Iowa basketball 25 years ago today - off to Asia

I didn't know I still had this shirt until my wife showed it to me this morning.

Twenty-five years ago today, the Iowa men's basketball team got on a plane at the municipal airport in Cedar Rapids, flew to Chicago, then caught what was supposed to be a non-stop, 14-hour flight to Seoul, South Korea. Because of head winds, the plane had to refuel in Tokyo.

Tom Davis' first Iowa squad played a few games in Seoul, then went to China and played in Shanghai and Beijing. It stopped in Hong Kong for the final weekend just for some R and R, then it was Hong Kong to Tokyo to Chicago to Cedar Rapids.

I covered the trip for the Gazette. To say it was an experience is to put it mildly.

That team had talent. Seven of its players spent some time in the NBA, and three of them had long NBA careers. To see how Davis and his staff (Gary Close, Bruce Pearl, Rudy Washington) interacted with players who had been strangers to them was interesting. Davis was the CEO. Pearl was the verbose, player-friendly guy. He was in his 20s, like I was. Oh, what the world had in store for him, and vice versa.

B.J. Armstrong, Ed Horton and Roy Marble were all sophomores-to-be who hadn't scratched the surface of what they were about to do at Iowa. But you could see in Asia that they had potential. You didn't see a 30-win season and Elite Eight finish in the NCAAs, but you saw a lot of talented parts that could do some interesting things if Davis knew how to move them around.

He did.

I could tell you a lot of stories about that trip, but I'm about to take off for vacation within the hour. Not to Asia, I assure you. My goodness that was a long time to spend on an airplane, especially when some of the people sitting around you were 6-foot-5 or taller. I sat next to Les Jepsen on the overseas flight home. Great guy. Taught me how to play chess. But he's 7 feet tall and had the outside seat, while I had the middle seat. If he'd been a self-absorbed jerk, that would have been the longest flight in aviation history.