40 years ago today, I saw the best college basketball team in the nation.
Southwest Conference (SWC) basketball was a big deal in the 1980s, and no school was better than the Phi Slama Jama squad of Coach Guy Lewis at the University of Houston. Akeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler, Larry Micheaux, Michael Young, and Reid Gettys were so good, all were drafted into the NBA. Olajuwon and Drexler were the stars, receiving inductions into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame after retirement.
The Cougars averaged nearly 30 wins a season between 1982 and 1984, reaching three Final Fours and two NCAA title games. While the loses to North Carolina (1982) and Georgetown (1984) were disappointing, the 1983 title game upset by Jim Valvano’s NC State Wolfpack on a Lorenzo Charles buzzer beater dunk was downright painful. Some of us are still waiting for that overdue Houston Cougar NCAA title to finish what Phi Slama Jama started 40 years ago.
Although Guy Lewis & Houston were tops in the SWC in the 1980s, other schools had fine programs of their own. Texas A&M, in my hometown of College Station, was a scrappy bunch that enjoyed 10 straight winning seasons in the 1980s. They were always tough at G. Rollie White Coliseum (the “Holler House on the Brazos”). On January 14, 1984, I headed to G. Rollie with some buds to watch A&M take on Akeem and the Cougars. We wondered whether the Aggies might pull off the impossible.
They game close. A&M cut a double-digit Houston lead to just a few points late, and G. Rollie was rocking like I had never felt before. But there was no denying the inevitable, as Olajuwon put the game away and secured a 70-64 win. After dispatching A&M in 1984, Houston would reach the NCAA title game for the second year in a row. Like the 1983 title game against NC State, 1984 would also end in a loss.
Four years later, I was off to little Austin College, an NAIA school in Sherman, TX. AC basketball was quiet at Hughey Gym; it felt a million miles away from the noise of the big time SWC basketball around which I had grown up. But if you know anything about Roo Tales, you know that Roo legends are often playing supporting roles in the larger world of Texas sports. Roo legends like Bob Mason.
Coach Guy Lewis of the University of Houston and Coach Bob Mason of Austin College have a lot in common. Both grew up in 1930s East Texas and found basketball as a vehicle out of Depression era poverty. Both starred for small NAIA schools: Lewis played for NAIA University of Houston from 1945 to 1947 while Mason did the same for NAIA Austin College from 1949 to 1952. Both enjoyed success on the court: Lewis led Houston to an NAIA tournament appearance in 1947, while Mason helped secure a Texas Conference crown for Austin College in 1951.
And after their playing careers were done, Guy Lewis & Bob Mason became close friends within the coaching fraternity that was Texas NAIA basketball. Lewis’s coaching career at Houston began in 1953; Mason’s tenure at AC began soon thereafter. Although the Cougars and Kangaroos never met on the court, Lewis & Mason played common opponents year after year and kept in close contact during the offseason. The two were pals and peers in their youth.
But the trajectories of their two schools soon began to differ dramatically. Private Austin College, in little Sherman, TX, remained small and NAIA. Public University of Houston, in one of the fastest growing cities in America, skyrocketed to the elite world of Division 1 NCAA. That trajectory took the Cougars from their modest NAIA days to the top of the basketball world when I watched them in College Station back in 1984.
As Lewis was changing the game of NCAA college basketball in the early 1980s, Mason was doing the same at the NAIA level. Bob Mason was elected President of the NAIA in March of 1983. In an AC Observer article that year, Larry Lundy wrote that as NAIA President-elect “Dr. Mason will travel…to the NCAA Rules Committee Meeting in Albuquerque, NM, the site of the NCAA basketball championship finals.” There, in Albuquerque, Bob Mason watched his buddy Guy Lewis and the Phi Slama Jama squad fall to NC State in arguably the most dramatic game in college basketball history.
I attended Homecoming 2024 at AC and was fortunate to bump into both Clayton Oliphint and Larry Lundy in the Larry Kramer Outback. Larry Lundy today is the Founder and President of LMG, a strategic marketing & management firm serving corporations, brands, events, & athletes. At the Outback, Lundy told me the story of attending the Final Four in Albuquerque with Mason and watching NC State deny Phi Slama Jama the 1983 title. I told Lundy that the end of that game still haunts a 12-year-old Marc.
From Lundy:
“My roommate Tracy Kennedy’s father was a big UH alum and we got tickets through him. Since I was writing for the AC Observer, I figured I would just go cover the Final Four [for the Observer]. No credentials or anything; I just showed up. Walking into the stadium, I see Bob Mason. He asked what I was doing, and I told him I was covering the Final Four [for AC]. He laughed and kept moving.”
“I show up at the press area and this reporter yells ‘hey, we have been looking for you. Here are your credentials.’ [Later], I realized that maybe that reporter thought I was someone else. I went courtside. No computer, just a writing tablet. All the other writers had to immediately file their story right after the game. I felt lucky as the AC paper came out weekly. At the end of the game, I got in an elevator with just 2 people: Houston Assistant Coach Terry Kirkpatrick and a crying Akeem Olajuwon.”
Roo Barry Faulkner Faulkner was also at the Pit in Albuquerque with Mason. Faulkner, in the artificial turf business at the time, was there for an NCAA facilities conference. He had been the AC basketball clock manager during his four years in Sherman and enjoyed a lot of basketball with Mason in the years after graduation. Faulkner and Mason were just 14 rows up at the Houston – NC State Championship.
Guy Lewis shook off the disappointment of Albuquerque in 1983 and reloaded for a 1984 title run which I got to enjoy at G. Rollie White in College Station. Early in that same 1984 season, a small college opponent dropped out of a tournament hosted by the Cougars. Lewis needed to find a replacement. So, he picked up the phone and called his friend Bob Mason, asking for the Austin College Kangaroos to fill that spot.
As reported by friend-of-Roo-Tales Alan Burton in the Sherman Democrat, Mason wisely and respectfully declined. “A few years back [in 1984], after a team cancelled on him, [University of Houston Coach Guy] Lewis phoned Mason seeking to schedule a game. ‘I’ve tried to forget about that,’ Mason chuckled. ‘That was when he had Akeem and that bunch. I told Guy it wouldn’t be good for either one of us.’”
The Houston Cougars were such a story 40 years ago that they inspired an ESPN 30-for-30 Documentary: Phi Slama Jama. The 2024 Cougars are once again an elite team in collegiate basketball; Houston is currently ranked #2 in the nation. When the NCAA tournament kicks off next March, I’ll be rooting for the 2024 Houston Cougars to go all the way and finish what I saw Phi Slama Jama start 40 years ago.
I often tell my Roo buds that Austin College maybe didn’t deserve an individual like Bob Mason. But we’ll take him. Mason’s playing and coaching career at AC stretched nearly a half century. With his basketball knowledge, educator mindset, and Hollywood looks, Mason could have likely ascended the heights of the NCAA basketball world. But he was a loyal NAIA Roo to the end. And Austin College benefited as a result.
Roo Tales are all about the ties that bind AC to larger entities in the state, nation, and the world. Those ties are only possible because of the big legends that roam the halls of little Austin College. Phi Slama Jama’s defeat of Texas A&M in College Station 40 years ago was a big game I still remember, in an environment very different from little Austin College. And yet, because of legends like Bob Mason, Austin College was almost in the same category as Texas A&M in 1984:
A victim of Phi Slama Jama.
https://www.sulc.edu/page/larry-lundy