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Kevin Freeman, like most people in the state of Connecticut, knew what was on the line in Phoenix on March 20, 1999.

“I think we wouldn’t have been here today, UConn wouldn’t have won three national championships, if we didn’t win that one game against Gonzaga,” Freeman, now 33, said. “There was a lot of pressure building up to that game, Coach [Jim Calhoun] had never been to a Final Four. Every newspaper would write about having the monkey on his back. Even we started feeling that pressure before that game.”

That one game against Gonzaga, that season’s ‘Cindarella Story,’ was the West Regional Final. With the first trip to a Final Four for both schools on the line, Freeman, who finished the game with 13 points and 15 rebounds, came through when it counted. Ahead by three points with six seconds left, it was Freeman, who was the MVP of the Big East tournament that season, who secured a rebound off a Bulldog miss and made both free throws to ice the game. The junior forward was the one who threw the ball in the air at the final whistle, putting a cap-per on the Huskies’ 67-62 Elite Eight win.

“I just remember the game being so tense,” Freeman said. “They were billed as the under-dogs and kept coming back. Anyway, we pulled away and I get to shoot the two free throws, and we end up win-ning that game. It seemed the pressure was off the school and we win the championship and that led to the next couple of championships and obviously the change in campus.”

After defeating Duke 77-74 in the national champion-ship that April, UConn was on the map. Richard Hamilton, Ricky Moore, Khalid El-Amin, Rashamel Jones, Jake Voskuhl and Freeman accomplished goals set the previous spring after the Huskies were defeated by North Carolina in the Elite Eight. The cast of characters that turned into champions were as close as they come.

“It was a great group of guys, we had a lot of personalities,” Freeman said. “And the dif-ference between today, and I always talk about it, is we didn’t have the social networks. We couldn’t text, cell phones didn’t come out yet. So we had face-to-face interaction every day with each other. To be hon-est, as many characters as we had, we loved each other and hung around each other all day

long, which is weird for a team even nowadays.”

The Huskies displayed their togetherness at the start of their tounament run in Denver. Prior to No. 1-seeded UConn’s game against No. 16-seeded Texas-San Antonio, most of the play-ers shaved their heads.

“The shaved head thing was a sign of closeness,” Freeman said.

Of course, not every Husky obliged and publicly displayed team unity, namely one center with golden locks.

“We couldn’t get Jake or Khalid,” Freeman said with a laugh. “That wasn’t going to happen because Jake was a rock star on campus.”

Freeman said the fan response following the title run was unlike any other experi-ence.

“I don’t think there will ever be a comparison to ‘99, even with 2011,” Freeman said. “When we won the champi-onship, they had a policeman waiting outside of our door... kids were burning fires in front of our dorm and people were constantly banging on our doors and there were groups of people coming into our room so they had two cops there for 48 hours.”

Freeman said, although the team had a celebrity-type fol-lowing from students across campus after winning a cham-pionship, he and his teammates talked with fans and fellow students often.

“Social wise– it was the same– high regard,” Freeman said. “Like I said, kids weren’t afraid to come up to you. And now they can hide behind a computer. There’s more inter-action. We’d interact with other students much more. I don’t know if they do today.”

After Freeman finished his four-year UConn career in 2000, he began his professional career in the ABA. Freeman’s pro career would go on to span 11 seasons with pit stops in eight countries. He managed to still visit his old, yet ever-changing, stomping grounds and finish his studies.

“I used to come up a lot when I first graduated, especially to work out,” Freeman said. “The campus really changed in the early 2000’s right when I [left], the expansion’s been amazing, it’s a beautiful campus now. And then I came back in 2006 to finish my degree. The players have changed. The coaches have changed. The entire campus has changed, but for the better.”

Last November, Freeman returned to UConn to accept the position of assistant director of men’s basketball administra-tion. His work, based mainly around academic and compli-

ance issues, involves mentoring the players and helping direc-tor of basketball administra-tion, Karl Hobbs. Just over a decade after finishing his col-lege career, Freeman is back on the same bench alongside Calhoun at Gampel Pavilion and the XL Center.

“I saw myself coaching, but to be back here is a dream for me,” Freeman said. “To get my true coaching ranks here is a dream for me and I didn’t pic-ture it coming full circle. Coach Calhoun really blessed me with this opportunity and if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.”

No matter how high up the coaching ladder Freeman climbs, some Nutmeggers will always remember him for his contributions to the 1999 NCAA national champions. Like Freeman said, that Final Four trip and national title meant the world to UConn. The championship run changed the basketball program and

school’s prominence forever. It’s a story Freeman doesn’t mind re-telling.

“I’ll never get tired of talking about the ‘99 team,” Freeman said. “It was one of the great-est moments of my life and

throughout Connecticut, wher-ever I go, people will always talk about it, so I’m used to it. When I lived in Atlanta, I wouldn’t get it at all, so when I come back here, it’s always brought up and I have no prob-

lem talking about it. It’s a joy going back to those memories.”

It’s a story that doesn’t get old.

GameDay SpecialThe Daily Campus, Page 1 Saturday, February 25, 2012

Freeman reminisces about 1999

What does it mean to be a Husky?

By Matt and Colin McDonoughSports Editors

Colin.McDonough@UConn.edu

What does it mean to be a Husky?

Is a Husky an athlete who couldn’t be bothered to go to class?

Is a Husky a coach who doesn’t care whether or not his players go to class?

Is a Husky an administra-tor who will find any loophole to get around the rules of the NCAA?

Is a Husky a foul-mouthed bully who will shout anything from the safety of the crowd?

Are the Huskies villains? Are they a Goliath striking down David on the court at Reliant Stadium, denying an upstart Butler team of the national championship that they seemed destined to win?

No, but over the past four years, that’s the conclusion many people have drawn.

Around the country, we are viewed as the bad guys. We are the school that will do anything to protect the legacy of Jim Calhoun. We’re the school that thumbs its nose at the NCAA, its rules towards recruiting and its academic standards. We are the school that has fans who leave early to beat traffic, shout obscene comments at opposing players and aren’t loud enough when the team really needs it.

The pundits in the national media, whether through their words or their tone, have con-demned us as representing everything that is wrong with college athletics.

But that’s not true. That’s not what being a Husky is about.

A Husky is passionate, dedi-cated and driven to succeed in the face of adversity. A Husky is part of a group; a group that shares those values and supports one another. A Husky is com-mitted to excellence, whether it’s on the court, in the class-room, or on the national stage.

Probably the best explana-tion of what it means to be a Husky is the one offered by my friend and colleague Colin

McDonough.“It means everything,” he

said. “It’s something you can’t put into words.”

Many schools with good teams claim to have the best fans in the country, and some the best education too. Few can boast the progress that UConn has seen in such a short period of time.

It wasn’t long ago when UConn was a small, rural and uninspiring school in the middle of nowhere. But over the past 20 years, we have grown from a rural backwater to become one of the nation’s finest public uni-versities and a Mecca of college basketball.

We are a success story. We started off as an underdog and we’ve grown up to become a top dog. Everyone loves an under-dog story, but once the underdog wins, and doesn’t stop winning, the story starts to get old.

But the story that unfolds within Gampel’s walls on game day will never get old because the excitement and passion that pours out in that arena can’t be replicated anywhere else.

Think back a couple of years

to when the Huskies beat No. 1 Texas 88-74 at Gampel, and how the roof almost came down after Jerome Dyson found Stanley Robinson for that half-court alley-oop. Remember last year when Kemba Walker hit that game-winner against Villanova. I didn’t think it was possible for Gampel to get any louder than it had been the whole second half. Suddenly, it did.

How about the U-C-O-N-N chant? You won’t find a more organic or powerful chant any-where in the country. It’s a syn-chronized, spontaneous punch in the gut deployed only in the key moments when the oppo-nent is on the ropes and the team needs that extra boost to put them away for good.

This is UConn at its best, a sea of blue and white coming together to carry its brothers and sisters to victory. It’s why College Gameday chose Storrs for its first ever broadcast, and why they decided to come back. When Gampel is rocking, even the most ardent UConn hater can’t help but say “Woah, that’s awesome.”

Tonight, Syracuse, our big-

gest rivals and the No. 2 team in the country, are coming to town. Since the Orange are headed to the ACC, this might be the last time we’ll ever see them at Gampel. The whole country is going to be watching, and they will be expecting us to lose.

I don’t mean just the bas-ketball team either. Given the team’s up-and-down perfor-mance this year compared to Syracuse’s, even the biggest Husky Hardcore has to admit that Syracuse has a really good team this year and will be a tough beast to slay. No, I mean they will be expecting us to lose. All they are going to hear dur-ing the broadcast is about how Jim Calhoun’s health problems could spell the end of his career. They are going to hear about how we may be banned from the 2013 postseason, and they’ll probably hear about all of the program’s missteps how we deserve to have the life choked out of us by the NCAA.

Then they will hear about how Calhoun may retire, Lamb and Drummond may jump to the NBA and half the rest of the team may transfer. They

will hear about how the UConn basketball program could fall from grace and endure a period of basketball hell like the one Indiana University has finally begun to emerge from just this year. And if we do lose, they will hear all of that and more, again and again.

But there is no better cure for negativity than winning, and no better opportunity to change the tone than with a big win at home over our nearly departed rivals.

The team knows what they have to do, so I say lets do our part.

Let’s show them our true colors. Let’s show them why UConn basketball, not Syracuse, is home to three national cham-pionships. Let’s show them the spirit and the drive to succeed that will carry us through what-ever adversity lies ahead. Let’s show them that through it all, we will emerge stronger than before, and that we aren’t going anywhere.

Let’s show them what it really means to be a Husky.

Michael.Cerullo@UConn.edu

Kevin Freeman (left), alongside teammates Jake Voskuhl and Ricky Moore and coach Jim Calhoun, presents President Bill Clinton with a UConn jersey after winning the NCAA national championship in 1999.

AP

Kevin Freeman goes up for a slam dunk in front of Syracuse’s Etan Thomas during their semifinal game of the Big East Championship Friday, March 5, 1999 at Madison Square Garden in New York.AP

Mac Cerullo

Matthew.McDonough@UConn.edu

GameDay SpecialSaturday, February 25, 2012 The Daily Campus, Page 2

With Calhoun’s surgery looming, Huskies looking to upset Orange

ESPN’s College Gameday and No. 2 Syracuse comes to Storrs this Saturday to face the UConn men’s basketball team at Gampel Pavilion.

The Huskies are coming off a thrill-ing 73-70 overtime win at Villanova on Monday night. Shabazz Napier hit the game-winning 3-pointer with 0.6 seconds left to improve UConn’s record to 17-10 and 7-8 in the Big East. Jeremy Lamb scored a career high 32 points and the Huskies came back from an early 18-point deficit to keep their NCAA tournament hopes alive. With the game tied at 70, it took Napier’s 30-footer to give UConn a much-needed win.

“Of course I thought it was going in,” Napier told the Hartford Courant after the game. “I don’t take shots to miss.”

The Orange, who beat the Huskies 85-67 in Syracuse on Feb. 11, are 27-1 and 14-1 in conference play. Syracuse’s only loss of the season came at Notre Dame. In the first meeting between the Orange and the Huskies, UConn hung around with Syracuse for most of the game. With less than seven minutes remaining, the Huskies were down by two points, but the Orange used a 22-6 run to end the game and bury UConn.

Four Huskies scored double figures, with Lamb leading the team with 18 points. Ryan Boatright scored 14 points, Andre Drummond scored 13 and Napier had 11. C.J. Fair had a double-double for Syracuse with 14 points and 12 rebounds. Scoop Jardine had a game-high 21 points.

UConn has gone 2-1 since that game, with wins over DePaul and the Wildcats, and a loss coming at the hands of Marquette at the XL Center in Hartford.

Coach Jim Calhoun will not be on the bench with his team on Saturday night. He will miss his seventh straight game. It was announced on Wednesday that the Hall-of-Famer will undergo surgery on his ailing back this Monday. In a state-ment released by UConn, Calhoun will not coach at Providence this upcoming Tuesday. Associate head coach George Blaney will continue to lead the Huskies.

“I’m glad we have finally determined the best course of treatment to deal with the problem,” Calhoun said in a state-

ment. “I’m looking forward to having the procedure done, hopefully recovering as quickly as possible, and putting it all in the past.”

Although Calhoun won’t be coaching, the student section and fans should be alive all day with ESPN Gameday on campus. UConn hosted the first Gameday in college basketball history on Jan. 22, 2005. The defending national champions lost to Pittsburgh at Gampel Pavilion. The UConn women’s basketball team was the first women’s program to host Gameday.

On Jan. 16, 2010, the Huskies beat Notre Dame after ESPN broadcasted from cam-pus that morning.

The Gampel Pavilion doors will open to students and fans at 8 a.m. on Saturday. The show starts at 10 a.m. on ESPNU, then 11 a.m. on ESPN. After Gameday ends at noon, students won’t be able to begin lin-ing up for the game on Hillside Road until 2 p.m. The game starts seven hours later at 9 p.m.

Sophomore guard Shabazz Napier takes a contested shot in UConn’s 79-64 loss to Marquette on Feb. 18 at the XL Center in Hartford. Napier hit the game-winning 3-pointer to defeat Villanova on Monday.

ED RYAN/The Daily Campus

By Colin McDonoughAssociate Sports Editor

Colin.McDonough@UConn.edu

Reliving the rivalry: UConn and ‘Cuse

Michael.Cerullo@UConn.edu

UConn and Syracuse have shared one of the country’s greatest college basketball rivalries, but with Syracuse leaving for the ACC in the near future, that rivalry could soon come to an end. Let’s reflect on some of the series’ best games.

March 8, 1996: Ray Allen goes off in the Big East semi-finals

One of Ray Allen’s most memorable moments in col-lege came in the 1996 Big East Championship game, when he hit a game-winning shot over Allen Iverson to give UConn the Big East title. But arguably his finest performance came in the previous game, when he buried Syracuse in the semifinal game with 29 points on 11-for-21 shooting and 4-for-9 from behind the arc, along with a tournament record seven steals.

The game was close until about midway though the sec-ond half. With the game tied at 55-55, the Huskies finished the game on a 30-12 run and wound up routing the Orange 85-67. After the game, Allen was quoted by The New York Times’ Frank Litsky as say-ing “I think they put their heads between their legs…we shoved it down their throats.”

March 9, 2006: Gerry McNamara stuns top seeded UConn

After falling behind by as many as 14 points in the second half, the No. 1 ranked UConn team fought its way back into the game and then took a three point lead with less than 11 sec-onds to play after two Denham Brown free throws.

But senior Gerry McNamara stunned the Huskies with a 30-foot shot to tie the game with less than five seconds remaining, sending the game into overtime. The Orange went on to upset the Huskies 86-84 and later became the first No. 9 seed to win the Big East Championship.

Feb. 11, 2009: Huskies beat Orange at Gampel Pavilion

The last time the Huskies and Orange faced off at Gampel Pavilion, No. 23 Syracuse couldn’t figure out a solution to Hasheem Thabeet. The 7-foot-3 UConn center had one of the best defensive games of his college career, pulling down 16 rebounds, blocking seven shots and affecting many more as the No. 1 Huskies beat Syracuse 63-49.

After the game, Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim called Thabeet “a tremendous defen-sive player,” a sentiment that was echoed by UConn senior guard A.J. Price, who led the team with 17 points.

The win came at a significant cost, however, as star junior Jerome Dyson injured his knee in the first half and wound up missing the rest of the season.

March 12, 2009: The six-overtime game

In one of the most memorable college basketball games ever played, UConn and Syracuse met in the quarterfinals of the 2009 Big East Tournament on Thursday night and didn’t go home until the early hours of Friday morning after Syracuse outlasted UConn 127-117 in six overtimes in the second lon-gest game in Division I history.

The game lasted a total of three hours and 46 minutes, and by the time it was over, the teams had combined for 244 points, four players on each team had fouled out and seven players had logged more than 50 minutes of playing time. Through the first five over-times, neither team could pull ahead, and on several occa-sions, would-be at the buzzer game winners rimmed out. It wasn’t until the sixth overtime, when Syracuse’s Andy Rautins hit a deep three to give Syracuse the lead, that the Orange finally put the game away.

The game nearly ended in regulation, however, after Devendorf appeared to win the game with a miracle three-pointer at the buzzer. Upon closer review, the ball left his

hand a fingertip too late, and the rest is history.

March 11, 2011: Huskies hold off Orange in BET Semifinals

After fizzling towards the end of the regular season, the No. 9 seeded Huskies had new life after Kemba Walker broke down Gary McGhee and hit the game-winning shot at the buzzer to down top seeded Pittsburgh in the Big East quar-terfinals. But Syracuse and the 2-3 zone defense had proven to be a bugaboo for the Huskies during the regular season, and in order to keep the run alive, the Huskies had to find a way to solve the zone.

The Huskies were 0-for-8 from behind the arc that night, but Walker was good enough that it didn’t matter. After the Huskies blew a late lead at the end of regulation, thanks to two Scoop Jardine three point-ers that tied the game at 68-68, the Huskies clamped down on defense and finished the game strong in overtime, winning 76-71.

Walker finished with 33 points and 12 rebounds, and the next night the Huskies would finish the job, beating Louisville to become the first team to capture the Big East championship by wining five games in five nights.

By Mac CerulloManaging Editor

UConn Huskies2011: NCAA ChampsLed by junior Kemba Walker, the Huskies won 11 straight games after a nine-loss regular season to win the Big East and NCAA nation-al championships. The Huskies made their fourth trip to the Final Four before defeating Butler for the school’s third national title.

2010: NIT 2nd RoundUConn finished 18-16 on the sea-son. The Huskies lost 65-63 against Virginia Tech in the NIT.

2009: NCAA Final FourUConn finished 31-5 and advanced to the school’s third Final Four, where they lost to Michigan State.

Syracuse Orange2011: NCAA 3rd RoundThe third-seeded Orange took care of business against Indiana State before falling 66-62 to Big East foe Marquette in the third round at Cleveland.

2010: NCAA Sweet 16No. 1-seeded Syracuse was a favorite to reach the Final Four. In the regional semifinals, however, the Orange were upset 63-59 by an upstart Butler team that would eventually finish as runner-ups.

2009: NCAA Sweet 16After defeating James Harden-led Arizona State, Syracuse fell to Blake Griffin and Oklahoma.

How the teams have fared in the postseason...

Page design by Matt McDonough, Cover by UConn Athletics and Mac Cerullo, Rosters courtesy of UConn Athletics.