Every Final Four and Big Ten championship. Every All-American, Jason Richardson though Cassius Winston. Every Michigan State basketball win worth cherishing in the Tom Izzo era. Heck, that there is a Tom Izzo era at all …
All of it can be traced back exactly 25 years, to Dec. 30, 1997, in West Lafayette, Indiana — and a result that seemingly came out of nowhere:
MSU 74, No. 5 Purdue 57.
“That changed the program,” Izzo said this week.
“Changed everything,” Izzo’s longtime former assistant Mike Garland said.
It certainly changed the trajectory of MSU basketball. It made people rethink the possibilities for the Spartans under Izzo. And got a 42-year-old, third-year coach off the hot seat.
“It was not if I was going to get fired,” Izzo said. “It was when I was going to get fired.”
If we’re ever going to look back at big games and defining moments in MSU athletics history, then this is an anniversary that should not pass without being acknowledged. If you’re under 35, there is arguably no bigger MSU basketball win in your cognitive sports lifetime. Because none of your other fond MSU basketball memories under Izzo would have happened without a turn of fortunes. And this was every bit that — a jarring, watershed moment.
From Dec. 30, 1997, the Spartans won 12 more Big Ten games that season, finishing 13-3 and as co-champions with Illinois, the first of four straight Big Ten titles, on their way to a Sweet 16, before three straight trips to the Final Four, including the 2000 national championship.
The first inkling that any of that could be possible occurred in that Big Ten opener at Mackey Arena, when unranked MSU, a 12-point underdog, mauled a Boilermakers program under Gene Keady that had been at the top of its game for several years.
“Nobody gave us a chance to win. I mean nobody,” said Garland, who was in his second season on Izzo’s staff at the time. “That particular game changed everything in terms of the confidence of our players, in terms of the confidence of our coaching staff. And it showed the basketball world that we were a team to be reckoned with all of a sudden.”
It became a big game. But it wasn’t at the time. Fans who saw it were either at the game or fortunate that a local channel in their area picked up the ESPN-Plus broadcast. In Lansing, WLAJ, the ABC affiliate, carried the game. But out of market, you were largely out of luck. In West Lafayette, Purdue’s fan base was preoccupied by their football team playing Oklahoma State in the Alamo Bowl at 8 p.m. that night. Hence the 5 p.m. tipoff against the Spartans.
MSU was a respectable 7-3 entering the game, but those three losses loomed around Izzo’s neck. The Spartans didn’t play the sort of schedule they do now. There was no Champions Classic. Just the Coca-Cola Classic, played at Breslin Center each year around Thanksgiving against a couple mid-major foes, which, this particular year, included Gonzaga, about a year before Gonzaga truly became Gonzaga. The Spartans’ three losses were at Illinois-Chicago, home against Temple and, for a third straight year, to Detroit Mercy.
“Trust me, man, they were going to fire us,” Garland said. “They were going to fire us, man, if we didn’t start winning. We all knew that. Now, a lot of the people claim they weren’t going to fire us and we weren’t getting fired and all that, it’s easy to say that now. That isn’t what they were saying — on the radio talk shows (and elsewhere).”
The previous February, with MSU headed to its second straight NIT in Izzo’s two years, the Lansing State Journal surveyed fans about Izzo’s performance. On a scale of 1 to 4, readers gave Izzo a 2.49. Jack Ebling’s story shared some of the reader feedback, including from a 17-year-old Lansing resident who would one day become the LSJ’s sports columnist. How embarrassing.
“The players are afraid to shoot,” I wrote, in part, apparently. “If they miss, Izzo will take them out. Part of the problem is that Izzo has never found the right combination to have on the floor.”
I have no idea what score I gave him then. Mercifully, Ebling didn’t include it.
RELATED: Couch: Izzo’s Hall of Fame career began with Burger King meetings with Tom Crean, fan scribblings above urinals and losses to Detroit
Months later, early in Izzo’s third season, MSU had a young group and some key injuries. No one knew Mateen Cleaves, Antonio Smith, Morris Peterson and Charlie Bell would fondly forever be known as the “Flintstones.” Cleaves was a sophomore, yet to live up to his billing. Bell was a freshman, pressed into a starting role, thanks to an injury elsewhere. Peterson was a third-year sophomore, coming off the bench, playing with a cast on his broken right wrist.
MSU’s win at Purdue was stunning to those outside the program and a bit unexpected to those inside the locker room, especially the manner in which the Spartans won.
But this wasn’t actually a team that rose up from nothing one day on the road at Purdue, suddenly becoming a contender. The signs were there that previous summer, they’ll tell you.
Cleaves had stayed in East Lansing through the offseason, losing 30 pounds and challenging his teammates every day in pickup games.
“He said, ‘I’m not leaving the gym,’ ” Izzo said. “He just hunkered down in here and didn’t go anywhere. Because he was half-embarrassed (by his freshman season). He was half-pissed off. That was really good. That set a tone.”
Redshirt junior Thomas Kelley emerged as a bona fide scorer that summer.
“Pros would come back home (to play) and we were winning open gyms (beating them),” said Kelley, now in his first season as an assistant coach on Izzo’s staff. “We had confidence. We were ready to rock.”
Then Kelley broke his foot just before the season.
“That hurt us bad, man,” Garland said. “Because he could score the ball. He’d have been our best player that year.
“We (eventually) won because we defended and we were just a mug on the offensive glass. The missed shot was our best play by far. And if we’ve missed an attempt after the missed shot, we’d get that shot back. And we would get it back and get it back until we scored a layup. People couldn’t contend with that.”
That persona began to take hold at South Florida on Dec. 20 — a 68-53 win over Seth Greenberg’s second-year program that embodied everything that happened later at Purdue, but without the brand recognition in the opponent.
“They were tougher than nails,” Izzo said of South Florida, a game he didn’t think he could afford to lose. “And that was a fist fight. I mean, there were more guys on the floor … that was a big win. I remember the fire alarm went off in the hotel halfway through the night. Just one of those — everything happened and we just fist-fought our way through it.
“That’s when I learned the most about Cleaves. Because he thought we could beat the Lakers. And his will to win was so big that … and the toughness thing was right there. Our team started following him.”
Izzo was hopeful the Spartans could compete with Purdue. He didn’t know if they could win.
Players from that team remember having a calm confidence heading into the game.
“We felt like we matched up with them well,” recalled Andre Hutson, who, as a true freshman, started at center against Purdue’s Brad Miller. “Just looking at them on film, we really felt like we could match up with them.
“Once the game got going, we took a lot of the energy out of that arena pretty quick, which was awesome.”
Hutson and Smith out-dueled Miller and Brian Cardinal, with Smith grabbing 15 rebounds and Hutson finishing with 13 points and eight boards.
“They put it on them dudes,” Garland said.
On the perimeter, MSU held Purdue star guard Chad Austin to 2-for-14 from the floor. MSU mixed in man-to-man and zone concepts defensively — yes, that’s right, zone, according to the LSJ. Purdue, which had averaged 91 points per game and shot better than 51% during its 11-2 start, scored 57 points and made 34.5% of its shots.
“I don’t know what else we could have done,” Cardinal told reporters then.
Most significantly, it was the night “Mateen became Mateen,” as Izzo put it. Cleaves had been good statistically all season, averaging 14.9 points and 7.4 assists. He scored 25 points on 9-for-18 shooting and dished eight assists at Purdue.
“I dreamed about (the upset) before the game,” Cleaves told the LSJ that night. “I knew it was on my shoulders.”
He propelled MSU to a 6-0 lead and a 35-23 edge at the break. The Spartans were on the front foot the entire evening.
“The walk back through that tunnel, celebrating the way we did,” Hutson recalled. “There was something that just happened, like we felt like, if we beat them, at their house, that was going to be the toughest game we were going play all year. It was very naive to think at the time, but that was kind of the feeling that we took away after that game.”
Izzo remembers a bit of the celebration and understanding that it was a significant win. But also realizing, “This is what we can do,” and that, “it wasn’t a fluke.”
It felt more like the beginning of something than something achieved. And it was.
“We knew what level our guys could play at,” Garland said. “And we finally got them to see that if they did what we asked them to do and if they trusted us and trusted one another, we could be successful. And that’s how we all went away from that. I remember how happy everybody was, but I also remember on the plane ride home and after the game, people were excited but not overly excited. Because we knew that the work had only just begun.”
The Spartans had nine days until their next game.
In the Dec. 31 edition of the LSJ, which chronicled the MSU’s win, the final notebook item read: “Six-hundred lower-bowl tickets are available for Michigan State’s men’s basketball team’s Jan. 8 home game against Wisconsin. Tickets are $11.”
That was the last time you ever saw anything like that.
MORE: Catching up with the 2005 MSU women’s basketball team – a squad as great as its dreams
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.
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