Banner year: Louisville's players, fans treasure 2013 title run, but NCAA's decision still stings

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Louisville 2013
(Sporting News)

When Luke Hancock sits at his desk working, he cannot escape the memories of his greatest day playing. Nearby is a magazine article his uncle had framed from the night he was the single most important player in American basketball’s single biggest championship game. There is a piece of artwork commemorating the “2013 National Championship” that includes a depiction of the score of that game, the winners’ trophy and the jersey of star guard Peyton Siva. There is a public resolution from when his home county of Roanoke, in Virginia, celebrated “Luke Hancock Day”.

“I’m reminded of our run every day,” Hancock told the Sporting News. That night a decade ago when the Louisville Cardinals played the Michigan Wolverines for the NCAA Championship, U of L coach Rick Pitino told his team they would think about something from that march every day for the rest of their lives. “He was so right.”

A day’s particular memory for Hancock, though, isn’t always of the confetti or the trophy presentation or hearing his name shouted through the loudspeaker when the selection of the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player was announced.

It could be not what was won, but what was lost.

“It’s two-fold, because in Louisville, everybody still says you’re the champ. But every time somebody says, ‘You’re still the champ’, or ‘They can’t take anything away from you’ it’s not painful, it’s just … it is a blemish,” Hancock told TSN. “And it’s one that I don’t necessarily think should be there. People have a perception that we were recruited to the university with all kinds of violations … and that’s not the case. Nobody that was on that court was recruited there with any of that stuff as a factor.”

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Ten years ago, on Monday, April 8, at the conclusion of a season in which Louisville won the regular-season and tournament championships of the Big East Conference in its final season in the league, after entering March Madness with a 30-5 record as the tournament’s No. 1 overall seed, the Cardinals faced Michigan in pursuit of their program’s third NCAA title and first in 27 years.

Everything went their way that night, from early foul trouble for Wolverines All-American Trey Burke to Siva’s stat-stuffing wizardry (18 points, 6 rebounds, 5 assists, 4 steals) to Hancock’s perfect deep shooting through five attempts to the dicey foul call on Burke when he stuffed Siva’s layup attempt with 5 minutes left to Chane Behanan’s herculean offensive rebounding that sealed a U of L victory.

Most everything since has gone against that team, starting with the revelation on a Friday afternoon in October 2015 that a book was soon to be published called, “Breaking Cardinal Rules”, which included a first-person account from a woman named Katina Powell describing how she delivered exotic dancers and escorts to the basketball residence hall for parties and sexual encounters she claimed were part of the basketball program’s effort to recruit the next group of Louisville greats.

The NCAA launched an investigation that concluded less than two years later with the declaration the 2013 title would be vacated because some active players who were involved in those parties had competed for the Cardinals as they reached the Final Four and won the championship. They retroactively were declared ineligible for receiving – say it with a straight face, now – extra benefits.

It was the first time in eight decades of the NCAA Tournament that a championship had been erased, even though there previously had been occasions when such a decision might have been justified. The simple, elegant banner near the ceiling of the KFC Yum! Center, adjacent to those commemorating the titles won in 1980 and 1986, had to be removed. Michigan did not ascend to the title of champion; it just became vacant.

“When it was all breaking, coming out at that time, Rick Pitino was still the coach,” guard Tim Henderson, a hero of the Cards’ semifinal comeback against Wichita State, told TSN. “And I remember asking him one day, and he told me, ‘Yeah, they’re probably going to take away the championship.’ And so I just kind of sat there. It was extremely frustrating at the time, but at the end of the day, it’s really not going to change their decision. And for me to dwell on that didn’t make sense in my mind, either.

“I mean, we all know what happened. The fans know, my teammates know. You’re frustrated, you’re angered about it at first. But then after that, life just kind of moves on. And that’s what’s happened.”

In sports, though, perhaps more than any other aspect of society, we tend to look back as the world keeps moving. Because what we remember in this venue almost always is joyful: championships, records, even the near-misses that required so much excellence merely to enter that category.

This is so much different than all of that.

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When Louisville chose to stage a 10th anniversary reunion in February to honor the members of the 2013 team, to allow them to enjoy one another’s company and recount stories about Pitino’s punishing practices and playing on toward victory after the gruesome leg injury to guard Kevin Ware in the regional final, to be presented to the Yum! Crowd during a game and be acknowledged for what they achieved, the entire weekend was necessarily a ballet more than a bash.

Everything had to be choreographed to remain within the boundaries of what was permissible relative to the program’s enduring NCAA sanctions. Most of the organization’s punishments for rules violators  have an expiration date – postseason bans, probation periods, show-cause orders –  but “vacated” is forever.

“Our athletic director, Josh Heird, we had discussions as a group, and he wanted to be sure we did something,” Kenny Klein, retired senior associate AD for media relations and now a consultant, told TSN. “We planned for it early on and came up with a date that coincided with All-Star weekend in case any of our guys that are still playing professionally could make it back.”

Montrezl Harrell of the Philadelphia 76ers was able to attend. Gorgui Dieng, of the San Antonio Spurs, had a family issue to address but was able to spend some time with the team through a FaceTime call, as was star guard Russ Smith, who is playing professionally in Italy.

“Card fans, during the 2012-13 season, the Louisville Cardinals took fans on a ride through the end of March and into April. Tonight we honor that team,” the arena’s public address announcer, Lance McGarvey, said that afternoon, before a highlight film of the team’s performance in the Michigan game was played on the various video boards. “Now, let’s meet the team.”

NCAA Tournament? March Madness? Champion? These words were not mentioned. “I don’t recall the exact verbiage,” guard Mike Marra told TSN. “You know what? Now that I’m saying it, they might have just introduced us as the 2013 team. I guess I just wasn’t paying that close of attention.”

It was a moment for all the members of the team to share with those who have entered their lives since -- wives, children – and to again feel the audience affection that once became almost routine while playing before capacity crowds.

There were empty seats this time, though not as many as one encountered at most 2022-23 Louisville home games, as the program navigated its worst season in decades. A season-best audience of 15,157 showed up to demonstrate their appreciation of the 2013 squad. The current Cardinals cooperated beyond all reason by pulling off a shocking upset of NCAA Tournament contender Clemson.

“Honestly, it was one of the best times I’ve had in a while,” Henderson said. “I haven’t seen many of those guys – some of them in that long, 10 years. And to be able to get back to that team and that family mentality and that setting …

“We were in a group text leading up to it beforehand, and we’re all joking with each other and everything else, like we used to 10 years ago. It was a lot of fun. And then we got to hang out with each other and just catch up, even with the guys who weren’t players but the guys who contributed, whether it be film, helping us with rebounds, feeding us basketballs, whatever it may be.

“They all have families now. We are all growing, mature and old, it’s funny just to see how far we’ve come from that 10 years ago. And the university, they really did it right with how they treated us. They did everything they possibly could that the NCAA would allow, which was still pretty frustrating. The NCAA is still not allowing certain things.”

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It’s quite possible what has been permitted relative to the 2013 team might have remained off limits if not for the decision by Hancock, Henderson, Marra, Dieng and Stephen Van Treese to file suit in July 2018 against the NCAA demanding they be cleared as individuals and their records be restored. Hancock noted other players “could have joined” the suit – they had not been implicated during the NCAA investigation – but did not because they felt the experience was behind them and wanted to move past it.

The case went to mediation and was settled a year later. The five plaintiffs were all affirmed as eligible student-athletes throughout their careers, and their statistics, honors and awards were deemed valid. The most obvious component of this was the Final Four Most Outstanding Player trophy Hancock had earned with his brilliant long-distance shooting in the victories over Wichita State and Michigan. That designation originally had placed him in the company of such legends as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson and Christian Laettner. Now, he was back.

“The NCAA didn’t try to protect us. They lumped everybody in and made us out to be some villains,” Hancock said. “Ultimately, when we got to the finish, after going back and forth with the NCAA a lot, it kind of became clear that without the school getting on board with us – when you win a team trophy, a team championship, that is really the school’s. So we could not ask for the championship back, because it wasn’t ours to ask for.”

The school subsequently did request permission from the NCAA to raise a banner in honor of the 2013 team, and it was granted and announced in mid-February, coinciding with the timing on the team reunion. It now rests between the one that says “1986 NCAA CHAMPION” and another earned by the school’s terrific women’s program stating “2009 WOMEN'S NCAA FINALIST.” This one says “2013 FINAL COACHES POLL #1”.

The USA Today poll of college coaches is the only one taken following the Final Four, and the No. 1 team universally has been the NCAA Tournament winner, even in seasons such as 1988, when Kansas (27-11) lost two of three to Oklahoma (35-4) but won the game that mattered most. So anyone who knows, they know what the new banner means. It also means, though, and it’s hard to escape, the team that won that last game must have some issue that differentiates it from the teams that won the two banners to the left.

“Some people said: Gosh, why would you put up a banner like that?” Klein told TSN. “Well, we were playing at Duke a couple weeks after, there’s probably 20 banners up there for them finishing No. 1. I don’t think it’s that unusual. It’s different in the fact we’re not permitted to do the other.”

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The NCAA was not inclined to revisit the Louisville case in a conversation with the Sporting News and instead directed us to a couple of years-old press releases: one announcing the initial penalty to U of L athletics and the second regarding the failure of the university’s appeal. And who can blame them, really? The word “sordid” evolved to depict precisely such circumstances.
There never had been anything quite like it in the complicated history of NCAA rules enforcement, and it almost certainly was the nature of the case that pushed the infractions committee to take the step that never before had been approached: erasing a championship.

There were members of the 2013 team who were cited in the book by Powell and journalist Dick Cady as having participated in the sex-oriented parties, although any athletes’ names were redacted in the official NCAA report from its committee on infractions. None of the former Louisville athletes who joined the lawsuit against the NCAA was cited by either.

“I mean, I was surprised. I was more than surprised,” Marra told TSN. “I was like, wow, that was happening right down the hall … It was surprising because I didn’t really witness any of that firsthand. I didn’t see any of that going on. When we had recruits in, you know, everything we saw was above board. And Coach Pitino, he was very strict about the NCAA rules at all times. I mean, he took me to play golf one summer and paid for the round. And then after the round, he told me, ‘Hey, you’re going to have to come around and work off that greens fee; you’re going to have to work the amount of hours to pay for that.”

Others who have worked for Pitino or played under him insist he always was committed to rules compliance. It is possible, though, he was vigilant only when he was vigilant. Because mere months after the initial NCAA ruling was presented in June 2017 on the “Breaking Cardinal Rules” case, which placed the basketball program on probation, Louisville basketball became involved in a separate scandal related to the Justice Department investigation of the basketball talent game. Pitino was fired in October of that year, and the subsequent investigation of the allegations against the Cardinals’ program complicated any efforts to have the 2013 championship restored.

"You can take down a banner, but you can't take down a national championship," Pitino told reporters covering this year's first-round NCAA Tournament games in Albany. "Those young men won a championship the honest way." 

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When TSN spoke with Hancock weeks before that team’s anniversary reunion, what seemed as though it would be the most difficult question to pose was dismissed as emphatically as Dieng might have thrown back an opponent’s layup back in the day: Do you resent the players who were involved in those parties and whose presence gave the NCAA a justification for vacating the title?

“No,” Hancock said without hesitation. “I think the details are lost ... I don’t blame those guys. I just know they’re not the villains they’ve been made out to be. And I know the work that we put in to get there. I’ll always support those guys. I think they’ll always support me. And I’m not mad at any of them.”

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In Louisville’s Sweet 16 game in the 2013 NCAA Tournament, Ware entered as a 16-minute a game player and departed as an emerging star. His uncommon dynamism and developing offensive talent produced 11 points on 5-of-7 shooting in a 77-69 victory over Oregon. It did not last long. Two days later, on a Sunday afternoon at Lucas Oil Stadium, Ware landed oddly on his leg and suffered a horrifying compound fracture in his right tibia. Hancock immediately stepped up from the bench to help comfort him.

And Henderson stepped in, figuratively, to take his place. “We were a team,” Henderson told TSN. “Everybody was so in sync with what the other person was doing. I mean, yeah, we had some NBA guys … but you look at how we moved as a unit, whether it was the first five or the eighth, ninth, 10th man off the bench. It didn’t matter who it was, we all knew exactly what we had to do.”

Louisville's 2013 NCAA Tournament
First round 16 NC A&T W, 79-48
Second round 8 Colorado State W, 82-56
Sweet 16 12 Oregon W, 77-69
Elite 8 2 Duke W, 85-63
Final Four 9 Wichita State W, 72-68
Championship 4 Michigan W, 82-76

Henderson entered the Louisville program as a walk-on and averaged 3.7 minutes per game in the 2012-13 season. He scored 22 points all year. And yet six of those were indispensable to the Cardinals completing the that season with a victory in the championship game and being handed the trophy that no longer is theirs.

With Louisville shockingly trailing ninth-seeded Wichita State in the national semifinals, 47-35 with 13 minutes remaining, Hancock made a move through the center of the lane and dropped a pass to Henderson in the right corner. Walk-on? Deep reserve? Heck with that. He was open with orders from Pitino to play like he belonged. Henderson dropped that shot without hesitation. Less than a minute later, Smith found him in the same spot, after almost an identical move. The result was the same, and that gaping lead was cut in half. Even Wichita’s Ron Baker, afterward, noted Henderson’s impact.

“You can’t erase it. You just can’t erase it,” Henderson said, but he acknowledged there will be times when he is recognized, maybe by a fan of another team, and they’ll comment on how it all didn’t really happen.

“I don’t take it personal because one, I know it happened. And two, I know they’re just saying it because they know it happened but they want to try to get a reaction out of you,” Henderson said. “So most of the time I just smile and laugh it off and I’m like, ‘Oh, yep, it sure didn’t happen.’ For me, it’s past that point.

“You’re not going to get an emotional reaction out of me to say we didn’t win it, or Luke didn’t hit his big shots, or Peyton didn’t play the way he did. It’s just laughable, and I know they’ve just got nothing better to do.”

Luke Hancock
(Getty Images)

Marra spent the 2012-13 season rehabilitating a torn ACL. It was the second season in a row he tore up his knee. None of that season was exactly how he imagined it, and he knew the second injury had ended his college career. The championship, though, he was very much a part of that. Pitino brought him into the staff and gave him assignments, including with scouting and practice.

“I still feel that I was just as important in my role as any of the coaches,” Marra said. Having the title stripped, he added, “I don’t think it hits me any different than any of the other guys. I think it hits me exactly the same. I think we all feel the same. We were all in it together.”

Hancock began at Louisville as a transfer from George Mason. He arrived with a reputation as a long-distance shooter, something Pitino emphasized long before many of his peers. After sitting out the mandatory year-in-residence – no transfer portal then – Hancock entered the rotation at the start of the 2012-13 season. He missed 21 of his first 24 3-point attempts.

“I got booed off the court,” Hancock said. “I was struggling with confidence. You can imagine how getting booed off the court would shake you a little bit. Later on they’d do this ‘Luuuuuke’ thing when I hit threes. At the beginning, those were boos.

“The education part for me of being hated on a little bit early, and then being able to confide in my teammates and keep our group together, and them putting confidence in me … and then winning a national championship … the ups and downs prepared me for the ups and downs that followed, I think.”

The problem with erasing the 2013 title is this is what was erased, these stories, much more so than the dreadful, indelible activities described in the book.

“It’s a total facade,” Hancock said. “It’s a punishment that wasn’t right, isn’t right, and I hope it’s rectified at some point.”

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One of Jimmy Blair's three children, daughter Jennah, beat brain cancer. His wife, Jill, once had surgery to remove a brain tumor. He knows better than most what real life is, what it is to agonize over the future of those dearest to him.

He also is a lifelong Louisville fan, raised by a father who would hand-draw the NCAA Tournament bracket annually in an era when printing one off the internet was not an option. His wife became a passionate Cards fan growing up attending games with her father, Bob Hazlett. He had season tickets in the last row of Freedom Hall, so high up he could stick a pin in the wall to use as a coat hook during games. Bob passed away in November.

So Blair is not equating the heartbreak of Louisville’s vacated championship with what matters most in life. But neither is he dismissing how he felt then, and still does.

“To a lot of outside pundits, to a lot of outside fans, they feel like taking down the banners and taking way the wins and the Final Four appearances and all the records for those four seasons – they act like that’s no punishment,” Blair told TSN. “When you have banners, and you have conversations with other team’s fans – not necessarily Kentucky, because Twitter is kind of the whole world – titles and Final Four appearances and banners and rafters are vitally important to us. And I think until you have one taken away, you still don’t really feel like vacated records are as important as they are.

“To tell you how significant it was, I could go sit in the spot where I was sitting when I got the news that our banner was being taken away. I had visited family in West Virginia, and I got a text alert and I was on Twitter and they said they’d made the decision to take away the banner. And it was like being hit by a truck – in a sporting fan’s kind of way. It took away a part of our history.”

Blair was in attendance at the reunion game and saw the “No. 1” banner raised. He found himself surprised to leave after that day's victory with such appreciation for what he observed, for the work done by Heird and his staff to restore at least some part of that team’s legacy.

“When I walked in, I didn’t expect to be impacted the way I was by seeing 2013 up there again,” Blair said. “Even though it’s not what it’s supposed to say, even though it doesn’t satisfy all the fans, seeing that up there, and the manner in which it was up – with the numbers and the font and everything looked similar – it was a lot more meaningful for me as a fan to see that banner up there again.”

Henderson now works as a senior sales representative for a medical device company. Marra is an executive in the insurance industry. Hancock works as a financial adviser and is a studio analyst for the ACC Network. They all live in the Louisville area, along with Van Treese, who works in real estate. Siva has returned to the city after the conclusion of his pro career and is working in basketball as a trainer and player development coach. Smith has a home in Louisville where he lives during the offseason.

Marra told TSN that he gets together regularly with Hancock and Van Treese. “Tim is a little more busy. He’s got a bunch of little kids.” Marra and his wife just had their first, though. They may be a little busier now, too.

Louisville banner
(Sporting News)

When they gathered last month for their reunion, one of the events was held at the Whiskey Row Lofts, a building directly across South Second Street from the Yum! Center. As it happens, on the side of that building is a banner. It has a depiction of the angry Cardinal U of L logo. Below, it has the inscription, “2013 NCAA CHAMPION”.

It is identical to the banners inside the arena that fly for the 1982 and 1986 teams.

Could it be? No.

“I know where the real one is,” Klein told TSN.

Wherever that is, it's not where it ought to be.

Author(s)
Mike DeCourcy Photo

Mike DeCourcy is a Senior Writer at The Sporting News