The NCAA Tournament final went to overtime this year, giving fans five extra minutes of college basketball before Virginia finished off Texas Tech. But as overtime finals of championship games go, the game hardly came close to the triple overtime thriller at the 1989 Culligan City of Palms Classic.
Fans gathered at Fort Myers High School to watch one of the most star-studded games the City of Palms had up to that point. One finalist, Flint Hill (Falls Church, Virginia), boasted future ACC stars Randolph Childress (Wake Forest), Cory Alexander (Virginia) and Serge Zwikker (North Carolina).
The other team in the finals, Abraham Lincoln High (Brooklyn, New York), had names you might recognize from “The Last Shot,” by Darcy Frey, who followed around the 1991-92 Lincoln team to produce one of the greatest and most poignant books ever written about high school basketball. The 1989-90 Lincoln team was led by Norman “Jou Jou” Marbury, the brother of NBA-bound Stephon, and Tchaka Shipp, whose immense basketball talent was destroyed when he fell asleep at the wheel of a car and suffered life-threatening injuries to his skull, lungs, leg and hands.
The City of Palms final aired on a regional sports network that year, and the game lived up to its billing as entertainment. It developed into a duel between Childress and Marbury. Back and forth they went, long into the night, until one last sequence that might have been the greatest in tournament history. Marbury hit a go-ahead jumper with six seconds left to put Lincoln up 68-67, but Childress came back and hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer to give Flint Hill the victory and the championship.
It was a turning point in so many ways. Falls Church was the first school from outside Florida to win the City of Palms. The tournament left Fort Myers High after that game, bouncing between Edison State College’s Gresham Gym and the Harborside Convention Center for four years before settling at Bishop Verot High School for a 22-year run. And it began to pick up steam as a showcase for elite talent.
The 1989 tournament featured five future NBA draftees; until then, only two others had ever played in the tournament. In 1990, a future top 10 NBA pick would play in the City of Palms, and by 1993, there were four future first-rounders in the field. The 1997 NBA Draft included four City of Palms alums in the top 10 picks.
Childress would go on to play with Tim Duncan at Wake Forest and get drafted by the Detroit Pistons with the 19th overall pick. Flint Hill teammate Alexander was taken 29th in the same draft and played seven seasons in the NBA. Zwikker won a national championship with the Tar Heels in 1993 but never played in the NBA, even though the Houston Rockets took him with the first pick of the second round in 1997.
The future was not so bright for the Lincoln stars. Marbury struggled with the SAT, had a scholarship offer from Tennessee revoked and wound up in junior college before playing one season of NCAA Division I ball at St. Francis (New York). Shipp played two forgettable seasons at Seton Hall and transferred to UC-Irvine. The crash happened as he drove back to the Irvine campus one night before ever playing a game for the school. An attempted comeback took him to low-level C.W. Post, but he had problems catching the ball and keeping his balance, and he lost his starting position there. He later failed to make the cut for a semipro team.
But, for one night at the City of Palms, Shipp, Marbury and their Lincoln teammates were winners, even though the scoreboard said they lost. They won an enduring place in the history of the tournament that soon became the best in the country.