40 Years of the Maui Invitational: From Humble Origins to Final Four Foreshadowing
The Maui Invitational began as a minor, four-team tournament. It's now a launch pad for Final Four dreams.
A common misconception I’ve encountered over the years is that Chaminade’s historic upset of a Ralph Sampson-captained Virginia team occurred at the Maui Invitational. The 1982 stunner, which became an unfortunate avatar reflecting the disappointment1 of Sampson’s three-time National Player of the Year award-winning career, predates the inaugural Maui Invitational by two years.
Virginia did, however, play in the first-ever Maui Invitational, held 40 years ago in 1984. The Cavaliers were coming off a Final Four appearance, credentials that have become common among Maui Invitational participants. To wit, the 2024 field features four teams — Auburn, Michigan State, North Carolina, and two-time defending national champion UConn — that have appeared in at least one Final Four in the last five years.
The 2024 Maui Invitational also features four participants ranked in the top 10 of the AP Poll, with Iowa State joining Auburn, UNC, and UConn. That serves as a testament to just how significant this event has become, featuring as many top 10 teams as it had total participants when it debuted.
The inaugural Maui Invitational, played after Thanksgiving Day on Friday, Nov. 23, and Saturday, Nov. 24, pitted Virginia against Providence in one semifinal and host Chaminade vs. Davidson in the other.
Honestly, that sounds like a decent enough field. Providence, a member of the Big East, had outstanding teams with Marvin Barnes and Ernie DiGregorio in the '70s, then reached the Final Four in 1987. Davidson has long been a consistently solid program with NCAA Tournament appearances in every decade since the '60s. Then, Virginia, in its return to Maui, was fresh off a Final Four run.
But in 1984-85, Virginia was very much in rebuilding mode. The Cavaliers went a dreadful 3-11 in the ACC that season. Davidson finished 10-19 in '84-'85 and went winless in its two games at the Maui Invitational — including getting lit up by Chaminade, 77-62, as the Silverswords advanced to face Providence in the first Maui Invitational championship.
Chaminade nearly captured the title in its only appearance in the lone championship game the Silverswords have made in their own tournament. Patrick Langlois is also the only Chaminade player to have won Maui Invitational Most Valuable Player, his 17 points and seven rebounds in the championship round giving the Silverswords the shot at the upset.
According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Langlois also came up with a steal with 45 seconds remaining to give Chaminade possession down two. Harold Starks stole it back but was fouled with 12 seconds remaining to go to the foul line.
His miss on the front end of the one-and-one gave Chaminade one last gasp — and a trio of misses, including a couple of tip-in attempts by Langlois, rimmed off. Providence became the first-ever Maui Invitational champion and left the island with two of the just 11 wins the Friars scored in 1984-85.
No, the inaugural Maui Invitational wasn’t the loaded field we have come to know. That distinction back in 1984 was reserved for a different tournament held at the Lahaina Civic Center.
Before the Maui Invitational’s rise as the preeminent Thanksgiving Week tournament, Chaminade hosted a second college basketball event over Christmas, albeit one played in Honolulu. This was essentially the forerunner to today’s Diamond Head Classic.
Yet despite being played on Oahu, in 1984, the Chaminade Classic was more akin to the Maui Invitational of today than the first Maui Invitational was.
That year, the field featured then-No. 15-ranked Louisville and No. 6 SMU. And Chaminade beat both.
On Christmas Eve, the Silverswords took down Louisville, 67-65. Here’s the UPI wire service description:
Each year major college basketball powers are lured to the Chaminade Classic by the prospect of spending a winter weekend in the Hawaiian Islands. While they may find fun in the sun, once they step onto the court they often find trouble in paradise.
Saturday, host Chaminade notched its third major upset in three years, beating 15th-ranked Louisville, 67-65, on a last-second shot Cardinals' coach Denny Crum described as 'a prayer.' Tuesday, the Silverswords will look to pull off another shocker when they play No. 6 Southern Methodist for the tournament title.
Louisville’s preseason ranking turned out to be a miscue. The Cardinals finished a disappointing 19-18, with Denny Crum still a year away from having a freshman named Pervis Ellison on his roster, leading UL to the national championship.
SMU, however, was an NCAA Tournament team that earned a No. 5 seed in the first 64-team field coming out of the tough Southwest Conference.
SMU almost reached the Sweet 16, too, before running into the original Loyola Cinderella story, back when Sister Jean was a spry 66-year-old. Surely, 1984-85 was just the beginning of a long, distinguished career free from controversy for SMU coach Dave Bliss, though.
Hmm. OK, perhaps not. The character of its coach notwithstanding, the '84-'85 Mustangs, built around standout big man Jon Koncak2, put together an impressive season that included a 71-70 loss to Chaminade on Christmas Day.
The shift from Christmas to Thanksgiving as the premier holiday for hoops in Hawaii didn’t take long to begin, however. The second Maui Invitational in 1985 more closely resembled the previous year’s Chaminade Classic, with champion Michigan beating Kansas State for the title after outlasting Virginia Tech in a thriller.
Under coach Bill Frieder, the 1985-86 Wolverines featured the previous season’s Big Ten Player of the Year, seventh overall draft pick in the '86 draft, and future cautionary tale Roy Tarpley. Before Tarpley’s infamous NBA flameout, he was the standout of a roster that also featured a few key members of a future Final Four-winning Wolverines team, most notably freshman Glen Rice.
No word on if Rice hooked up with any future political figures while in Maui, as he allegedly did two years later at the Great Alaska Shootout. Rice did, however, contribute to Michigan’s 28-5 finish in the ‘86 campaign.
Michigan’s Maui Invitational title capped the last of four-team fields. The next year, 1986, signaled a turning point in the tournament becoming the marquee event. Will Perdue led Vanderbilt past New Mexico in the '86 Maui Invitational, beating VCU and a Norm Stewart-coached Missouri team that won the 1987 Big 8 Conference championship along the way.
What could be considered the first Maui Invitational truly indicative of how we know it today, however, came in 1987.
A field featuring three teams that advanced to the 1988 Sweet 16 or further was on hand, including champion Iowa and runner-up Villanova. The Hawkeyes, coming into the Maui Invitational ranked No. 11, escaped a good Stanford team that won 21 games that year under legendary coach Mike Montgomery.
The 78-75 Iowa win was the most competitive for the Hawkeyes on their way to becoming the fourth-ever Maui Invitational champions. They blasted Villanova in the championship, 97-74, after handing Kansas one of its two losses in Lahaina during the semifinals, 100-81.
The Jayhawks fell to another NCAA Tournament team in the 3rd-place game: Illinois, with another coaching icon, Lou Henson, on the sideline.
Kansas recovered. The Maui Invitational was one chapter in the storybook national championship run of Danny & The Miracles, the remarkable Jayhawks team captained by Danny Manning to one of the most improbable titles in March Madness history.
In the process, the 1987-88 Kansas team began a tradition of Maui Invitational participants going on to win that season’s Final Four. The tradition continued the very next year, in fact, with Michigan returning to claim its second championship in Lahaina.
The aforementioned Glen Rice had a 1989 NCAA Tournament that rivals Danny Manning’s among the best individual efforts in the Big Dance’s history. Before then, he won MVP of the 1988 Maui Invitational, leading Michigan past the previous season’s national runner-up, Oklahoma, in the title game.
The 1988 Maui Invitational established the tournament as what it is today, featuring four teams ranked No. 16 or better in the AP Poll. Along with Michigan and Oklahoma, the field featured a No. 8-ranked UNLV team with Anderson Hunt, Greg Anthony, George Ackles, David Butler, and Stacey Augmon — key figures in the Runnin' Rebels' 1990 national championship.
Maui’s history of producing national championship winners is front and center in 2024. North Carolina makes its return to the island in pursuit of its fourth Maui Invitational title in the 21st century, with each of the previous three — 2004, 2008, and 2016 — preceding Tar Heels Final Four runs.
That North Carolina would this year need to get through a three-game run of Dayton, which last played in Maui facing Kansas in one of the Invitational’s all-time great championship game; either Iowa State or Auburn; and potentially two-time defending national champion UConn makes this arguably a more difficult stretch than even March Madness could offer.
It’s a remarkable evolution for a tournament that began 40 years ago as something of a footnote on the college basketball schedule.
Disappointment is a relative term and, in the context of Ralph Sampson’s career, is best explained in Chuck Klosterman’s book Eating the Dinosaur. Klosterman devotes a chapter to Sampson, providing both the best dissection of the ahead-of-his-time big man that I have ever read, and a frustrating reminder that one of the many misfires the defunct ESPN vertical Grantland made was not employing Klosterman as a regular college basketball columnist.
Readers who grew up on ‘90s basketball, like me, may know Jon Koncak only as “Jon Contract.” The six-year, $13.2 million dollar deal he signed with the Atlanta Hawks in 1989 was considered so absurd at the time, it was still an oft-cited punchline in SLAM magazine well into Bill Clinton’s second term. At SMU, however, Koncak averaged a per-game double-double of nearly 18 points and 11 rebounds.