Reusse: Before the dramatic change in college basketball, you had to love Clem Haskins

Let’s face it. The original expansion of the Big Ten, with Penn State in 1990 and then Nebraska much later in 2011, made the Big Ten worse as a men’s basketball conference. The league needed two more Northwesterns like it needed a return of the University of Chicago.

The addition of Penn State was not yet a rumor and the Big Ten still had wonderful basketball symmetry in the winter of 1986-87.

Ten teams, all with travel partners: Ohio State-Indiana, Wisconsin-Northwestern, Purdue-Illinois, Michigan-Michigan State and Gophers-Iowa. Games were mostly Thursday nights and Saturday afternoons. Two games a week (home or road) for eight weeks, single games during Iowa week.

Perfection.

Clem Haskins came in for the 1986-87 season after the accusations of what occurred in Madison, Wis., in January 1986 tore down the program. Haskins had to put together a roster with all the chaos that Ben Johnson and now Niko Medved have faced with the Gophers as stragglers in the name, image and likeness era.

Clem’s first Gophers team opened the Big Ten season with home wins over Wisconsin and Northwestern (then traditional basketball dregs) and proceeded to lose 10 in a row before a swing to Indiana and Ohio State in late February.

Indiana was 12-1 in the conference and rated No. 2 by the Associated Press.

There was no soothing female voice in a cellphone to warn me how long this might take in actuality, so I rented a car, rose very early on Thursday morning and drove to Milan — the real-life model for “Hoosiers.”

Wasn’t a great highway and it was over five hours of driving round trip.

Talked to folks on Milan’s main street, went to the school, was inside Assembly Hall and hacking out a “Hoosiers” piece a few hours before tipoff. I finished about the time the anticipated blowout started.

And guess what? In one of the most amazing efforts you could ever have seen from a Gophers team (any sport), they had Indiana on the ropes over the final minutes. It took a reversed call from an official after he was foul-mouthed by Indiana coach Bobby Knight to bail out the Hoosiers.

The ref was so sheepish that Haskins went nuts and Clem didn’t get a technical.

This was when college athletic teams appreciated coverage from outlets not dedicated to sugarcoating. The Gophers bus was leaving for Columbus, Ohio, for Part 2 of the road trip 75 minutes after the game, and I had a ride if finished with the game story.

Made it.

And after a short time, the lights were put out inside the bus. Players and others either talked quietly or slept in the back, and I had three of the best hours of a long newspaper career — across the aisle from Clem, talking quietly, mostly listening to him talk about growing up as a basketball prodigy in Campbellsville, Ky., when the mighty Kentucky Wildcats were getting ready to force Adolph Rupp to integrate.

Clem said he was in Lexington for two days, ready to enroll and help break the racial barrier, but he was so homesick he called the family and said he needed to come back. Haskins and Dwight Smith wound up integrating Western Kentucky basketball, and, with those two as juniors, the Hilltoppers lost 80-79 to Michigan in the round of 16.

“The whole state was waiting for us to play Kentucky, with the winner going to the Final Four,” Haskins said in the darkness. “And then he made the call that decided the Michigan game.”

And then came the real tragedy.

The Smiths — Dwight, younger brother Greg (a longtime NBAer) and sister Kay — were driving from campus in order to be home for Mother’s Day in 1967. There had been torrential rains and ditches were flooded. The Smiths’ vehicle went into one of those ditches, and Dwight and Kay drowned.

“Dwight was my basketball partner and greatest friend,” Haskins said that night. “And Kay, she was such a beautiful young woman, a great person. People advised them not to drive the roads they would be on in that weather, but they had to get home to tell their mom they loved her.”

Clem shook his head again. He went quiet.

Yevette Haskins — Clem’s wife, an all-time favorite for 15 years of Gophers players and Clem’s camp goers — died Dec. 17. This came after their son, Brent, died at 51 in November 2024.

Rail against Coach Haskins if you want.

Those three hours in a dark bus after he had an all-time upset stolen from him … that’s the memory of Clem that lasts.