Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s fate. Maybe it’s nothing. But for those with even the mildest case of Triskaidekaphobia – fear of the number 13 – keep watchful eyes on the March 11-15 Southeastern Conference men’s basketball tournament at Bridgestone Arena.
Following Quarterfinal Friday (which this year lands on Friday the 13th) the SEC will crown its 13th champion inside Nashville’s downtown venue on Championship Sunday in the bracket’s 13th game.
See where we’re going with this?
The Ledger recently spoke with several former Tennessee and Vanderbilt stars about playing Friday the 13th, quirky routines and next week’s tourney. SEC legends Ron Slay of Tennessee and Vanderbilt’s Barry Booker (both honored in 2017) say that what some may call superstitious habits – wearing the same clothing game after game, eating the same foods, counting the ball’s bounces before shooting a free throw – aren’t necessarily superstitions.
Booker, Vandy’s record-setting “Long Ranger” from 1986-89, describes himself as “a creature of routines” and says he would have no qualms about playing on Friday the 13th.
“That would not give me any pause whatsoever,” he says. “I just wish I could be out there – wish I still had the legs and knees and physical makeup to get out there and do it on this Friday the 13th.
“I would be excited about that,” adds Booker, who helped Vandy reach the NCAA Sweet 16 in 1988. “It was more of those routines than it was, you know, this is going to bring me luck today. This is going to help us win.”
That “routine” approach is echoed by UT’s Slay (1999-2003), who says athletes stick with whatever’s working for them.
“You always want to relive the glory time. I mean, whatever it was that you had success in, you don’t want to change a thing because everybody’s looking for their competitive edge,” says Slay, whose number of routines included pacing the baseline at the end of warmups.
“Back and forth, looking at my opponent, thinking about something that they said about somebody in my family or something that wasn’t true. Just to get me riled up and ready to play. To go into warrior mode. And from that point there, it was on,” Slay says.
“If I’m doing something that you can’t do, I want to continue doing it. And I don’t necessarily want to tell you about it. So that’s exactly what it is. Everybody’s looking for that competitive edge and they feel like that’s theirs.”
Good things happen in 13s
This is Nashville’s 13th time hosting the SEC’s showcase event at Bridgestone, surpassing Louisville Gardens (1941-52) as the most frequent host site in tournament history.
The SEC held its first 12-team tournament at the arena in 2001. Expanded to 16 teams last year, the number 16 matches how many times the SEC Tournament has been in Nashville – twice at Vanderbilt’s historic Memorial Gymnasium (1984, 1991) and COVID canceled the 2020 tourney at Bridgestone after the first round.
Hosting the SEC Tournament has certainly been lucky for Nashville, a financial boon. Nashville Sports Council CEO/president Scott Ramsey puts direct spending for tourney week in Nashville at an average of between $18 million to $20 million.
“In the beginning we didn’t have as many teams and as many days. And the spending number was a little less because costs were less. So, probably averaging about $20 million a year,” Ramsey explains.
“And that doesn’t count the 30-35 hours of television coverage that we get nationally each year. So it’s well over a quarter-billion dollars that we’ve seen spent on this and probably closer to $300 million, I would guess.”
David Kells, the chief venues officer for the Nashville Predators, Bridgestone Arena and Clarksville’s F&M Bank Arena, calls the long-term SEC relationship “a win-win for everybody.
“Like they say, people make their own luck, and I think the city of Nashville has done that,” Kells says. “The SEC has done that by choosing to partner with us and the city and the CVC and all the service groups that help make this thing possible.
“So in that regard, I can say that Nashville, the SEC and Bridgestone Arena have made their own luck.”
Slay and Booker love that Nashville is the SEC’s basketball home.
“Nashville’s a great home for the SEC Tournament, for sure,” says Slay, a co-host on WGFX 104.5 The Zone’s afternoon sports talk show and studio host on SEC Network. “The SEC does a terrific job. … The guys you never get to see up close and personal, you get to see them here. So I think Nashville’s a great spot for it.”
Adds Booker: “I love it. Being a native of Nashville. I’m amazed at how Nashville has grown and how everybody loves coming here. … It is incredible that people from all over the world want to come to downtown Nashville and have a good time.”
Good nights and good luck
The Ledger also talked to Booker’s teammates, Barry Goheen (1986-89) and Will Perdue (1984, 1986-88), as well as Vandy great Lee Fowler (1971-74) and Tommy Smith, a longtime college/pro coach and executive from Nashville, who spent 2019 as adviser to Vandy’s athletic department.
Goheen, a 2008 SEC Legends inductee, recalls a time during his junior year – the Commodores’ 1987-88 Sweet 16 season – when he didn’t want to change his or the team’s good fortunes.
“We had a seven-game winning streak that year, spread out over the better course of a month, and I refused to get a haircut during the entire streak,” Goheen says. “Coach (C.M.) Newton said, ‘I don’t care if it grows down to your butt, basically, as long as we’re winning.’ He didn’t mind one bit – which tells me he probably had some of those little superstitions of his own.
“Everybody kind of has something like that and they just feel like there’s a level of comfort maybe. If you’ve been winning, you’re playing well or whatever it is, you want to do the same thing.”
Perdue, a 1988 World Almanac first-team All-America and third-team AP All-America pick, labels himself a creature of habit during both his Vanderbilt and NBA stops with the Bulls, Spurs and Trail Blazers. He wore socks the same way, practiced shots the same way, worked with the same ball boy or coach in practice. The routine never changed.
“I’m a little anal retentive. I used to be very methodical and had a specific ritual I needed to do every day,” says Perdue, an SEC Legends inductee in 2003. “I was a very repetitive individual, very predictable.
“I didn’t think it was odd because it was so normal for me,” Perdue adds, “but when you tell people about that, they’re like, ‘Yeah, you might be on the spectrum.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I don’t think so.’
“I just had a lot of beliefs about what I needed to do to clear my mind – which would then allow me to play. So I had to check all these things off the box.”
Perdue doesn’t consider himself superstitious “but that doesn’t mean I’m not. … You have a specific routine that puts your mind at ease, which then makes it easier for you to play because at the time you’ve been doing it for so long and so often you don’t think what it means. Is it superstitious? Is it lucky? Is it not lucky? It just becomes an everyday habit.”
Fowler never got to play in an SEC tournament because it was discontinued from 1953 to 1978, but he helped Vandy win the 1974 SEC Championship and reach the Sweet 16. He recalls how his carry-over Columbia High School pregame ritual almost backfired when he got to Vandy.
“In high school, I got to the point where I felt like if I was making everything I shot, I never shot well in the games. So I almost tried not to make shots in warmups because I didn’t seem to play well after I did that,” says Fowler, who later served as athletic director at both MTSU and NC State and chaired the NCAA Division I Basketball Committee in 2000.
“That changed because, early in my (Vandy) career, I thought, ‘Man, I’m wearing it out; get it to me tonight.’ And then later on, I thought, ‘I made all my shots and I didn’t score hardly at all on my open jump shots.
“That was kind of squirrelly because you sure hope that the coach wasn’t watching you during warmups and said, ‘Hell, he didn’t make anything; we’re not going to play him tonight. I didn’t see him make a shot.’ I never really told anybody that, but that’s what I’d tell myself.”
Smith, a former Cumberland University player and coach who was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 2013, calls routines “a sophisticated superstition” similar to rigid military structure.
“We were really focused on routines … so that it becomes memorized activity. We used to tell our guys it’s like the military,” Smith says. “We met for breakfast the same time every morning, practiced at the same time, had shootaround at the same time, got to the arenas the same time … so nothing got out of whack and served us well.”
Fowler and Smith share funny stories on the superstitious nature of legendary coaches Roy Skinner of Vanderbilt and UCLA’s John Wooden.
“(Skinner) seemed to do the same routine every home game,” Fowler says. “He’d come in at the exact same time; he would sit in the exact same chair. He wasn’t the type of guy that was so organized that he just did it the same way every time. His practice schedule was on the back of a matchbook.
“If the chair was a little bit off, he’d move it back to where he’d had it the time before. You kind of noticed those things and just assumed it was a superstition for him because he did everything in the locker room right before we went back after shooting to play the game. Of course, we were winning a lot during my time there, so you assumed that he felt like it was working, so why would you change anything?”
Smith still laughs at how former UCLA and NBA star Bill Walton pranked Wooden.
“Bill, bless his heart, told me this story that Coach Wooden had to find two pennies before every game in the locker room. And he would take two pennies and put them on the floor so he could find them,” Smith says. “If anybody didn’t need superstition, it was him. Bill talked about the time he kind of hid the pennies as a practical joke.
“So even the great John Wooden had (superstitions). But he also had the strict routine of practicing the same way and playing the same way. To me that’s a sophisticated superstition. And that’s what we did.”
Keep your fingers crossed
This season, the SEC has featured a tight regular-season race with Florida (23-6, 14-2) in first place going into the final week. Whoever wins will need some lucky bounces and shots along the way. Every fan inside Bridgestone Arena will have fingers crossed, hoping good fortune smiles on their favorite team.
Slay and Perdue call it a wide-open tourney that any team – with a little luck – can win but agree that Florida is the team everybody’s chasing. As many as 11 SEC teams are projected to advance to the NCAA Tournament starting the following week.
“Man, I think it’s going to be real competitive. Coming down this stretch of the SEC season, you’ve got guys that have been trending in the right direction,” Slay says. “There’s a lot of opportunity out there for everyone.”
Through Feb. 28 games, Florida’s followed by Alabama (22-7, 12-4) and Arkansas (21-8, 11-5). Tennessee (20-9, 10-6) was locked in a three-way tie with Missouri and Kentucky for fourth place with two regular-season games, but tiebreakers give Mizzou the No. 4 seed.
Vandy (22-7, 9-7) was tied for sixth place with Texas A&M and Texas following Saturday’s 91-77 loss at Kentucky. The Commodores would get the No. 8 seed based on tiebreakers. Vandy, playing their last three regular-season games on the road, closes out the regular-season Saturday at Tennessee, which lost 71-69 at home to Alabama last weekend.
SEC Tournament pairings will be announced Saturday night following the conclusion of the regular season.
Slay sees Vanderbilt having a hometown advantage. “They should have the fans coming in and supporting those guys and, man, Tyler Tanner’s been leading them. I don’t see any reason why they can’t go win the championship,” he says.
“The leader in the clubhouse probably would be Florida because they’re the defending national champs (and) defending SEC champs and knowing what it takes at this moment to get there. You look at Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee. All three of them can go win it and I don’t think anybody would be shocked.”
Perdue says the SEC Tournament is about matchups and Vandy can advance if the bracket falls its way.
“Florida got off to a slow start and we now understand they are the best team in the conference,” Perdue says. “(Vandy’s) a really good team, but the SEC is really good. It’s one of those things you learn, that it’s all about matchups. Arkansas is just not a good matchup for (Vanderbilt).
"If Vanderbilt steps up and shoots 40-plus percent from behind the arc – gets a lot of points in the paint, wins the battle of the boards, minimizes the number of points for their opponent – and all of a sudden, they can beat anybody,” Perdue says.
Booker says the four teams that earn a double-bye into the Friday the 13th quarterfinals have an advantage over the other teams.
“You need that game on Friday the 13th to be your first game,” Booker says.