On Thursday night in Honolulu, less than 24 hours before the biggest upset in the history of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament took place, across half an ocean and a full continent, Chaminade University held its annual athletics gala.
Guests included a couple of players from the 1982-83 basketball team, inducted into the university’s Hall of Fame five years ago. Also in attendance was Merv Lopes, the long-retired coach.
They are, and forever will be, celebrities for beating top-ranked Virginia 35 years ago.
“It comes up a lot,” Tony Randolph, the team’s 6-foot-6 sophomore center in 1982-83, said Saturday morning. “I want this to sound humble, but we get introduced as legends, because it’s a story that no one forgot. It’s one of those moments here: Where were you when it happened?”
It was a lifetime ago, although not long enough to erode the widely held belief that Chaminade’s 77-72 victory over No. 1-ranked Virginia was the greatest upset in college basketball history.
Now and again, another startling upset occurs that causes people to invoke Chaminade’s name. That happened Friday, when a school called the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, beat top-ranked Virginia, 74-54. UMBC became the first 16th-seeded men’s team to beat a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.
Chaminade found itself in the conversation again. That it was Virginia, first in 1982, again in 2018, gives the discussion a poetic refrain. “It amazes me that people don’t forget that game for some crazy reason,” Lopes, now 85, said Saturday. “We’re going to see what happens to Maryland and how people talk about them 35 years from now.”
A tiny Catholic university, with fewer than 1,000 students and a shared campus with a high school, about a mile from Waikiki, Chaminade was in the process of changing its name before Dec. 23, 1982. The school wanted something easier to remember, easier to pronounce. It wanted to be the University of Honolulu.
But then its basketball team beat Virginia, the best team in the country. Chaminade — suddenly famous, forever remembered — could not change its name. How could you, after people made T-shirts and stickers that read, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Chaminade”?
“The name Chaminade became a household name,” Randolph said. “It’s so recognizable. We’re very proud of that.”
Maybe UMBC will resist the urge, someday, to rename itself something easier to remember, something more phonetically alluring, because of the lingering fame of a basketball game. Maybe those clunky initials will become part of the sporting lexicon, shorthand for a monumental upset, the way that the once unknown, often mispronounced Chaminade has been for 35 years.
For now, though, it does not seem right to try to compare the two, really. How do you rank upsets, anyway? Who cares? The only sure thing is that Chaminade’s victory came in a different time and a far different place.
On Friday, UMBC’s feat unfolded in a full-size, full arena in Charlotte, North Carolina, in real time everywhere. Countless people around the world, presumably, gathered around television screens and mobile devices to watch it happen. The UMBC athletic department’s Twitter account played along as color commentator. Its followers grew tenfold in a matter of hours, pushing past 50,000.
In 1982 in Honolulu, the only people watching were the 3,383 counted in Neal Blaisdell Center, which was not half full. There were no television cameras. News of the upset, in the middle of the night in the early hours of Christmas Eve for most of the United States, took hours, even days, to spread across the mainland.
(As Sports Illustrated wrote a decade ago in an article titled “The Greatest Upset Never Seen,” Chaminade’s victory, among other things, “assured that ESPN and its cable spawn would henceforth permit virtually no game to go untelevised.”)
The culture and the game were different back then. There was no shot clock, no 3-point line. Virginia, with 7-foot-4 center Ralph Sampson, the two-time player of the year, was undefeated. It had beaten Georgetown about 10 days earlier in what was dubbed, despite occurring just two years into the 1980s, the “game of the decade.”
Virginia and Sampson arrived in Hawaii from Japan, having just beaten Utah and the University of Houston, which had been gaining steam as a highflying juggernaut nicknamed Phi Slama Jama. The Virginia Cavaliers were 8-0, and Honolulu was meant as a rest stop on the way home.
Chaminade was an NAIA school that had lost to Wayland Baptist two nights before. At the time, Lopes was a junior high school counselor who coached Chaminade on the side.
The teams were tied at half, 43-43. Unlike what happened Friday, when UMBC turned a halftime tie with the Cavaliers into a rout, Chaminade fell behind by seven midway through the second half. The Silverswords, named after a plant, chipped away at the lead.
Sampson was guarded mostly by Randolph. They knew each other from Virginia, where they grew up. Randolph spent years guarding Sampson in recreation leagues and in high school, and reportedly even dated Sampson’s sister. (He said Saturday they were “good friends.”)
Randolph, knowing he could not compete with Sampson inside, hit several midrange jump shots that pulled his opponent out from under the basket. Randolph scored 19 points and hauled in five rebounds. Sampson had 12 points and 17 rebounds.
“Ralph was so caught up playing those big guys, like Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing, that he forgot that his homeboy could shoot jumpers,” said Randolph, now 55, a basketball coach who spent years counseling troubled youth.
When Chaminade’s Mark Rodrigues lobbed a pass over Sampson on a backdoor screen to fellow guard Tim Dunham for a dunk, the score was tied.
Dunham, who attended high school at St. Louis School, the Catholic school that shares a campus with Chaminade, soon broke the tie for good with a 22-foot jumper, with just over five minutes remaining.
That was when fans in the building truly began to believe that they were witnessing a game that would resonate across time zones and over the years. Chaminade usually attracted dozens or hundreds of fans, not thousands. Most were there that night to see the best team and the best player in the country, not the scrappy squad of locals.
“As the game unfolded, they were a little quiet, but all of a sudden when we started pouring it on and getting the lead, the crowd just switched,” Randolph said. “That’s when they got the chills. ‘Are they going to beat these guys?’”
Virginia, down by two points, missed three shots in the final minute. Then Chaminade sealed the victory with three free throws. The postgame photograph on the court, taken after fans in the stands called the team out of the locker room for an encore, is on a wall that serves as a Hall of Fame at Chaminade. The 1982-83 team was inducted in 2013.
The victory spawned the Maui Invitational, an early-season tournament that attracts some of the top programs to Hawaii. Chaminade, now in Division II in the Pacific West Conference, plays and occasionally upsets one of them, despite having lost its element of surprise more than three decades ago.
(“Don’t be the next Virginia,” one can hear a coach telling his players. Turns out that, as of Friday night, Virginia might have become the next Virginia, with UMBC the next Chaminade.)
These days, Chaminade has 1,157 undergraduates. Seventy percent of them are from Hawaii, and 71 percent of the students are women, the school said. A movie deal about Chaminade’s upset win over Virginia is in the works, said William Villa, the athletic director.
“That hopefully will help to perpetuate the Chaminade legend to a whole new audience who weren’t in this world in 1982,” Villa said in an email Saturday.
He added: “We’re Chaminade on the rise — 35 years later!”
Back in 1982-83, it was not Virginia’s only upset loss to rock college basketball. North Carolina State beat Virginia in the final of their conference tournament, which got the Wolfpack into the NCAA tournament, where they beat Virginia again in a regional final. That set up North Carolina State’s dramatic championship victory over Houston, another game that is mentioned in the debate over history’s biggest upset.
It took Virginia 35 years — all the way to this February — to attain the No. 1 ranking again. It took UMBC a game to take it away, just as Chaminade did in 1982.
“It seems like every year there’s more and more people who were at that game,” Randolph said. “There was only 3,000 that night, but now there’s about 80,000.”
