Elvin Hayes and Lew Alcindor in the Astrodome
But in 1968, college basketball barely qualified as a major American sport. There were two specific games that changed the paradigm and turned men’s college hoops. One of them was Michigan State playing Indiana State for the 1979 national championship. Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird. You know the deal.
The other was the “Game of the Century,” which was played Jan. 20, 1968. Reigning champion UCLA, riding a 47-game winning streak, played No. 2 Houston in front of 52,693 people at the Astrodome. At the time it was the largest paid audience to ever watch a basketball game. No. 1 UCLA had Lew Alcindor. No. 2 Houston had Elvin Hayes. Both teams were undefeated. It was the first national primetime telecast of a college basketball game in history.
The year 1968 was a tumultuous year by any standard. It felt as if the world was coming apart.
February 8
At the South Carolina State campus, police open fire on students protesting segregation at Orangeburg’s only bowling alley. Three protesters die and 27 more are wounded. Nine officers are tried and acquitted of charges related to the use of force. A protest coordinator is convicted of inciting to riot, serves seven months in prison—and is pardoned 25 years later.
April 4
Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis for the sanitation workers’ strike, is fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Gunman James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, flees the country. Over the next week, riots in more than 100 cities nationwide leave 39 people dead, more than 2,600 injured and 21,000 arrested.
See the rest of the Smithsonian Magazine 1968 Timeline here.
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