“I wanted to grab him,” Williams said. There was no time.
“I remember telling him I was going to make it,” Blake said.
Correction:
An earlier version of this article misidentified the member of the Maryland basketball team who was a former football player. It was Calvin McCall, not Andre Collins, who had been a quarterback for Maryland’s football team. This version has been corrected.
Maryland 2002 national championship resonates 10 years later
The 2002 championship game
The best-of-Gary Williams archive page contains all of the stories and columns from the April 1 National Championship game.
The Terps got the ball inbounds, the Huskies reacted as Blake predicted, and he took it, “a knuckleball,” Williams said. It went in.
The next weekend, in the national semifinals against Kansas, the Terps fell behind 13-2 early on. Williams called timeout.
“I’m going to kill Wilcox,” Williams said, “because he’s not doing anything.”
But as they came to the huddle, Williams was pre-empted. Dixon already had Wilcox by the jersey. Throughout the timeout, Dixon’s screaming didn’t stop. Suddenly, Williams became the calming presence.
“Okay,” Williams said. “We’ve got to play. Just play.”
By halftime, Maryland was up seven.
“That was Dixon,” Williams said.
That was Maryland.
‘Anything can happen in one game’
Wilcox, now a member of the Boston Celtics, was scheduled to have heart surgery Thursday in Cleveland to fix an enlarged aorta — a season-ending but not career-threatening issue, Williams said. Earlier this year, Nicholas, who won two Euroleague championships with the Greek club Panathinaikos, parted ways with his team in Italy’s top league and returned to Florida to collect his thoughts. Holden worked his way into a college assistant’s job at Monmouth, but the staff was fired after 2011, and he now works at a financial firm in Jersey City.
Six years ago, Baxter was charged with firing a gun within blocks of the White House and, despite having reached a plea agreement with prosecutors, spent time in jail when a judge threw out the agreement. “He had to get away from the people he was hanging out with,” Williams said. Dixon’s NBA career ended in 2009, and he spent some of the past two years fighting the stain on his reputation that came from a positive test — and subsequent suspension — for an anabolic steroid while he was playing overseas. The 165-pound Dixon vehemently denied the charges, and he has since resumed his pro career.
At some point, the championship is in the past — another day, another month, another year, a decade behind — and real life takes over.
“We all have our lives now,” Mouton said. His is running a nonprofit AAU program in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, “trying to teach kids and parents a lot of the stuff I learned at Maryland, fundamentals and teamwork.”
Holden’s experience is the same as he coaches a team of fourth graders. “There are no shortcuts,” he tells them. “I take that into everything I do in my life.”
Grinnon, now a manager for a financial firm, likewise draws on his old experience.
“Starting from Coach Williams down, the way he ran his business, ran his coaching — if you’re on time, you’re late; responsibility; raising the expectations from good to great; you got to be an expert at what you do — all those things I incorporate every day of my life in the business world,” he said.
Those things would be true, 10 years later, even if Blake hadn’t sealed that game against Connecticut, even if the Terps never came back against Kansas, even if there was no national championship.
“One game doesn’t determine how good of a coach you are, because anything can happen in one game,” Williams said. “But people look at it that way. The outside looks at it that way.”
Ten years later, the outside looks in at that Maryland team from a decade ago and sees all the pieces — physical and mental — to win a title. Does it seem like 10 years ago, when they pulled it off?
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