Classic Flashback: MSU 2000

(Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from The Final Four, Reliving America's Basketball Classic, a book produced and published by the NCAA. For more on the book, click on the title.)

The road to the 2000 national championship began with placemats.

In 1996, when second-year Michigan State coach Tom Izzo was trying to convince Mateen Cleaves, Morris Peterson and A.J. Granger to cast their lots with the Spartans, he always had special placemats at each recruiting dinner.

Each mat was tailored to a specific player's personality. They included photos, fictitious career stats and predictions of stardom in East Lansing. For example, Granger's placemat included a headline: "Granger makes buzzer-beater against Kentucky as Michigan State wins NCAA crown."

But as Granger told writer Steve Grinczel of the Saginaw News, he thought the mats were rather cheesy. "Yeah, right," Granger remembers telling himself. "What can this Tom Izzo possibly know?"

Yet Granger, a power forward, signed with the Spartans, as did two products of the bleak industrial city of Flint-Cleaves, a highly recruited point guard, and Peterson, a late-blooming small forward. Their careers didn't exactly get off to the start they envisioned.

As freshmen, they belonged to a Spartan team that was eliminated in the second round. Of the NIT, that is.

Said Cleaves, "That was the lowest point of my career. There's nothing wrong with the tournament (NIT), but it was tough to sit in front of the television and watch the teams in the NCAA tournament. All the media attention they get and how much fun it is and the smiles on the players' faces. And I said to myself, 'I'm going to play in the NCAA tournament. I'm not going to the NIT anymore.'"

And he didn't. Before Cleaves' sophomore year, the Spartans added another product of Flint, shooting guard Charlie Bell.

The media dubbed Cleaves, Peterson and Bell the "Flintstones," but they really were the cornerstones of a team that brought the Spartans their greatest glory since Earvin "Magic" Johnson led Michigan State to the 1979 national title.

In their final three years, Cleaves, Peterson and Granger led the Spartans to victory in more than 80 percent of their games. They won three Big Ten regular-season titles and two Big Ten tournament championships.

Then, after being eliminated by Duke in the 1999 national semifinals, they all came back as seniors to lead the Spartans to the university's second NCAA title.

"The night we lost to Duke, we were down," Cleaves said, "but we still had some guys who felt that we had accomplished something just by getting to the Final Four. But Antonio stood up and said, 'Hey, learn from this. Don't feel like you've accomplished something until you've won it all.' And I tlked to the guys and said we've got to get hungry. We can't just want to get to the Final Four."

The aforementioned Antonio, last name Smith, was the beginning of Izzo's pipeline to Flint. He exhausted his eligibility without fulfilling his dream, but he kept in constant contact with his former teammates during the 1999-2000 season, helping them cope with adversity.

Early in the season, for example, Cleaves, who had turned down an opportunity to be a cinch NBA first-round draft pick, missed 13 games with a stress fracture in his right foot, forcing Bell to move to the point. The Spartans lost some games, including a memorable one to Kentucky on the road in December, but they held themselves together until Cleaves returned.

During the regular season, the Spartans defeated Wisconsin twice. Then they eliminated coach Dick Bennett's ball-control, defensive-minded Badgers again during the Big Ten tournament. So they weren't exactly thrilled when they learned that their Final Four semifinal opponent would be-you guessed it-Wisconsin, which was making its first Final Four appearance since winning the third NCAA tournament in 1941.

"You think you're finally finished with a team like that," said Cleaves, "and the next thing you know, you're playing them again. It's like, '0h, my God.' "

And that was pretty much the feeling of the RCA Dome crowd of 43,116 and everyone who watched the telecast of the Wisconsin-Michigan State game.

At halftime, the Spartans led, 19-17. At the end, their margin was 53-41. For fans who think the game revolves around the slam dunk and the three-point shot, it wasn't exactly state-of-the-art basketball.

Despite a sub-par performance by Cleaves, who made only one of his seven shots from the floor and committed four turnovers to only one assist, the Spartans won with rebounding (a 42-20 advantage) and superior defense. They also were blessed with an outstanding second half by the 6-7 Peterson, who scored 11 of his game-high 20 points during a 13-3 MSU run in the second half.

Still, it was such an unsatisfactory game that the Spartans' locker room was subdued. Then again, that might have had more to do with the team slogan that was rooted in Antonio Smith's comments after the loss to Duke the previous year:

"We haven't won anything yet."

As Izzo put it, "They really are excited about what they've accomplished, but they have a dream. Everybody has dreams, but few of us ever get to live them. And it's here. They get to live it."

The Spartans' championship-game opponent was a team about as different from Wisconsin as salsa music from the waltz. Under young coach Billy Donovan, the Florida Gators had mastered the uptempo style that Donovan had learned under Rick Pitino.

In 1987, Donovan had been the point guard for Pitino's Providence team that made it to the Final Four in New Orleans. Later, when Pitino took the job at Kentucky, Donovan was one of his assistats.

Like Pitino, he believed in uptempo basketball-full-court pressure on defense, running and gunning on offense. After clawing their way to a 43-32 halftime lead, the Spartans appeared to suffer a fatal blow when, with 16:18 remaining, Cleaves was shoved out of bounds and came down hard on his right ankle, forcing him to hobble to the locker room.

But Bell, drawing on the experience he gained during his fellow Flintstone's 13-game absence, moved to the point and held things together until Cleaves returned with 11:51 remaining. Perhaps inspired by their fellow senior, Peterson and Granger combined for MSU's next 16 points to give the Spartans a 71-58 advantage with 7:36 remaining.

At the end of the Spartans' 89-76 victory, Peterson had 21 points, Granger 19, and Cleaves 18. The three seniors also combined for 13 of Michigan State's 32 rebounds and contributed 10 of the Spartans 19 assists.

Peterson said he was playing for his grandmother, Clara Mae Spencer, who had died the previous week in Mississippi, and Cleaves said he realized his dream of winning the NCAA title while CBS played the song, "One Shining Moment," in its post-game montage.

And naturally, both, along with Bell, said they were happy to give the citizens of Flint something to be proud of.

But the enduring lesson of the Spartans will be the value of staying in school.

Many of their rivals were decimated by early defections to the pros. Indeed, State was one of the few senior-dominated teams in the nation.

Yet because Peterson, Granger, and, especially Cleaves, had a unique commitment to education, to a school, and to a coach, the Spartans prevailed. If it was a great triumph for Michigan State, and it surely was, it was just as great a triumph for college basketball.

In only his fifth year since replacing the popular Jud Heathcote, who coached the Magic-led Spartans to their 1979 title, Izzo had Michigan State back atop the college basketball world.

Written by Billy Reed
Reprinted with the permission of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (c) MMI