Two Saturdays ago, just minutes after his beloved Kentucky Wildcats had fought their way past a scrappy opponent and into the Sweet 16 of the NCAA basketball tournament, Cliff Hagan answered the phone in his Sea Oaks home.
“I’m exhausted,” Hagan told the caller. “I just played 40 minutes.”
That was after top-ranked Kentucky, despite shooting poorly and being outrebounded, pulled away from a stubborn Cincinnati squad in the second half to win by a comfortable 13 points.
So you can imagine how the 83-year-old Basketball Hall of Famer felt this past Saturday night, sitting in front of his television and watching the Wildcats get seriously challenged, and often outplayed, by a fearless, confident Notre Dame team that had twice beaten Duke and North Carolina this season and won the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament.
When Hagan answered his phone Sunday, less than 24 hours after Kentucky’s nail-biting, come-from-behind victory over the gritty Fighting Irish in an Elite Eight classic that wasn’t decided until the final shot, he still sounded emotionally spent.
“We were lucky to win the damned game,” Hagan said of his Wildcats, who trailed for most of the night and were on the ropes until the final 2 1/2 minutes. “I’ll be glad when this is over.”
With its 68-66 triumph, Kentucky improved to 38-0 and advanced to the Final Four for the second consecutive season.
The Wildcats will face Wisconsin in a rematch of last year’s national semifinal, which they won.
“Nobody,” Hagan said, “has ever gone 40-0.”
Not since the Bob Knight-coached Indiana Hoosiers finished 32-0 in 1976, in fact, has there been an undefeated NCAA basketball champion. Not since the Adolph Rupp-coached Wildcats finished 25-0 in 1954 has there been an undefeated Kentucky team.
Hagan was a star forward and co-captain on that Kentucky team, leading the Wildcats in scoring (24 points per game) – his 51 points in a season-opening rout of Temple stood as a school record until 1970 – and leading the nation in rebounding (13.5 per game) to earn consensus All-America honors for the second time (1951-52, 1953-54).
But the team didn’t go to the NCAA tournament.
After Hagan helped Kentucky win the 1950-51 national championship as a sophomore, the NCAA implicated three Wildcats in a point-shaving scandal and suspended the team for what should’ve been his senior season in 1952-53.
So Hagan and two other senior starters, Frank Ramsey and Lou Tsioropoulos, chose to return to the team as graduate students – all three had been selected by the Boston Celtics in the NBA Draft – and led Kentucky to its first perfect season since a 9-0 showing in 1911-12.
The 1953-54 Kentucky team won the Southeastern Conference championship, was ranked No. 1 in most national polls and was awarded a bid to the NCAA tournament.
Under a then-existing, lit- tle-known NCAA rule, however, players who had already graduated were not eligible for postseason competition.
Rather than go to the NCAA tournament without three of his best players, Rupp rejected the bid.
Louisiana State, led by All-America center Bob Petit, represented the SEC in the tournament, which was won by LaSalle, a team Kentucky had defeated by 13 points earlier in the season.
The NCAA championship trophy went to La Salle, but The Associated Press still kept Kentucky atop its year-end rankings.
“We’ll never know what would’ve happened, but we had a lot of talent,” Hagan said of the 1953-54 Wildcats, who won their 25 games by an average margin of 27 points but beat Louisiana State by only seven in the SEC championship game. “When we got the NCAA bid, the players wanted to go, but Coach Rupp knew the three of us were the foundation of the team and didn’t want to go without us.”
The Helms Athletic Foundation, which ranked college basketball and football teams from 1936 through 1982, named Kentucky its 1953-54 national basketball champion – the last of only four times the group didn’t award its title to the NCAA tournament champion.
But Hagan, a Kentucky native who returned to the school in 1973 and served as its athletic director from 1975 through 1988, said the Wildcats don’t include the Helms title on their list of NCAA championships.
“We don’t recognize it,” Hagan said.
Kentucky did recognize Hagan, however, retiring his No. 6 jersey in May 1954, before he went on to play 10 NBA seasons with the St. Louis Hawks (1956-66).
He was a five-time NBA All- Star who helped the Hawks win the league championship in 1958.
Hagan then jumped to the fledgling American Basketball Association, where he was a player-coach with the Dallas Chaparrals for two-plus seasons and, in 1968, became the first player to be named an All-Star in both professional leagues.
In 1978, he was the first Kentucky player inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Ten years later, Hagan moved to Vero Beach’s barrier island – he discovered the area when friends from Kentucky invested in the property that became the Kentucky Club – and spends seven months of the year here, returning to his Lexington-area home in early May.
“When we decided to look around, I’ll never forget driving through the gates at Sea Oaks for the first time and seeing all the trees and greenery,” Hagan said. “It’s one of the prettiest places I’ve seen. But I also liked the fact that it was a tennis community.
“I still play four days a week, which isn’t bad for a guy my age,” he added. “We’ve got a good group at Sea Oaks, and I love to play.”
Almost as much as he loves Kentucky basketball.
“I love watching basketball and, if Duke’s playing, I try to catch the game on TV,” said Hagan’s Sea Oaks neighbor and former Hawks teammate, Jeff Mullins, a Kentucky native who starred at Duke and won an Olympic gold medal before becoming an NBA All-Star and winning an NBA championship with the Golden State Warriors.
“But I’ll miss a game now and then. Not Cliff,” Mullins added. “He’s more religious than I am. If Kentucky is playing, he’s in front of a TV.”
Hagan said he’s as devoted to the Wildcats as any season-ticket holder, watching games from his living room, where he doesn’t want to be disturbed.
“I’ll sit in my living room, in front of the TV, and I just go crazy,” Hagan said. “We’ve had some very close games this year and it’s been very stressful. I’d love to see 40-0.”
Hagan said he likes what he has seen from the current Kentucky squad, especially the way coach John Calipari has convinced a young, athletic, talent-laden group to play so selflessly.
As for Calipari’s philosophy of recruiting the best players, knowing most of them will spend only one year at Kentucky, then jump to the NBA, Hagan was, well, philosophical.
“How can you not go get the best players you can?” Hagan said. “The way I see it: If you don’t get them, you’ve got to play against them. I’d rather play with them.
“Maybe the NCAA will do something to discourage it, but until that happens, you can’t blame the athletes,” he added. “If you’ve got a chance to go to the NBA and get paid a few million dollars, you’ve got to do it.”
Kentucky is merely working within the system in place – some say he has perfected it – and Hagan said, “Calipari has done a great job with these kids.”
He ought to know.
He’s there, sitting in front of the TV in his living room, watching every game and rooting hard for 40-0. And he’ll be there again Saturday night as his beloved Wildcats chase history.
“I don’t like watching games at parties, where people are talking and socializing, having a drink,” Hagan said. “I’ve done it before, and I know people who enjoy getting together for the games and doing that. But when Kentucky is playing, I just want to sit and watch it.”
At this time of year, when the games mean so much, just watching can be exhausting.
For Hagan, who emotionally invests so much of himself in every possession, it feels as if he played the full 40 minutes.
