PicoBlog

Despite previous sentiments expressed in this newsletter as recently as a couple of weeks ago, the past few days have exhibited a fact that can occasionally go overlooked – it’s possible to have exciting, meaningful men’s college basketball in November.

At the Maui Invitational, the semifinals were comprised of four top-10 teams, punctuated by No. 2 Purdue edging No. 4 Marquette 78-75 in a thrilling title game. Teams from some of the sport’s most distinguished brands are squaring off as I type this in the Battle 4 Atlantis in the Bahamas. Matchups between major-conference teams, some of which are ranked, have taken place over the past few days, a needed salve after an underwhelming slate of games in the first two weeks of the season.

Thanksgiving week is most commonly associated with NFL football, but with a buffet of enticing games airing seemingly around the clock in a way it won’t again until the NCAA Tournament, it’s an absolutely glorious time for college basketball.

Over the past several years, though, there has been a notable absence in the sport’s programming around the holiday, which, to fans of a certain age, leaves behind a hole just as large as the host state itself. Once one of the marquee events in the sport, the Great Alaska Shootout exists today as something of a ghost.

While there is still a women’s tournament with the same name, which returned in 2022 following a four-year absence, the men’s event hasn’t taken place since 2017.

For decades after its founding in 1978, it was one of college basketball’s preeminent showcases, regularly attracting some of the highest-profile programs, top-ranked teams and biggest star players during Thanksgiving week every year.

Jim Boeheim, Larry Brown, Jim Calhoun, Denny Crum, Bob Knight, Mike Krzyzewski, Lute Olson, Rick Pitino, Dean Smith, Jerry Tarkanian, John Thompson, Jim Valvano and Roy Williams all coached in it. Ray Allen, Len Bias, Elton Brand, Vince Carter, Brad Daugherty, Baron Davis, Tim Duncan, Joe Dumars, Pervis Ellison, Patrick Ewing, Danny Manning, Glen Rice, Glenn Robinson, Dwyane Wade and James Worthy all competed in it…and, frankly, that’s cutting the list pretty short.

For all the sadness its disappearance brings and the nostalgia its memories gin up, it’s fair to wonder how a tournament taking place in one of the most remote parts of the country and in the lone state that doesn’t have a Division I basketball program ever got so popular in the first place.

But, remarkably, it did.

What grew into an early season behemoth began with a relatively simple idea.

In the mid-1970s, Bob Rachal, the head coach at the University of Alaska Anchorage, was looking to raise the profile of his fledgling program, which began play in 1977 and competed, as it still does today, at the Division II level. 

After going 16-18 in his first season, Rachal wanted to make a splash and he came across a loophole that offered him the chance to do just that. NCAA rules limited members to just 28 men’s basketball games a year, but contests that were held outside of the contiguous 48 states did not count against that limit (it’s no coincidence that the two biggest multi-team events for years were held in Alaska and Hawaii).

He started reaching out to prospective schools, confirmed their interest and just like that, what Rachal dubbed as the “Sea Wolf Classic” – named after UAA’s mascot – was born.

The event very nearly died before it could even take its first step. Rachal, who the university describes in its archives as someone with “a personality reminiscent of a 19th century riverboat gambler,” was fired in 1978 for recruiting violations, a move that feels a little too on-the-nose for someone compared to a 19th century riverboat gambler. As a wise philosopher once said, scared money don’t make none.

Two days after firing Rachal, UAA athletic director Lew Haines opened the top drawer of his former coach’s desk and came across seven contracts, each of which was signed by the coach of a team from the lower 48 states and each of which promised an $8,000 payout for their trip up to Alaska for the nascent tournament. Even if Haines wanted to wipe out the last relic of a man he just ousted, it was likely too late to do so.

Still, some logistical hurdles remained. The gym at West Anchorage High School, which was the largest available venue at the time, was booked that week because of the annual town production of The Nutcracker. The U.S. Army stepped up to help, offering up the 4,000-seat Buckner Field House at Fort Richardson, as well as a fleet of vans to help transport the tournament’s teams.

For such a new, seemingly small-time operation, the inaugural Shootout had some unexpectedly high juice. Three teams ranked in the top 15 of the preseason poll that season were among the eight participants – No. 4 Louisville, No. 9 Indiana and No. 12 N.C. State. That starpower and brand resonance eventually showed itself. After each of the opening two-game sessions drew an average of only about 2,500 fans, close to 6,000 bought tickets for the semifinals and finals, with N.C. State beating Louisville 72-66 in the championship in front of a sold-out gym.

The coaches loved the opportunity for extra games against strong competition, UAA and the city of Anchorage loved it for the attention it garnered well beyond the state’s sizable borders, and with it, a new fixture on the college basketball calendar was born.

In the years that followed, it only swelled in influence and importance. 

The following year, in 1979, it changed its name to the Great Alaska Shootout. In the early 1980s, it moved into Sullivan Arena, a new venue funded by oil money that doubled the number of available seats for games. In 1985, ESPN began broadcasting it. 

Rather quickly, it was consistently drawing in some of the sport’s top programs. Over a period of 24 years, from 1980-2003, 12 teams that competed in the Shootout made the Final Four later that season, though, oddly, none of them won the national championship. Because of that, the Shootout took on a quality that was both aspirational and validating. If your program competed in it, it meant that it mattered.

With that glut of excellent teams led by NBA-bound stars and legendary coaches, the Shootout was home to some indelible moments. The 1987 championship game between Arizona and Syracuse featured an astonishing eight future NBA players between the teams, with the Wildcats coming out on top. In 1993, UAA, which competed in the tournament every year and was often a useful punching bag, stunned what would be a 21-win Wake Forest team while holding a seven-foot freshman named Tim Duncan scoreless.

Though it wasn’t revealed until decades later, the tournament took a humorous turn – regardless of your political leanings – in 1987, when Glen Rice, then a high-scoring junior for Michigan, had a one-night stand with Sarah Heath, a young sports anchor for local TV station KTUU. A year later, Heath got married, took her husband’s surname and became how so many of us know her today – Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and failed vice presidential candidate. 

The tryst was reported by “The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin,” a 2011 book by author Joe McGinniss that, among other things, claimed that a fresh-out-of-college Palin had a "fetish" for black men at the time while quoting a friend as saying Palin had "hauled [Rice's] ass down." It also featured this testimony from a friend of Palin’s from that time in her life:

“Hysterical, crying, totally flipped out. The thing that people remember is her freak-out, how completely crazy she got: I fucked a black man! She was just horrified. She couldn’t believe that she’d done that.”

In the book, Rice confirmed the hook-up. Michigan, for its part, lost to eventual champion Arizona in the semifinals before edging UAB in the third-place game.

From a purely on-court standpoint, the Shootout reached its zenith in 1998, when it hosted one of the greatest games in the history of multi-team events in the sport.

That year, No. 1 Duke faced No. 15 Cincinnati in the championship game that was largely billed a triumphant homecoming for Blue Devils star Trajan Langdon, a former star at East Anchorage High School who was appropriately nicknamed “the Alaskan Assassin.”

In a matchup featuring two eventual national players of the year and No. 1 overall NBA Draft picks in Elton Brand and Kenyon Martin, the Blue Devils suffered what would be their only regular-season loss of the year when the Bearcats pulled off one of the most incredible and effecive full-court, baseline out-of-bounds plays you’ll ever see – the in-bounder throwing a baseball-style pass to Martin at the opposite free-throw line, who touch-passed it over to a streaking Melvin Levett to his left, who had a clear path to the rim for a dunk with one second left to break a tie and give Cincinnati a 77-75 win. The most beautiful part of it? It only took two seconds off the clock.

The moment, euphoric as it was, had the defect of any high point. The only way to go from there was down.

For the better part of two decades, the Shootout and the Maui Invitational, the latter of which was launched in 1984, were the two dominant early season tournaments. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, though, that pool grew considerably. Many of those events were in warmer, decidedly more tropical locations – the Bahamas, Las Vegas, Orlando, Myrtle Beach, Fort Myers and Charleston, among others. A number of them offered larger purses for participating.

The Shootout had its tradition and nostalgia, but for players, coaches and fans looking for a sunny place to spend their Thanksgiving, it had no retort to the glut of imitators sprouting up around it. This week in Anchorage, for example, the temperature never got above 37 degrees, with the sun rising every day around 9:30 a.m. before setting at 4 p.m.

ESPN, which began organizing and executing its own multi-team events around the holiday season, stopped broadcasting the Shootout in 2007.

The later years of the Shootout’s heyday still featured robust fields — as recently as 2004, five of the seven Division I teams competing in it ended up racing the NCAA Tournament – but the writing was on the wall. In 2008, a year after ESPN pulled out of the event, it featured San Diego State, Hampton, Portland State, Seattle, Western Carolina, Northern Illinois, UAA and Louisiana Tech. Its final seven years included only two major-conference teams. In 2017, its last year, the eight-team field consisted of the College of Charleston, Sam Houston State, Santa Clara, Cal Poly, Central Michigan, Idaho, Cal State Bakersfield and UAA.

In Aug. 2017, what loomed as a likely outcome became a reality – the 2017 Shootout would be the last one, with UAA chancellor Sam Gingerich saying at the time that the university could no longer sustain the funding to host it.

In 2022, it re-emerged as a women’s tournament, with this year even including a top-five Utah team, albeit in a meager, four-team field that also featured UAA, Eastern Kentucky and UAB. Between that small pool of teams, the lack of quality depth and the absence of a male counterpart, the Shootout doesn’t possess the same magnetism and magic it once did.

Truth be told, there likely isn’t a place for it anymore. 

The chance to make more money and travel to a warmer, sunnier climate during the time of year in which the weather gets more miserable and the days get shorter is too enticing to pass up, regardless of how many frisky, up-and-coming sports anchors ready to hump to mask their latent racism may await on the Last Frontier.

We’re not necessarily missing out on high-stakes, compelling college basketball as we all emerge from our tryptophan-induced comas and scroll through the channel guide because the Shootout is functionally extinct. The kinds of matchups that used to take place in a gym in Alaska now just happen in a ballroom at a Caribbean resort.

But we’re undoubtedly worse off for not having it. Nostalgia is a powerful, often misleading force, but that doesn’t always mean it’s wrong. In this case, you don’t even have to be a child of the 1980s and 1990s to understand what we lost.

(Photos: Anchorage Daily News)

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