THE TEAM: Cameron Mills' documentary on 'The Untouchables' nears release
Was Kentucky's 1995-96 national championship team the best in college basketball history?
Cameron Mills, his teammates that year and Rick Pitino believe that it was. More than a few Kentucky fans, and some less sympathetic to the Cats, would agree.
Here Cats Illustrated previews Mills' documentary, which amounts to a behind-the-scenes story of one of the most intriguing college sports teams of all-time.
Mills wasn't trying to prove that Kentucky's '95-96 title team was the best of all-time when he set out to make a documentary on those Cats, affectionately regarded as 'The Untouchables' in Big Blue Nation lore. That's an interesting hypothesis, but not the main thrust of his work, which is set to release on Christmas Day.
Rather, he sought to provide new perspective on what made that team special. The documentary is full of interviews with Mills' teammates, including some of the best players in Kentucky history, as well as Rick Pitino, the captain who piloted that Kentucky team to the program's first national championship in 18 years and its sixth all-time.
That team's well-documented 20-year reunion took place in Miami over the summer, and Mills has spent the better part of six months working on this project.
LINK: You can preorder your copy of The Team - The 1996 National Champion Kentucky Wildcats right here. Watch the trailer and purchase a copy for yourself, family or friends during this Christmas and holiday season.
Mills, who hosts The Mills Show (Sundays 7-9 p.m. on 630AM and WLAP.com), spoke with Cats Illustrated about that 1996 championship team in advance of the release of his work. Below you'll find a Q&A session that explores that team's journey to the championship, but it's very little compared to everything in the film.
Cats Illustrated: When you and everybody got together in Miami earlier this year and spent some time reminiscing and honoring your team accomplishment 20 years ago, had the passage of time changed the perspectives and the memories that you heard and shared?
Cameron Mills: I don't know why people remember certain things. You're going back 20 years and you get 13 guys together including their coach. Someone remembers this and someone says, 'Oh that's right,' and then someone else remembers two or three things. So you get all those guys together and it's really the totality of all the memories together. The jokes are coming and back then they weren't funny because it was a very serious time in our lives, which the movie brings out because of all the pressure on us. We started the year number one, and you hear our coach say it, 'This was the year. This was the year it had to get done.' And that's kind of the pressure we all felt. So there were all these memories that kind of joined together down in Miami and things came up. Something would trigger another memory and with everything that came up we were just laughing, the whole time we were down there.
Cats Illustrated: In the documentary Pitino says everybody knew that you guys had a championship caliber team once that group came together. Putting a team together is very different for today's Kentucky, under John Calipari, than it was back then. There were more players returning, more freshmen becoming sophomores and juniors becoming seniors. Mark Pope, Tony Delk and Walter McCarty gave the senior leadership. Talk about someone like Ron Mercer, who had just joined the team as a heralded freshman. How did he become acclimated to the team and what kind of adjustment was there with the younger guys joining the more experienced players?
Mills: I think you'll see there was a lot of conversation very early on. My perspective is different than all of those guys. I sat on the bench that whole year. I played 16 minutes all year. In fact, I played more my freshman year than I did on that team. I'm sitting over on the bench and I don't know that I'm feeling the kind of pressure those other guys were. I think in terms of acclimating Ron Mercer, one of the easy parts about that was a lot of those guys came in as highly touted freshmen themselves. Antoine (Walker) certainly did. Tony Delk certainly did. Walter probably did. So they kind of understood the roles of, 'Okay here comes another big-time freshman. How does he fit in?' And I think one of the things guys (established) early was it didn't matter if you were a senior. It didn't matter if you were a freshman. What mattered, especially after the first loss to UMass, was, if we kind of worry about who gets the most minutes and who gets the most points we're not going to do anything special.
Some things kind of collided to force us into only, only worrying about how we went as a team. How we were going to gel, how we were going to play together, because we kind of ultimately realized at some point, and a lot of guys say it was after the UMass loss, that if we do this together and don't worry about ourselves and our egos then we've got a much better chance of meeting our expectation, which was to win it all. Just like coach said, we had a championship team and we knew it. We lost Chris Harrison and Andre Riddick from the year before, and Rodrick Rhodes which was a big loss, but everybody else was coming back. So you add Derek Anderson (transfer) and you add Ron Mercer. You're adding a lot of talent to that team and it's just, you pretty much figure, this is the year you've got the best chance to do it.
Cats Illustrated: One thing that's interesting is John Calipari says today the team that's having the most fun at the end of the year is probably going to be the team that's left standing. But in your film, Rick Pitino talks about how that season really wasn't fun because of the pressure and the expectations. It wasn't fun until it was over. Even still, anybody who watched that team could tell you guys had a ton of fun playing together. So how did you find a way to play loose game in, game out, when in the big picture the pressure was so overbearing?
Mills: I think a lot of that was (Pitino's) perspective and the pressure he felt. He was the best coach, at that time, who had not won a championship. He had been to the Final Four. When you're the head coach and you're responsible for that I don't know that it's possible to have fun. I will tell you, here's what's fun. Winning basketball games is fun. Losing is not. To say we didn't have any fun, I mean, we won 27 straight. Let's put it this way. With all the craziness, the excitement and pressure, in the locker room before the game with all the screaming and yelling and right before (the players) go out the coach says, 'The most important thing is to go out there and have fun.' What they mean is, 'Go out there and win.' I think that's what it comes down to. We were having fun but I think it's fair to say the pressure was mostly on Coach P. But he would talk about how pressure's a good thing. Pressure is what makes you prepare. It's what makes you stay after practice and work on rebounds. It's what makes you run the length of the floor after practice to make sure you're in the best shape you can be in. Pressure is good.
Cats Illustrated: Everybody talks about the UMass loss and what the team learned from that, mostly how to defend an elite big man like Marcus Camby, who had his way with you guys in your first meeting with UMass. There's not as much talk about the Mississippi State loss in the SEC Tournament. At the time some people would chalk it up to pressing for three straight days and how tiring that is in spite of your depth and talent, as well as how well Mississippi State played, but what did you take from the Mississippi State game going into the NCAA Tournament? What lessons carried over for those last six games? And since the UMass loss is a big part of the documentary, talk about some of what the film presents about that.
Mills: We learned a couple of things. We learned that our pressure had to be better. First off, in the movie we do a whole segment on the UMass loss, and there are a couple of things I'll point out. You can look for it when you see it. We got an interview with Calipari and it's there from 20 years ago and there's a quote great, a great interview by him. But on the Mississippi State game, we learned that pressure is not invulnerable. Mississippi State did a great job of handling the pressure. It just didn't seem to work for us. But back to the UMass loss, thinking back to that, after that loss we came back, and its mentioned in the documentary, but there was a team meeting. Coaches laugh all the time about team meetings but I never do. Sometimes you'll have five or six team meetings a year and you might not learn something from the first four, but you really learn something from the fifth. The coaches aren't there and they have no control over it. This is the leaders of the team, the captains or somebody on the team taking the initiative to say, 'Guys. We've got to do something. We've got to change." And that team was unique. Antoine Walker is the one who really made the biggest change and that's what the film talks about.
Cats Illustrated: Think back to the dynamics of that national championship game against Syracuse. It was interesting then and maybe more so in hindsight. That year everybody thought it was Kentucky and UMass. The first game pumped that up even more. In a championship documentary, 'The Untouchables,' immediately after that title, Rick Pitino was shown talking before the Syracuse game about how, 'You cannot come this far to lose now.' Obviously motivation shouldn't be a problem for anybody in the national championship game, but what was it like winning the game everybody wanted to see in the Final Four and then going out to play a much less hyped Syracuse team for the real championship? You were a part of another championship team that had a somewhat similar dynamic. You beat Stanford in a dramatic game and then you face Utah. Utah wasn't nearly as hyped throughout the year as North Carolina. So even if motivation wasn't an issue against Syracuse, was there any sense at all that this last game was mostly a coronation more than another street fight, either on the team or in some of the vibes you all picked up?
Mills: I will tell you this. Nobody on that team felt it was a coronation. That last game, it may have felt like that for some people, but that's not how we felt. We didn't go into that game feeling like, 'It's just a matter of time.' Trust me. We were at the banquet room at the hotel where we were going over some last minute game planning stuff and you could just feel the pressure in that room. It was alleviated at least a little bit when Coach Winston Bennett walked in wearing his pinstripe suit and everybody just started laughing at him. It was this moment where everybody laughs or giggles and you could reset but at no point did we ever feel like Syracuse (would be an easy opponent).
Cats Illustrated: Talk about the bond between that team and the Kentucky fan base in a general way, especially after you won that championship? Kentucky fans are obviously incredibly invested in their teams, probably more than any other fan base, but that team held and still holds a special place in a lot of people's hearts, in part because you were so dominant but also because it was the program's first championship in 18 years. There were some dark years and even though in those 18 years there were some good seasons, it certainly wasn't the best stretch in the program's history. So what was that team's experience with the Kentucky fan base and did you sense how special what you were doing was for people?
Mills: Well, there's always a connection at Kentucky. I think back to (the plane) landing (in Lexington after the championship). There was a football game this year when the team returned, I guess it was after the Louisville game, and a bunch of fans went out. That's kind of how it was when we landed coming back from the Meadowlands the next day. There were all kinds of fans at the airport. You kind of know at that point you're going to be (regarded as) a special team in Kentucky basketball, because you won a championship. But it really says something about that team that people wanted to greet us as soon as they possibly could.
I'll also say this. There's a very big difference between teams that almost do it and teams that do it. I kinda wish there wasn't in some sense because that '97 team, for me personally, was more meaningful, because it was my best Final Four and the best tournament that I had in my career. It was a year when the expectations were there but they weren't nearly as high as they were in '96. When we were down in Miami I asked about making a documentary about the '97 team and the answer was no. And I was kind of taken aback by how quickly they said no. I said, 'There's something special about that team,' and (Derek Anderson) said, 'No. We didn't win it.' There's this idea that only teams that win it all deserve something like (a tribute documentary).
Of course, D.A. made a documentary about the team a few years ago. So you've now got two guys on that team who have made a documentary about what happened. You think there might just be something about that team that we want people to know? It goes beyond the fact that we were national champions and this (film) really isn't about, 'We're the greatest team ever.' We kind of play with that (in the movie) but that's not really what it's about. It's about, if you want to be considered the greatest team ever, or you want to have a great team, you have to take all the egos and throw them aside to truly become a team. That's why we call it 'The Team.' Because what I've been reminded of the most, what stands out to me in the documentary, is that it doesn't matter who scores the most points. It matters what team has the most points at the end of the game.
And that's what stands out about that team. They threw away their egos and that's what's special about that team. You watched these guys sacrifice their egos and there's something so special about that in this day and age. It makes you think about Coach Cal and how he gets all of these guys in these number one recruiting classes to sacrifice their egos for the team. That's what wins championships. Individuals don't win championships.