‘A wonderful thing’: UK’s 1978 champions relish being remembered 40 years later

James Lee stroked his gray goatee Thursday as he looked at a 40-year-old photograph. It showed a portion of a throng of people — estimated in the thousands — who crowded into Blue Grass Airport in March of 1978.

The people were there to welcome the Kentucky basketball team back from St. Louis, where it had won the national championship. Another 15,000 fans waited in Memorial Coliseum for the players and coaches to join them for an on-campus celebration.

“Right now, I’ve got chill bumps,” Lee said as he studied the photograph and reflected on an upcoming team reunion. “This is a wonderful thing. And I hope someday they’ll get to do this again.”

Kentucky plans to honor these national champions on the 40th anniversary of their achievement at halftime of Saturday’s game against Missouri.

The players gathered in Rupp Arena on Thursday to talk to the media about their glory days and pose for a team picture. The passage of time from then to now hung in the air. An overriding message: It’s nice to be remembered.

“I knew we were focused from Day One in practice to win a championship,” said Kyle Macy, the point guard. “But I don’t know if we knew the impact it would have on our lives. As basketball players, you think the ultimate goal is to win a championship. That’s as far down the road as you thought. You didn’t think, ‘Hey, if we win this, we’ll have a reunion 40 years from now and a bunch of media will come out and the fans will kind of remember us.’”

With the possible exception of Rupp’s Runts, Kentucky’s 1978 national champions might be the most popular team in program history.

To ask why there is an enduring embrace led to several theories.

Rick Robey, who along with the late Mike Phillips formed the team’s famous Twin Towers, mentioned the team-fan bond that strengthens over time. Players and fans had celebrated and mourned together: the upset of No. 1 and undefeated Indiana in the 1975 region finals; the loss to UCLA in that season’s national championship game; the 10-10 record to begin the 1975-76 season; the loss to North Carolina and its four-corners offense in the 1977 region finals, and finally 1978 and UK’s first national championship in 20 years.

“In today’s game, it’s the one-and-dones, or you’re here two years,” Robey said. “People ask me to do radio shows right now and talk about Kentucky basketball. I can’t remember the guys’ names because they’re not here long enough. That’s maybe some of the reasoning behind it.”

Lee and Macy pointed out that their team was UK’s last national champions before the NCAA outlawed pre-season scrimmages away from campus. So the 1977-78 team and its fans got an up-close look at each other in the flesh.

“When you go to eastern Kentucky and those kids are coming to see you and wishing you well and they pack a high school gym to see you, oh, that’s a warm feeling,” Lee said. “That gives you perspective of what Kentucky basketball is all about.”

The players recalled the iconic moments of that season and the team’s playing style trademarks.

LSU Coach Dale Brown famously branded UK’s physical play as “karate defense.” Looking back, Macy did not object.

“We had guys who liked to make the other team hurt,” he said. “And I tell people, we were real nice about it. We knocked somebody down with a screen, I mean we’d help them up and pat them on the back.”

The two losses — at Alabama and LSU at midseason — were recalled.

“Kind of a wake-up call,” Robey said. “That if you don’t get ready each night, you can get beat.”

Coach Joe B. Hall’s gutsy decision — with UK trailing Florida State in the first round of the NCAA Tournament — to bench three starters to begin the second half.

“If we’d lost that game, Coach Hall would have never been allowed to come back to Kentucky,” Robey said. “It was the right call. It woke us up.”

Of course, who could forget Jack Givens scoring 41 points in the championship game victory over Duke?

“It started out, I wasn’t making shots early on and was nervous,” Given said.

But with Duke in a zone, Givens came from the baseline to the foul line, took passes and hit turnaround jumpers with deadly precision again and again.

“We all thought Duke would make a change and come out differently in the second half,” Givens said. “They never did.”

With that, Givens quipped, “I’m still sending them checks, donating to Duke athletics.”

To hear the players was to realize the pressure the championship lifted off Hall still remained vivid. What Givens called “kind of a pressure-packed year” was especially so for Hall, who had the unenviable task of following Adolph Rupp as Kentucky coach.

“We were sitting on the plane coming back from St. Louis,” Macy said. “You could see the weight was off his shoulders. Even though we were in a two-hour delay on the plane, it didn’t bother him because he was having a good time.”

This story was originally published February 22, 2018 at 6:26 PM with the headline "‘A wonderful thing’: UK’s 1978 champions relish being remembered 40 years later."