It was announced today that Lance Blanks passed away. (If you haven’t had a chance to read Mike Finger’s post on the matter, take a couple minutes out of your day to read it.) The tributes have come pouring in, from TJ Ford to Lance’s longtime announcing pal Lowell Galindo, and they all paint the same picture of a genuinely nice human being who left the people around him better than he found them.
I did not meet Lance Blanks as an adult - I met him when I was 13 and it wasn’t nearly as substantive as I would have wished; not because of him but because I was the same emotional malcontent I am now, starstruck and a somehow even more awkward teenager - and I would have liked to, the next bad thing I hear about Lance Blanks will be the first bad thing I hear about Lance Blanks. That’s not what I’m here for though, as people like Mike Finger - and I’m sure Craig Way, Tom Penders, our own Steve Ross, and many others will eulogize Lance better than I could. I will leave that to the experts, as it were. I’m here because Blanks’ death brings into focus an opportunity to honor a group who were as responsible for Texas basketball being on the map as TJ Ford and even more responsible than Kevin Durant: the BMW team.
For anyone under the age of 40 or so, it’s hard to properly state just how transformative the 1989-1990 team was in terms of local and regional interest; prior to Tom Penders, Texas Longhorns basketball was mostly a wasteland. There were individually interesting seasons, like when Abe Lemons had LaSalle Thompson and some of the Harold Bradley teams in the 60s, but for the most part anything between Slater Martin and the hiring of Tom Penders was best forgotten by anyone and everyone involved.
(I’m not going to poke the bear by mentioning that Slater Martin’s Final Four teams were from when the NCAA Tournament field was…8 teams.)
(And the NIT was a bigger deal.)
(OK maybe I’m poking the bear.)
Tom Penders injected life into a moribund program by getting out and running. The last Bob Weltlich team scored 70.7 points per game, the first Penders team scored 94.3. The Runnin’ Horns name, which might have been partly a branding exercise was also entirely correct; Texas went from middle of the pack in scoring nationally to 4th, and the impact on their attendance and TV ratings exploded. In the second year, the Runnin’ Horns were propelled by the BMW engine aka Lance Blanks, Travis Mays, and Joey Wright, and they were a sight to see. If you’re too young to remember or just want a refresher, here’s a game where they played a much younger (and enough skinnier you may not recognize him) Shaquille O’Neal-led LSU team. They lost this game, but it was 124-113 in regulation.
Texas cracked the 100-point mark 11 times that season and was north of 90 points 19 times in 33 games; they ran, and it was fun. Their season ended when they hit the brick wall of Arkansas for a third time that year, all three of which were burnt orange losses. That said, the Elite Eight finish was enough that fans were waiting for Texas when they got back home; thousands of fans filled the Erwin Center to cheer on the players and coaches for the ride they took us all on. My father took me to the event which ended in an autograph line in the bowels of the Drum, and I came home with a program signed by the team.
Those photos are from a couple of years ago and I still have the program stashed away with a handful of other Longhorns memories. It is one of my most prized possessions and a reminder of the team who helped bring me into basketball consciousness.
I know I am not alone in owing my Texas basketball fandom to Lance Blanks, Travis Mays, & Joey Wright. They were the beginning of Texas’ ascendance into a national program and they should be honored as such. Put a jersey in the rafters of Moody that honors the three of them, bring the rest of the team and Penders & as many of his staff as are still around, and have Lance’s family take part. It would be a fitting posthumous tribute to Lance, and a reminder of a step on the journey to how Texas got to where it is now.
We were in a rut. We were in grass-contemplating McWilliams football purgatory, three years removed from the sesquicentennial oil meltdown and the resulting budget slashing at UT. I was a junior and people were already lamenting the Armadillo and the passing of real Austin. All I knew about basketball was that the women were very good, and the prior men's coach had been nicknamed "Kaiser Bob." People told me not to bother going to games. I didn't know what the sweet sixteen even was, or the "great eight", as it was sometimes called then. Then came Penders, then came the spring. Man, that changed fast. I still remember the noise in the Drum, I still remember all of their names, all of these years later. I remember a spontaneous parade on the drag after the Panama Myers block, people hanging out of car windows, spraying Shiner onto the sidewalk. We've had some great players, some amazing moments, but no one changed the program like the BMW. Thanks for writing this, and blessings for the family and for Lance, taken too soon.
Too young.
I loved Penders' style and BMW lit the torch. Lance could shoot from anywhere, drive, pass, and play balls out on defense as well. I attended several games in 89-90. Although I had been a hoops fan for a generation by that time and although I was a UT Ex I became a casual Texas fan with Lemons and a hopeless fanatic with BMW.
As Galindo's [much] better second half, he occasionally caused me to grit my teeth when he misused the word "parasitic" to describe two or more players whose mesh on court was perhaps "symbiotic". Nevertheless, the bright sparkle of his personality will be missed by a great many of us.
Thank you, Johnny for your reminisces, as well.