University of Southern Mississippi Athletics
From the Broadcast Booth - Eagles First Trip to March Madness
3/16/2018 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
By John Cox, The Voice of the Golden Eagles
One of the most exciting years in Golden Eagle Basketball history will always be the 1989-90 season when the Golden Eagles made their first ever appearance in the NCAA tournament on March 15, 1990. Led by players like Clarence Weatherspoon, Daron Jenkins, Darrin Chancellor, Russell Johnson and Marcus Crowell the team had finished in a tie for second during the Metro Conference’s regular season and then lost a heart-breaking 83-80 game to the Louisville Cardinals in the conference tournament championship game in the Gulf Coast Coliseum in Biloxi.
Although the Golden Eagles under Coach M.K. Turk had been assured by league officials that they had a great opportunity to be selected as an at-large team to the “Big Dance” following the loss in the championship game, the team and coaching staff kept their fingers crossed that the following day on Selection Sunday their name would be called. There weren’t any selection Sunday parties back then that I can remember even for the team, in fact most of us were sitting at home that afternoon watching on TV and waiting to see if the Golden Eagles were going to make it for the first time. All the so called experts were saying that the Golden Eagles should be in but no one knew for sure. There wasn’t any internet like there is today where you could look up a team’s RPI or go to a web site where the mock brackets were posted, so you just had to sit in front of the TV and wait.
But then sometime late that afternoon as the tournament field was announced, up popped the Golden Eagles and a scheduled matchup in the opening round of the NCAA tournament against the LaSalle Explorers, the team they had defeated three years earlier for the 50th NIT championship in Madison Square Garden. This time the matchup would be in Hartford, Connecticut. I remember staring at the TV and letting it all soak in and then the phone starting ringing because the Golden Eagles were headed to the Big Dance.
The entire athletic staff (much smaller than it is now) then headed to the old Field House on campus to meet and plan the Eagles trip. Athletic director Bill McLellan and his assistant Nick Floyd passed out the assignments as the Eagles starting preparing for their trip to Hartford.
Coach M.K. Turk, who had become head coach of the Golden Eagles back in 1976-77, reflected years later that a berth in the NCAA Tournament was something he had hoped he could bring to Southern Miss basketball when he had taken over the program 13-years before.
“I don’t think many people would have ever thought that the day would come that we would be playing in NCAA Tournament. But we worked hard and recruited hard with the hope that someday it would happen. When we got into the Metro Conference in 1982-83 and realized that we could be competitive against the teams in the league at that time and as we saw our team and our program get better, is when we first started to think big things could happen here. Then we won the NIT on one of the biggest stages you could play on and our players and our fans started to believe big things could happen and would happen and then that year it did.”
The day before the team’s game against LaSalle during the team’s open practice at the Hartford Civic Center it was like a circus. The national media was all over the story and was anxious to cover Southern Miss and the team that had made it to the NCAA tournament for the very first time. There wasn’t much practicing that took place that day. It was an open practice and fans of all of the teams scheduled to play in the tournament, in addition to Golden Eagle fans and more media that had ever covered the team filled up a lot of seats that day. There was a press conference with the coaches, there were television and newspaper interviews with the players and it seemed very little time to practice that day. What I remember was the Golden Eagles just shooting around that day led by Clarence Weatherspoon and he and his teammates putting on a dunking exhibition that had the fans cheering and yelling inside the arena. More than one “Spoon” yell has heard that day.
The national media was all over the story of the little known Golden Eagles and they were fighting to get interviews with Spoon and his teammates and Coach Turk and even head athletic trainer Larry “Doc” Harrington and then sports information director Regiel Napier was running around everywhere trying to handle all the requests. Even me, the team’s young radio announcer had a CBS-TV crew following my every step to the Civic Center that day to help tell the story of the Golden Eagles, even to the extent of following me from the parking garage to the arena that morning with a camera rolling.
Even the radio broadcast that day was different. At the time I was working by myself on the broadcast and when we requested media credentials we requested one for me and assumed that like everywhere we went during the regular season there would be two or three spots reserved for our radio broadcast, but we were wrong. Because we had only requested one credential, when we arrived that the arena that day, that is what I had, one spot for me, my equipment and everything else that we carried, sandwiched in between a sportswriter on each side. But somehow we made it work and had very few problems, if any with our broadcast that day. We did learn or maybe the NCAA learned that we needed to request more space for our network radio broadcast or that more space needed to be allotted for the schools broadcasting the game by the NCAA.
The game that day between the Golden Eagles and LaSalle would feature a match-up of two of the premier players in country, USM’s 6-foot, seven inch Weatherspoon, who was a sophomore that season, and 6-foot-seven inch Lionel “The Train” Simmons of LaSalle, a senior, who had scored 34 points and had 11 rebounds against the Eagles in the NIT championship game as a freshman three years before.
The NCAA tournament game that day would be won by the Explorers 79-63. It was a back and forth game early in the contest but LaSalle pulled ahead and grabbed a 36-29 lead at halftime. The Golden Eagles would struggle to shot the ball effective in the second half and shot just 36.2-percent that day and although LaSalle didn’t shoot a whole lot better (38.9-percent), they outrebounded the Golden Eagles 40-30. Weatherspoon led the Eagles with 16 points and 14 rebounds, while Russell Johnson had 14-points and seven assists, Darrin Chancellor had 14-points and three assists and Daron Jenkins had eight points and nine rebounds. Simmons as usual led the Explorers that afternoon with 32 points and 16 rebounds.
The following season (1990-91) the Golden Eagles would record a 21-8 mark and earn the regular season championship in The Metro Conference and once again advance to the NCAA tournament to face North Carolina State in the Laurel, Maryland regional at the Cole Field House at the University of Maryland. The team would make it’s only other appearance in the NCAA tournament following the 2011-12 season when they faced Kansas State in the East regional in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Our trip to Hartford for the NCAA tournament was one of the most memorable experiences I have ever had in traveling with the Golden Eagles and broadcasting Golden Eagle basketball and one that I always think about this time of year. This time of year is always special and an exciting end to the college basketball season and that is why I will never forget the first time Southern Miss went dancing in the NCAA tournament.
