Kenny Walker’s most consequential defeat as a UK Wildcat was delivered by John Thompson
When Kenny Walker was asked Monday about Kentucky basketball’s inexplicable 3-of-33 shooting performance in the second half of UK’s 53-40 loss to Coach John Thompson and the Georgetown Hoyas in the 1984 Final Four, the ex-Wildcats star laughed.
Even 36 years later, laughter seems the best antidote to painful memories from the surreal Final Four meltdown by one of Kentucky’s most talented men’s basketball teams.
“Heck, if we’d shot 20, 25 percent in the second half instead of 9.1 percent, we probably would have won the game,” Walker said.
The family of Thompson, who became the first Black head coach to win a men’s NCAA Division I basketball tournament in 1984 by beating UK and then Houston in the Final Four, announced Monday that the coaching icon had died at age 78.
Georgetown was a college hoops afterthought when Thompson, a former Boston Celtics center, took over as head coach in 1972. Improbably, he built the Hoyas program into one of the nation’s best, reaching three Final Fours in four seasons from 1982-85.
Future NBA stars Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning, Dikembe Mutombo and Allen Iverson were among the players Thompson lured to the Washington, D.C., school.
For decades, basketball fans in Kentucky have been working through theories on how a star-laden UK roster — think future NBA front-court players Sam Bowie, Melvin Turpin, Winston Bennett and Walker plus senior guards Dicky Beal and Jim Master — morphed into the gang that couldn’t shoot straight in the second half of the 1984 Final Four game.
After making 10 of 20 first-half shots and building a 29-22 halftime lead over Georgetown, Kentucky shot as if its basket were moving in half two.
UK’s five starters — Walker, Bowie, Turpin, Master and Beal — combined to go 0-of-21 from the floor after halftime. Freshmen Bennett (a 12-foot jumper with 10:04 left in the game) and James Blackmon (two buckets in the final 3:50) scored the only Kentucky field goals of the second half.
Years later, the Kentucky head coach, Joe B. Hall, said “that was the worst half I was ever a part of.”
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Lake Kelly, a UK assistant in 1984, said in 2007 that the fact that Walker, emerging as a star-caliber player late in his sophomore season, had suffered an Achilles tendon injury earlier in the NCAA tourney and was not his usual self was the biggest factor in Kentucky’s second-half futility.
“In games we won, about 55 percent of our points would come from (Walker) in the second half,” said Kelly, who died in 2009. “(Against Georgetown), we couldn’t have him out there.”
For his part, Walker (who went 1-of-3 from the floor in 29 minutes) says he does not use his injury as an excuse for how poorly Kentucky played. The credit, he says, should go to Georgetown’s suffocating defense, anchored by Ewing and power forward Michael Graham.
“Georgetown’s (players), whether you loved them or hated them, were basically the ‘Bad Boys’ Pistons before the Pistons,” Walker says in reference to the physical Detroit teams that won back-to-back NBA championships in 1989 and 1990.
After their respective college careers ended, Walker and Ewing ended up as teammates with the NBA’s New York Knicks.
Walker says the former Georgetown star never stopped bringing up the 1984 NCAA tourney semifinals game.
“He reminded me of that game all the time,” Walker says.
For Thompson, the 1984 NCAA title was the highlight of a golden stretch at Georgetown. In 1982, Ewing’s freshman season, the Hoyas reached the NCAA finals, where they lost to North Carolina on a jumper by a freshman wing named Michael Jordan.
In 1985, Ewing’s senior season, Thompson brought Georgetown to Rupp Arena for the Final Four. The heavily favored Hoyas needed two victories to become the first repeat NCAA champs since the John Wooden-era UCLA dynasty.
Instead, in the NCAA finals, Villanova made nine of 10 second-half shots and registered a 66-64 shocker over Georgetown.
With due respect to American Pharoah’s Breeders’ Cup Classic win at Keeneland in 2015, Villanova’s upset of the Hoyas (who finished 35-3) stands as the greatest sports moment in Lexington history.
As Georgetown head coach, Thompson went 596-239 from 1972-99. Yet Walker says the most commendable aspect of Thompson’s coaching tenure was his willingness to stand up for players from difficult backgrounds.
In an echo of the present, Thompson boycotted a game in 1989 to protest an NCAA proposal that would have denied athletic scholarships to students who failed to qualify under heightened academic standards that Thompson considered discriminatory.
“He took guys from tough backgrounds,” Walker says. “He welcomed those guys in and, not only did he teach those guys how to be great basketball players, he taught them how to be men, how to be Black men. John Thompson was fighting that battle long before it was fashionable.”
