Midnight was fast approaching, for both the evening of March the 9th and the St. John’s basketball season, and still the noise came tumbling down out of the darkened seats at Madison Square Garden, flooding the floor, trying to spark the Johnnies and spook Marquette.
Damned if this didn’t really sound like New York’s hometown college team playing a home game. Damned if it didn’t turn what looked to be a Marquette walkover at 75-58 into an 89-88 St. John’s lead with just over three minutes to play, 12,604 people sounding like twice as many, killing the refs, cajoling the Johnnies, murdering Marquette.
If it didn’t end the way the locals wanted it to — Marquette survived this whistle-marred slugfest 101-93, advancing to face Xavier on Thursday night — it left everyone hoarse and happy. The way it’s supposed to be here on basketball night late in the winter. The way it’s supposed to be when St. John’s is in the house.
From the moment Dave Gavitt dreamed up the Big East, this is where he wanted its showcase tournament to be based, but he knew it would take time. In the beginning, the member schools couldn’t even sell out their on-campus gyms for every game.
“As soon as we felt confident,” Gavitt said in 2004, “we knew we needed to get this to New York. I thought it might take five years.”
It took four. They came in 1983. They were a bigger hit than “Cats.” It has been a perfect fit ever since.
And mostly, that’s a good thing. Mostly, that’s a great thing. And you can go back to the beginning and on through the years: Coach after coach and player after player has extolled the Garden as the conference’s showpiece. There was a time when Jim Calhoun was at his most powerful, and Connecticut its most dominant, and he was asked if maybe they should move the tournament around once in a while.
Calhoun laughed.
“Would you move the Empire State Building to Peoria?” he asked.
Of course, it has helped that the one team that could have made coaches conspire and collude and think a little ill of the city and the building has never quite seized what should be one of the great advantages in all of sports. The Garden, after all, is where St. John’s has played at least half its home games for years.
That should be a huge boost for the Johnnies.
And yet it rarely has been. St. John’s roared to the first Big East Championship contested on the Garden floor, a very good team featuring Chris Mullin as a sophomore and David Russell as a senior, and when the Johnnies beat Boston College in the title game there was no mistaking it for a neutral court.
Same deal two years later, when the Johnnies and Georgetown played for the third of four times that year, and the Hoyas were just too good to be affected by the heavily partial crowd, but 25 years later Lou Carnesecca would put his index fingers in both ears and joke, “I still hear the ringing from that night.”
Those are isolated snapshots. The Johnnies won again in 1986 (led by Walter Berry), and again in 2000 (led by Bootsy Thornton) and that’s it. Three titles in 33 years. Meanwhile, UConn and Georgetown won seven titles apiece, Syracuse five. Louisville, which was a conference member for all of eight years, won as many tournaments as the Johnnies have since 1980.
There are a lot of things that Mullin has to accomplish in his incarnation as coach, and quickly. Foremost, he needs to get players, lots of players, good ones, and that much seems to have been accomplished starting next season.
The tricky part, of course, is making sure those players’ talents translate to performance. And then: They have to turn the Garden into a monster, the kind of legitimate home-court advantage that might actually inspire a Jay Wright or a Chris Mack or a Kevin Willard to observe — however subtly — that maybe the Johnnies have something of an advantage getting this tournament in their backyard every year.
It’s hard to see it that way right now. The ballyhooed seniors class that earned an NCAA bid last year never once won a Big East Tournament game at the Garden. Wednesday, the drought grew a little more. At some point this has to be more than a showpiece building for the whole league.
At some point, soon, it has to become more than a little unfair that the Johnnies get to play here every March. Someday teams will start to whisper. Someday they’ll have to gripe. Someday.
