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This Day In Sports…January 20, 1968:
In a game that many consider the birth of modern-day college basketball, Houston upsets UCLA 71-69 in the Astrodome. A crowd of 52,693 watched, and millions more joined them on TV in the first NCAA regular season hoops game ever broadcast in prime time. It was the top-ranked Bruins, winners of three of the previous four national championships at the time and riding a 47-game winning streak, against the second-ranked Cougars, eager to prove they belonged on the same pedestal after falling to UCLA in the 1967 NCAA Tournament semifinals.
The setting in the Astrodome was unique in itself. A basketball game had never been played in a building like that, so they placed the court smack in the middle of the field. Box seats were as far as 100 yards from courtside. There wasn’t a good seat in the house. But that hardly put a damper on the night. The noise was deafening, and reaction around the country was so immediate that the event’s promoter, Eddie Einhorn, was furiously scribbling notes in the first half as orders came in for 10-second drop-in ads to be read in the second half.
It was just as much about star power as it was about the team matchup, with UCLA featuring 7-2 center Lew Alcindor (later to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), and Houston countering with 6-9 forward Elvin Hayes, who had put up 25 points with 24 rebounds in the loss to coach John Wooden’s team the previous March. Alcindor had changed college basketball since coming out of high school in New York City in 1965. In fact, the NCAA banned dunking after his sophomore season in 1967 in an effort to neutralize his dominance (the rule lasted for nine years).
But Alcindor came into the game against the Cougars dealing with a scratched cornea and had missed the past two games. It affected him. Alcindor’s teammates rose to the occasion, but Houston still led 46-43 at halftime. Defense tightened up at both ends after the intermission, and the game was tied 69-69 with two minutes remaining. And with 28 seconds left, Hayes dropped in two free throws to give the Cougars a 71-69 victory, capping off a 39-point, 15-rebound night that included three blocks of Alcindor shot attempts. Alcindor, meanwhile, was held to 15 points on 4-for-18 shooting.
UCLA’s 47-game winning streak remains the third-longest in NCAA history. The current record also belongs to the Bruins, who in 1971 began compiling an 88-game winning streak that wouldn’t be broken until 1974. But that’s not the footnote UCLA will remember. Two months after the “Game of the Century,” the Bruins annihilated Houston 101-69 in the Final Four on the way to another national title. Alcindor scored 19 points and Hayes 10.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
