Chaminade’s Win Was Unbelievable

Nobody believed the score.

Chaminade 77, Virginia 72.

The 800-student NAIA school from Honolulu beat the nation’s No. 1-ranked school on Dec. 23, 1982, in the biggest upset in college basketball history.

Virginia had a 7-foot-4 center who was en route to his third straight national player of the year award.

The Cavaliers had been to the Final Four the previous season. In the four games before playing Chaminade, they won by 13 points at Duke, beat Georgetown and sophomore center Patrick Ewing in what was billed as “The Game of the Decade,” and then went to Japan for a two-game tournament.

Playing without an ill Ralph Sampson, Virginia beat Houston, featuring center Hakeem Olajuwon, and Utah in Tokyo.

Most of the 3,500 fans in the University of Hawaii’s Blaisdell Arena were there to see the No. 1 team and the No. 1 player. They wound up seeing the No. 1 upset.

When the score and story moved on The Associated Press wire around 2 a.m. EST, several newspapers called the New York office to verify the copy.

“Which Virginia did they beat?” one caller asked, thinking it might have been Virginia State, Virginia Union or another school with a similar name.

The late Tom Mees was nearing the end of a “SportsCenter” on ESPN that night and was given a piece of paper with the news of the upset on it, but he balked at reading it.

“We were dumbfounded,” Mees told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin at the time. “Nobody had heard of Chaminade then. I asked them to double-check it.

“Usually I would bolt for the door to go home and get some sleep, but that night I went back upstairs and called someone in Honolulu. If I was going to read something this momentous to the country, I wanted to at least make sure I’d been right.”

Chaminade players Richard Haenisch and Mark Rodrigues knew the outcome was right, and they celebrated higher than anyone else, climbing on to the rims after the game in what became instant photo classics.

“In the second half, the crowd sounded like 35,000. You could hear them saying ‘Oh my God, they can beat these guys,’ ” Haenisch said. “They rushed on the court and I sat on the rims. It was a great feeling.

“Nobody knew how to say our name. They thought it rhymed with ‘lemonade.’ Then you heard people say, ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Chaminade.’ ”

The 20th anniversary is being celebrated a little early because the schools meet Monday in the opening game of the Maui Invitational, an eight-team tournament that Chaminade, now a member of Division II in the NCAA, hosts every year.

The matchup was created by ESPN, and the tournament has invited some of the significant participants to this year’s event.

“That game will be like the Titanic or Iwo Jima,” current Virginia Coach Pete Gillen said this month. “They’ll be reviewing when they beat us 20 years ago.”

The review has been going on for two decades and was only heightened by the Silverswords’ wins over highly ranked Louisville and Southern Methodist the next two seasons.

Chaminade’s Tony Randolph had played against Sampson in high school in Virginia and in pickup games.

That helped his confidence despite the eight-inch difference in height. Randolph finished with 19 points, seven more than Sampson.

“That team we had wasn’t scared of anybody,” Randolph said.

Haenisch admitted there was some fear against a team that had just beaten Houston.

“We knew they just came from beating Phi Slamma Jamma and we were intimidated a little early,” he said. “When you start executing your plays, you start believing. We were tied at halftime and went into the locker room feeling they’re not any better than us.”

Then came the game’s signature play, and it was one of the smallest players who pulled it off.

“Both teams had a five-, seven-point lead but it was close,” Randolph said. “Then Mark Rodrigues came off the bench and found Tim Dunham off a back screen, and he slammed it home with Ralph Sampson in the vicinity. That play was usually the one we used to shut the door on teams. That night, when it happened, we knew right then everything was clicking.”

Said Haenisch, now a broker in Los Angeles: “The alley-oop to Dunham really got us going and let us think we can win this game. Dunham said he was 6-1 or 6-2. He was 5-10.”

Dunham, who is the pastor of the Greater Faith Missionary Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Calif., didn’t get caught up in the height controversy or the hype around the play.

“It was just another play, one we regularly did in games,” he said. “A two-handed alley-oop sounds more accurate.”

Sampson had been diagnosed with pneumonia after the Georgetown game. He spent most of his time in Tokyo sick in his hotel room. He returned to the court against Chaminade and had 17 rebounds against the Silverswords.

“All our players had played their hearts out in Tokyo,” Sampson said. “They relaxed too much when they got to Honolulu. They went to the beach, got a suntan, got healthy. It was a situation where we just weren’t ready to play.”

Sampson, who works with youngsters through his organization, Winner’s Circle in Atlanta, isn’t thrilled talking about the game.

“My career speaks for itself as far as basketball is concerned,” he said. “There are always lapses. People can call it what they want. Now I’ll have a chance to work with kids by doing some camps in Hawaii. If a game like that can lead to something like this 20 years later, that’s great. It was special for Chaminade and the players and fans. Me? I’ll remember the Georgetown game.”

No one will ever forget Chaminade-Virginia.

Three months later, Virginia lost to North Carolina State one game shy of another Final Four, and Chaminade lost to South Carolina-Spartanburg in the NAIA tournament.

It’s the game on Dec. 23, 1982, that made history.