BTO Exclusive: Alaska's Fight To Save The Shootout
By LEW FREEDMAN
Basketball Times Online
ANCHORAGE – The bullies are trying to wipe the Great Alaska Shootout off the map of college basketball. For 32 seasons, the University of Alaska-Anchorage, a little Division II school in the Far North, through dint of its own genius, creativity and perseverance has managed to stage a wildly popular Off-Broadway production.
But after establishing a proud history featuring famous players, famous coaches and elite teams, the event that is as much a staple at Thanksgiving in Anchorage as turkey and gravy, is hanging by its fingernails from a cliff edge on 20,320-foot Mount McKinley.
The recently concluded annual event was reduced from eight to six teams this year for the first time ever. If you knew it even took place this year, it’s likely your hometown team was involved and you caught the action on cable access channel 97 or some other quasi-secret signal being transmitted near you.
It was a minor miracle that there was a 32nd annual Shootout. Alaska-Anchorage’s athletic director broke the world record for telephone solicitation to talk five teams into joining his Seawolves at Sullivan Arena, never mind finding seven willing dance partners.
“It was by far the hardest ever,” said AD Steve Cobb of scheduling. “I spent hours and hours and hours on the phone. I believe we contacted every school that was eligible to come.”
Since there are 340-some Division I basketball-playing schools, one hopes Cobb’s cell phone plan was expansive and not expensive. Of course, not every school was eligible to come. That’s because in recent years the NCAA has drastically altered the rules that were in place when Alaska-Anchorage gave birth to the Shootout in 1978.
In the 1970s, NCAA rules allowed for teams to visit Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico to play games that did not count against their seasonal totals. This rule was designed to encourage athletic participation at universities located in far-flung places. A small-print savant named Bob Rachel – UAA’s first coach when it joined the NCAA – realized the Indianas and North Carolinas would be attracted to Alaska because the three games they played in a tournament would be exempt from their totals. He was right. The Shootout was established and the same principle applied to University of Hawaii’s hosting of the Rainbow Classic at Christmas.
Heck, with the regular season beginning on Dec. 1, the Shootout had a monopoly on early-season play. Players such as Patrick Ewing and Tim Duncan made their college debuts in Alaska.
ESPN came along and decided nothing could be finer than to be the overall provider of college hoops programming. And whether it was mountains of snow, or a pristine blue ocean, it made for pretty background pictures.
ESPN eventually signed on for a 22-year run with the Shootout. On the East Coast, you could lie around on your couch in a turkey coma and flip on a game at midnight from The Last Frontier. It was cool stuff and there wasn’t much competing programming, except for infomercials selling ginsu knives.
Then the big boys got jealous. They couldn’t abide the idea that a Division II school (definitely not one of them) should reap so much free publicity and control the best-known pre-season tournament in the land. So along came the Pre-Season NIT. Then there was Coaches Vs. Cancer. Pretty soon anyone who ever dribbled a basketball petitioned for the right to hold a pre-season tournament. A couple of years ago, there were some 80-plus exempt events. And the NCAA said what the heck, let’s start the season on Halloween, or was it Veteran’s Day?
NCAA rules changed faster than amendments got slapped onto the Congressional health-care bill. A school could only play in one exempt tournament every four years. No tournament could invite more than one team from the same conference in the same year. And only two games in a tournament could count as exempt instead of the original three. Then ESPN, which used to send an A-team featuring Dick Vitale to broadcast from the snowbound North, abandoned the Shootout altogether in favor of sponsoring its own tournaments. So the medium became the messenger and it’s a wonder that the NCAA allowed that conflict of interest.
“ESPN and the NCAA used to be our best partners,” said Cobb. “Now they’re our toughest competitors.”
It’s as if those two so-called best friends of college basketball are water boarding the Shootout to a torturous death, but they call it the free marketplace.
Reducing the field was painful for administrators and coaches who have nurtured the Shootout like a precious flower. Some schools even refused to come because flying to Alaska would look bad to their cost-cutting institutions, despite expenses being paid. Cobb had to pop some ibuprofen after hearing that.
Lee Piccard, a retired Alaska-Anchorage vice chancellor, who has seen every Shootout game, said he is happy the tournament survived with six men’s teams.
“I thought if anything, we’d go from something to nothing,” he said. “It’s certainly better than nothing.”
In better years, the Shootout regularly attracted the nation’s top teams. It was coomon for a Shootout team to become NCAA champion. The roster of past players includes Dwyane Wade, Elton Brand, Glenn Robinson, Wayman Tisdale, and James Worthy. Year after year, underdog Alaska-Anchorage pulled off an electrifying upset. There was always Tony-caliber drama.
Coaches often spoke about the cultural experience offered by a visit to Alaska. Two by two, players and coaches went off to Thanksgiving dinners at private homes to learn that not all Alaskans lived in igloos and that although you could ride a dog-sled for fun, Alaskan kids didn’t ride them to school. Over time, paranoid coaches refused to allow players out of their sight for even a few hours to mix.
However, this year, Washington State divided up 12 guys in private homes. Coach Ken Bone is no stranger to Alaska, having coached in Alaska-Anchorage’s league with Seattle Pacific. Bone even took his team to the Alaska Zoo to see the polar bears.
“To me, that’s all part of the experience,” he said.
Houston Coach Tom Penders likes coming North and believes it’s a shame the way the Shootout has been diminished by higher powers.
“This is the granddaddy tournament of them all,” Penders said. “It was the highlight of your season. If you don’t respect the past, it’s wrong. I think there are a lot of coaches out there who are being selfish.”
It has never been easy to make a go of life in Alaska. The distance is a little bit farther. The weather is a little bit harsher. For now, Alaska-Anchorage has weathered the storm. A field of eight has been announced for 2010.
And written into those contracts is a $150,000 penalty fee for withdrawal. Hey, as the NCAA and ESPN would say, It’s just business.
Lew Freedman is a Chicago-based sportswriter and a long-time contributor to Basketball Times. He is also the author of 42 books. A veteran journalist, Freedman has covered the Great Alaska Shootout on 20 occasions.
Phote Credit: www.goseawolves.com
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