Pretty good article on the Stipo/Sundovld era

Posted on: April 24, 2020 at 11:27:55 CT

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/sports/mizzou_mens_basketball/first-pitches-the-saga-of-stipo-sundvold-no-1-in-the-land-and-a-little/article_5e79859a-828f-11ea-972e-fbf776e7960d.html

The seven-footer drove in from the East side of the state, while the savant arrived from the West. They met up in a stormin’ man’s locker room with every intention of turning Missouri — insert laugh track here — into the No. 1 basketball team in the nation.

It was late summer of 1979, and Steve Stipanovich, Jon Sundvold and I were incoming freshmen. But those two were also co-saviors, and my hope as an aspiring journalist was to chronicle it all. All I had to do, at first, was take a look around.

Stipanovich — or “Stipo” to all of us on campus — was hard to miss. His actual height was up for debate (he called himself a 7-footer, though the school listed him 6-foot-11), but either way, he was able to duck down into “The Shack” for a beer like the rest of us. Boys will be boys and celebrities will be celebrities, and that’s basically what Stipo was: half-boy, half-celebrity. He was Missouri basketball’s first uber-recruit, a McDonald’s All-American who had gone 63-1 at De Smet High in St. Louis. The son of an undertaker, Stipo appeared to be headed to Notre Dame to play for a real “Digger,” Richard Phelps. But the Tigers’ mercurial coach Stormin’ Norman Stewart — as one Missouri man talking to another — sold Stipanovich on the idea of creating something from scratch. In other words, the goal was to put Mizzou basketball in the same sentence as North Carolina, Kentucky and — dare I say it? — Kansas.

Stipo liked the sound of that and, even though he was Catholic, passed on the Fighting Irish — saving Norm’s hide, to a degree. He wasn’t rated as highly as Virginia’s 7-foot-4 Ralph Sampson or Kentucky’s 7-foot-1 Sam Bowie, both of whom were seen as one-man bands. But at the very least, Stipo was automatic from 15 feet in and vowed to elbow anything KU. He’d just need some help to wind up No. 1 in the polls, and that’s where his buddy across the state came in.

Jon Sundvold was a coach’s dream from suburban Kansas City who had a jump shot to die for. He was the classic 6-foot-2 combo guard, too elegant a shooter to be a point guard but too wise not to distribute. For over a year straight, Stewart had been recruiting him and Stipo in tandem. Norm assigned assistant coach George Scholz to shadow Stipanovich at De Smet and another assistant, Gary Garner, to stalk Sundvold at Blue Springs High. On the Saturday of the Larry Bird-Magic Johnson Final Four semifinals, Stipo called Sundvold to see if they wanted to be a package deal to Missouri. Sundvold told him he was scheduled to visit Eddie Sutton at Arkansas that next weekend, but Stipo paid no mind to that. On the Monday morning of the Bird-Magic national championship game, Stipo announced at a St. Louis press conference that he was going to be a Tiger. He finished by saying he hoped his friend Sundvold would follow suit.

There was no Twitter in 1979. So Sundvold heard the Stipo news that afternoon from Garner, who was still lurking outside the Blue Springs gym. Jon called his dad for approval and then told Garner he was committing to Missouri, too.

“You don’t want a press conference?’’ Garner asked.

“No, I’m just telling you now,’’ said Sundvold, always low-maintenance.

I heard all of this my first few weeks of college, and as I walked to my classes, I always had my eye out for each of them. I finally ran into Sundvold down at Brewer Fieldhouse playing pickup with the rest of us fools. At Brewer back then, the games were to 15, full-court, and the winners stayed. I ended up watching Jon stay 90 minutes straight.

Between the two of them, Missouri now had its Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside. This was going to be known as the Stipo/Sundvold era, with a little Larry Drew, Mark Dressler and Ricky Frazier sprinkled in. But first, there was the small matter of … football season.

I had come to Columbia from out-of-state — the Washington, D.C. area — and learned fairly quickly (maybe 120 seconds) that Missouri football was king of the town. That had long been the case, but the buzz seemed to grow exponentially following the 35-31 upset win at Nebraska in 1978 when the Huskers had been staring a national championship in the face.

Maybe it was because tailback James Wilder — who’d scored four TDs in Lincoln that day — was coming back for the 1979 season, along with quarterback Phil Bradley. Maybe it was because the Tigers were getting both Oklahoma and Nebraska at home that year. If anyone was about to be No. 1, it was the football group. Stipo/Sundvold hadn’t even scored a point yet.

But hype can only get you so far, and the football Tigers lost by a combined five points to the Huskers and Sooners. They shanked four field goals in another home loss to Oklahoma State and laid another egg at home against Kansas State. For once, people couldn’t wait for basketball to start.

I heard Stipo and Sundvold were roommates that first fall and wondered if their personalities were a match. Turns out, Jon was a Finance major who rarely hung out with Stipo away from the apartment. He never once wore team-issued shirts or sweat pants to class. Instead, Jon wore polo shirts with his collar up. His friends were all from the business school, whereas Steve’s friends were — gulp — football players.

I’m not saying football guys are a terrible influence, but, from time to time, they can tend to be on the prowl. Sundvold got a whiff of this two weeks into college when Steve’s older brother Ted — a promising lineman on the University of Colorado football team — showed up at their apartment unannounced, vowing to quit the sport. For several days, while Ted hid out, Stipo lied to his parents whenever they’d ask if he’d heard from Ted.

It was a red flag for Sundvold, but the real eye-opener was the day Jon went to their refrigerator and found a keg where there used to be milk. He knew right then he wasn’t in Kansas (City) anymore.

Once basketball started, it’s clear who the B.M.O.C. was: Stipo. He was averaging 14.4 points and 6.4 rebounds a game, whereas Sundvold was a role player. Jon had his moments — like when he torched Kansas State’s 3-2 zone in Manhattan en route to clinching the Big Eight title or when he hit 4 of 7 shots to help defeat Notre Dame in the NCAA Tournament. Eventually, the coach at USC, Stan Morrison, would call Sundvold an “Einstein in sneakers.” But at that time, outside of the senior point guard Drew, Stipanovich was the centerpiece of the emerging Missouri basketball program. And I remember Stipo hating that kind of pressure.

I was covering the team by then for “The Campus Digest” — the student alternative to “The Maneater” — and the storyline entering our sophomore year was Stipo’s waistline. I heard how he’d basically run away from basketball over the summer, lying on a beach in California, as far away from Norm as possible. He put on 25 pounds and didn’t wear it well. But even worse, Stipo wasn’t moving back in with Sundvold that fall. His new roommates were four football players.

The parties at that place were legendary. Sundvold would tell people he’d poke his head in for five minutes, witness the debauchery and rush out. There’d be half-naked girls and guns, and the latter is what changed Stipo’s life and times at Missouri.

The infamous story, as it was told to me, occurred during Christmas break of 1980 when Stipo was left all alone in his raunchy campus house. He found a leftover gun from one of the parties. He flipped the revolver around, and it inadvertently fired, grazing him in the upper arm. His life, not to mention his celebrity, passed in front of his eyes. The last thing Stipo wanted was publicity — particularly foolish, negative, embarrassing publicity. So he made up a whopper.

With his arm bleeding, he shot another bullet into his mattress and used a workman’s glove to smash out a window in the house. He was going to pretend there’d been a burglary and an assault.

He called a teammate, senior guard Mike Foster, telling him he’d been shot by an intruder who had muttered that he hated basketball players. When a shaken Foster arrived to shuttle him to the hospital, Stipo was sitting on his front porch as calm as could be. Foster seemed puzzled, but for a solid 24 hours — while Stipo was at the hospital and then at the police station — the other players on the team feared for their lives.

I was told that Sundvold and his roommate, Barry Laurie, were so frightened of being shot that when they entered their dark apartment, they crawled on all fours to their light-switch. Eventually, Stipo told police the truth, accepting the ridicule that was headed his way. He then went home to St. Louis to heal, and, from what I was told, Stewart and Sundvold weren’t certain he was ever coming back.

Sundvold remembered Stipo’s brother Ted bailing on football and feared Steve would be just as rash. Every third day that December and January, Stewart would summon Jon to the basketball office to phone Stipo, just to see how he was holding up. I was told Jon was furious at Stipo for all of the nonsense. But Sundvold dialed hm anyway. One day, Stipo told Jon how some kid at Steak N’ Shake had teased him for shooting himself, and that he had shot-putted the kid across the restaurant. Jon’s response was, “Dude, you gotta get back here.’’

So that was how Stipo straightened out his life and his basketball — all due to an accidental flesh wound and a plea from Sundvold. Stipo was never the same, in a good way. The team won its second straight Big Eight title, setting the stage for our junior year. Stipo and Sundvold would be moving back in together, and I would be getting the basketball beat at the Missourian.

It was a big deal to be covering the team at such a prestigious newspaper, and I specifically enrolled in the one class that Stewart taught: “Coaching of Basketball.” I was thrilled to see that Sundvold was also taking the course, although Norm lambasted me in front of everyone whenever I missed a question on a test. Jon’s comment to me back then was, “I guess Norm’s tough on everybody.’’

The truth was, he was harder on the players that year than ever before — because they wouldn’t lose. That’s how Stewart rolled. He would coddle you after defeats, but he would alternatively roast you when you won — just so you would keep the pedal to the metal. Considering the Tigers won their first 15 games that year to rise to No. 2 in the country, Stewart was incorrigible. I remember Stipo and Sundvold dreading practice because he only ran them harder, berated them louder.

Still, deep down, Stipo and Sundvold wanted the school’s first-ever No. 1 basketball ranking, just to validate their joint decision three years prior to the I-70 drive to Columbia. They were both All-American candidates now and future first round draft picks (Stipo would go second overall). But if they couldn’t reach the Final Four or win a national title, topping the polls was the next best prize. Finally, when North Carolina fell to Wake Forest on Jan. 21, 1982, Missouri needed only to beat Oklahoma at the Hearnes Center on Jan. 23 to rule college basketball.

They did it in a breeze, 84-64, and for the first time in my life, I saw the Antlers hold up index fingers instead of middle fingers. The crowd chanted, “We’re No. 1,” and Stipo and Sundvold returned to their apartment, opened their refrigerator … and, from what I heard, celebrated with a glass of milk. Or maybe soda.

Either way, that was progress.