Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room

by Michael Perry

Banks came to UC’s rescue several times during the 1989-90 season. In addition to the Flyers, he had last-second shots to beat Florida State and Creighton, and he made two free throws against DePaul to send that game into overtime.

  “I was the captain,” he said. “It was my team, so I wanted the ball at the critical times and they wanted to give it to me.”

  His best game probably came his senior year, when the Bearcats upset No. 11 Southern Mississippi 86-72 at Shoemaker Center. Banks finished with 23 points, nine rebounds and a career-high nine assists. He had averaged just 11.7 points in the previous nine games.

  IN FOR THE LONG HAUL

  Tarrice Gibson was not the first player to sign with UC after Huggins became coach; that was Michael Joiner (May 1989). But Gibson, who signed a month after Joiner, was Huggins’s first four-year player.

  Gibson is from Dothan, Alabama, in the southeast corner of the state (population 60,000). Dothan is known as the “Peanut Capital of the World.” Gibson really wanted to go to Georgetown—a basketball power in the 1980s under coach John Thompson—but the Hoyas instead signed another guard. Gibson felt that other schools backed off him because they thought he was headed to Georgetown.

  Florida State offered him a chance to walk on. But Gibson verbally committed to Howard Community College in Big Spring, Texas.

  Cincinnati entered the picture late in Gibson’s senior year, 1989. His recruiting trip to Cincinnati was his first airplane ride, and assistant coach John Loyer and Keith Starks met Gibson at the airport.

  “As soon as I met Keith, Lou (Banks), and Andre (Tate), I was sold,” Gibson said. “The first time I saw Lou, he said, ‘We’ve got to put some muscles on you, little fella.’ They called me ’Bama. I went back home, and a week later I signed.”

  The Howard coaches told him: If you have the chance to play at UC, go for it.

  “What Lou, Andre, Keith and Levertis (Robinson) did in 1989 was the best thing that ever could’ve happened to me,” Gibson said. “You’ve got Lou the hardass, Andre the consummate professional, Levertis the minister of defense, and Keith the workhorse. They taught me everything they knew. Andre’s leadership, Lou’s tenacity, Keith’s will not to give up. Levertis was mild tempered; nothing ever rattled Levertis.

  “They laid the foundation for the family.”

  FAMILY MATTERS

  Gibson arrived in Cincinnati with some clothes in a brown paper bag on September 16, 1989. He remembers the date. He owned next to nothing.

  Loyer picked him up at the airport and dropped him off on campus. Tate was going to his mailbox in the dorm. “’Dre, I’ve got your new teammate right here,” Loyer said. “Take care of him.”

  Tate and a female friend took Gibson to K-Mart and bought him sheets, a pillow and blanket. Banks took him to a bank and gave him $10 to open an account. “I didn’t have a dime to my name,” Gibson said.

  All of this is why, 25 years after he came to town, Gibson lives in Cincinnati, keeps in touch with numerous former players from the Huggins era and offers advice to new players who need it.

  “That’s what we do as a family, we try to go above and beyond the call of duty for each other,” Gibson said. “I talk to every teammate that I had at the University of Cincinnati more than I talk to my biological brother and sisters. My four years at UC were the best years of my entire life.”

  Tarrice Gibson brought tremendous energy and aggressive play off the bench as the Bearcats’ top reserve during the team’s run to the 1992 NCAA Final Four. Gibson currently ranks eighth at UC with 150 career steals. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  UC fans probably know Gibson by the name “Tarrance”—which he insists is not his name. He should know, right?

  Gibson said a guidance counselor from Northview High School misspelled his name on a form that went to UC. Then UC referred to him as Tarrance in all publications for the next four years.

  “It never bothered me,” he said. “I thought it was cool that they were renaming me. But it bothered my grandma. I went to (sports information director) Tom Hathaway once and told him, ‘That’s not the spelling and my grandma doesn’t like it.’ Tom told me that I needed to bring my birth certificate to show him the spelling of my name. I thought, you think I’m going to lie about my name? I said, ‘Forget it.’”

  To be fair, Gibson signed his name as “Tarrance,” was referred to that way by almost everyone and never complained to UC officials until just before his senior season—too late to make changes in various publications. He finds the confusion somewhat amusing.

  Now, he said, he signs all business papers “Tarrice.” He is known in Cincinnati by Tarrance, Tarrice and T-Rat, his nickname. “I answer to every one of them,” he said.

  BREAKTHROUGH RECRUIT

  Perhaps the most important recruit in the Huggins’s era was Herb Jones, a two-time junior college All-American at Butler County (Kansas) Community College.

  “He was a great player,” Huggins said. “I thought what we had to do was win, and I thought Herbert was probably the best guy out there that we could get to win.”

  UC was the first school trying hard to sign him, and that was important to Jones. When Oklahoma coach Billy Tubbs made a late run for Jones, showing him Final Four and conference championship rings, Jones remained loyal to Cincinnati.

  “Huggs came out (to Kansas) and was showing me the system,” Jones said. “I thought I’d fit in. I don’t really know how I was sold. All my friends were saying, ‘Why do you want to go to Cincinnati? You can go anywhere.’”

  The six-foot-four Jones was relatively quiet. He stayed to himself at first more than he hung out with teammates. He mostly went to class, practice and the cafeteria. But on the court, it didn’t take long for him to make an impression.

  “Herb was the real deal,” Starks said. “No one could stop him. Nobody was as strong as him on the block. He was quick off the floor. We always thought Levertis could jump high. They had classic battles. If Herb was 6-10, he would’ve been (national) player of the year (in 1992).”

  “I had never seen anybody that small be able to play down low the way he did and score in all kinds of ways,” Anthony Buford said. “There’s no question he didn’t get his due nationally. I think he got his due on our team.”

  And within the program.

  UC coaches would use the fact that they signed the National Junior College Player of the Year to help land more top junior college players in the next recruiting class.

  “If you would ask Huggs: ‘Who’s the guy who turned the program around?’ He’d tell you Herb,” former assistant coach Steve Moeller said. “He was the first high-profile guy.”

  “I didn’t really think of it like that at that time,” Jones said, “but that’s what people said later, that I broke the recruiting barrier.”

  Jones was an Associated Press honorable mention All-American in 1992. UC’s previous AP honorable mention All-American was Robert Miller in 1978.

  CHANGE OF ADDRESS

  Following Anthony Buford’s second season at the University of Akron, his coach, Bob Huggins, accepted the head coaching position at the University of Cincinnati. After Huggins took the job, he returned to Akron to meet with each player. Right away, Buford wanted to know whether there was a spot for him at UC.

  “He was who I trusted,” Buford said. “The only reason I went to play basketball at Akron was because of Bob Huggins.”

  Privately, Huggins told people he wanted Buford with him in Cincinnati. But he didn’t want it to appear as if he was raiding the Akron program. He encouraged Buford to stay put, saying he didn’t know what the situation at UC would be like. Buford was on pace to become Akron’s No. 2 all-time scorer; he would have 1,400 points after three seasons.

  The players lobbied for assistant coach Steve Moeller, who ended up joining Huggins at UC, to get the Akron job. But instead the school chose Coleman Crawford, who had worked under Huggins, then spent a year as a
n assistant at Tennessee.

  Suffice it to say, Buford did not get along with Crawford for a variety of reasons. Buford would tell Huggins how unhappy he was, but Huggins couldn’t say anything in response. When his junior season ended, Buford told Huggins: “I’m not playing my senior year at Akron. I am transferring down there (to UC) whether you like it or not.”

  Every award Buford earned from his last season at Akron he threw in the trash.

  Akron’s spring classes ended in May. Buford headed right for Cincinnati. He would have to sit out one year, then would have only one season of eligibility to play for the Bearcats.

  That was fine with him.

  THE EXAMPLE

  Buford had surgery on his right knee in late March 1990, after Akron’s season ended. When he arrived in Cincinnati two months later, he could only walk around. No running. No basketball.

  His first day on campus, he met some of the players for the first time. Tate, who had just completed his college career, immediately said, “Let’s play one on one.”

  “I can’t,” Buford said.

  But as soon as he did start working out and playing pick-up games, the holdover Bearcats began testing the new guy.

  “I finally realized what was going on,” Buford said. “When he first came to UC, all Huggs talked about was how tough his former players were. He used me a whole lot as an example. So these guys had heard a lot about me, and now here I am in the flesh and they all wanted to find out firsthand. They were going at me like you can’t imagine.

  “I’m kind of in the mindset that I’ve played three years of college basketball and I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. And I know physically I’m not ready. But they did not like me. You could hear them on the side, saying, ‘He ain’t all that. Huggs is full of it.’”

  Tate, Robinson and Starks—all recruited to UC by Tony Yates—were the main culprits.

  “When Buford got there, everybody did want a piece of him,” Tate said. “Huggs had built him up to be a tough guy. We had heard so much about him. And we didn’t back down from anybody.”

  “We were a very tight group,” Robinson said. “Buford was kind of like an outsider.”

  Finally, one day, Buford served notice: “Do what you need to do right now because this doesn’t mean anything. When the season starts and I’m healthy, I’m going to kill all of you.”

  The response: Yeah, whatever.

  Buford knew Huggins’s offense better than anyone on the team. Tate, a graduate assistant that season, also knew the offense well and practiced sometimes with the Bearcats. Together, they posed problems for the starters.

  It wasn’t until later that Buford would become friendly with some of the players.

  He even got into fights with Robinson during practice. One day, while going for a loose ball, Buford caught Robinson with an elbow. Robinson, a second-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, responded with a quick punch to Buford’s jaw.

  “I started to retaliate, then I realized who it was,” Buford said. “Being a little bit smart, I decided not to take it any further.”

  “That’s what happens in the heat of battle,” Robinson said. “The way our practices went, you couldn’t expect anything but that.”

  THE CALIFORNIA KIDS

  Southern California, 1990.

  “I didn’t know anything about Cincinnati,” Corie Blount said. “I didn’t even know they had a basketball program.”

  “All I knew was WKRP,” Terry Nelson said. “I didn’t even know Oscar Robertson went here.”

  “I knew about the Big O, but that was a long time ago,” Erik Martin said. “I knew Cincinnati didn’t do anything in the last decade that would jog my memory.”

  Such was the mindset of three junior-college recruits being pursued by the University of Cincinnati.

  The main targets were Nelson from Long Beach College and Blount from Rancho Santiago. Moeller had recruited the state of California as an assistant at Rice and Texas earlier in his career. In July 1990, he went to the West Coast to see Nelson and Blount.

  It was during that trip, at a summer-league game at Cerritos College, that Nelson had what is probably the best game of his life. “I was like 16 of 17 from the field,” Nelson said. “I scored 34 points, had a couple dunks. Moe went back and told Huggs: ‘This guy’s a player. He can score, he’s tough, he can rebound and he can defend.’”

  It was also during that trip, at an open gym at Rancho Santiago, that coach Dana Pagett told Moeller: “I’ve got a guy who’s better than Corie.” The player was Erik Martin, who had left TCU after the 1989-90 season and was to play for Rancho Santiago.

  Moeller recruited all three. Junior college players typically didn’t sign letters of intent until the spring, but the Cincinnati coaches—in just their second year in Clifton—wanted to secure these three in November.

  Nelson and Blount, who knew each other from summertime games, took their recruiting visits together in October. Nelson, who had signed with Cal State-Fullerton out of high school, wanted to leave California. He was the easiest to sell.

  “I told Corie the first night in Cincinnati I was coming,” Nelson said. “I said I know what I want. If you come, we’ve got a chance to go to the Final Four. I just liked the chemistry of the guys. We had a good time. I fell in love. I knew this was a place I could settle down and do some fishing. I told Huggs the next day. I don’t think he took me seriously.”

  Blount still wanted to take a trip to Tennessee. He was also considering UNLV and Utah.

  After Nelson and Blount returned from UC with good reports, Martin decided he wanted to take a visit to Cincinnati, too. However, he did not want to sign until the spring. His father Edward even told the UC coaches that.

  Well, Huggins responded, then Erik has eliminated himself because we need commitments now. Moeller repeated that message to the family.

  Eventually, Martin’s father called to say his son had changed his mind. Sorry, Huggins said. “The only way I’ll bring him in on an official visit is if he comes in here and likes it, he signs without going anywhere else.”

  Which, of course, is what happened. Then Martin went to work on Blount. “Just imagine, the three of us can go there and turn it around,” he’d say.

  Blount took a recruiting trip to Utah. Finally, he, too, committed to the Bearcats.

  “I told all my friends I was going to Cincinnati with Erik and Terry,” Blount said. “My friends didn’t even know where Cincinnati was. They were saying, ‘That ain’t no basketball school.’”

  The three California Kids signed in November 1990.

  They came to Cincinnati together the following summer, driving in a rented Plymouth Sundance. It took them four days to cross the country.

  “We were the California Connection,” Blount said. “We felt the hype when we started playing in the summer league (at Purcell Marian High School). Then Nick (Van Exel) came later. . . . It took off from there.”

  SETTING A TONE

  Early in the summer of ’91, some Bearcats played pick-up games at Shoemaker Center—and some did not. Herb Jones played over at Xavier. Some guys rarely played at all.

  Huggins returned from a trip out of town and heard all this. He summoned the team to a racquetball court on Shoemaker Center’s lower level, then turned out the lights.

  He proceeded to blast each and every player, including Buford.

  Said Blount: “I’m looking at Erik and he’s looking at me, like, man, it’s true what they say, this dude is crazy. That did it. We were playing together in the gym all the time after that.”

  It was during that meeting, Nelson said, that he told everyone he thought his junior college team was successful because the players did everything together.

  “If we went to the store, we went together,” Nelson said. “Our motto was togetherness. They looked at me like I was crazy and started laughing and making jokes out of it. They thought it was funny, but it soon became our theme. Everything we did from that point, we did toge
ther.”

  “COACH” BUFORD

  Herb Jones, Tarrice Gibson, Allen Jackson and Anthony Buford were already in town. Nick Van Exel arrived from Trinity Valley Junior College in Texas. The California Kids—Corie Blount, Terry Nelson and Erik Martin—came from the West Coast.

  This collection of players from all over the country started bonding months before the magical 1991-92 season was to start.

  Buford watched the talent and felt, if the chemistry was right, if everyone was “on the same page,” if the guys could handle Huggins, there was potential for something special.

  So he started coaching. He’d warn his teammates old and new about what they would experience with Huggins, how at times he’d be uptight, how there were times the players would not be able to do anything right. “He’s going to cuss you out and say crazy things,” Buford said. “Don’t pay attention to how it’s being delivered, just listen to the message.”

  Buford would gather guys in his apartment and ball up pieces of paper and try to explain the offenses, the defensive presses. Whatever he could show them about Huggins’s system, he did.

  “Our group trusted each other,” Nelson said. “When Anthony said something to me, I didn’t get defensive thinking that he was trying to coach me. I just thought he was helping me. I figured whatever he could teach me would get me to play sooner. Everybody wanted to win.”

  There was tremendous basketball IQ among the group. They really understood the game. By the time preseason practices started, the coaches were able to move through plays quicker and work on more advanced offenses and defenses.

  “They were ahead,” Huggins said. “I don’t know how much ahead. The important thing is we had guys that were leading and guys that were helping. I think their understanding of what was supposed to happen was a lot better.”

  SHORT RESISTENCE

  Blount did not want to lift weights when he got to UC, and he did anything he could to get out of it. “You recruited me to play basketball, you didn’t recruit me to be a body builder,” he would tell Huggins.