Hours before tipoff, a long line of students snaked around the exterior of Beasley Coliseum, and when he saw it Mark Hendrickson grasped the transformative effect of sports – even beyond what they’d already done for him.
It was the last college basketball weekend of the 1994 regular season at Washington State, and the Cougars needed wins over Stanford and Cal to make their case to the NCAA selectors in those days before a conference tournament.
“And I’d never seen anything like that,” Hendrickson remembered. “Everyone was so hyped.”
Stanford went down, with a fight, and Cal put up a better one, sprinting to an 11-0 head start before the Cougs plugged into the juice of 11,019 fans.