Keith Smart and Derrick Coleman were roommates months after the 1987 national championship during the U.S. Olympic basketball trials.

Now that’s awkward.

‘The two of us never talked about the game at all,’ said Smart, now an assistant coach for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. ‘We talked about everything basketball-wise, but we never brought up the subject of the championship game.’

Smart’s baseline jumper with five seconds remaining lifted Indiana over Syracuse in the 1987 national championship game, 74-73, and assured Smart would forever live in college basketball lore.

It also elevated the words ‘Keith Smart’ and ‘The Shot’ to curses in the Syracuse area, still to this day. Smart was shocked that when he met Carmelo Anthony, even after Syracuse’s 2003 national championship, the former SU superstar brought up 1987.

‘We played Denver, I think this was last year, and I bumped into Carmelo,’ Smart said in a teleconference last week. ‘I said something about welcome to the family of winning a championship. He mentioned something real brief like, ‘Yeah man, we finally had to get you out of our thinking.’ That was pretty interesting that even he thought of something like that.’

Smart said he has never talked to Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim – although both ‘starred’ in the 1994 movie ‘Blue Chips’ – but came close to speaking with Boeheim once in Atlanta a few years back during a U.S. national game. Boeheim was a coach on the team and Smart, who lived in Atlanta, attended and sat on the floor.

There was no meeting.

Strangely, to this day, Smart has never discussed The Shot or the game with his own head coach, Bobby Knight. Other people have told him what Knight thought of his performance, but the legendary coach has never said it to Smart’s face. During the game, Knight benched Smart because of some mistakes, but the junior finished with 21 points on 9-of-15 shooting and a memory that will last lifetimes.

Still, Smart quietly admitted he doesn’t think his life would be drastically different today if he didn’t hit ‘The Shot.’

OK, well, maybe not.

‘I think my life would have continued to move along the path I’m on now,’ Smart said. ‘We wouldn’t be having this little press conference, but I think I’d still be in the position I’m in. But the great thing is I don’t have to think about that.’

The playKeith Smart describes The Shot in his own words 20 years later:

‘We had a motion offense, so we didn’t have a particular player we would go to. We were going to play off the read, what the defense was going to do. First option was (Steve) Alford, if he moved off the screen.

If that wasn’t available, you try to go inside to Daryl Thomas or Dean Garrett. I was going to Daryl Thomas. Our senior leadership on our team, Daryl didn’t force a shot. He passed the ball back out to me with a little bit under six seconds or somewhere in there. And I was able to make a move on the baseline going to my left.’

Published on March 28, 2007 at 12:00 pm