Georgia basketball: Reliving the Bulldog’s run through the 1983 Elite Eight

Georgia basketball has one Final Four appearance in program history. That trip was almost 40 years ago in the 1982-83 season.

The Georgia Basketball team astonished everyone including yours truly by making it to the Final Four the year after superstar Dominique Wilkins departed for the NBA and Atlanta Hawks.

Without the “Human Highlight Reel,” few expected much from those left behind. But Coach Hugh Durham melded the starting core of point guard Vern Fleming, shooting guard Gerald Crosby, forwards James Banks and Lamar Heard and center Terry Fair to overachieve in stunning fashion.

I attended a few games in Athens that year and during the Wilkins era. I had a UGA Marketing professor who was a pretty good racquetball player and thrashed me despite my being younger by 15 years. I watched him play Hugh Durham in knockdown, drag-out matches that made me want to give up the game.

Durham instilled that competitive fire into the 1983 Dawgs line-up from starters to the bench. Yet no one expected what they would do in the postseason, Georgia’s first-ever NCAA tournament birth. No one expected they would get past the first round. Except for Durham and the players themselves.

And if anyone reading this tells me they believed UGA would beat Dean Smith’s North Carolina Tarheels in the quarterfinals I will come to your house and give you a good talking to. That group from Chapel Hill included future NBA stalwarts Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins, and Brad Daugherty, along with a dang solid Matt Doherty and Jim Braddock.