None of the current Mocs or Thundering Herd remember the heyday of the basketball rivalry between Marshall and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
The rivalry will be renewed after 13 years at 7:30 tonight in Huntington, W.Va., as part of the Global Sports Shootout.
“It’s different now than it was, and it’s different than the [UTC/]East Tennessee rivalry,” Mocs coach John Shulman said. “But it is nice to be going back to Marshall.
“We’ll see if we keep this going, but it’s different because we’re all in different leagues.”
The UTC/Marshall rivalry used to be ugly, nasty mean and heated between the fan bases, coaching staffs and even the players.
“When you’d first show up, there’d be 5,000 people in the stands 90 minutes before the game started,” said John Gibson, who played in the 1984-85 and ’85-86 seasons and later was an assistant coach for the Mocs. “When we went to Marshall my first year, I didn’t go out before the game because the taunting was so fierce. And I was the only white guy on the team, so they’d wear me out.”
UTC won three straight SoCon tournaments, and then Marshall beat UTC in double-overtime to win the 1984 tournament for its first of three in four years.
“There was great dislike, and one thing that polarized them is that both coaches were like WWF characters in Rick Huckabay and Murray Arnold,” said former Marshall assistant coach Dan Bell, whose son Keegan is UTC’s starting point guard. “They both had the hero and villain personas. It was easy for fans to really dislike the other coach.”
Mack McCarthy entered the fray at the start of the 1986 season as UTC’s head coach. The fans left him with a library full of memories about the series. And it started the day he was announced as the head coach.
McCarthy’s wife bought him a new blazer for the news conference. But it was a green blazer, and that didn’t go over too well with UTC fans in attendance.
“It didn’t take long for a few people to point out that I had made an extreme faux pas,” McCarthy said. “Thankfully it wasn’t the bright Marshall green, but it was close enough.”
McCarthy now is an associate athletic director at East Carolina, which is a current rival of Marshall in Conference USA.
“Their students used to meet us at the shootaround and boo us the whole way in,” said McCarthy, who has coached more games in Huntington than any opposing coach. “It might be 20 or 50, but they would meet us and boo us and I’ve never seen that done anywhere.
“This was a huge rivalry, something that our fans cared about.”
This reunion also is a homecoming for UT forward Chris Early, who won three state championships at Huntington High School. He’ll have plenty of family and friends in the Cam Henderson Center cheering for him. He’s played in that gym twice.
“This is an opportunity to go home and play in front of friends and family,” Early said. “I’m not terribly excited, because we’re trying to get another win. It’s not about me; it’s about us getting a win as a team.”
Contact David Uchiyama at duchiyama@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6484. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/UchiyamaCTFP.