Indiana University Olympians. David Woods
He and his parents and brother, Sean, rode home in a van at a leisurely rate. They stopped for two hours in Las Vegas and walked around Caesars Palace. Steve had been “put through the ringer,” as his father, Sam, put it, and he slept a lot. As they crossed the Illinois-Indiana border, he saw the first sign: “WELCOME HOME, STEVE. CONGRATULATIONS.”
There were more signs and banners on Interstate 70 overpasses. East of Indianapolis, he saw a police car in which a girl was waving from the backseat. It was Tanya Frost, his girlfriend at the time and his wife since 1987. Past the Greenfield exit, the Alford van pulled over, and Steve and Tanya loaded into a convertible for a caravan home.
For six miles along I-70, all the way to the State Highway 3 exit, cars lined both sides. Helicopters hovered overhead for TV cameras. After arrival in New Castle, townspeople reached out to shake Alford’s hand, and hundreds of people were lined up on both sides of the family home on Hickory Lane.
“The reception in New Castle is something I’ll never, ever forget,” Alford said.
Two nights later, on Steve Alford Day in New Castle, the world’s largest high school gym filled with spectators. The ceremony was capped by Alford’s speech, in which he lamented never winning a state championship for Sam, his father and high school coach. Steve took the gold medal off his neck and put it around his father’s.
As his father had told him on the phone while the Olympic team was in San Diego, “There’s a lot of players in Indiana who can say they’ve won a state championship. Very few can say they’ve won an Olympic gold medal.”
Steve Alford was seemingly fated to be basketball royalty in Indiana.
He was born November 23, 1964, in Franklin, Indiana, the son of a coach. Soon after his second birthday, his parents, Sam and Sharan, sent Christmas cards forecasting that their son would be a Mr. Basketball in Indiana. Mom and Dad were right.
By age three, Steve was sitting on the bench at Monroe City High School, where his father was the coach. He learned to add by watching numbers on the scoreboard and to read and spell by looking at game programs and last names on the backs of uniforms. At five, he was playing in a YMCA league in Vincennes while his father coached at South Knox.
He would shovel snow from the driveway to shoot baskets if he couldn’t get in a gym, practiced broadcasting games in a closet, and kept journals of his progress. Until he left for IU, he missed just two of his father’s games—one when he had the chicken pox, another when he finished fourth in a regional Elks Hoop Shoot free throw contest at age ten in Warren, Ohio.
Sam Alford coached for four years at Martinsville, where local hero Jerry Sichting was idolized by his young son. (Sichting went on to be an All–Big Ten guard at Purdue and played and coached in the NBA.) Then his father moved onto New Castle and its 9,325-seat gymnasium.
If there is anywhere in the world for a basketball junkie to grow up, it is New Castle. Alford was no physical specimen—he was all of five foot ten and 125 pounds when he got his driver’s license—but he tirelessly worked on his body as well as his game. He would shoot one hundred to three hundred free throws a day, charting them all and punishing himself with fingertip pushups or sprints when he missed.
He played in nineteen varsity games as a freshman, totaling 30 points, and averaged 18.1 for the 13–9 Trojans as a sophomore. He averaged 27.3 as a junior and 37.2 as a senior for teams that went 12–10 and 23–6. He was indeed Mr. Basketball in 1983, finishing with 1,078 points, one off the single-season state record set by Carmel’s Dave Shepherd in 1969–70. Alford was 286 of 304 on free throws for .944, which would have led the NBA or NCAA that year.
In the next-to-last game of his high school career, he scored fifty-seven points— one off a state postseason record that has stood since 1915—at the Hinkle Fieldhouse semistate in Indianapolis. New Castle beat Broad Ripple 79–64 but lost to eventual state champion Connersville 70–57 that night, despite Alford’s thirtyeight points. So he scored ninety-five points in one day. He was eighty-two of eighty-three on free throws in seven sectional, regional, and semistate games.
He and Tanya missed prom so he could play in the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic at Pittsburgh. Alford scored just four points, but he said, “The basketball game still was better.”
At IU, Alford averaged 15.5, 18.1, 22.5, and 22.0 during four seasons in which the Hoosiers were a collective 92–35. As a senior, he was a consensus All-American for the 30–4 Hoosiers. He scored 23 points, featuring seven-of-ten shooting from the three-point line, as Indiana beat Syracuse 74–73 for the 1987 NCAA championship. Alford shot .530 on threes in the first season it was used by the NCAA.
He left Indiana as the Hoosiers’ all-time scoring leader with 2,438 points (a record broken by Calbert Cheaney) and a record .898 percentage on free throws.
Alford was the first pick of the second round by the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA draft. He lasted four seasons as a pro, three with Dallas and one with Golden State, before retiring at age twenty-six. He totaled 744 points in 169 NBA games, more than 300 points less than he scored as a high school senior.
He became a college head coach at twenty-seven, returning to his home state at Manchester University. After a 4–16 first season, he was 78–29 in four years, including a 31–1 final season in which Manchester lost in the NCAA Division III championship game.
He subsequently coached four seasons at Southwest Missouri State (78–48), eight at Iowa (152–106), seven at New Mexico (155–52), and more than five at UCLA (124–63). He was fired at UCLA after a 7–6 start to the 2018–19 season. He returned to the Mountain West Conference when he was hired by Nevada in April 2019.
He took teams to the NCAA Sweet 16 four times, including three with UCLA and once (in 1999) with Southwest Missouri. His best records are 31–5 with UCLA in 2016–17 and 30–5 with New Mexico in 2009–10.
His sons, Bryce and Kory, both played college basketball for their father. Kory set a New Mexico high school record with 1,050 points in his senior season, averaging 37.7 per game. Kory left UCLA with the school’s career record for threes made.
Quinn Buckner, 1973.
IU Archives P0020733.
Scott May, 1976.
IU Archives P0039895.
Quinn Buckner and
Scott May
1976
Winning Back the Gold “Stolen” at Munich 1972
NO AMATEUR BASKETBALL PLAYER HAS EVER HAD, OR EVER WILL HAVE, A year like Quinn Buckner and Scott May did. It is no longer possible in a one-anddone era that features pros in the Olympic Games.
It was momentous enough that the 1975–76 Indiana Hoosiers, at 32–0, are the last NCAA champions to go undefeated. Buckner and May? They were 40–0.
They were key pieces on the US team that exacted revenge in the Montreal Olympics for what happened at Munich in 1972. Officials had awarded a do-over to the Soviet Union, which beat Team USA 51–50 for the gold medal.
“That was all part and parcel to the additional drive that many of us had, to right that wrong,” Buckner said. “They stole it. It’s that simple.”
Buckner and May were 32–0 in college and 7–0 in the Olympics. They were 1–0 versus the Soviet Union. They helped the Hoosiers to a 94–78 victory over the reigning world champions in an exhibition before a sellout of 17,377 at Indianapolis’s Market Square Arena on November 5, 1975. May scored thirty-four points on thirteen-of-fifteen shooting.
That was not Buckner’s first experience against the Soviets, nor was it his first in international basketball. He was on a team that toured China in 1973 as part of US diplomacy.