PITTSBURGH — Where to begin? With the mother of the newest star of college basketball, weeping in the stands, now that her son whom so few had heard of two hours before was now in the conscious of a nation’s fans, marveling at his fearless shooting?
With the winning coach of Oakland, a lifer on his job, trying to put into words how he had to wait 40 years for the basketball night of his life?
With the stunned victims from Kentucky, a blueblood now facing a stigma of ugly NCAA tournament exits and broken promises?
They were all part of a remarkable landscape Thursday night when Oakland brought down Kentucky 80-76. When a Division II transfer named Jack Gohlke came off the bench to slay a dragon, with 32 points and a shooting display that would make Caitlin Clark proud. Ten three-pointers. Ten. From hither and yon, usually with lots of Wildcat hands in his face. And when Kentucky exited the stage early again, meaning that in the past four years, the Wildcats have won one tournament game. Two fewer than Saint Peter’s.
How to sum up all that? A graduate student Kentucky forward might have done it best. “It’s March, you know?” Tre Mitchell said. “It’s March.”
You knew it was March Thursday night when Gohlke — who this time last year was finishing his career at Hillsdale College — came off the bench and began burying shots from everywhere. Well, everywhere outside the three-point arc since traditional two-pointers are not on Jack Gohlke’s radar screen. The mad bomber from Oakland had 12 three-point attempts in his first 12 minutes on the floor. He made 10 of the 20 he took for the game. Those 20 Thursday night are 12 more than the number of two-point shots he has put up the entire season — 355 total attempts, 347 from the three-point line. His barrage was what pushed the proverbial No. 14-seeded David from Oakland, with not one NCAA Tournament victory in its history except for a play-in game, over the proverbial No. 3-seeded Goliath from Kentucky, who has won 132 of them.
“I don’t like the David and Goliath thing,” Gohlke would say in a hallway afterward. “Obviously Kentucky is a tremendous team and we came in as an underdog, but we believe in ourselves, and obviously now the country believes in us.”
You knew it was March when Greg Kampe, in his 40th season at Oakland and the longest-tenured coach in Division I, could look at such a wonderful moment and know part of it came from the zone defense he had conjured up years ago, and the belief he had put in his Oakland team this very week. That’s Oakland, Michigan by the way, not California. Lots of people get that wrong.
“This changed everything tonight. There’s nobody in the country that doesn’t know where Oakland basketball is,” Kampe said. “We don’t want the Cinderella slipper. We want the respect that this is a good basketball team.”
So let us go around PPG Paints Arena to get a better feel for the moment.
Start just a few rows off the court. There Dave and Lisa Gohlke had just lived every parent’s fantasy.
“It’s everything you could have dreamed of,” Dave said of his son. “Just the chance to play, and to play well, and to win, it’s incredible.” The father looked back on all those hours he watched his son shooting basketballs outside the house. “Sometimes he would almost be late for the bus because he’d still be there shooting.”
He also thought back to a conversation he had with his son this very day. “I was trying to tell him to enjoy the moment,” Dave said. “He said, `we’re not here to enjoy this, we’re here to win.’”
Meanwhile, Lisa kept dabbing at tears. What mother wouldn’t at such a moment? “It’s everything he has worked so hard for, he has put in the time, he has put in the effort,” she said. And what was a mother’s role during all those formative hours of shooting?
“I rebounded.”
Now to the post-game media interview room. There Kampe was talking about how he had discussed the movie Hoosiers with his guys. The ultimate basketball underdog film with Jimmy Chitwood the heroic shooter.
“That’s my boy right there,” he said, nodding to Gohlke. “Jimmy. Jimmy Gohlke.”
Then he tried to describe how Thursday night had happened.
“I've always been a coach that won games with offense, and this year it's all been defense, and great players making plays down the stretch. And we just win close games. If you would have been in our huddles the last seven, eight minutes of the game, we said if we're ahead with the six minutes to go in the game, we will win, and they believed that because they've done it all year. We win close games. We make plays. We just do those things and that’s how you win.”
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He also wanted to interject something about the postgame handshake with John Calipari. “Unbelievably gracious,” Kampe said of the Kentucky coach. “Because it has to be a hard thing for him, too. I feel bad because I didn’t know what to say to him. I just stared at him.” Kampe added one more thing because he is a coach and he understands the heat that will be directed at Calipari after another Kentucky demise in March. “I want you to remember that’s a very good man.”
Now to the Oakland locker room. There’s guard Rocket Watts, who once played and lost against Kentucky as a Michigan State Spartan. “This is a payback game for me,” he said. He is also Gohlke’s roommate, and no, he was not surprised to see roomie torch the Wildcats.
“He put the work in, he did all the reps. We’ve got so much confidence in him that we knew every time it touched his hands it was going to go in,” Watts said. “That’s what he do.”
Across the way was Blake Lampman, a graduate student and another one of Oakland’s veterans. He described the reaction last Sunday when the Golden Grizzlies found out they were paired with Kentucky.
“One thing that went through all of our minds is they have a lot of freshmen,” he said. “Although this is our first time in the NCAA Tournament it was their first time too.”
He wasn’t surprised by Gohlke’s performance and confidence, either. “It’s backed by work ethic,” he said. “He knows what he’s done, what he’s put in the last five years.” And he understood how the past few hours had made a celebrity out of a kid from Division II, turning obscurity into fame, as the NCAA Tournament so consistently does.
“You score 32 and you beat Kentucky on the first day of the NCAA Tournament on CBS at 7:10,” Lampman said, “yeah you’re going to be the hottest name.”
Finally, back to the hallway, where the man of the hour had probably been asked more questions from the media in 30 minutes than previously in his entire life.
What just happened?
“I think they all believed,” Gohlke said of his teammates, “but I think I was the one that was most confident. I was trying to tell them, hey guys we belong here. This is the moment we’ve all worked so hard for this season and our whole basketball careers."
“I’ve just worked so hard to get to this point I’m not going into any game thinking I’m going to lose. As a shooter, you can’t let that doubt start to creep in. That’s when it’s going to become a problem.”
He discussed how Kampe had recruited him with the assurance there would be a green light, “I remember one thing he told me specifically was, `I know you’re going to take some bad shots and I want that... Sometimes I feel like I can make bad shots.”
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He made a lot of tough ones Thursday night, anyway, many of them drawing fireworks-type oohs and aahs from the crowd — and probably the distant TV audience — while they added to Kentucky’s frustration. Gohlke wears the most appropriate jersey number on the floor. No. 3.
He also told the story of an ongoing conversation with Kentucky freshman Rob Dillingham Thursday night. Earlier in the week, Gohlke had been quoted as saying that he knew Kentucky was a top-rated three-point shooting team, but he thought he and his teammates were better.
“Obviously as you have heard I’m pretty confident,” he said. “I meant no slights at all to them, they’re tremendous players, tremendous shooters but I have to believe I’m a better shooter because that’s just how shooting goes. That’s how basketball goes.”
Dillingham found him before the game. “He was just saying to me, `You better knock some down today,” Gohlke said. “Fair enough. I was talking a little bit. I’d better knock some down.”
So he did. Ten of them. Actually, he had said in the post-game press conference, “I’m always mad if I miss one, even if I was 10 of 11... I was literally telling Trey T (Townsend) as we were walking in here I should have made 13.” Anyway, Gohlke and Dillingham chatted again toward the end of the game, the Kentucky guard complimenting him for backing up his words.
“I was telling him,” Gohlke said, “Hey man, I wish I was in your shoes going to the NBA draft.”
But instead, Gohlke and Kampe and Oakland are going to Saturday’s second round to play NC State.
“They understand that their life changed tonight,” Kampe said. “But it could get changed a hell of a lot more if we keep this thing going.”
Absolutely. It’s March, you know?
