It wasn’t as rehearsed as a Broadway play, but Joe D’Ambrosio had seen, and participated in enough of Kemba Walker’s dramatics to be well prepared for the final act in that Thursday matinee at Madison Square Garden, March 10, 2011.
“You knew it was going to be Kemba’s shot,” said D’Ambrosio, radio voice of UConn basketball from 1992-2018. “He’d had so many game-winners that year, I was expecting something out of the ordinary. When he got the ball back, I just wanted to communicate to the listener everything that happened. And when he broke Gary McGhee’s ankles, I’m thinking to myself in the moment, ‘This is going to be terrific, make sure your call matches the moment.'”
So in Joe D’s words on the radio, which sync up flawlessly with the video, it was … “Walker to the right, … top of the key, McGhee has him on a switch with six … here’s Walker with four, stops. Moves moves left, steps back, the jumper. It’s gooooood. At the buzzerrrrrr, and Kemba Walker has done it again.”
On ESPN, play-by-play announcer Dave Pasch exclaimed “Cardiac Kemba has done it again!” and that line has stuck in memory. D’Ambrosio’s call was pitch-perfect, in volume, cadence and detail. Either way, the moment was captured in sound and real time as one that belongs on canvas in a museum of Connecticut sports history.
UConn legend Kemba Walker announces retirement from professional basketball
Walker, 34, announced his retirement as a basketball player on Tuesday, ending a career that brought him affection and stardom worldwide, but long before he was on a first-name basis with basketball fans everywhere, he was a household name here. Cardiac Kemba was, and always will be, Connecticut’s Kemba, and thank yous have been ringing across the state.
“He set a standard,” said Jim Calhoun, UConn’s Hall of Fame coach from 1986-2012. “Playing-wise, personality-wise, family-wise, team-wise, on being special. No matter what anybody ever tells me, and I can be stubborn, nobody ever did what he did for a national championship team.”
The signature moment, his game-winning shot against Pittsburgh in the Big East quarterfinals at Madison Square Garden, a short subway ride from where he grew up in the Bronx and played high school ball in Harlem, in the third and pivotal game in UConn’s five-wins-in-five-days march to the title, is the one for which he will always be remembered. It’s almost ridiculous, when one thinks about it, but that shot put the thought in people’s head — including mine, at the time — that that UConn team, which had to win five in five because it finished ninth, at 9-9 in the conference regular season, had become a team of destiny, and that destiny was the school’s third national championship.
“Obviously, we won a big game, but everything got better when he hit that shot, the belief of the team and the belief in him,” Calhoun said.
“Five games in five nights, and that was all about Kemba,” said Phil Chardis, who has been around the program as a reporter and for UConn athletic communications since the late 1970s. “It was unprecedented. He took over New York, he took over the Big East Tournament. Everybody in The Garden knew he was going to take that shot, and they still couldn’t stop it. And you thought, ‘What can they do to top this?’ Well, all they could do was win six in a row in the NCAA Tournament.”
Hamden's Joe Castiglione, voice of the Red Sox, is taking his place in Cooperstown; you can believe it https://t.co/73uA04sAX1
— Dom Amore (@AmoreCourant) June 29, 2024
The fairytale thing of it is, all of it happened almost by accident. Calhoun and his staff were drilling down on another player who suddenly informed them he was going to visit somewhere else. “And I said to (assistant coach) Dave (Leitao), ‘Let’s get in the car and go see Kemba Walker at Rice High School,'” Calhoun remembers.
Walker had been cut from Rice’s team as a freshman, but was now a legit college prospect, with elite skills and, we soon learned, charisma to lift everything even higher.
“About halfway through our visit he said, ‘Coach, I want you to meet my family, UConn has always been my dream school,'” Calhoun says. “He made a lot of dreams come true, that’s for sure.”
He played 111 games for UConn, averaged 33 minutes, 16.1 points, 4.1 assists, 4.4 rebounds, always the focal point as the Huskies went to the Final Four his freshman year, and won it all his junior year. And Walker did it all, even the endless interviews, with a smile.
“He played with such joy,” Calhoun said. “He led by example, he led by having so much fun playing basketball that everyone around him had fun.”
Walker’s career, in retrospect, may be even more consequential than it seemed after those last 11 games in 2011. For the Huskies, after winning championships following dominant regular seasons in 1999 and 2004, it had been a while, and in the wake of NCAA turmoil, there was already talk that the program had seen better days, especially as Calhoun neared 70 and retirement.
Walker’s time at UConn, during which freshman Shabazz Napier was inspired and instilled with the qualities to lead the program to another championship in 2014, served as a bridge from the early 1990s to the present day, and a true “dynasty” needs such bridges between eras. “He’s the bridge from Ray Allen and Emeka Okafor to Jordan Hawkins and Donovan Clingan and Adama Sanogo,” D’Ambrosio said.
“… If it wasn’t for 2011, I’m not sure that 2014 happens,” Chardis said. “Otherwise, it would have been a long gap between championships, it would have been a long drought and who knows where we’d be today? On any UConn all-time team, Kemba Walker is on your first five for one year that stands out, it was a tremendous performance.”
The Pitt game was only one of a series of dramatic shots and tours de force Walker fashioned in 2010-11. There were two games in the Maui Invitational, the Texas game, Villanova. “He was the money guy,” D’Ambrosio said, “and with no disrespect to the modern-day guys, we haven’t seen a guy like that at UConn since Kemba, not been anybody who did it in the clutch like he did.”
Walker was the ninth pick in the 2011 NBA Draft and spent eight years with Charlotte, often dismal years in terms of losing, but he played in four All-Star Games. When free agency came, he had a chance to join a contender and put his career on a Hall of Fame trajectory, but when he got to the Celtics, his knee injuries became more and more debilitating. When he played for the Knicks and Mavericks, the injuries had robbed him of too much to still be Kemba.
He remains immensely popular in Charlotte and it should come as no surprise that Wednesday he joined the staff of new head coach Charles Jones as a player enhancement coach, one of several assistants announced.
If he doesn’t get into the Naismith Hall of Fame, he certainly belongs in the Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame. “He’s one of the great college players of all time, no ifs ands or buts about it,” Calhoun said.
How a great career ends is rarely what we remember. The moment Walker’s announcement hit social media, the inexorable movement of time was quickly thrown into reverse, the moment was 2011 and that version of Kemba was set permanently on Connecticut’s canvas.
“He’ll never be forgotten by anybody who played with him,” Calhoun said, “anybody who got to know him. You still hear it from people. The joy he played with was almost unparalleled. It’s a very loose term, ‘special,’ but Kemba will always be very special.”
Dom Amore: In a region of champions, Dan Hurley’s Huskies are the dynasty in residence
