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A touched Life Two straight titles proves something's up at tiny Life U.Posted: Tuesday March 28, 2000 10:18 PM
By John Donovan, CNNSI.com MARIETTA, Ga. -- The odds, you have to think, are downright staggering. Two national championship games in two straight seasons. Both tied with less than 10 seconds to play. Two funky, off-balance shots after two near-disastrous turnovers -- two prayers, when you get right down to it. By two different members of the same team, a year apart. (These are two guys, by the way, who were both hobbled almost to the point of no return in their respective games and who now, by more happenstance than anything, are roommates.) Two shots that fall, dead perfect, into the basket. And, ultimately, two straight national championship trophies. You can play NCAA tournament games from now until next March -- from now until March 2050, if you'd like -- and you won't get two straight championship games with two endings as mad, as exciting, as far-out unlikely as those two. But that's just the start of it, really. The back-to-back NAIA national titles for little Life University -- an oasis of pine trees and softly rolling hills stuck in the urban sprawl northeast of Atlanta -- are more than simply unlikely. Something decidedly ... different ... is going on at Life.
It is a college full of back-cracking, neck-twisting, adjustment-making Doctors of Chiropractic-to-be. And that means everyone at the school has to suffer the sideways glances that that particular profession often engenders. The school's president, a huge presence of a man who won a national football championship with Georgia Tech in 1951, founded the school as Life Chiropractic College in 1974 and has built it into the 125-acre accredited university that it now is. Dr. Sid Williams -- Dr. Sid to everyone on campus -- is an Atlanta native with a streak of evangelist in him as wide as an Atlanta freeway. He's a big, smiling, silver-haired preacher of the wonders of chiropractic care, a man who often finds himself in the center of controversy and who always finds himself in the center of something. Dr. Sid also is a bit of a sports nut. "Everyone likes a victorious team," says Dr. Sid, and his rich Georgia accent makes "everyone come out evva-won. "But what a lot of people don't recognize is, as sports goes, so goes chiropractic. We're into sports chiropractic. "We give sports chiropractic probably 30 percent of the reason we're winning. It gives us a physical and mental edge." You can't be a student at Life, can't live in Atlanta and know about Life, and you certainly can't be an opponent of a Life basketball team without knowing chiropractic is what this school is all about. For better or worse -- whether you consider chiropractic care legitimate or something a long way from that -- Life University and chiropractic go hand in neck-squeezing hand. Life's mascot is an eagle named Doc. There's an 18-foot tall pair of bronzed healing hands that sits at the campus' main entrance, just across from the gym. And then there's the table. When Life's basketball team first started to travel to the NAIA tournaments back in Kansas City, chiropractic table in tow, team chiropractor Dr. John Downs remembers the looks he'd get and the arguments he'd wage to get the table somewhere close to the court. Now, after three national basketball titles in the last four years, people have come to expect the table. They see Downs, standing at the end of the bench -- or Dr. Sid, often, right behind the coaches -- on a constant lookout for players who might need a little adjusting. Downs has pulled many a player off the court in the past few years and slapped him on that table to get his neck or his spine straightened out during the game. Including, as it works out, a couple key players in two huge games in the past couple years. Corey Evans was a junior point guard for the Eagles in last year's NAIA championship game. Life had been down by as many as 26 points in that game but had fought back to tie the score at 60 against Mobile (Ala.) University with just seconds left. Evans, a 6-foot point guard from Cocoa, Fla., took the inbounds pass and brought the ball up. A spin move got him free around the halfcourt line with about six seconds left, and a crossover at about 25 feet freed him of his last defender. Evans went up at the 3-point arc with maybe three seconds left, but the last defender he had juked raced back and flew across his path, from right to left. Evans double-clutched, falling forward to avoid touching down before he let the ball go. He flung the ball toward the basket. The shot dropped through with 2.2 seconds left while Evans skidded on his chest, shooting arm beneath him, watching it the whole way. The Running Eagles won 63-60. "I still watch it," Evans says of his shot. Earlier in the game, Downs pulled Evans out, stuck him on the table and worked on him. Evans had been having some lower back pain, and everyone on the team knew the Eagles would need him down the stretch. He averaged 15.1 points a game last year, and was coming off a 31-point game in the NAIA quarterfinals against Concordia (Calif.) and a 35-point gem against Azusa-Pacific in the semis. He scored 22 in the win over Mobile and was named the tournament MVP. "You feel better afterward," says Evans of the chiropractic help he's received. "I don't know if it's a mental thing or whatever. But it seems to help." Jimmie Hunter was watching that championship game at home in Memphis. He remembers thinking, as Evans brought the ball up, that he was in a rhythm. He remembers thinking that, if Evans got a clean look in that final trip down the floor, he could make the shot. Hunter, who has gone by the nickname "Snap" since childhood, had just finished a stellar freshman season at Memphis, where he averaged 16.2 points a game. He had no idea that, less than a year later, he'd be playing alongside Evans at Life. Heck, Hunter wasn't completely sure where Life was.
At the time, Hunter didn't know the troubles he'd soon face. Memphis' semester program wouldn't allow him to make up classes in the summer, so he was looking at the possibility of sitting out a year, something he didn't want to do. A friend in Atlanta told Hunter about Life, and when Hunter found out he was eligible to play there immediately -- Life is on the academic quarter system, and would accept the summer classes -- he decided to enroll. He was Life's leading scorer this past season, at 22.1 points a game, and was second behind Evans in assists. Last Monday, against a perennially tough Georgetown (Ky.) team in the NAIA title game, Life had taken a 13-point halftime lead and seemed ready to coast to its second straight title. But Hunter got twisted up under the basket on a play in the second half and, doubled over in pain, had to leave the game. He was out for more than six minutes. It was Life's fifth game in six days, and it was starting to catch up to the Running Eagles. "When you have a tournament like the NAIA," Downs says, "the people that stay healthiest survive." While Hunter was on the table, being feverishly worked on by both Downs and Williams -- Dr. Sid also had called Hunter to the table early in the game -- Georgetown steadily cut into Life's lead. By the time Hunter came back in, with somewhere around two minutes left in the game, Georgetown actually had taken a brief one-point lead, at 54-53 with 2:33 left. Hunter made a jumper to get the Running Eagles up by one point with 1:09 remaining, then made two free throws to put them up three with 41 seconds left. But a 3-pointer from Georgetown's Mark Williams tied the score at 59 with 26 seconds left. Life had no timeouts left. "I'm thinking 'It's coming down to this again,'" Evans said. "I thought they were going to double me, and I was going to get it to Corey for an open jumpshot," Hunter said. "I was looking at the clock, waiting for the double-team to come, and it never came." Hunter brought the ball up, but lost it in the frontcourt for a split second under heavy pressure from Georgetown's Williams. When Williams lunged for it, Hunter went around his back with the ball, dribbled between Williams and Georgetown's Ricky Ward and got free for a drive to the basket. He planted his left foot at the free throw line, on the left side of the lane, and floated up for a running one-hander. Williams, trying to recover, dived at Hunter's feet. On his way down, the ball dropped softly in. Hunter saw it from the seat of his shorts, with about 4 seconds left. "Every time I think about it, that I, like, hit the shot to win a national championship ...," says Hunter. "It's something special." His back barely hurt at all. In fact, he bodied-up on Georgetown's Williams in the final seconds and forced him to cough up the ball at halfcourt. "You can feel it as soon as they adjust you. It helps a lot of things -- your balance, your shot," says Hunter, a thinnish sophomore who has aspirations of playing in the NBA. "Who's to say? Adjustment might have made me hit that shot." It is just two days after Hunter gave the Running Eagles their second straight national title. The two friends, Hunter and Evans, are on the court at Life -- a court the Atlanta Hawks have used for years for training camp and they still use for their summer league games -- talking about the improbability of the whole last-seconds winning shot, two-years-in-a-row thing. A basketball materializes. A visitor intervenes. Hunter walks through his move again. He loses the dribble, goes behind the back, lifts up his right foot and throws up the floating one-hander. Back rim and out. Evans is next. He remembers his shot like it was only two days ago. In fact, before the Running Eagles made the trip out to Tulsa, Okla., for the NAIA tournament, he treated himself to another viewing of it. He slowly dribbles up to the left wing of the three-point arc. He crosses over, losing the visitor. He avoids another invisible defender, starts to go up, double clutches and throws up the shot. He doesn't fall forward like he did the first time, but it doesn't matter. Airball. Roger Kaiser is a former pro basketball player who has headed the Life basketball program since its inception nine years ago. He's like most coaches in one significant way. "I'm looking at any edge I can get," he says. "And I think the rest of them are missing the boat." He is, it is clear, a chiropractic believer. "It is incredible," Dr. Sid says of the back-to-back titles and the way they were won. "It's magical, almost. "But we experience it every day." Williams is going on about chiropractic and the part he says it played in the wins. "It seems magical," Downs adds, "to people who are not familiar with chiropractic." In the end, who really knows? Maybe it is magic. Or maybe it is the wonders of chiropractic care. Or maybe it's simply great athleticism and great coaching and a great big unbelievably honking dose of super good luck. Maybe, though, it's also this: The beauty of the smaller version of college basketball's playoffs, a version often overlooked when the NCAA basketball barons and their $6 billion hype-heavy machine start to steamroll every other sporting event come March, simply shining through. It's hard to explain. But, for sure, there is something ... different ... going on at Life.
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Jimmie Hunter makes some impressive moves in carrying Life University to its second straight NAIA title. 
