Reusse: Eric Musselman will coach for first time at Williams Arena when USC faces Gophers

The Gophers’ first Big Ten basketball championship in 35 years had a bit of blip in the middle of it with the Ohio State riot on Jan. 25, 1972, at Williams Arena, and the coach’s departure after the 1974-75 season was not exactly smooth, but there remains no doubt that a young Bill Musselman was as important as any post-World War II figure to be found in Gophers basketball lore.

Before Musselman, the arena was a world-class fire trap — holding more than 18,000 with minimal space wasted on aisles — and the only assured sellouts were for the eight-team, one-class boys basketball tournament held near the end of March.

There were nice audiences in the early ‘60s, when Lou Hudson was a superstar with Archie Clark, Don Yates, Mel Northway and Terry Kunze. Then, Sweet Lou broke his shooting hand and had to play the Big Ten schedule lefthanded as a senior in 1966.

Yates and Kunze were also gone, and there went the dreams of glory.

Not even Bill Fitch, later a big winner for the Boston Celtics, could turn out crowds entering the 1970s. And when athletic director Marsh Ryman hired a replacement for the 1971-72 season, it was Cal Luther from Murray State in Kentucky.

As legend has it, Luther took the job without a serious inspection of Williams Arena. And once he looked more closely at the basketball monolith with the raised floor, he called Murray State officials and said, “I’m coming back to coach the Racers.”

Ryman had chosen Luther over Musselman, from Ashland University in Ohio, for only one reason: Musselman was 30 years old. A Big Ten school, even one with 13,000 empty seats for most games, was not supposed to hire a 30-year-old from lower-tier college basketball.

OK, Mussy might have believed in modified NIL a few decades earlier and escaped ahead of the NCAA posse in 1975 (and it did agitate us that he took Mark Olberding, a sophomore star-to-be, with him to the ABA), but he definitely got the ball rolling.

And Jim Dutcher filled the Barn and won a Big Ten title in 1982, and he also left after a mess in Madison, Wis. And Clem Haskins brought the Gophers to the Final Four, before Jan Gangelhoff’s term paper on the menstrual cycle was turned in by so many basketball players that the “academic fraud” scandal caused his departure in the summer of 1999.

But from Musselman’s first game in December 1971, when he revealed the Harlem Globetrotters-style pregame show, until Clem went back to Kentucky 28 years later, Gophers basketball ranked only behind the Vikings as a persistent attraction in the Twin Cities sports market.

Eric Musselman, 61, was there for the start of Gophers hoops fever, spinning basketballs on the side of the court during the pregame show as an 8-year-old son of the coach. And now on Friday, Jan. 9, he will be coaching a game for the first time in the Barn when his Southern Cal Trojans take on Niko Medved’s surprising Gophers in front of a crowd that might reach 10,000.

“In this new 18-team Big Ten, we’re the first West Coast team to start the main portion of the conference schedule with three road games in the other time zones,” Musselman said this week. “We were at Michigan and Michigan State, and now we have the Gophers, really playing well for Niko.”

“I was at Arizona State and LSU as an assistant for three years, and this is my 12th season as a head coach in college, but it’s the first time I’ve brought a team to Williams Arena,” Musselman said. “There aren’t many like it.”

The Trojans went to a Timberwolves game en masse this week, and there were a couple of other potential site-seeing happenings scheduled.

“I think Eric reined that in a little bit; he told me, ‘We have to try to get things right before the Gophers’ game,’” said Jeff Munneke, a Timberwolves vice president and employee since Bill Musselman was the original coach in 1989.

Asked about the rocky kickoff to the Big Ten’s 18-game January-to-March finish, Musselman said: “I’d start by saying, ‘That’s the No. 2 [team] in the country in Michigan, and a typically strong Tom Izzo team at Michigan State.’

“Clearly, we’re still an NCAA tournament team off our play earlier. We have to get a little healthier, we have to play better, and you know what else? We have to start seeing some shots fall.”

Proving that life isn’t fair, Eric’s father, Bill, one of the most fanatical workout people to be found, died at age 59 at the Mayo Clinic … from a disease (systemic amyloidosis) that produces abnormal amounts of protein in a body.

When Eric was starting his coaching career in the minor pro leagues, his father was famous for showing up, sitting nearby and offering nonstop advice.

When Eric’s Rapid City Thrillers and Flip Saunders’ La Crosse Catbirds were meeting in a CBA showdown, Bill was there giving suggestions to Eric and basically spatting with Flip — a former Gophers point guard and another Ohio player who was one of Bill’s all-time favorites.

The loss of his father now 25 years ago does not mean Eric is without parental advice. Eric’s mom, Kris Platt, is alive and well, living in La Jolla (a community in San Diego) and watching the Trojans’ games religiously.

“She drives up for some of the home games,” Eric said. “She knows her basketball.

That was the first Musselman year, of course, a Big Ten schedule that kicked off with a 52-51 victory over Indiana — and with young Hoosiers coach Bobby Knight chasing the referees off the court and down the stairs to the Barn’s locker room.

You had to be there, as 19,000 newly minted Gophers hoops zealots were on that outrageous January night a mere 54 years ago.