The year 2020 continues to be awful, spitting out one bad story after another. If you have felt that 2020 is a year in which you simply don’t want to get up each morning, out of fear that the news is going to be terrible, or that the news is going to be worse today than it was the previous day, you’re not alone.
This is the dark, come-on-it-can’t-keep-getting-worse reality we all inhabit these days. Sure enough, Sunday brought another dark cloud to the world, chiefly the American sports landscape. There is a connection with the USC family in this particular report.
The latest bad news comes from Mike Lupica, the longtime sportswriter who disclosed the news on Sunday that USC basketball legend Paul Westphal has been diagnosed with brain cancer.
Westphal was a member of the 24-2 USC team under coach Bob Boyd in 1971, regarded by many as the best Trojan men’s basketball team of all time. The 1940 Final Four team under Sam Barry went 20-3 and certainly belongs in the conversation, but the 1971 team lost only twice, and those two losses were to UCLA at the height of John Wooden’s dynastic run with the Bruins. In a modern college basketball world — with a 68-team NCAA Tournament — the 1971 Trojans would have been a No. 1 seed in the Midwest or South Region with a great chance to make the Final Four.
Because of the difficulty of assessing 1940s-era college basketball in a modern context, it is easier to look at the 1971 Trojans — set against the UCLA dynasty — and recognize their brilliance as a team. The 1940 team isn’t necessarily inferior to 1971, just harder to place in a comparative context.
Paul Westphal, after making USC great, produced a brilliant career as a player and a good career as a coach. Westphal was an anchor for the Phoenix Suns in the latter half of the 1970s, one of the most important Phoenix Suns of all time. He forged a Hall of Fame career, making five All-Star teams and earning three All-NBA First Team selections. He won an NBA championship with the Boston Celtics in 1974 before going to Phoenix and facing the Celtics in the 1976 NBA Finals.
Westphal’s high basketball IQ was displayed in Game 5 of that 1976 Finals series, regarded as one of the greatest NBA games ever played.
Westphal’s decision to call a timeout, even though it gave the Celtics a free throw on a technical foul, made it possible for Garfield Heard to hit the rainbow jump shot which tied the game at the end of the second overtime and sent it into a third OT period. Westphal married supreme skill and acute intelligence on the basketball court for 13 years, enabling him to gain a piece of basketball immortality.
Westphal’s coaching career reached its height in 1993, when he led the Phoenix Suns to their second NBA Finals appearance, the first since the 1976 Finals Westphal played in as a member of the Suns. Westphal watched Michael Jordan dominate the final minute of Game 6 — a moment everyone was able to relive on “The Last Dance” documentary earlier this year — to deny the Suns a chance to play Game 7 at home for the world title.
Our prayers go out to Paul Westphal and all who love him. We hope for a full recovery, and we send healing energy to the Westphal family.
