It's something Stanford freshmen learn to handle – the feeling that everyone else on campus is smarter, more accomplished and has a faster laptop. That sense of inferiority dissipates soon enough. But not for varsity athletes. For them, just setting foot on Palm Drive means getting hit with the Farm's standards for success. Stanford has won 74 NCAA championships (second most in the nation, behind UCLA and tied with USC), including a record-breaking six in 1996-97. The University already has four national championships this year and is poised to claim its fourth straight Sears Cup, awarded annually to the school with the best athletics program. At the 1996 Summer Olympics, Stanford athletes won 16 gold medals, same as China. And don't even get started about Tiger Woods (1997 gross national product, same as China).
So how does it feel to be a member of the men's basketball team? By any outside measure, the program in recent years has been among the most successful in the nation. As this season began, the team had advanced to the second round of the ncaa tournament three straight years and had reached the Sweet 16 the previous spring – the Cardinal as perennial, not annual. By campus criteria, however, the players felt like just another weed in the garden.
"It's nice to see the other teams on campus doing so well," says guard Kris Weems. "But it makes you jealous. You want to have that same experience." Adds forward Peter Sauer: "It's just high expectations. We have coaches [at Stanford] who have won 12, 15 national championships. The women went to back-to-back Final Fours. No one thinks of winning as a surprise at Stanford."
Perhaps not. But the surprise this year may be that men's hoops now can be mentioned in the same breath as those other power programs. During a four-month span beginning in mid-November, the Cardinal put together an astounding run to the national semifinals, the Final Four in San Antonio. The season started with a record 18 consecutive victories, rocketing Stanford as high as fourth in a late-January Associated Press poll ranking the nation's best teams. In Pac-10 conference play, the Cardinal won 15 of its 18 games, finishing second to defending national champion Arizona. At the end of the regular season, the team's 26-4 record easily earned it an invitation to the NCAA tournament.
The tournament combines what college athletes sell best – emotion – with America's characteristic love of the underdog. Before Valparaiso's electrifying upset of Ole Miss, you couldn't find three people outside Indiana who knew that Valpo wasn't French for dog food. The NCAA pool sheet has become a seasonal rite in the workplace and, outside the office, legal sports books took in about $80 million on March Madness this year, surpassing the Super Bowl.
The Cardinal, though, was unruffled by the hype. The team won its first four games of the tournament, including a breathtaking comeback against Rhode Island that put Stanford in the Final Four. The 86-85 overtime loss to Kentucky at the Alamodome was anything but heartbreaking. When the season ended, the Cardinal had stunned the basketball world with its strength of spirit, not to mention strength under the boards.
Back in November, team members signed a poster that captains Pete Sauer and Kamba Tshionyi hung in the locker room. It listed a dozen or so goals – and the last one was the boldest: Win the NCAA title. "I looked at it on and off throughout the season," says sophomore forward Mark Madsen. "All the guys looked up there."
It was a goal many would have considered laughable when Mike Montgomery signed on as head coach in 1986. With its emphasis on academic achievement, Stanford is simply not an option for many of the nation's best high school players. On the day he was hired from the University of Montana, Montgomery insisted admissions standards were "absolutely not an insurmountable problem." In 12 years, he has won 64 percent of his games. With 235 Stanford victories, he is just 23 short of surpassing Howie Dallmar for first place on the school's all-time list – a record he is very likely to set next season.
As for this season, it began with one question: "Is there life after Brevin Knight?" An All-American guard, Knight was the team leader before graduating from Stanford last year and going on to star with Cleveland in the NBA. The truth is that Montgomery had adjusted his style to suit the 5-foot-9 Knight's mercurial quickness and playmaking skills. With Knight gone, Montgomery had a team that could play his brand of basketball: a big, bruising group that pounded the ball inside and outrebounded opponents by 9.5 per game. Eight players stood 6-foot-7 or taller, including 7-foot-1 All-Pac-10 center Tim Young.
Add to that muscle a pair of guards who jump-started the offense: Weems, a deadly outside shooter for most of the year, and Arthur Lee, who got so tired of answering questions about following Knight that he shut everyone up with his postseason play. A 6-foot junior from Los Angeles, Lee caught fire in the postseason, averaging 20.6 points per game, seven more than in the regular season. His heroic performance in the 79-77 comeback victory over Rhode Island in the Midwest Regional finals included an out-of-his-head 13 points in the last two minutes – with two three-pointers suggesting form right out of the Olympic snowboarding competition. He finished the game with 26 points, seven assists and no turnovers. He also slapped the ball away from Rhode Island in the final minute. It fell into the sturdy hands of Madsen, whose slam dunk gave Stanford the lead for good – and gave the world Madsen's post-slam audition for the next Tarzan.
Montgomery's emphasis on brawn wasn't foolproof. Arizona and Connecticut, two teams with unusual quickness, easily defeated the Cardinal. The defending national champion Wildcats ended Stanford's 18-0 start with a 93-75 victory at Maples Pavilion on January 29, then blew out the Cardinal a month later in Tucson, 90-58. UConn trounced Stanford, 76-56, in a game that perhaps illustrates the lengths to which basketball programs will go to chase national television exposure. The Cardinal flew cross-country in the middle of the Pac-10 schedule to face the Huskies for a 9 a.m. Pacific-time tipoff.
But Stanford won a whole lot more than it lost – and the wins had a certain character. "We never blew anybody out," Montgomery said in San Antonio the day after the tournament loss to Kentucky. "It was always a blue-collar deal: playing defense, staying within striking distance. We always seemed to grind and find a way."
All that grinding helped the Cardinal win a remarkable six of its eight games that were decided by three or fewer points. Those games provided some of the highest drama of the season – the one-point victory over Rhode Island at the Cable Car Classic in December, the two-point win over Cal in the Oakland Coliseum fueled by Young's 17 points and 15 rebounds, the 74-72 thriller at Washington, when Weems dribbled the length of the court and hit a three-pointer at the buzzer. "Oh man," says Weems, a 6-foot-3 junior from Kansas City, Kan. "I haven't been that happy since high school."
Despite such personal heroics, close games usually are won by teams, not players. It's easy to sign a poster on a locker- room wall. It's more difficult to put aside personal goals and prejudices for the common good. "Mike has said it to the guys plenty of times," athletic director Ted Leland says. " 'As long as you guys don't care who does it, we can win a lot of games. If you start worrying about who scores, we'll be an average team.' "
The players seemed to understand. On the court, eight different players led the team at least once in scoring. Off the court, too, the team came together. At the conclusion of every undefeated road trip, as the bus crossed El Camino Real and entered campus, Sauer led the players in an Australian rowing song. The lyrics, which cannot be reprinted here, "are anatomically correct," explains Bob Murphy, the radio voice of the Cardinal. "And it didn't matter who was on the bus: Sarah Montgomery [Mike's wife]; 12-year-old Annie Montgomery."
Even before the regular season ended, the players started focusing on the March tournament. One loss there, they knew, and they'd be on their way home. Four consecutive wins and they'd be in the Final Four. Assigned to the Midwest Region, the Cardinal opened March 13 against College of Charleston in Chicago. Sophomore Ryan Mendez came off the bench to hit two crucial three-pointers, and the Cardinal won, 67-57. Stanford's size steadily wore down Western Michigan, 83-65, in the second round. The Cardinal advanced to the third round – Sweet 16 – at the Kiel Center in St. Louis, a facility run by Sauer's father, the president of pro hockey's St. Louis Blues. As omens go, that's not bad.
Purdue, seeded No. 2, loomed as physically large as No. 3 Stanford. But thanks to double-doubles from Madsen (15 points, 13 rebounds) and freshman forward Jarron Collins (12 points, 11 boards in only 23 minutes of playing time), Stanford won, 67-59. That set up the amazing Elite Eight game against Rhode Island: Down by six with just 59 seconds to go, Lee pulled a Michael Jordan and Stanford won by two. Only the most noble of Stanford fans failed to take delight in denying Rhode Island coach Jim Harrick, who had delivered many a painful loss to the Cardinal while head coach at UCLA.
On to San Antonio, where Stanford would play in the Final Four for the first time since 1942. The team tried to relax, but it was hard when 20,000 fans showed up to watch them practice at the Alamodome. (Maples seats only 7,500.) When reserve guard Alex Gelbard stretched out on the locker-room floor at the Alamodome with a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he confirmed every sportswriter's preconception of Stanford. But the Cardinal didn't want to be known for brains alone. "I definitely don't think there's a team out there that's better than us," Sauer said. Then, to deflect the harsh light of reality from his bravado, he smiled and added, "I'm glad we don't have to play Arizona again."
Kentucky, which went on to win the NCAA title, found Stanford to be its toughest opponent. The Cardinal jumped out to a 15-3 lead, lost it early in the second half, then fought back to tie with 27 seconds in regulation, thanks to another clutch three-pointer from Lee. Kentucky led by as many as six in overtime, but three-pointers from Mendez and Sauer pulled Stanford back within one. But time – and the cold-eyed accuracy of Wildcats guard Jeff Sheppard (27 points on his way to becoming the Most Outstanding Player in the Final Four) – proved too much for Stanford to overcome.
Perhaps the best news of the season is that the team that reached the Final Four is dominated by juniors. Having all five starters return, says Montgomery, "doesn't guarantee you anything. It gives you an opportunity. What you do with the opportunity is the key."
Whatever Stanford does, it will be hard-pressed to match the sheer joy this team brought to its fans. Former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, a visiting professor this year, stopped by the locker room after the Kentucky loss. Bradley, who played in the 1965 Final Four for Princeton before a long career with the New York Knicks, had dinner with the team last December and attended several games. "I don't know when I've seen a better game," Bradley told Assistant Coach Doug Oliver, who is leaving to become head coach at Idaho State. "This is the first time since the '77 Knicks [his last season] that I felt an emotional connection with a team. It was a special thing, more for me than for them."
Special for everyone. "I suppose if we did this five straight years, you'd walk into the rooting section and you'd have people" – Montgomery goes stonefaced to illustrate disappointment – "like you let them down. I really got the sense that those people were absolutely ecstatic with the kids' performance, their effort, their decorum. All the things you should be happy with."
And Montgomery? "I don't know what I'm supposed to feel," he says, hesitating. "I feel a sense of satisfaction, a sense of a job well done, a sense of a lot of people doing a good job. I'm not walking away from this thinking, 'You didn't do enough.'"
Turns out Montgomery knows what to feel after all.
Ivan Maisel, '81, a Sports Illustrated senior writer, covers college basketball and football.
