Forty Minutes To Glory

Hall watches the consolation game and then walks beneath the stands toward his dressing room. Engrossed in thought, tense, by mistake he starts to enter the Duke locker room. Gene Banks, the Blue Devil freshman, and several other players look up, startled. Hall catches his mistake and heads for his team's locker room. There he goes over defensive assignments, reminds everyone to look to the middle of Duke's zone, gives Phillips a quick demonstration on how he wants him to take the ball to the basket and then writes a big "40" on the blackboard. "This is it fellows," he says as the players huddle up. "Forty minutes to glory."

Hall is toughest on his players when they are in the lead. He drives them like a jockey whipping his mount down the stretch, flailing away with his rolled-up program as Kentucky leads throughout the first half. The score mounts to 45-38 as Givens, criticized earlier in the year for not being able to play well in big games, puts in his team's last 16 points, six of them in the final 31 seconds. But Hall is not about to let anyone relax. He charges into the dressing room right behind Williams and chews him out for his defense.

Williams says something back to him.

Hall explodes. "This is a hail of a time for you to get upset, Lavon."

Then Hall starts in on Cowan and finally he blasts Phillips, who has had a woeful first half, missing all three of his shots and drawing four fouls.

His mission accomplished, Hall now stands before a team that feels as if it were losing instead of winning. He goes to the blackboard. "I guarantee you that they cannot guard you right here," he says, pointing to the middle of the Duke zone. He spends the rest of the intermission talking about technical matters until, just before the Wildcats go back on the floor, he says to Phillips, "Mike, hang in there. You may have a hail of a half."

In the second half, Kentucky hits nine of its first 14 shots and has a 66-50 lead with 12:42 left. Thereafter, Kentucky plays just well enough to win. The Cats are cautious, giving up a 15-foot jump shot that Duke's Jim Spanarkel keeps firing in. A 13-point lead with 2:44 left is trimmed to four before Lee ends the game with a dunk shot. That makes the final score 94-88 in Kentucky's favor.

As the game ends, Hall wades through an engulfing crowd, climbs over the press table and a railing, and goes into the stands to hug his wife. On the floor, one net is down. The players are going down to the opposite end to cut loose the other when Lee, who had been castigated almost daily during his four years at Kentucky, calls out for Hall. "Joe, Joe," he yells, but Hall does not hear him. So Lee goes into the stands and pulls Hall onto the floor. Phillips lifts the coach up on his shoulders, and Hall snips away all but one of the final strands of the net. He leaves the last one for Givens, who has scored 41 points and forever silenced his critics.

As the crowd surges around him, Hall hugs and thanks each of his players.

Mike Phillips says, "It made it all worthwhile."