YouTube Gold: 1993’s One Shining Moment
We’re the furthest thing from UNC fans but we’re okay seeing Eric Montross triumph here.
In 1993, the NCAA Tournament tradition of the One Shining Moment video montage had some wonderful highlights.
George Washington gets the prime mascot spot as he reads Cinderella. A coach we don’t recognize has a bit of conversation with the Arkansas mascot and we’re also not sure who the band is who is featured after that.
Duke makes its debut coming out of the tunnel as the two-time defending national champion.
Bob Knight was a regular while he was at Indiana and the fans show their love followed by an uncharacteristically impish shot of the General. The great pity of Knight is that he had so many fine qualities that were overruled by his ugly side.
UNC’s George Lynch, who in a lot of ways was the heart of that great 1993 UNC team, gets a solo shot.
Kansas’s 5-6 guard Calvin Rayford pulls off a brilliant strip of Indiana’s Damon Bailey. Seriously! Wow!
Nick Van Exel hugs his Cincinnati coach Bob Huggins and then we get a shot of Kansas’s Rex Walters exulting. Trivia: did you know that Ol’ Roy Williams had two of the more loathsome coaches in recent history, Matt Doherty and Kevin Stallings, on his staff that year?
Like the previous year, Michigan’s Fab Five gets plenty of face time here. Chris Webber is happy in his first shot, or at least the first where we’re sure we recognize him.
Webber gets another powerful block, as he did in the 1992 version. A few frames later, somebody gets really lucky on a flubbed alley-oop. Then a Louisville player throws a remarkable pass while sitting near half court.
Jason Kidd, who knocked Duke out on his way to a Hall of Fame career, runs out of bounds but not before tossing a ball behind his back.
Grant Hill got a nice reverse layup for the Blue Devils and Temple legend John Chaney makes an appearance.
Bailey makes another appearance, this time pensive as defeat by Kansas grows imminent.
Kidd leaps in triumph which is surely after defeating Duke, followed by a Lynch dunk.
Webber makes a freakish play against UNC’s Donald Williams, coming from behind and stripping him without him even realizing that he’s there - not easy to do at his size. It’s pretty amazing really. Fellow Fab Fiver Jimmy King goes in for a dunk but CBS was nice and didn’t show Webber’s idiotic timeout (if you don’t know, he called a timeout with 11 seconds left - but Michigan was out of time outs and got a technical foul instead. This was after Webber got away with a travel on the same play).
The video ends with UNC celebrating and we’ll say two things about that.
First: both of Dean Smith’s championships came when opponents made terrible, devastating errors in the final seconds (Georgetown’s Fred Brown inexplicably passed the ball to UNC’s James Worthy on the Hoya’s last possession of the game in 1982). And second in this video, the team coalesces around the late Eric Montross. Montross, you’ll recall, died recently from cancer. A lot of fans, even Duke fans, thought very highly of the guy. It’s kind of sweet to see him in this great moment of triumph, forever on the Internet.
Next up: Duke comes within a fingernail of three national championships in four years.