The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
January 19, 1974 · the Athletic and Convocation Center
The game: Team histories belong to Sports and the team legs; this game belongs here, where Sports itself assigns it — a single night that the city remembers as an event. Top-ranked UCLA, 13–0, winners of eighty-eight straight games, met second-ranked Notre Dame, 9–0, at the Athletic and Convocation Center on Saturday, January 19, 1974. With 3:22 to play, after Digger Phelps's timeout, UCLA led 70–59, and the streak looked like eighty-nine. Notre Dame scored the game's final twelve points. Dwight Clay's corner jumper with twenty-nine seconds left — his only field goal of the second half — gave the Irish their first lead, 71–70. Bill Walton, who scored 24, missed a twelve-footer in the closing seconds; John Shumate took the last rebound; and the crowd rushed the floor. Gary Brokaw scored 25 for Notre Dame and Shumate 24, matching Walton. Phelps was thirty-two years old. John Wooden, famously, called no timeout during the run, through five straight UCLA turnovers. UCLA won the rematch at Pauley Pavilion a week later, 94–75 — the night stands alone, which is why it is remembered as this city's great single game.
The frame the streak carried: The eighty-eight games remain the men's college record, and both of its ends happened in this building: UCLA's previous loss, before the streak began, was also at the Convocation Center — January 23, 1971, Notre Dame 89, UCLA 82, Austin Carr scoring 46 — so that the Bruins' two defeats bracketing eighty-eight wins stood 1,092 days apart, both in South Bend. One measure of the game's afterlife is in its retellings, which do not all agree: a later account puts Clay's shot at twenty-one seconds, and retellings differ on Walton's shooting line — the twenty-nine seconds of the Notre Dame athletics and Associated Press accounts is the figure printed here, and Walton's twenty-four points are printed without the line.
Sources:
- University of Notre Dame Athletics — the Joyce Center at 50 retrospective and the athletics account of January 19, 1974: the 70–59 score at 3:22, the final twelve points, Clay's shot at twenty-nine seconds.
- Associated Press account of the game (as carried in the Washington Times) — the score, the scorers, the floor-rush.
- ESPN Classic — the streak's frame: UCLA's previous loss in the same building, January 23, 1971, Carr's 46, and the rematch at Pauley.
- Sports section of this history — the teams' arcs, and its assignment of the famous single games, this one among them, to this section.