"Finally, payback for what Christian Laettner did to us."
(Referring to the legendary 1990 east regional final during the NCAA men's basketball tournament, and Laettner's buzzer-beater that sent Duke past University of Connecticut by one point in overtime.)
Congrats UConn. This was a legendary game too, and you played amazing. I was rooting for Duke but I wanted to see a good game more than anything, no matter who was competing. You deserve this win.
Best of wishes going on into the Final Four.
Are you kidding?? Laettner was trash. Good player but crude and rude in every other way. Insulting and stomping on opponents. He was a poor man's Larry Bird and at least Bird knew to stop with his mouth. Laettner deserved the hate he got.
ReplyDeleteI posted much the same as this lil' write up on Facebook and got jumped flunky by a friend who argued... and I have to agree with her... that Laettner kind of deserved some of the hate. I'd clean forgotten about the stomping incident.
ReplyDeleteDang. Suddenly I feel old :-/ Then again that was 34 years ago.
Crazy that after decades we're still talking about Christian Laettner.
ReplyDeleteLaettner set Duke's goodwill back by almost forty years. Of course there are going to be people who remember him.
ReplyDeleteI just checked the stats and this lil' post from last night is SMOKIN' hot today! A lot of traffic from North Carolina but also elsewhere, including some from Connecticut.
ReplyDeleteYes, we do still find ourselves talking about Laettner. It will be another 30 years and people will STILL be talking about him. I however don't dwell on one player, and instead prefer to think of it more in terms of the Blue Devils during the 1991 and then 1992 seasons when they won back to back national championships. That was positively the stuff of legend. I was wearing a Duke shirt on the streets of Brussels in the summer of 1993 and got spotted by some high school students visiting from Pennsylvania. It was a bonding moment between Americans in a foreign city :-)