Sport: The Year of the Superstuffers

Dunk. The word does not do justice to the majesty and the savagery of the act. First comes the ballet move—an explosion in the legs, a concussive last step and then a great leap. Floating, twisting, pulling free of the floor, drifting over dazed defenders. Then the frozen moment, suspended above the basket, serene for a timeless instant. Finally the kill: ramming ball through rim in a single ferocious stab of hostility and triumph.

As every schoolyard player knows, the dunk is back in college basketball. After a decade of exile prompted by fears that the advantages of the big men would destroy balance, the dunk/slam/stuff has set backboards resonating across the country. Trying to ensure that the equipment—as well as the quality of play—survived the onslaught of a gifted new generation of players, the National Collegiate Athletic Association retained the ban on dunks during warmups. (Regulation-play attrition is high enough: the University of Detroit broke 20 rims, at $30 each, in 27 games.) But it is a niggling constraint, and one scarcely noticed by fans who come to cheer the unleashed superstuffers.

Shredded Strings. This season’s array of gifted college players—not to mention dunkers—is among the biggest in basketball history. U.C.L.A.’s Marques Johnson, winner of the new Adolph Rupp Trophy as the nation’s top player, is a dunker nonpareil. James Hardy has shredded the strings so often for San Francisco that Dr. J. comparisons follow him like autograph hounds. His teammate 7-ft. Bill Cartwright has a soft shooting touch and an altitudinous, B-52 dunk that conjures up memories of U.C.L.A.’S Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the man whose size and skills were largely responsible for instituting the anti-dunk rule in the first place. But size is not quintessential. Alabama’s Kent Looney, a 5-ft. 9-in., 141-lb. guard, went over a 7-ft. opponent to stuff a rebound. The country’s top dunker is Rutgers Center James Bailey, who has slammed down an incredible 85 jams this year. For Bailey, a lay-up is a lapse of imagination. Aside from individual practitioners of the dunking art, there are teams who make the stuff a group effort. The University of Louisville’s official nickname is the Cardinals, but they prefer the designation “Doctors of Dunk.” The pyrotechnics are crowd-rousing, as increased decibel levels in fieldhouses everywhere attest, and at Louisville, fans express their appreciation in more tangible ways: attendance is up an average of 2,000 for each home game.

The ringing rims are only an aspect of a memorable season for college basketball. No single team has dominated the game as have U.C.L.A. and Indiana, but evenly matched good teams abound. The number of talented players is so large and so evenly distributed that Arkansas Coach Eddie Sutton could, with few exceptions, adhere to a self-imposed 500-mile recruiting limit and still field a 26-1 team. Traditional powerhouses such as U.C.L.A., North Carolina and Kentucky made the top 20, but so did newcomers Detroit, North Carolina-Charlotte, Utah and Arkansas. Back in the fold are such born-agains as San Francisco, back-to-back national champions during the Bill Russell era, and Holy Cross, which has not been in the N.C.A.A. tournament since Tom Heinsohn departed.

The second season, the one that really counts, began last week with the opening round of the N.C.A.A. tournament. The 32-team field may just be, team for team, the best in history. As the teams work up the tournament ladder toward the final prize, two contrasting styles, as usual, will clash: ball control and freelance offense. The return of the dunk has underscored a growing trend toward wide-open, flashy offensive play. While defense is still most often the key to winning the big ones, deliberate, ball-control offense appears to be going the way of the two-hand set shot. No team is among the top 30 in both offense and defense. Still, a pattern clearly emerges. Twice as many N.C.A.A. tourney entrants can be found among the offensive pacesetters as among the defensive leaders. At the extremes are the No. 1 teams in each category: stingy Princeton, which allowed opponents an average of 50.8 points per game, and Nevada-Las Vegas, for whom 50 points in the first half is an off night (the Rebels average 108 points and have scored as many as 135).

Run-and-gun offense carried the pre-tournament polls; eight of the top ten teams averaged more than 84 points per 40-min. game. Without the goad of a 24-sec. clock and with zone defense allowed, the scoring output of the national collegiate leaders was more per minute than that of the pros. It is a pace that can be kept only with fast breaks and outside shooting, not by endlessly passing the ball in controlled patterns. As University of Cincinnati Coach Gale Catlett puts it: “You have to let the thoroughbreds run.”

Jerry Tarkanian, whose speedy Nevada-Las Vegas team shoots as though every game were the Battle of the Bulge, agrees. Tarkanian is not satisfied with ball control, the back-door lay-up or, for that matter, with merely his end of the court. Says he: “The less talent you have, the more deliberate you have to be. You want to reduce the floor space on which the game is played. We want to do just the opposite: spread the court and utilize the full 94 feet.”

Whoever emerges triumphant on March 28 in Atlanta will walk away with the banner of one of college basketball’s most lustrous and exciting years. And probably stuff it into the strings of the nearest goal.