The Big East by Dana O'Neil

Author:Dana O'Neil [O'Neil, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

PITINO AND THE 3-POINT REVOLUTION

“Best coaching job I’ve ever witnessed”

Slicing and dicing through a defense that no one sliced and diced their way through, Pearl Washington finally arrived at the last Georgetown defender between him and the basket, the seven-foot wall of Patrick Ewing. Most people—or at least most ordinary people—paused here. Washington did not pause. Instead he went up and over the man who turned shot blocking into an art form, gently laying the ball in over Ewing’s head. CBS announcer Billy Packer, apoplectic at Washington’s audacity, turned to Boeheim and mouthed, “What’s he doing?” Boeheim responded with one of his standard-issue shrugs. “That’s just Pearl,” he said.

As the Big East segued out of arguably its greatest generation of players, it fittingly turned to a man whose game couldn’t be stopped as the bridge to the conference’s future. “He was a dazzler,” Lou Carnesecca says of Washington. “He was here, there, and everywhere.” With a game born on the playgrounds, Washington shake-and-baked to the rim with flair, leading a second wave of players that proved just as critical to the league’s development as the first. If the dominance of the more established teams helped solidify the Big East’s foundation, the emergence of new blood in the mid- to late 1980s, taking the baton from upstart Villanova, cemented the conference’s power. By the time the conference celebrated its tenth anniversary, six of its nine members had competed in a Final Four, spreading its wealth in a way not seen in any other conference in the country. By comparison, the ACC, long the standard-bearer in college basketball, had sent just five of its members to the Final Four by 1989—and the league was twenty-six years older than the Big East.

But before the new blood could have their day, Washington enjoyed his. A year behind Ewing and Mullin, Washington did not want for attention. In 1984, in just his fifteenth collegiate game, he took the kick-out on a missed free throw and pushed the ball just beyond the half-court line, where he launched a nearly two-handed push shot from midcourt, swishing the bucket to give Syracuse a buzzer-beating win over Boston College. As the Carrier Dome screamed in dizzying euphoria, Boeheim walked over to shake Gary Williams’s hand. “He’s already standing next to me, like he knew it was going in,” Williams says. “Get the hell out of here.”

In due time, folks would come to expect such heroics from the kid from Brooklyn, whose style separated him from the crowd. But in some ways, Washington was a hoops Everyman. He didn’t jump particularly high, play particularly fast, or shoot particularly well, but he crafted a game built on such elusiveness and street smarts, it seemed otherworldly. “Someone asked me who was the most difficult player to guard, and I said Pearl Washington,” John Thompson, Jr., said. “We were known for defense, and if we pressured Pearl, he went by us, and if we came to him, he still went by us.

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