WASHINGTON – Tom Izzo remembered the bus ride to his first Sweet 16 as Michigan State basketball coach.
The heartbreak from his two trips to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament as an assistant coach under Jud Heathcote – the “Clockgate” against Kansas in 1986 and Kenny Anderson’s controversial 3-pointer in 1990 – were in the rearview mirror. So, too, were his first two seasons after taking over for his mentor, both of which ended in second-round exits in the NIT.
The future was in front of the third-year coach and his nascent program in 1998. And it was being televised.
“I remember coming over the little hill,” Izzo said Thursday, March 26, reminiscing about the ride to the game in Greensboro, North Carolina. “All of a sudden, that’s when the [broadcast] trucks had saucers that were big. And my guys were looking over, and I said, ‘Ah, it’s no big deal, guys, it’s just TV cameras.’ There were so many trucks with so many.”
“It caught us by surprise,” said Lorenzo Guess, who was a freshman guard on that team and is now the Spartans’ director of strength and conditioning.
Inside the Greensboro Coliseum, something bigger awaited: Dean Smith and No. 1 seed North Carolina. Three future first-round NBA draft picks, including Vince Carter and Antawn Jamison. A sea of powder blue.
And a humbling lesson in a 73-58 loss for the Big Ten champions, even though Izzo remembered it as getting “beat by 100.”
“That was my first experience. It was exciting, it was nervous, it was good,” he said. “We didn’t play great. It led to better things down the road.”
Building a foundation
It also provided the first hint of Izzo’s ultimate blueprint to take his program to levels only he and his players envisioned at the time. It’s something he has been reflecting on the past few weeks, about not taking any of the success for granted.
“You gotta think – coming from the NIT to get to that, it was just fulfilling, uplifting. Because we started working,” said current assistant coach Thomas Kelly, a guard on that team, on Thursday. “And to get to the Sweet 16 was big-time. I mean, that was a great feeling. It was just by any means necessary. We were just trying to win.”
That first Sweet 16 was the first of an active record 28 straight NCAA appearances for Izzo and 3-seed MSU (27-7), which will face 2-seed Connecticut (31-5) on Friday. It’s Izzo’s 17th trip to at least the second weekend of March Madness, with tipoff is 9:45 p.m. (CBS) at Capital One Arena.
Since his March Madness debut, Izzo also has taken the Spartans to 11 Elite Eights, eight Final Fours and a national championship. And he helped MSU to a seat at the table among college basketball’s bluebloods.
“There might not be as many bluebloods anymore. I like the term because I think that means you’ve withstood the test of time and you’ve earned the right over years and years and years,” Izzo said. “I mean, we’ve been pretty good for 30 years. Haven’t won enough national championships. I don’t know where we are. Whoever takes over for me has got a job.
“We got to get to be one of those, if we’re not. I think that takes consistency over time.”
Izzo’s 2000 national title team featured “Flintstones” Mateen Cleaves, Morris Peterson, Charlie Bell and several other key players who also got their NCAA tournament baptism during that 1998 run.
‘By any means necessary’
That season, MSU won Izzo’s first of a record-tying 11 Big Ten regular-season titles –and the program’s first since 1990 – but dropped a 99-96 overtime thriller to Purdue in the finale to finish 13-3 in league play and share the crown with Illinois. Despite owning the top seed in the inaugural Big Ten Tournament, the Spartans then lost their first game to Minnesota and ended up as a 4-seed in the East on Selection Sunday.
But they were back in the NCAAs for the first time since Heathcote’s final game, a shocking, soul-crushing loss to Weber State that ended Kelley’s freshman year and Shawn Respert’s venerable MSU career.
Izzo’s first NCAA weekend, ironically, came in the same place this season began: Hartford, Connecticut. The Spartans knocked off 13-seed Eastern Michigan, 83-71, then weathered what Kelley remembered as “an ugly game” against 5-seed Princeton, 63-56, to get to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 1990. Cleaves, the Spartans’ captain and a second-team All-American, put together a tour de force performance with 27 points, nine rebounds and five assists despite committing seven of MSU’s 21 turnovers against the pesky Tigers.
“That’s when Mateen really kind of willed us,” Kelley said of Cleaves, the only Spartan to score in double figures in that game. “He really did his part as far as playing both sides of the ball. He willed that win. … It was just by any means necessary. We were just trying to win.
“I know it was an ugly game, but we did what we had to do to win. That’s all that mattered at that time.”
The buzz wore off quickly when the Spartans got to North Carolina and realized just what they were in store for against a top seed in a hostile environment. The Tar Heels jumped out to a 14-point halftime lead and rode Carter and Jamison for 20 points apiece to end MSU’s season.
But that Sweet 16 run emphasized that Izzo was the right man for the job after some shaky moments in his first two years and early losses that season to Illinois-Chicago and Detroit Mercy.
“He was always intense, so that didn’t change,” Guess said. “We just knew what we needed to do to win and knew how to do it. We had the guys to do it, so everybody just bought in and went 100 miles per hour for it.”
Kelley said everything intensified within the program from that first brush with NCAA success. And it started with Izzo.
“It just made us even more to the point. He held janitors accountable, secretaries. He turned it up, because he got a taste of it,” Kelley said. “I laugh about it a lot. We started at the beginning, me and him. That NIT stuff wasn’t cool, and I remember how people treated both him as a coach and us as players. It wasn’t easy.
“That’s why I always feel a certain way. Because to see this where it’s come now, it means a little something more to me.”
Lessons in accountability
Izzo’s players feed off his energy.
Kelley returned to the court that offseason, and he and Peterson, his roommate, started having late night sessions with Cleaves. Soon, the rest of the Spartans joined them. Their workouts became like practices, then like games. And they continually escalated the stakes among themselves.
All because they saw the advantages North Carolina experienced when they got to the Sweet 16.
“That summer, it was like, ‘We gotta try to take it to another level and get to a 1-seed,’” Kelley said. “That’s when open gyms started becoming more about bragging rights. Whoever’d win that day, they got bragging rights. We’d stop at each other’s apartments, and we were talking stuff and challenging each other. So those open gyms were really like games, and sometimes harder than games.
“That’s when it became competitive. Me and Mateen, sometimes our teams would play against each other. And more importantly, when the pros came back like Shawn Respert and Steve Smith and those guys, playing against those guys and challenging them, too. We’d lose some, but we also started winning some, too. So that’s when we knew, you know what, we’re really starting to take this to another level.”
Kelley recalled talking to Cleaves that summer in MSU’s auxiliary gym before the star was about to meet with Izzo. And it laid the groundwork for the next step in Izzo’s grand plan.
“[Cleaves] was talking about, ‘Man, it’s time to start playing some Dukes and North Carolinas in the nonconference.’ And I told him, ‘Tell him we got your back on that,’” Kelley said. “That’s where anytime, any place started. Because we felt like we were ready.”
MSU proved it that 1998-99 season. The Spartans won their second of four straight Big Ten titles, earned that first 1-seed, then played their way into Izzo’s first of three straight Final Four appearances. That year ended with a loss to Mike Krzyzewski and Duke in Tampa, Florida, but further validated Izzo’s vision.
A year later, the Spartans were celebrating a national championship. All by staying true to his ethos of accountability.
“If you think it’s easy to get to a Sweet 16, Elite Eight, a Final Four and a national championship, and there are a couple of coaches that can do it maybe with more talent or different ways,” Izzo said. “Mike is a good example since he’s been the greatest of all. First time I coached against Mike Krzyzewski, I looked down. When he got on a knee and said something, I went, ‘Wow, he’s no different than me. He just wins more games, so he can be calmer than me.’
“He’s awesome. He holds kids accountable. He did it. It hasn’t changed.”
Neither has Izzo.
“I’m at one point in my career that I’m happy. I don’t give a damn. I don’t,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. I don’t have many players that leave, I don’t have many players that don’t come back. So somebody must enjoy something.”
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State basketball 1st Sweet 16 only the beginning for Tom Izzo