The Shot, the Spectrum, and the official who got it right: Christian Laettner’s moment, 30 years later

If any fans in a Spectrum crowd that for most of that memorable Saturday churned like a restless blue sea were focused on Tom Clark during the timeout with 2.1 overtime seconds left and Kentucky leading Duke by a point in the East Regional final, they must have wondered why the referee’s head suddenly mimicked a metronome.

Senior official Tim Higgins prepared to hand the ball to Duke’s Grant Hill under one basket. The crew’s third man, Charlie Range, stationed himself beneath the other. Clark, the least experienced of that 1992 NCAA Tournament game’s officials, had the rest of the floor.

As he stood there opposite Kentucky’s bench, Clark knew the most excruciating end-game decisions were likely to be his. There was no replay yet in college basketball. The validity of any potential game-winning shot would be his alone to decide.

“The Spectrum’s big clock was overhead so I wouldn’t be able to find it in time,” Clark, 72, said this week on a call from his Ohio home. “There was so much noise I’d never hear the horn. I had to be sure I fixed on the shot’s release and then looked instantly toward the clock over the basket. So during the timeout I practiced moving my eyes from where I figured the shot might be to the clock.

“I was going, ‘Release-clock. Release-clock. Release-clock.’ At the same time I’m praying to my father, who’d died a few months earlier, ‘Please don’t let me mess up.’ I’m figuring there will be a pass to midcourt and somebody will throw up a wild shot. Then I see that Kentucky ain’t going to be guarding the inbounds pass and I about threw up.”

Unimpeded, Hill, the son of an NFL star, heaved a 75-foot strike to Christian Laettner. The Blue Devils’ devilish center, wearing a white No. 32 jersey that 25 years later sold for $119,000 at auction, faked, turned, and launched what will forever be dubbed “The Shot.”

Determining that there were two-tenths of a second remaining when Laettner released, Clark signaled to the scorer’s table that the basket was good and sprinted off the court. The greatest game he’d ever worked — hell, the greatest game he’d ever seen — was over, and amid the swirling cacophony of joy and sorrow he sought refuge in the Spectrum’s tiny officials room.

Now, three decades after that unforgettable moment on the afternoon of March 28, 1992, the East Regionals are back in Philadelphia, though this time at the Wells Fargo Center. Laettner’s basket is still regarded as the greatest single play in NCAA Tournament history, with YouTube videos of it continuing to attract nearly as many eyeballs as dancing cats.

Those who saw it live or on CBS’s telecast recall exactly where they were, what they were doing. And the principals themselves, the players, coaches, and referees, insist they still feel that moment’s powerful mix of tension, relief, elation, and despair.

“Years later, when I was in the NBA, we’d come to Philly to play the Sixers in the new building and I’d look over to where the Spectrum was,” said Cherokee Parks, the Duke 7-footer who now works in development for the NBA. “I’d tell my teammates, ‘That was the spot. Right there. That’s where The Shot took place.’ "

Its legend has been enhanced by its context, coming in the last possible instant of an utterly remarkable college basketball game between two elite programs coached by future Hall of Famers. There were five lead changes in its frantic, final 32 seconds.

Kentucky’s Jamal Mashburn, who had 28 points and 10 rebounds, was sensational. Laettner was better. The Duke senior, who had nearly been ejected after deliberately stepping on the chest of a fallen Wildcat earlier in the game, was otherwise perfect — 10-for-10 from the field, 10-for-10 from the foul line.

“The game of basketball really came through that day,” Parks said. “It was an absolutely fantastic game.”

The events that defined it initiated with 2.5 seconds left in overtime, when, with Kentucky trailing, 102-101, the Wildcats’ Sean Woods banked in an improbable 13-footer over Laettner.

As that shot dropped through the rim, Laettner made a beeline for Clark.

“I look up and there’s this 6-11 guy running right at me, right into my face,” said Clark, retired now and living in a Cincinnati suburb, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky. “He’s right in my face. He’s got his hands up and he’s screaming for a timeout, Nobody talks about that play. But if Laettner is two-tenths of a second later in calling that timeout, he never gets his shot off.”

In the wake of Woods’ basket, Duke’s other stars were convinced fate had cruelly ended their dreams of a second straight national title.

“When that shot went in I stopped believing,” said Hill, a Duke sophomore and now a CBS tournament analyst. “After something like that I didn’t think there was any chance we were going to win.”

Junior point guard Bobby Hurley felt similarly deflated.

“A shot like that goes in and you think, ‘OK, we’re not supposed to win,’” said Hurley, currently Arizona State’s head coach.

But after gathering his stunned players on the sideline, coach Mike Krzyzewski struggled to disabuse them of that notion.

“The huddle was surprisingly calm,” Parks said. “Coach told us we were still going to win the game. He knew what he wanted to do and he asked Grant if he could make the long pass. When he said he could, he asked Christian if he could catch it.”

It wasn’t an idle question. That February, in a loss — their second and last that season — at Wake Forest, a long Hill pass at game’s end had bounded off Laettner’s outstretched hands.

In the other huddle, coach Rick Pitino, in his third season at Kentucky, decided he was going to double Laettner with a pair of 6-foot-7 players — Deron Feldhaus and John Pelphrey.

“It made sense,” said Pelphrey, now the head coach at Tennessee Tech. “He knew they’d try to get the ball to Laettner. He’d been killing us all game.”

Before the Wildcats returned to the court, Pitino yelled, “No fouls.” He needn’t have.

“Everybody knew I wasn’t going to call a foul in that situation unless the guy ended up in the Naval Hospital across the street,” Clark said.

Hill had regained his confidence during the timeout. “After that I believed we could win,” he said. It grew when he saw no one lined up to try to obstruct his pass.

Free now to roam the baseline, he moved a few steps to his right, clear of the potentially obstructive backboard, and unloaded. As he did, Laettner came off a screen and posted up at the free-throw line. The pass arrived shoulder-high. Heeding Pitino’s advice, Pelphrey and Feldhaus didn’t closely confront him. Laettner corralled the ball, dribbled once, faked right, turned, and shot.

From his distant vantage point, Hill thought his teammate was taking too much time. “When he took that dribble, I was thinking he might not get it off in time — I wanted him to shoot it right away,”

For Parks, on the bench after scoring four points in six minutes, those 2.1 seconds seemed an eternity.

“It was all so very slow and surreal,” Parks said. “You could almost see what was going through Christian’s head. He was like, ‘Oh, dude, I’m going to catch this, shoot, and win the game.’ He’d hit a couple of shots like that in the NCAAs the previous two years. That’s part of why so many people didn’t like him.”

Curiously, those who disliked the player who inspired the ESPN documentary, I Hate Christian Laettner, included at least one teammate.

Asked this week for his recollections of The Shot, reserve Marty Clark responded in an email — “There are certain things I don’t celebrate,” he wrote. “Christian Laettner is one of them.”

Attempts to reach Laettner for comment were unsuccessful.

Once Laettner scored, the Spectrum erupted. Verne Lundquist, CBS’s play-by-play man for the game, called that explosion of sound “the loudest I ever heard a basketball arena.”

On the sideline, the normally subdued Krzyzewski emphatically spiked the towel he’d clutched throughout the final minutes. Duke’s Thomas Hill walked aimlessly through the crazy scene, a bemused expression of disbelief on his face. Laettner exuberantly raised his arms and was immediately gang-tackled by delirious teammates.

“You’re swept up in it,” Parks said of the reaction. “You go crazy and then you keep replaying it and replaying it. It’s like. ‘Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.’ That one moment lasted five or six hours. That whole trip back to campus, from the bus to the plane to the bus, could have taken six hours or it could have taken two. I don’t know. We didn’t have phones to replay it. We had to remember it as it happened. So we kept talking about it.”

Amid Duke’s celebration, Kentucky players wandered the arena floor zombie-like, unable or unwilling to grasp the reality.

“You’re in a daze,” Pelphrey said. “You’re thinking, ‘Wait, what just happened? Let’s do it again. It’s not supposed to end this way.’”

Meanwhile, back in the officials room, Higgins asked Tom Clark if he was certain The Shot was good. Because if he missed the call, Higgins warned, Kentucky fans were likely to storm the room. Just then there was a knock at the door. The game’s three officiating observers had the same question for Clark.

“I told them all the same thing,” Clark said. “I told them I had it. The ball left his hand with two-tenths of a second left.”

A few weeks later, Clark received a package in the mail. Opening it, he found a photograph of the moment Laettner released The Shot. The clock above the basket read two-tenths of a second.

“The photo was signed,” Clark said. “It said, ‘To Tom: I’m glad you got this right. Coach K.’”