Aztecs End a 17-Year Drought

By ROBYN NORWOOD

March 11, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

How long has it been since San Diego State was in the NCAA tournament?

Well, let’s see ...

Tony Gwynn, who once played basketball as well as baseball for the Aztecs, still only had 362 major league hits.

Marshall Faulk, who was in the stands Saturday night in Las Vegas when San Diego State won the Mountain West tournament championship, didn’t have the first of his nearly 15,000 NFL rushing yards. (He was 12.)

The year was 1985. It has been 17 years.

Suddenly, the school long considered a sleeping giant in the basketball world is awake, three seasons after Steve Fisher took over as coach.

The Aztecs (21-11) will play Illinois (24-8) in a Midwest Regional game Friday in Chicago.

“We’re hoping not just to go, but to go and win,” said Fisher, who knows something about winning in the NCAA tournament.

He won the 1989 title at Michigan as an interim coach, and took the Wolverines to the title game again in 1992 and ’93 during the Fab Five Era with Chris Webber.

Before Fisher arrived in San Diego in 1999, the Aztecs had only one winning season in the previous 14.

They were 5-23 his first season, 14-14 the next.

They started this season in the Red Raider Classic in Lubbock, Texas, as Bob Knight made his debut.

They played the Red Raiders the second night, and when they lost to a team that had been 9-19 the season before, things looked bleak.

Nobody knew then how good Texas Tech was.

Nobody knew how good San Diego State could be either, when it was 2-5 in conference in mid-January. Now the Aztecs have won nine of their last 10, the only loss in overtime.

“We’ve taken huge steps in the last six weeks,” Fisher said. “Now, we’re in the spot where everybody wants to be.”

They have Randy Holcomb, a senior forward who started his career at Fresno State, then transferred to Los Angeles City College and now gets to go home to Chicago after a 20-point, 12-rebound performance in the title game against Nevada Las Vegas that made him tournament most valuable player.

“To go home and to play Illinois, a school I wanted to play for out of high school, it’s unreal,” Holcomb said.

There’s point guard Deandre Moore, a junior from Compton who had made only 16 of 36 free throws all season. He made four of four down the stretch against UNLV.

Then there’s Al Faux, the swaggering senior walk-on from Crenshaw High. He sank the jumper with 19 seconds left to upset Wyoming in a tournament semifinal.

And there’s junior guard Tony Bland, who used to play at Syracuse. Now he’s still playing, and Syracuse isn’t.

Fisher is in, and Michigan’s not.

Luke Walton will play for Arizona, and now his brother Chris, a sophomore forward who comes off the Aztec bench, is in too.

And San Diego State, which last season was only in as host of an NCAA regional at Cox Arena, finally gets to put on the uniforms and play.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

SAN DIEGO STATE (21-11) vs. ILLINOIS (24-8)

Midwest Regional

Friday at Chicago

SAN DIEGO STATE AT A GLANCE

Nickname: Aztecs

Regional seeding: 13th