Spartans Learn Lessons From 2000 Championship Team
12/11/2015 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
By Steve Grinczel, MSUSpartans.com Online Columnist
Tum Tum Nairn Jr.'s memories of Michigan State's 1999-2000 team are artificial.
They were planted in his consciousness while watching endless hours of video from the Spartans' single-minded run to the school's second national championship and first under head coach Tom Izzo.
That doesn't make the images of Mateen Cleaves, Morris Peterson, Charlie Bell, A.J. Granger, Andre Hutson & Co. any less real for Nairn, who was a 5-year-old growing up in The Bahamas when the Flintstones were writing their page in history.
In fact, they're fresher than most.
Nairn, a sophomore point guard, arrived on campus just over a year ago after prepping at Sunrise Christian Academy in Bel Aire, Kan.
"I didn't know anything about them as a kid," Nairn said. "When I got here is when I first began knowing about that team. One of the first things I did is look up the national championship game they played against Florida in 2000.
"I saw how Mateen hurt his leg and when he came back out the crowd went crazy. I watched all that stuff so many times, I can't even count. I watch it by myself when I'm at home just to see their faces when they won it, and see how happy Coach Iz was and just to get that feeling for what they did to win a national championship because that's my biggest goal in college."
Nairn will be able to add an information-rich narrative to the highlight footage stored in his memory banks when members of 2000 MSU team return to the Breslin Center to celebrate a belated 15th-year reunion this weekend. All but Aloysius Anagonye (playing overseas in Turkey) and Adam Ballinger (living in Australia) are expected to attend the No. 1 Spartans' fifth NCAA finals rematch with the Gators since that momentous 89-76 victory in Indianapolis.
There may be wrinkles where there were none, less hair and maybe even some gray hairs starting to emerge, but Nairn is anxious to make a personal connection to what he has viewed on his iPad screen.
"I saw a lot of passion," he said. "I saw a team that looked like they were going to win that game. I saw a confident group of guys that you could tell were together and really close, and there was great camaraderie. You could just tell they were playing for each other out there."
Michigan State senior combo guard and Cleaves-like floor-leader, Denzel Valentine, was born six years after his father, Carlton, pulled down his last rebound for the Spartans and six years before the 2000 Spartans embarked on their national title journey.
He remembers being allowed to stay up late to watch the final game.
"We stayed up, me and my brother, and my mom, and after they won we took a stroll around East Lansing," Valentine said. "It was a pretty good time."
Playing in front of that team is going to be like performing for Spartan royalty.
"It's going to be real cool and it's going to add extra motivation for me and my teammates because you see the guys who helped build this thing," Valentine said. "They're probably going to come in and talk to us before the game."
The Spartans will be advised to hang on every word.
"I remember they had great players, they had great leadership and they got things done down the stretch," Valentine said. "We'll be ready to play."
Michigan State is also certain to check its No. 1 ranking and the white Final Four banner from last season at the door, even though the 2000 team never held the top spot until after it beat the Gators.
"We can't say nothing yet," Valentine said. "They got the green one -- that's what matters, the green (NCAA championship) banner."
Izzo expects the atmosphere in the Breslin Center to be electric because in addition to honoring his beloved national champs, the MSU football team will be recognized for winning the Big Ten title and earning its first berth in the upcoming College Football Playoff.
Cleaves, Peterson and David Thomas, Izzo's director of basketball operations, helped start the program's turnaround as freshmen in 1997-98, and Bell, Thomas and Hutson left Michigan State in '01 as the winningest players in school history. While Izzo says welcoming back former players is the favorite part of his job, he doesn't need them to personally remind him of what they mean to Spartan basketball.
"I look at it every day," Izzo said. "I look at the three Final Fours, I look at the four Big Ten championships that that group produced, I look at my bank book, figuring I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them. I look at a lot of things.
"I have an incredible appreciation for how they sustained just a grinding, athletic, fast-breaking, tough defense (that season). They kind of stood for everything the program's been built on. It's gone up and down a little bit (over the years) because you get different players, but I think what it does for me, it reminds me how you've got to play just a little bit different style now. You can't quite be as bruising as they were, but we gotta be probably more bruising than we've been."
Izzo wouldn't hazard to guess how this season's team would fare against Cleaves' group, but he sees similarities in terms of ambition and determination.
"Hard to compare them," Izzo said. "I think this team, with the skill-level it has, if it has the mind of that team, it will be very, very good. The best part of the whole thing is that (the current) guys have to talk to our guys. That's what all great programs have -- they have people that'll tell them. That'll post them up.
"They're sick of my voice, so it will be nice to have someone else's voice."
Nairn's perception of the 2000 team's togetherness is spot-on, according to Hutson, who owns a fitness center in East Lansing and runs a non-profit organization geared toward promoting healthy lifestyles.
The members of that team remain in close and stay in contact with one another. They actually celebrated a reunion last May in conjunction with an alumni function, minus Izzo and Anagonye, in Southern California.
"But it's still going to be good to get the whole crew back together again," said Hutson. "We for sure have a tremendous bond with each other. Over the years we've been very involved in knowing what pretty much everybody on the team has done, which is pretty strange.
"This bond is unique from all the different teams, coaches and organizations I've played for. We really just stick together and I think it's not so much from the fact that we won a championship. I think it's from all the work we put in together as a group over quite a long period of time."
There's no mystery about the how or why the Spartans prevailed in 2000.
"I don't think we won it by no means of luck," Hutson said. "We felt like we earned it. The most intriguing thing I remember from that year is just our confidence. There was never another point in my 20-plus years of playing basketball that I felt as confident as I did the year we won the national championship.
"Before the season started, we set goal to win the national championship, we talked about it and it was on our mind from the jump. There wasn't a game we didn't think we couldn't win. In the Coach Izzo era, we were the group that kind of set the tone. He always said you guys are the ones who are going to set the footsteps in the sand for this program and looking back, it's true."
