Dereck Whittenburg's shot fell short. Lorenzo Charles caught it and dunked. NC State beat Houston 54-52 for the 1983 national championship, and Jim Valvano ran across the floor looking for someone to embrace.
The ending is almost too easy to tell. It moves so quickly from a missed shot to a celebration that it can make everything before it seem like an introduction. Charles and his teammates had spent a season getting to the few seconds we keep replaying.
NC State's historical account of the finish describes a final possession that nearly went wrong before the ball ever reached Whittenburg. A pass was tipped. The shot was rushed. Charles completed a play that had become much less orderly than anyone drawing it up would have wanted.
I like the awkwardness of that account. We can appreciate the preparation required to win a championship and still admit how untidy the last opportunity became. The sport leaves room for a player to help after the intended action has started to break down.
Whittenburg had already returned once
The season's earlier interruption belonged to Whittenburg. In Tim Peeler's account published by NC State, he broke his foot against Virginia on January 12, 1983. A senior's remaining college season suddenly had a much less certain shape.
His place on the team had taken time to develop. Peeler describes Whittenburg spending his first two seasons as a reserve behind Kenny Matthews. By the championship season he was playing alongside Sidney Lowe and Thurl Bailey, with a larger part in the team's plans.
That sequence makes the injury more than a piece of background. A player had worked toward a role and then lost access to the games in which he expected to perform it. The teammates around him had to keep the season moving while he was unavailable.
There is a temptation, once the championship is known, to describe the interruption as something the team needed. I would be careful about that. The later victory cannot tell us that an injury was beneficial or that the same result could not have happened another way. It tells us NC State found a way to continue and Whittenburg returned before the season ended.
CBR's account of Kalin Lucas's Michigan State career gives injury and return a different chronology. Each case deserves its own details. A player's recovery should never have to produce a trophy to count as a substantial part of his life in the game.
Several people kept NC State in contention
The university's Hall of Fame account of the 1983 team identifies freshman Ernie Myers as an important midseason contributor. It also names Alvin Battle, a junior college transfer, alongside Charles, Terry Gannon and Cozell McQueen in the group supporting the senior starters.
Those are different points in college careers gathered into one roster. A freshman needed to help immediately. A transfer arrived with a previous college experience. Players who would return for another year were sharing the season with seniors approaching the end of theirs.
The final image tends to flatten those differences. Everybody is celebrating the same result. Earlier in the year, they had different jobs and different reasons to be concerned about whether they could do them.
NC State earned its NCAA Tournament place by beating Virginia for the ACC tournament title. It then survived Pepperdine in double overtime in its opening NCAA game. Those results, recorded in the Hall of Fame account, give the run a little of its actual difficulty back. Reaching the final was itself a series of problems to solve.
The same account describes Charles with only two points before the closing play against Houston. Lowe, Whittenburg and Gannon had supplied NC State's second-half scoring to that point. Charles still had an opportunity to decide the game.
A useful player can have a quiet night
That last fact is the one I would keep near a recruiting evaluation. A limited scoring total can describe a difficult game without settling everything a player remains capable of doing. The next available action may suit him much better than the previous one.
Charles was close enough to the basket to finish when Whittenburg's shot arrived short. A teammate's miss had given him a job with no time to consult the scoring total.
For readers following Houston's incoming players, that is a useful question to bring into another era. What can each player do when the offense gets disrupted? The 1983 game supplies historical context, rather than a prediction about a different roster.
A recruit looking into NC State's basketball program will encounter that finish as part of the school's history. Whittenburg's reserve seasons and Myers' midseason contribution make the account more useful. The team had room for players at different stages of development.
The missed shot gave Charles one more action to make. He caught the ball near the basket and finished it. Whittenburg's season, which had stopped with a broken foot in January, ended with his teammate putting that attempt through the rim in April.
