 10 hours of my life. I’ll never forget it.”
Ten years to the day of that triumph, Memphis will begin the quest to become the first team since that Pastner-led bunch to win a conference tournament in order to make the NCAA Tournament. These Tigers, like those Tigers, will have to win three games in three days, starting with Friday’s night quarterfinal round game against UCF or East Carolina.
So perhaps it’s worth revisiting the last time Memphis pulled this off when it absolutely had to, when Jackson and Will Barton and Chris Crawford and Tarik Black were all freshmen, because even Pastner can see parallels between that 2010-11 Memphis team and the one that will take the court in Fort Worth, Texas, this week.
It starts with the first time Memphis played at UTEP in 2011, exactly two weeks before its postseason triumph there. The Tigers lost by 27 points on national television and “people were ready to run me out of town,” Pastner said.
But, as Pastner put it, “as time goes by and you look back, it’s deeper than it actually looks. And something positive happens out of the negative situation.”
Essentially, he’s not sure if Memphis wins the C-USA Tournament over UTEP without getting blown out by UTEP. And the same scenario could be playing out for this year’s Tigers.
If all goes according to plan in the AAC Tournament bracket, they would have to face Houston in the semifinals, just six days after the Cougars hit that desperation, half-court heave to beat Memphis to close the regular season. It was a shot that may have cost the Tigers a chance to earn an at-large berth into the NCAA Tournament, and the coach who last led them to the NCAA Tournament in 2014 took notice.
“Memphis had a tough loss the other day to Houston and you’re flying home, and you’re devastated, and now you’ve got to go win the conference tournament,” Pastner said. “But sometimes things are deeper than they look on the surface, and if they can go and turn around and win the conference tournament, they’ll look back and say, as devastating as that was, it might have helped us win this conference tournament.”
There’s also the doubt. The doubt this current Tigers team faced when it started the season with a 6-5 record, and the doubt Penny Hardaway faced because of that. It sounds a lot like the doubts Memphis erased 10 years ago.
“Y’all were saying we were done; this team was overrated,” Barton told reporters after the C-USA Tournament championship game. “We heard all the criticism. Everybody talking bad about us around town. We just looked at each other and said, ‘Man, we can win this.’ ” The circumstances are a bit different. The Tigers’ title run 10 years ago came as a shock considering they lost three of their final five regular-season games. This season, Memphis enters the AAC Tournament with wins in nine of its past 11 games, a surge that has many around the city believing this group can do what that 2010-11 team did.
So the general sentiment remains unchanged.
“It’s a great feeling to know you can go to a tournament and win every game,” Hardaway said this week. “There’s been times where you’ve gone with teams and, ‘Man, we don’t know how to beat these guys.’ Going to this tournament, we know we can beat anyone.”
Like Pastner, you can hear the excitement in Hardaway’s voice as he discusses March Madness. He reiterated this week that he cherishes the Elite Eight run he went on with Memphis State back in 1992 more than anything in his basketball career. More than even making the NBA Finals.
He wants his players to experience a moment like that, a moment like the one that led to the best 10 hours of Pastner’s life. After seven long years without Memphis in the NCAA Tournament, the entire fanbase deserves another moment like that.
“It set the tone for us,” Pastner said of the impact that win 10 years ago had on his tenure at Memphis.
And maybe history is about to repeat itself.
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter: @mgiannotto