HAWAII 20-year reunion of college basketball's greatest upset

It was back in 1982 when NAIA's Chaminade defeated No. 1 ranked Virginia.
By JIM O'CONNELL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Nobody believed the score.
Chaminade 77, Virginia 72.
The 800-student NAIA school from Honolulu beat the nation's No. 1-ranked school on Dec. 23, 1982, in the biggest upset in college basketball history.
Virginia had a 7-foot-4 center who was en route to his third straight national player of the year award.
The Cavaliers had been to the Final Four in 1981. In the four games before playing Chaminade, they won by 13 points at Duke, beat Georgetown and sophomore center Patrick Ewing in what was billed as "The Game of the Decade," and then went to Japan for a two-game tournament.
Playing without an ill Ralph Sampson, Virginia beat Houston, featuring center Hakeem Olajuwon, and Utah in Tokyo.
Most of the 3,500 fans in the University of Hawaii's Blaisdell Arena were there to see the No. 1 team and the No. 1 player. They wound up seeing the No. 1 upset.
Nobody believed score
When the score and story moved on The Associated Press wire around 2 a.m., several newspapers called the New York office to verify the copy.
"Which Virginia did they beat?" one caller asked, thinking it might have been Virginia State, Virginia Union or some other school with a similar name.
The late Tom Mees was nearing the end of a "SportsCenter" on ESPN that night and was given a piece of paper with the news of the upset on it, but he balked at reading it.
"We were dumbfounded," Mees told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin at the time. "Nobody had heard of Chaminade then. I asked them to double-check it.
"Usually I would bolt for the door to go home and get some sleep, but that night I went back upstairs and called someone in Honolulu. If I was going to read something this momentous to the country, I wanted to at least make sure I'd been right."
Chaminade players Richard Haenisch and Mark Rodrigues knew the outcome was right, and they celebrated higher than anyone else, climbing on to the rims after the game in what became instant photo classics.
"In the second half, the crowd sounded like 35,000. You could hear them saying 'Oh my God, they can beat these guys,' " Haenisch said. "They rushed on the court and I sat on the rims. It was a great feeling.
"Nobody knew how to say our name. They thought it rhymed with 'lemonade.' Then you heard people say, 'Yes, Virginia, there is a Chaminade.' "
The 20th anniversary is being celebrated a little early because the schools meet Monday in the opening game of the Maui Invitational, an eight-team tournament that Chaminade, now a member of Division II in the NCAA, hosts every year.