Chaminade Slays Sampson

By Paul Hamann

In what was supposed to be a cupcake win during a Hawaii stopover, Ralph Sampson and the University of Virginia were blindsided by tiny Chaminade. Two of the officials who worked the game were just getting comfortable with three-person mechanics and the third official faced a long ride home with the losers.

Just about all of America overlooked the game — a lopsided matchup between the No. 1 team in the NCAA, featuring the widely accepted choice for best player in the nation, and an NAIA school of 800. Some wouldn’t learn about the incredible upset until three days later, since the late end of the game pushed the news into the Christmas holiday.

But the half-filled gymnasium, who came out to see Ralph Sampson’s University of Virginia take on Chaminade on Dec. 23, 1982, along with officials Tom Fraim, Pat Tanibe and Giff Johnson, witnessed the biggest upset in college basketball history.

“Chaminade was an underdog by far, and I think people were just hoping they didn’t get slaughtered by too wide a point margin,” recalls Johnson. “I thought that, although it might be a blowout, it was still an exciting game to officiate,” said Tanibe. “As the game progressed, I was surprised that Chaminade was playing so competitively and hung in with Virginia.”

Surprise is a colossal understatement. Virginia only scheduled the game to justify a Hawaii stopover on the way home from games with the University of Houston and the University of Utah in Japan. The Houston game was billed as a showdown between Sampson and fellow big man Hakeem Olajuwon, but the showdown never materialized. Sampson was ill and didn’t play in either Japan game, both of which the Cavaliers still won.

But, while Virginia handled a Houston team that would go on to that season’s NCAA championship game, it couldn’t handle Chaminade, losing, 77-72, in the Maui Invitational.

“Chaminade had maybe three players who could have played Division I,” Tanibe said. “They had a pretty good team at the time.”

For Hawaiian officials Tanibe and Johnson, in addition to an opportunity to officiate a top-quality team from the mainland, they had one of their first shots at three-person mechanics, which was just becoming common on the mainland and was still seldom practiced on the Islands.

Fraim, a veteran Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) official who traveled with Virginia through Japan to Hawaii, was the crew chief that night. He was faced with the task of providing three-person instruction just before the game to two officials he had never met.

“I was very concerned that I wasn’t going to have adequate time to have a very good pregame conference,” Fraim said. “I did the best I could. I just pulled out the game board with the three dots and the magnetic pieces, and just started from the basics.” That pregame paid off. “Not bad,” Fraim recalls of the three-person mechanics that day. “I never felt like any of the issues that may or may not have occurred were because of anybody being out of position.”

“Three-man officiating is a breeze,” said Johnson. “I wish I’d stayed around to do more.”

While some believe that Sampson may have not played up to snuff because of lingering impacts from the illness that kept him on the bench in Japan — he shot four for nine and scored 12 points, but helped Virginia dominate the boards with 17 rebounds — none of the officials felt like Sampson’s play was the primary factor in the result. The entire Virginia team had a bad night.

“Virginia just played very poorly in the first half,” Johnson said. “Chaminade just took it right to Virginia. For the first few minutes of the game, Chaminade took an early lead, and it just went back and forth.”

Incredibly, the teams were tied at 43 at halftime. Chaminade was running with Virginia in a high-scoring game.

To start the second half, Virginia made a run to take the lead, and many expected Chaminade to fold.

“The teams came out of the locker room and we started the second half, and Virginia immediately took the lead,” Johnson said. “As I recall, it was maybe six, eight points, and you could just feel sort of a sigh in the audience, like the feeling that ‘well, Chaminade held Virginia to a tie in the first half, and that’s all they’re going to get. Now Virginia is going to roll, and that’s the game.’

“But suddenly, Chaminade came back,” Johnson said. “I think once they came back from that initial Virginia run in the second half, the Chaminade players — you could see the look in their eyes. When you’re on a court, you can feel momentum one way or the other, and Chaminade was thinking, ‘Hey, we can win this game.’”

Chaminade held a small lead in the waning moments of the game when Johnson called a critical carrying violation against Virginia.

“The guard (Othell Wilson) was maybe five feet away from me,” Johnson recalled. “I was right on the play. My recollection is that he tucked his hand right under the ball, just carried it right around and made a really big spin move. It was a carry. There was no question in my mind.”

When the officiating crew ran off the court and Chaminade cut down the nets, Johnson recalls “kind of commiserating with our partner official from the mainland because he had to fly on the same plane as the Virginia team. We all rolled our eyeballs about that one.”

It turns out that they need not have worried. “(Virginia) was very professional, very pleasant,” Fraim said. “I saw Ralph Sampson in an elevator that evening. He was very much the gentleman, very much the professional. I saw Coach (Terry) Holland that evening, and Coach Holland has always been and is to this day the epitome of the college coach from a class standpoint.

“I never sensed that they were saying the referees had anything to do with the outcome of the game,” Fraim continued.

Fraim continued his ACC work and is now the chairman of both a printing and distribution corporation and a biomedical company. Tanibe is an assigner for the PacWest Conference.

Johnson moved to the Marshall Islands a few years after the Chaminade upset. While there, he became connected to the Islands’ fledgling basketball program — as a coach. “The only reason I got into coaching is because there weren’t many coaches, and so my limited knowledge ended up being more than people had here,” Johnson said. As a coach, he brought home the nation’s first medal in international play — a bronze for the women’s team in a regional Micronesian competition. Since then, he has returned to officiating, serving as secretary general for the Marshall Islands Basketball Federation, a member of FIBA. He also edits the Marshall Islands Journal.

Paul Hamann has officiated high school basketball since 1996. He is a high school teacher who lives in Vancouver, Wash.