For a brief time nearly 20 years ago, University of Hawaii and Tulsa were unlikely rivals.
All the Rainbows and the Golden Hurricane had in common from 2000 to 2002 was a short-lived conference affiliation, and the fact that they were at the top of the Western Athletic Conference.
“When we play them it’s like going to the park and playing with your friends. It seems like we always have great games with them, and they have great fans,” said Tulsa’s Antonio Reed, about half an hour after UH edged his team 86-85 before a frenzied full-house “whiteout” crowd of more than 10,000 at the Stan Sheriff Center on Feb. 21, 2002.
About 100 of those Hawaii fans had waited to applaud Reed after a radio interview following his 24-point performance.
It remained a friendly rivalry, even though this was the third of four straight UH wins — the others were at Tulsa, two of them in the WAC tournament final, propelling Hawaii to back-to-back NCAA Tournaments for the first time ever.
On this night, Reed’s performance was negated by a career-high of 28 points from Carl English, Predrag Savovic’s 27, and clutch play in the last 3 seconds by Mark Campbell and Haim Shimonovich, both performing feats out of their comfort zones.
Shimonovich, a burly 7-foot center, came out to half court to challenge Tulsa’s last-second heave, moments after pass-only point guard Campbell hit a free throw with 2.9 seconds left. Campbell had just been fouled on his only field-goal attempt of the game.
“The clock was winding down so I just put the pedal to the metal and went for it,” Campbell said.
Both teams finished 15-3 and atop the WAC regular season standings; the victory gave UH a tiebreaker to take the accompanying NCAA bid in case it didn’t win the conference tourney. That became a moot point two weeks later.
“Sometimes you have people’s number. That just happens,” said UH coach Riley Wallace, when the ’Bows blew out the hosts, 73-59 in the WAC tournament final.
Hawaii lost in the first round of the NCAAs — again, in its fourth try. But this was still one of the most exciting teams in program history, finishing with a 27-6 overall record.
