By MACK ROSENBERG
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

The atmosphere. The fans. The anticipation. The Garden. It was St. John’s versus Georgetown. It was a big time college basketball game in New York City in the early 1980s between the top two teams in the country, and Tom Pecora was there.

“People were offered three or four hundred dollars for the ticket. It was that big of a game,” says Pecora. “I wasn’t making that much a month.”

The 1980s paled in comparison  to today if you are measuring the level of popularity college basketball had in the tri-state area. In fact, some may argue the 80s was the final decade in a slow, painful death of the sport in New York City. At the time, Pecora, now the head basketball coach at Fordham, was coaching high school ball at Long Island Lutheran. He remembers when Madison Square Garden and New York City were college basketball’s crown jewels.

Being a city kid, Pecora attended St. John’s games regularly at Alumni Hall in Queens. “We’d sneak in the back door of Alumni Hall with either old tickets or ushers would give you a wink and let you walk in. They knew you were a little kid who just wanted to watch basketball.”

It was a time when the NCAA tournament and New York were inseparable.

But as Pecora got older, the idea of going to games at Madison Square Garden enticed him, and he caught on with some of the older kids in the neighborhood who could take him there.

“New York was the place to be. The NCAA realized that,” says Richard Rothschild, a sports history writer for SI.com. “For most of the 1940s, both the NIT and the NCAA tournament were in New York City.”

They realized that only after seeing the success of the NIT, which was the first postseason tournament in college basketball. It was first played in 1938 at the old Garden. Kids these days probably could not even tell you what NIT stands for, but this was a time when it dominated the sport. One year later, in 1939, came the first NCAA tournament on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Six or seven thousand people attended. Meanwhile, at the Garden, nearly 20 thousand people attended the NIT. The NCAA got the message, moving its East Regional and Championship games to Manhattan beginning in 1943.

The Madison Square Garden was and still is an alluring place to have a basketball game. Just ask Cal Ramsey, a small forward who played for NYU from 1955-1959 during an era when the Violets were household names.

“It was very exciting as a young kid growing up in New York and getting a chance to play at Madison Square Garden against top flight teams in the metropolitan area,” reflects Ramsey. “It was very competitive.”

The Garden was magical in its heyday, and the players —  Ramsey included — did nothing to take away from the mystique. Kids from cities and small towns from all over the country made the Garden the hottest ticket in college basketball. And, you could not watch them on television. It was always a big event that you had to see in person.

“The market wasn’t flooded. Now, with ESPN and all the other networks, you can watch a different college basketball team from anywhere in the country on any given night in your home,” says Pecora. “People would come in and say, for example, ‘Iowa’s coming to play at the Garden. Wow, they have that kid so and so. Let’s go see him.”

Imagine today if a team was invited to participate in the NCAA tournament, and decided instead to play in the NIT. It happened in 1970 when Marquette head coach Al McGuire decided to play in the NIT because the NCAA did not put the Warriors in their preferred region of Dayton, Ohio.

“That was a big deal because it meant all of a sudden he was snubbing the NCAA. It was the last time anyone did that,” says Pecora.

As a result of McGuire’s antics, the NCAA created a new rule saying any team who declined an invitation to the NCAA tournament could not participate in any other post-season tournament. It began a slow but steady end to the dominance of the NIT.

Geography, believe it or not, also had a lot to do with coaches like McGuire deciding to ditch the tournament. The Final Four’s stay at the Garden only lasted until 1950, transitioning afterward to places like Kansas City, Mo. and Seattle. For schools on the east coast, why travel thousands of miles to play in a lesser known tournament with only eight teams? If a team could play in the NIT closer to home in New York City, where its fans see them, it was not going to pass up that opportunity.

“No coach in his right mind today would say ‘we’ll go to the NIT.’ But, back then, a lot of coaches felt it was more fun to go to New York City, because the competition was outstanding,” admits Rothschild.

Also, 1950 was the last year that the NCAA tournament would feature just eight  teams. It began expanding in 1951. In the same year, the first of two devastating point shaving scandals swept across the sport. The first made a dent in the sport’s metropolitan reputation. The second one in 1961 ended it for half a century. Rothschild says the move was predictable, but unforgiving. “You could say it was harsh to stay out of Madison Square Garden for 53 years.”

The gap in between has seen a lot of great games come through the Garden, reminding everyone that the tournament was due to make a comeback appearance in midtown Manhattan for this year’s East Regional Final.