Basketball began to change in the 1950s due to Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics and Wilt Chamberlain but real change would have to wait for the 1960s. Jerry West, Connie Hawkins and Pete Maravich were all game changers. But nothing had the impact of the Game of the Century.
In 1968, UCLA was at the start of its epic championship run and riding a long winning streak. Houston was a Southwestern team when basketball was still kind of new there, or at least the rest of the nation was unaware that a different style was emerging in the Old Southwest - Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Coaches like UTEP’s Don Haskins and Houston’s Guy Lewis were pioneering a style that was much more like today’s game than the slow, deliberate style favored by the Ibas and others.
Houston had become pretty successful by 1968 and were #2 in the country behind the Bruins. The teams had met the previous spring in the NCAA tournament, with UCLA winning 73-58.
Guy Lewis managed to get UCLA to come play in the Astrodome where 52,693 people came to watch.
There were no network basketball broadcasts at the time, no ESPN. The game was syndicated and for the first time a game was seen nationally. A young Dick Enberg was the play-by-play man.
Unfortunately for UCLA, Lew Alcindor, now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, suffered a scratched cornea just before the big game. He missed the two games prior to the Houston trip. He did play against the Cougars but his vision wasn’t 100 percent.
Elvin Hayes had no such problem.
Houston’s star forward lit UCLA up for 39. It was a tight game but the Cougars won, 71-69.
They met again in the Final Four where UCLA won 101-69. Jabbar said that the Bruins wanted to “teach [Houston] some manners.”
Mission accomplished. And by the way, UCLA didn’t lose again until 1974.
The video here is really interesting, particularly what the participants say about the crowd noise: the Astrodome was so big that there was a delay while it went to the top and then bounced back down.