Cameron Mills, right, with national champion teammates Wayne Turner and Jeff Sheppard during UK's 1996 reunion weekend. (Vicky Graff Photo)
Cameron Mills still remembers Kentucky’s 1997-98 national championship season when his team was down by 17 points to Duke in the second half of the NCAA regional final.
“I am sulking thinking we have had a great run winning the SEC regular season and the conference tournament. We got to the Elite Eight. I was in the national championship game the last two years. I was having that moment thinking I had a great career, especially for a walk-on, at UK but it was over,” Mills said.
That was before point guard led a dramatic comeback and both Scott Padgett and Mills hit clutch 3-pointers late in the game to lift UK to a win that sent the Cats to a third straight Final Four.
“Fortunately for me the other guys were not having the same thoughts as me. They were fighting to win so I could come in, get a ball batted to me, make one shot and go right back out,” Mills said.
The comebacks continued in the Final Four in San Antonio. Kentucky trailed Stanford 13-3 in the national semifinals and won 86-85 in overtime. In the national title game, UK was down by 10 points in the first half against Utah but won 78-69.
“We were down to Utah and the halftime horn goes off and you will see (Utah) guys in red walking off the court. The locker rooms were about a mile away (in the Alamodome). They were so far the coaches got golf cart rides to the locker room,” Mills said. “We literally ran to the locker room and were passing guys in red who were walking.
“(Final Four Most Outstanding Player) Jeff Sheppard noticed that and after coach (Tubby) Smith talked to us we huddled in the hallway and Jeff said, ‘Those guys are done. They are gassed. We ran off and they walked. They are done.’ He was right and we came back and won.
“We didn’t come back as many times as the team this year has done. I can’t think of too many games where we were down double digits at half until the last three games. But remember we had a bunch of older guys who had been to two national championship games already and had learned our lessons. These guys this year are still learning.”
