LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Some m✤emories are so vivid, they are have no age. Close your eyes, and decade🔯s feel days away.
For 74-year-old SMU coach 💃Larry Brown, who spent Wednesday afternoon telling stories about Dean Smith and John Wooden and the Iron Curtain, being at the NCAA Tournament feels like somet🍌hing that happened in another life.
“I really don’t reme💧mber ever being here,” Brown said jokingly, as his SMU squad prepares f𝓀or a second-round game against UCLA on Thursday.
Everyone else remembers Brown’s most re๊cent tournament appearance — when he led one of the most famous runs in tournament history, with Kansas’ Danny Manning and the Miracles claiming the 1988 national championship as a six-seed. The next year, Brown returned to the NBA, where he had previously coached the Nuggets and Nets, and began a seven-team, 22-year tour.
ꦅAfter a brief retirement, Brown returned to college coaching in 2012 for the first time since winning the championship at Kansas, a puzzling decision to spend the final years of his career in the last place anyone would expect him to finish his career, if anyone was even aware that SMU still played basketball.
But as one of the last remaining bridges to a legendary generation gone from the game, Brown said his reason to return was simple, a desire to teach what he had learned — from Smith and Henry Iba and John McClendon and Frank McGuire, among many others — to a fಌew more players.
“I just want to be able to let people hear the things that I was ꦍtaught,” Brown said. “I didn’t handle retirement very well. … I just thought I had something to offer, but more than that, I wanted to be able to teach the things that I was taught that helped this game a little bit.”
In his third season at SMU, Brown has added one more intriguing chapter to a story that already seemed over, taking the sixth-seeded Mustangs (27-6) to the NCAA Tournament for the first time i💝n 22 years, giving Brown more flashbacks in their matchup with 11th-seeded UCLA, the storied school he led to the national title game in 1980.
Twenty years removed from their last national title, the Bruins are a far different team from the one Brown never felt comfortable calling himself coach of, unable to equate himself💎 with Wooden and♉ his 10 national championships.
In this tournament, UCLA (20-13) stands out most as a school perceived to have stolen a spot from more-deserving mid-major teams, but the teaꦦm is relishing the opportunity so many disrespected teams never receive.
“It’s a lot of motivation,” UCLA freshman Kevon Looney said. “Everybody doesn’t think we deserve to be here, and I think we’re going to try to prove theꦡm wrong. I think we feel that we deserve to be here.💞”