• Season: 1990-91
• Date: Saturday, February 2, 1991 (Technically this was Sunday 2/3, as the game tipped at midnight, but the record books record the date as 2/2.)
• Opponent: Boston University
• Start Time: Midnight ET
• Site: Curry Hicks Cage
• Special Event: none
• TV: ESPN
• Radio: ?

• Result: UMass 82, BU 65
• Attendance: 4,058 (sellout)

One step beyond: Madness on ESPN
By Sam Silverstein, The Massachusetts Daily Collegian Staff, February 1, 1991

Call your friend in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Guadalupe, Mexico, or Eugene, Ore.: The University of Massachusetts men's basketball team is going to be on TV.

Saturday night's UMass-Boston University game at the Cage will be broadcast live on ESPN, beginning at midnight. ESPN reaches 57.2 million homes in the United States and is also shown in Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

Cage doors will open between 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Saturday night, according to acting Athletic Ticket Manager Thorr Bjorn. Students with valid student IDs will be admitted for free as usual. But this game will not be 'as usual.' Midnight is not when people usually play basketball.

“It's important to the program, and it's the first step,” coach John Calipari said. “When ESPN leaves here, I want them to say 'Wow, they've got a good, clean crowd.' Then we'll get more games during regular hours.”

Other differences: There will be six TV timeouts during the game; two in the first half and four in the second. Each team will be allotted one less timeout to call on their own. And there will be double the normal of security officers on duty.

The game gives those Minutemen from far-flung home towns a chance to play in front of friends and family. The two Minutemen furthest from home are Tom Pace, from Denver, Co., and freshman Jeff Meyer, from Wausau, Wis.

“I'm excited because my parents are going to be able to watch,” Meyer said, “… and my younger brother and sisters are excited because they'll get to stay up late.”

The national telecast will be the first in the 60-year history of the Cage and will be UMass' first regular season coast-to-coast appearance. Last year's 53-51 loss to Temple in the Atlantic 10 Tournament Championship in Philadelphia was on ESPN.

Dick Vitale is not coming.

'Perfect weekend' for men's hoop
UMass beats URI 70-67 in overtime; over BU 82-65
By Sam Silverstein, The Massachusetts Daily Collegian Staff, February 4, 1991

For the University of Massachusetts men's basketball team, it was the perfect weekend.

Friday night, Rafer Giles was ushered off the court in a rush of ecstatic fans after lifting UMass to a 70-67 win over Rhode Island with an electrifying 3-pointer as the clock expired in overtime.

With the shot, Giles became the 18th player in the program's history to score 1,000 career points.

In the earliest hours of Sunday morning, before a coast-to-coast audience on ESPN and a delirious student body that lined up hours before the game's midnight start, UMass raced past Boston University 82-65.

This morning, the Minutemen are 14-6 overall and third in the Atlantic 10 at 7-4. They've won three straight. They've beaten every New England team they've played: BU, URI, Holy Cross, Vermont, Boston College, Dartmouth, Lowell and New Hampshire.

For the University of Massachusetts men's basketball team, it was the perfect weekend.

BU falls short on ESPN There were lights, cameras and action. The Minutemen steamrolled Reggie Stewart and BU Sunday morning at the Cage as Giles followed his Friday night heroics with a 24-point, 8-rebounds, 5-assist performance.

UMass trailed 15-13 early, then jumped to a 26-17 lead with a 11-4 run fueled by 7 points from Giles.

Stewart scored 17 of BU's last 19 points of the first half and had the Terriers within striking distance at intermission, down 37-31.

Stewart went cold in the second half, however, and BU's hopes of stealing the scene went down with him. Overmatched inside, the Terriers yielded 10 unanswered points and fell behind 47-31 in the first 1:45 of the second half.

“The only thing we had on them was depth,” coach John Calipari said. “We really wore them down.”

After UMass' lead reached 19, at 58-39, with 14:30 to play, BU rallied to within 10 with a 15-5 run capped by a Stewart steal and layup.

But UMass center Harper Williams hit a pair of 16-foot jumpers and Jim McCoy (18 points) had a dunk, a 3-point play and a jumper during a 13-5 run that sealed it.

Giles sinks URI Giles' 1,000th career point provided the most emotional moment of the season in Friday night's A-10 overtime win over Rhode Island at the Cage.

With the game knotted at 67 and the clock winding down, Giles took a feed from Anton Brown, faked an oncoming defender and launched a 22-foot shot that touched off a wild celebration as fans, teammates and coaches stormed the court.

Giles entered the game needing 15 points to reach the 1,000-point plateau, but bricked his way to a 1 for 6 first half. Giles recovered to score 14 after intermission, and finished with 17.

“In the first half I got down. I was thinking too much about getting 1,000,” Giles said. “But in the second half my shot was there … in overtime I was feeling it.”

Of the game-winner Giles said, “I didn't know there wasn't any time left. It was unbelievable.”

“There was no real play,” Calipari said. “We spotted up Rafer on one side and Jimmy [McCoy] on the other. They all ran to Jimmy, and Rafer stood there and made the shot. If Rafer's feet are underneath him and he's set, he'll make it.”

URI took a lead in the opening minutes of the game and held it until there were four minutes left in regulation, when McCoy punctuated a 13-4 run with a fast break layup to tie it at 54-all.

Mike Brown canned a pair of free throws with :25 left to send the game into overtime.

In overtime, UMass edged to a 63-61 advantage on a Giles 3-pointer and McCoy top-of-the-key jumper. URI tied it twice, at 63- and 65-all, on an Eric Leslie (14 points) running one-hander with :09 on the clock, before Giles sank the game-winner.

UMass puts BU to bed
It's a good night for Minutemen
By Joe Burris, Boston Globe Staff, 2/3/1991

AMHERST – Midnight madness turned into Sunday silence very quickly for Boston University.

The University of Massachusetts jumped to a 16-point second-half lead and silenced each BU rally thereafter en route to an 82-65 win over the Terriers in a nationally televised midnight affair last night. Or is that this morning?

Playing without second-leading scorer Tony Barbee (mononucleosis) for the second consecutive game, the Minutemen (14-6) scored the first 10 points of the second half to take a 47-31 lead. BU (7-13) cut it to 63-53 with 8:12 left, but that was as close as it could come. The Minutemen increased the margin to 79-60 with 1:13 left, and the capacity crowd of 4,058 – which began forming lines around 8:30 p.m. – flocked to the exits.

It appeared the teams would provide little for their national audience in terms of point production. At the 10:34 mark of the first half, Jason Scott scored to put the Terriers up, 12-11.

But then things heated up offensively. For BU, Reggie Stewart was practically the only spark. He scored 17 of the Terriers' last 19 points and finished with 20 in the first half. At times, he shot over two or three players. Still, BU shot only 37 percent from the floor.

UMass countered with an inside attack from Harper Williams (10 first-half points) and the outside shooting of Rafer Giles (15 first-half points).

Midnight madness
By Joe Burris, Boston Globe Staff, 2/4/1991

AMHERST – Those who missed the annual New Year's Eve gala in New York's Times Square had a chance to witness a reasonable facsimile Saturday night in Amherst. That is, if you didn't mind partying in an tiny gym with 4,000 University of Massachusetts students up past their bedtime.

There was no countdown to midnight, but once the bewitching hour was nigh, you could count on all sorts of antics from the rowdiest college basketball fans outside the Atlantic Coast Conference. There was no big white ball to drop; instead, UMass and Boston University players used a burnt orange ball – and each time a Minuteman dropped it through the rim it was like midnight, Jan. 1, all over again.

Ad for The Pub that appeared in The Collegian in the run-up to the game.

“It's just one big party,” said William Harris, a student from Boston who was among the 4,058 who jammed into Curry Hicks Cage for a midnight game between BU and UMass.

They call it Midnight Madness – an ESPN gimmick of starting basketball games – many of which are not on Pacific Standard Time, at midnight. The games draw fans in droves (UMass students began lining up about four hours before the game), which usually makes the local fire marshal antsy. The games conclude somewhere around 2 a.m., which usually makes the local press antsy.

But all others seem to enjoy it. Fans painted themselves in school colors and yelled and screamed and flashed posters (HOW DOES “BU-PEUW” SOUND) and flung bucket lids and hoisted persons down bleacher rows and chanted cuss words when UMass players were whistled for fouls – all of this on national TV. Equally important, both schools and their players received national exposure they normally wouldn't have.

Oh, by the way, UMass won, 82-65. The Minutemen, led by Rafer Giles' 24 points and Harper Williams' 21, improved to 14-6 overall and remained unbeaten against New England teams. Should the Minutemen win their season finale against Rhode Island, it would mark the first time they finished unbeaten against New England teams since the 1933-34 season.

One BU player who caught the eyes of those watching was forward Reggie Stewart, who hit for 20 first-half points, including 17 of BU's last 19. “But in the second half, my legs were gone,” said Stewart, who finished with 24. “It was tough because we had no fans here. I think they were tired, too, but their fans kept them up.”

At many other campuses that host Midnight Madness, crowd noise hits high decibels partly because cameras are there; when they leave, some of the spirit often goes with them. But what was seen from Minutemen fans on ESPN Saturday night / Sunday morning is what you'll see at just about any UMass home game. Imagine 4,000 Johnny Mosts without the raspy voice. If you're a UMass player, you can do little wrong. If you're a UMass opponent, you're on the Most Wanted List in Amherst.

“It's the Duke of the North,” said BU forward Fred Davy, as fans chanted and staged the wave hours before tipoff.

“I thought that the kids would anticipate long lines outside and not come, and we'd have an empty gym,” said UMass head coach John Calipari. “I was wrong. There were as many kids in line outside as indoors. And inside it was like Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium.”

The moment that most stirred the crowd had nothing to do with the players. As the national anthem was being sung, UMass students (some of whom had painted American flags on their faces) walked onto the court with large American flags. (Operation Desert Storm had begun just a couple weeks prior.)

“I had been thinking about putting this on for a good week,” said Jason Erdos, a flag-faced student from Lexington. “I got outside at about 8:30 p.m. and there was already a line. But because of my face, some people let me go to the front of the line.”

But there were some antics from the crowd that BU players would like to forget. On two separate occasions the base of the basketball goal was shaken while a BU player attempted a free throw. On both occasions, policemen moved to the scene to stop the ploy, and after the goal stopped shaking, the Terrier shot and missed.

There were reports from some students that about an hour before the game, an ESPN camera crew went outside to film fans standing in line, and once the camera lights went on, fans jumped out of line and moved to get on camera.

“It was a mob scene,” said Mike Bissaillon, a student from Sunderland. “There were no police out there at the time, but they finally came and started lifting people from the pack.” UMass officials could not say whether anyone was injured.

But mostly the night went smoothly. Particularly for the Minutemen, who built a 19-point second-half lead and held off a BU rally that cut it to 10.

“We felt that because of the fans, BU was going to try to go crazy offensively to silence the crowd,” said Williams. “We felt we had to work hard defensively.” The gala ended at about 2 a.m., and it took the weary-eyed crowd no time to disperse. UMass will likely stage a repeat performance Wednesday against West Virginia. But that one starts at 7:30, a time that seems to be to everyone's liking.

“I'd just as well keep it at 7:30,” said UMass guard Jim McCoy, who added that the midnight gimmick sounds good but can be tiring. “Your mind says, 'Yes, yes,' but your body says, 'No, no.' ”

“I'm too old to be staying up this late,” said BU athletic director Gary Strickler. “You can quote me on that.”