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In 1985, Villanova became the lowest-seeded college basketball team to walk away with a national championship at the NCAA Tournament, a feat that came after they pulled off a shocking upset with a point guard who’d done a bunch of cocaine before the game.
The Villanova Wildcats have been perennial March Madness participants since they joined the Big East at the start of the 1980s, and the program representing a fairly small private Catholic university in the Philadelphia suburbs has done an impressive job consistently punching above its weight over the decades.
That was especially true in the 2010s when the legendary Jay Wright led Villanova to a title in 2016 (with the help of the Kris Jenkins buzzer-beater that broke UNC’s heart) before bringing back another trophy with a dominant win over Michigan in 2018.
As things currently stand, Villanova has earned the right to cut down the net on three separate occasions thanks to the aforementioned win in 1985, a Cinderella story that featured a fairly wildly subplot courtesy of Gary McLain.
Villanova point guard Gary McLain did cocaine before the Wildcats pulled off a Final Four upset
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In 1985, head coach Rollie Massimino led Villanova to a 25-10 record in the regular season while going 9-7 in the Big East, which was enough to get the Wildcats an invitation to the Big Dance as an eight-seed in the first year the tournament expanded to 64 teams.
Villanova was obviously facing an uphill battle in its quest to win its first national championship and knew it was going to need some big contributions from standout big man Ed Pinckney, who’d get scooped up by the Suns with the 10th overall pick in the NBA Draft a couple of months later.
Pinckney got some help from forward Dwayne McClain and point guard Gary McLain, a trio that dubbed themselves “The Expansion Crew” when they arrived together on campus for their freshman year in 1981 because they thought they had the potential to expand the horizons of the program.
It turned out they were onto something.
Villanova eked out a 51-49 victory over Dayton in the first round before punching their ticket to the Sweet Sixteen with a win over top-seeded Michigan.
They advanced to the Elite Eight with a three-point win over fifth-seeded Maryland and were able to continue their unlikely run with the decisive 56-44 win that sent North Carolina home and gave them the chance to head to Rupp Arena in Lexington to face off against #2 Memphis State in the Final Four.
The Tigers were viewed as the favorites in that tilt, but Villanova was ultimately able to keep its unlikely run going with a 52-45 win in a contest where McClain recorded a game-high 19 points, Pinckney outdid everyone else on the glass with nine rebounds, and McLain contributed nine points and a couple of assists to the cause.
That led to Villanova facing off against Georgetown in what is known as “The Perfect Game,” a legendary battle where the Wildcats were 9.5-point underdogs but managed to stun the world by making 78.6% of their field goals en route to the 66-64 win.
Two years later, McLain wrote an equally shocking story that was published in Sports Illustrated in which he revealed he started smoking weed when he was in middle school, a habit that only worsened during his time in high school.
He was still a regular smoker by the time he arrived at Villanova, and just a few hours before his first game at the school (an exhibition against Yugoslavia in November 1981), he took his first bump of cocaine. While he didn’t become instantly hooked, he found himself coming back to the drug in the years that followed before he eventually ended up dealing it after finding himself in the throes of addiction.
In the article, McLain admitted he “did a quarter-gram of blow” in his hotel room before heading to the game against Memphis State and finished the rest of the bag afterward to celebrate the win.
He didn’t re-up prior to the showdown with Georgetown (where he earned Most Outstanding Player honors thanks to some clutch free throws at the end), but he did help himself to a few bumps in the bathroom of the bus Villanova rode to the White House to meet Ronald Reagan in the wake of the victory.
McLain was drafted by the Nets but never played in an NBA game. He spent decades attempting to get his drug habits under control before finally getting clean in 2005, and since then, he’s used his journey as a cautionary tale while serving as a motivational speaker.