They play the SEC Basketball Tournament this week in Nashville. The weather calls for pleasant springtime weather until Saturday when there is a 100 percent chance of rain and the forecast calls for thunderstorms that are likely to be severe.

And you ask: Why the hell does that matter? They play basketball indoors.

Well, let me tell you, there was one March when it really did matter. Boy, did it matter. 

We’re talking Atlanta and the Georgia Dome. 2008. It was a Friday night, March 14, although Friday the 13th should have been much appropriate. This was the quarterfinal round, last game of the night. Mississippi State vs. Alabama. Hell of a game. I was covering for the Clarion Ledger with my sidekick Kyle Veazey. We were on a fairly tight deadline, which is to say the newspaper was going to hold the presses until we filed our stories.

Of course, Alabama hit a desperation three-pointer to send the game into overtime. And now, State led 64-61 with two minutes, 11 seconds remaining. Just steps away from us, Bama’s Mykal Riley, who had hit the game-tying shot at the buzzer, dribbled the ball near the sideline with State’s Ben Hansbrough guarding him closely. Suddenly, we all heard this incredible roaring sound, really, like a freight train coming straight through the building, which began to shake. 

I looked at Veazey, and managed this: “Tornado?”

Kyle replied, wide-eyed, “Earthquake?”

Riley stopped dribbling. Hansbrough quit guarding. Both looked up at the ceiling. They were so close to us, we heard Hansbrough say to Riley, “Sounds like a tornado.”

It was.

Astonished and frightened fans all stood and looked all around, trying to figure out what was happening. Some rushed for the exits. A catwalk, hanging far above us, menacingly swung back and forth as if it might fall any second. Veazey and I didn’t know whether we should hide under the press table, check our britches, or run like hell. Suddenly, deadline pressure was the least of our worries.

As it turned out, the winds had torn off a huge section of fabric siding, leaving a gaping hole near the ceiling on one end of the building. Rain blew through that. The Georgia Dome cooled considerably in just minutes. Nature provided a lot more air conditioning than needed.

On the State bench, Coach Rick Stansbury looked into the stands and finally spotted his wife, Meo, and one of their three sons. He texted her and asked where the other two sons were. She texted back that they were sitting down on the bench with him.

“I had a little lapse there,” Stansbury later told us.

We all did.

The delay lasted about an hour. The Bulldogs – Hail State and all that – eventually claimed a two-point victory. Alabama’s Riley launched a 3-pointer at the buzzer from nearly the same spot where he had been dribbling when Mother Nature so rudely interrupted. The ball went in the basket, then rattled out.

What came next was a waiting game. SEC officials and athletic directors met behind closed doors for a couple hours before a decision was made the tournament would be continued the next day at Georgia Tech. The Georgia Dome was declared unsafe.

Several of us reporters already knew before the announcement came. How? We were walking around near the loading docks when we saw workers loading up all the cameras and production equipment on the TV trucks.

“Where y’all headed?” we asked.

“Georgia Tech’s gym,” one of them answered.

To make a long, long story short, the tournament was finished on Saturday and Sunday in the much smaller Georgia Tech arena. The SEC lost hundreds of thousands of dollars – if not more – on ticket refunds. As fate did have it, Georgia, one of the two lowest seeds, shocked everyone but perhaps themselves by winning the whole thing. Dennis Felton’s Bulldogs, who had upset Ole Miss by two points in the first round, defeated Kentucky, Mississippi State and then Arkansas. They heroically won those last three games over two days (30 hours). Georgia had entered the tournament with a 13-16 record. The Bulldogs entered the NCAA Tournament with the SEC’s automatic bid at 17-16.

It was weird, by far the weirdest SEC Tournament on record.

Thankfully, nobody died. In retrospect, many might have perished or been badly injured if not for Mykal Riley’s shot that sent the Alabama-Mississippi State game into overtime. Had Riley not made that shot, thousands of fans would have been exiting the arena – or already out on the sidewalks and streets – when the tornado roared through downtown Atlanta.

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