Nate Ritchie wasn’t supposed to factor into Hoosier Hysteria’s dunk contest. It was supposed to be Troy Williams’ show.
Williams, a sophomore guard, loves to dunk the basketball. He showed it last year when he made SportsCenter’s Top 10 Plays with a putback dunk a little more than two months into his freshman season.
He shows it in practice, when most drills end with the basket shaking and Williams grinning. He shows it in layup lines, which really become dunk lines when he takes part.
Ritchie was an unknown, his dunking ability condensed to a 15-second video he posted to his ?Instagram before the season.
It was Williams’ contest to lose. And then he did.
When Ritchie, a freshman walk-on, stepped up for his first-round attempt, he was introduced through the Assembly Hall PA as “the underdog, the sleeper of the dunk contest.”
His first attempt didn’t go well, ending with Ritchie facedown in the row of photographers behind the basket and the ball clanging off the rim. His second didn’t go well, either.
“I just fell,” he said. “I was lucky enough that they gave me another chance at it.”
With time expiring, he was able to recover to complete a dunk as time expired.
He wasn’t supposed to be in the final round, either. A scoring error by the judges panel, which involved emcee Sage Steele’s six-year-old daughter, allowed Ritchie to slip into the finals with Williams and junior forward Hanner Mosquera-Perea.
Misses on his first two attempts forced Williams to settle for a simple windmill. Mosquera-Perea missed his first two as well, pushing a power dunk through the net to modest reviews from the judges.
Then, almost as soon as he stood up, Ritchie ended things.
Stanford Robinson weaved the ball through his legs and tossed it off the backboard. Ritchie sprinted in from the right wing, caught it and windmilled home, the same dunk as in the Instagram video.
Before the ball even hit the ground, he was celebrating.
The walk-on from Middlebury, Ind., was the 2014 Hoosier Hysteria dunk champion.
Perhaps the only two people who weren’t surprised by the upset were Ritchie himself and IU Coach Tom Crean.
“Haven’t you seen his YouTube video?” Crean said. “Now he’ll be known for something more than his YouTube tapes. I’m not surprised.”
In his post-contest interview at center court, Ritchie played down his giant-killing.
“The other guys, they seemed a little confident and stuff,” he said. “I tried to play the quiet card.
“I mean, I’ll take it.”
