INDIANAPOLIS – Joel Ayayi of Gonzaga is a liar on the field, with his back, in the back line, his eyes closed and doesn’t look good, he accidentally elbowed Evan Mobley, a 7-foot player, in the face. of Southern California, and a fit officer leans over Ayayi, approaching his mouth gently. Ayayi doesn’t move and starts to get scared. Sitting in the front row of the media seats on this baseline, I have a terrible thought:
Does the referee make sure Ayayi swallowed his tongue?
That’s more or less the moment Ayayi sits down. Now you try your mouth and I understand: check your teeth. What stupid thought? It’s a school basketball game, the 2021 NCAA tournament, the time of our lives. This isn’t a horror movie. Maybe I read james Patterson too much.
That’s when I hear it. This is what it looks like, at the near-empty Lucas Oil Stadium, of this western regional final:
Hitting!
The ball is at the end of the field, Andrew Nembhard of Gonzaga just stole it and kicked it for a tray, but the noise has come here, on my side, in front of me.
Now someone else is lying on the floor, on their backs, on the back line. His eyes are open, but it’s horrible because he doesn’t move. He can’t see. He is an arbitrator, the same one who had cared for Ayayi; your call is Bert Smith, and I have a terrible thought:
is
Gonzaga won 85-66, along the way. That’s the kind of thing you write when you publish a basketball game at school for the paper. You put it at a prominent location in history, especially when the winning team goes to the Final Four.
Oh, that’s right. I’m sorry, Gonzaga goes to the Final Four, his praise for beating the Trojans. I’ll soon gather the motivation to write about the game and show you some of what I saw from my back line position.
Right now, I can’t get Bert Smith out of my head. The sound he made when he hit the ground. The look on his face. The emptiness in his eyes. He’s not there.
Turns out he was alive, but he was cold. This story has a satisfied ending, and I’m not talking about Gonzaga going to the Final Four, I’m talking about Bert Smith coming home. He is from Florence, Kentucky, has a circle of relatives and, according to a statement through the NCAA during the period of the time, Smith had been in contact with his circle of relatives, was not taken to a local hospital, but back to his hotel. . All the news is good.
More: NCAA referee Bert Smith collapses in Gonzaga-USC game
But the scene is so bad. Bert Smith is lying there, with his back, his arms above his head. He’s not moving. His eyes are wide open. His mouth too.
People write that it “collapsed,” but that’s not what happened. When your knees come loose, you collapse. When he stumbles, he collapses.
Bert Smith collapsed, collapsed in a minute, stop at a corner of the field, a few feet away, near the end of Gonzaga Bank, then begins to retreat, rewind, fall slowly. It is stiff when it falls and the back of its head bounces off the pitch. That’s the noise we heard.
Hitting!
Ten yards away is Pavel Zakharov, a Zags rookie, who stayed there, watching Nembhard score at the other end and then watching the 10 players return that way. Nembhard is the closest player to this corner, protecting the USC ahead of Drew Peterson when Smith falls. Hear the noise in the quiet sand and look over your shoulder. Also Peterson, come to Smith with his back, motionless, as Zakharov and Gonzaga’s medical staff rush. Now the referees run to see Smith, and that’s when it gets scary:
Everyone makes crazy gestures to ask for help: a doctor, a stretcher, a miracle, is hard to say, but EMT staff in the opposite corner of the box roll the stretcher temporarily towards Smith. blue bag. I’ve noticed them before, when I wrote about a Roncalli lacrosse coach whose center stopped a game. Inside the bag is a defibrillator, which you use to shake the center when it stops.
Now the sand is silent. I’d say he has a sepulchral silence, but it probably wouldn’t be a word to use so carelessly.
I’m as close to Smith as you can imagine without having to touch the gurney, and I can see him move his chest, up and down. The defibrillator guy put it back in the bag.
Once the game is over, it’s time to digest what happened. In the country? Of course, I guess. Gonzaga is here I would say that the Zags are scary, but it is also not a word to use so carelessly.
Gonzaga led 13-4 when Officer Bert Smith fell with 15:44 to pass in the part, less than two minutes after the fall of Ayayi, on the way, and the hold lasted about five minutes. in the field, then the crowd applauds him as he is climbed onto the gurney in a seated position and across the court into the tunnel. The look on Smith’s face is shy.
The game resumes and Gonzaga continues to run. The Zags complete at 25-8, then 36-15, then 69-45, their biggest advantage of the day. Drew Timme continues to borrow the ball from USC guards and drain throughout the area and position it, once with what we call a step from the euro. Drew Timme is a 6-11 center. C is remarkable.
The same goes for the way he scores easily as opposed to Mobley, the 7-foot USC player who is projected as the selected No. 2 or No. 3 in the 2021 NBA Draft drops to the defensive position, as if it were too easy. A few possessions later, he attacks Mobley and ends up in contact with his left hand, then flexes his right biceps. He scored thirteen of Gonzaga’s first 23 points and leads USC alone, thirteen-8. He ended up with 23 problems, five rebounds and four assists, but he’s probably not even the Most Productive Player in the Zags.
It would be a small advance Corey Kispert (18 points, 8 rebounds) or the gunman Jalen Suggs, the other player projected as number 2 or 3 in the draft, who almost has a triple-double (18 points). , 10 rebounds, 8 assists).
Gonzaga is 30-0, two games behind the 1976 Indiana National Championship team, which also had a 32-0 record, the last undefeated champion on the men’s side of Division I. It’s hitale, but I don’t care much about the story. I want to know more about Bert Smith, so I’m calling a friend, John Adams, who retired a few years ago as national coordinator of NCAA men’s basketball officers. Adams tells me that he knows Smith well, that “he is a wonderful quiet boy, very intelligent, with a wonderful sense of humor, but not me first”.
Adams, who lives in Indianapolis, hosts an annual cocktail after the Indianapolis 500. He says Smith, who lives near Cincinnati, is a big fan of Indy’s 500 miles and attends the party. Smith also plays golf and is retired from Avis, where he worked for 18 years as a manager and he is 56.
The medical staff at Lucas Oil Stadium has fallen out of dehydration and, in fact, there are online videos showing Smith moments before the incident, staggering, nearly losing his balance and not running on the court while Nembhard steals the ball and heads for the court. Smith stays where he is, then falls.
Five minutes later, he smiled as he disappeared into the tunnel, a school basketball officer getting that weirdest moment: the ovation of his life.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or www. facebook. com/gregg. doyel.