Photo by: ©Joe Sullivan/ Boston College Athletics
Commonwealth Classic Roars Back To Life On Wednesday
December 09, 2025 | Men's Basketball, #ForBoston Files
BC and UMass meet for the first time in a decade.
The December 9, 1995 front page of The Boston Globe sports section cast the perfect illustration of the hearts and minds of a sports-fanatic region. The front page of the entire newspaper discussed a possible football stadium and entertainment complex in South Boston, but the real heart of the region's winter slate ripped the Commonwealth into two very distinct camps with one picture stretching across every inch of the proverbial fold.
To the left stood the outstretched arms of Donta Bright. Between his arms, the unmistakable cursive-U curled into a basketball with the four-letter abbreviation of his Amherst-based campus. His block No. 4 uniform was one digit higher than his team's national ranking, and his left fist cut right through Worcester's approximate location. Beyond him was the dribbling image of Danya Abrams, and the more familiar logo of Boston's team.
BC was three days removed from defeating Pittsburgh in its second Big East game and six days separated from a near-upset against ninth-ranked Connecticut. Even in a young season's infancy, beating Louisville at the end of November courted national relevance, so the game against the third-ranked Minutemen cast significant buzz that spiraled out of control as the teams approached their matchup at Boston's FleetCenter. long and large shadow over whatever occurred against the Panthers.
"It's hard for people in Massachusetts to understand this," said head coach Jim O'Brien, "but [the Pitt victory], in my mind, was more important than [the UMass] game because you have to win games in the league. Getting our kids to understand that has not been easy because everywhere we go, we're asked about it."
Such was life for the two biggest basketball brands in the Commonwealth. The 1995 meeting carried buzz as high as the governor's office and brought BC and UMass to the state's largest and most important basketball arena for the first time since matchups in the 1970s sent the Colonial Classic to old Boston Garden. A rivalry that began in the 1950s came of age during the near-annual meetings that alternated between the Curry Hicks Cage and Roberts Center courts, but college basketball looked very different during the early 1990s because of the growing spectacle and impact of a nationally-televised audience neatly mastered by UMass head coach John Calipari.
Just one year earlier, his team earned the program's first-ever No. 1 ranking in the Associated Press by slaughtering its way to a 16-0 start, and the entire state frothed at the possibility of a Final Four bid after Marcus Camby, Donta Bright, Dana Dingle, Edgar Padilla and Carmelo Traviest all returned to the program. UMass had opened the 1995-1996 season by beating No. 1 Kentucky, No. 19 Maryland and No. 10 Wake Forest.
Something about BC, though, left UMass uneasy. O'Brien's teams notoriously lacked fear after advancing to the 1994 East Regional Final with wins over No. 1 North Carolina and No. 5 Indiana, and Abrams aptly replaced Bill Curley by breaking through a 20-point per-game average during the nine-win season of 1994-1995. Even with 19 defeats, a team without Bill Curley or Howard Eisley defeated No. 20 Georgetown before earning an overtime win at Madison Square Garden's Big East Tournament.
"Although the FleetCenter was designated as a neutral site, UMass officials were so concerned with BC having any home-court edge that even the smallest details - including what brand of basketball will be used - were determined by a coin flip," wrote Michael Vega ahead of that game. "BC won four of six decisions. As a result, BC will wear its home white jerseys, sit on the Celtics' side of the bench, have its choice of locker rooms (not including the Bruins or Celtics dressing room) and have its official scorer keep the official book."
Thirty years later, the memories of those battles bring BC to the MassMutual Center for a new chapter of its most intense in-state rivalry. Too many fans waited far too long for the next round of the matchup that tore at the parochialism and regionalism embedded within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and too many years elapsed with the very clear and clean difference being cut between two programs living on different ends of the college basketball planet.
UMass is the only Massachusetts programs good enough historically to match Boston College, and watching Camby, Bright, Travieso and Lou Roe build the Minutemen into a national powerhouse challenged O'Brien to rebuild the Eagles behind Abrams, Scoonie Penn, Duane Woodward and Antonio Granger before transitioning the program to Kenny Harley, Xavier Singletary, Troy Bell, Uka Agbai, Kenny Walls, Jared Dudley, Craig Smith and so many other successful players that were downright good and successful on a basketball court.
They'd bring the kitchen sink to one another and battle with a regularity that eventually moved back to campus buildings in the early 2000s. They complemented one another as members of two basketball-mad conferences that owned space in each other's home markets, outliers carrying the state's flame during the memorable 1990s downturn of the Boston Celtics until changes in the tectonic plates sent them into completely different worlds.
"It's rare that an event carrying so much hype lives up to its billing," wrote Dan Shaughnessy in 1995, "but the long-awaited clash of Minutemen and Eagles turned out to be even better than we'd hoped. The sellout crowd and national television audience were treated to 40 minutes of nonstop emotion and action, and the outcome wasn't decided until Marcus Camby's rejection of Danya Abrams' baseline bunny with 59.6 seconds left on the clock.
"BC coach Jim O'Brien said, 'This may have been the single best atmosphere for a game that I've been involved in,'" wrote Shaughnessy. "It was second to none and certainly good for basketball in the city."
The old Big East and Atlantic-10 Conferences battled one another in their hometowns because of their forced relationships. Providence had Rhode Island. Villanova contended with Temple. Georgetown is less than two miles away from George Washington and marginally shorter than Duquesne's distance from Pittsburgh. St. Bonaventure and Syracuse were close enough to inhabit the same region. Rutgers was outside of the city limits but close enough to pester Seton Hall and St. John's and eventually left the A-10 to join the Big East alongside West Virginia. Their replacements started shifting the league towards a less-localized footprint and included Virginia Tech, which departed after less than five years to likewise join the Big East.
BC long departed that conversation after joining the Atlantic Coast Conference, and even the Minutemen moved into the Mid-American Conference after spending 50 years as an A-10 founder. Things are different, a necessity in the modern era of finding and carving the right path into the right league and the right position in college sports.
Wednesday night doesn't care. Wednesday night doesn't worry about results or leagues or anything beyond the 80-mile stretch of road that separates Amherst and Chestnut Hill. BC's traveling into the Western Massachusetts hostility for the first time since 2008. The Eagles will play UMass for the first time since the Minutemen claimed three straight wins in the mid-2010s.
The Commonwealth Classic is back.
To the left stood the outstretched arms of Donta Bright. Between his arms, the unmistakable cursive-U curled into a basketball with the four-letter abbreviation of his Amherst-based campus. His block No. 4 uniform was one digit higher than his team's national ranking, and his left fist cut right through Worcester's approximate location. Beyond him was the dribbling image of Danya Abrams, and the more familiar logo of Boston's team.
BC was three days removed from defeating Pittsburgh in its second Big East game and six days separated from a near-upset against ninth-ranked Connecticut. Even in a young season's infancy, beating Louisville at the end of November courted national relevance, so the game against the third-ranked Minutemen cast significant buzz that spiraled out of control as the teams approached their matchup at Boston's FleetCenter. long and large shadow over whatever occurred against the Panthers.
"It's hard for people in Massachusetts to understand this," said head coach Jim O'Brien, "but [the Pitt victory], in my mind, was more important than [the UMass] game because you have to win games in the league. Getting our kids to understand that has not been easy because everywhere we go, we're asked about it."
Such was life for the two biggest basketball brands in the Commonwealth. The 1995 meeting carried buzz as high as the governor's office and brought BC and UMass to the state's largest and most important basketball arena for the first time since matchups in the 1970s sent the Colonial Classic to old Boston Garden. A rivalry that began in the 1950s came of age during the near-annual meetings that alternated between the Curry Hicks Cage and Roberts Center courts, but college basketball looked very different during the early 1990s because of the growing spectacle and impact of a nationally-televised audience neatly mastered by UMass head coach John Calipari.
Just one year earlier, his team earned the program's first-ever No. 1 ranking in the Associated Press by slaughtering its way to a 16-0 start, and the entire state frothed at the possibility of a Final Four bid after Marcus Camby, Donta Bright, Dana Dingle, Edgar Padilla and Carmelo Traviest all returned to the program. UMass had opened the 1995-1996 season by beating No. 1 Kentucky, No. 19 Maryland and No. 10 Wake Forest.
Something about BC, though, left UMass uneasy. O'Brien's teams notoriously lacked fear after advancing to the 1994 East Regional Final with wins over No. 1 North Carolina and No. 5 Indiana, and Abrams aptly replaced Bill Curley by breaking through a 20-point per-game average during the nine-win season of 1994-1995. Even with 19 defeats, a team without Bill Curley or Howard Eisley defeated No. 20 Georgetown before earning an overtime win at Madison Square Garden's Big East Tournament.
"Although the FleetCenter was designated as a neutral site, UMass officials were so concerned with BC having any home-court edge that even the smallest details - including what brand of basketball will be used - were determined by a coin flip," wrote Michael Vega ahead of that game. "BC won four of six decisions. As a result, BC will wear its home white jerseys, sit on the Celtics' side of the bench, have its choice of locker rooms (not including the Bruins or Celtics dressing room) and have its official scorer keep the official book."
Thirty years later, the memories of those battles bring BC to the MassMutual Center for a new chapter of its most intense in-state rivalry. Too many fans waited far too long for the next round of the matchup that tore at the parochialism and regionalism embedded within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and too many years elapsed with the very clear and clean difference being cut between two programs living on different ends of the college basketball planet.
UMass is the only Massachusetts programs good enough historically to match Boston College, and watching Camby, Bright, Travieso and Lou Roe build the Minutemen into a national powerhouse challenged O'Brien to rebuild the Eagles behind Abrams, Scoonie Penn, Duane Woodward and Antonio Granger before transitioning the program to Kenny Harley, Xavier Singletary, Troy Bell, Uka Agbai, Kenny Walls, Jared Dudley, Craig Smith and so many other successful players that were downright good and successful on a basketball court.
They'd bring the kitchen sink to one another and battle with a regularity that eventually moved back to campus buildings in the early 2000s. They complemented one another as members of two basketball-mad conferences that owned space in each other's home markets, outliers carrying the state's flame during the memorable 1990s downturn of the Boston Celtics until changes in the tectonic plates sent them into completely different worlds.
"It's rare that an event carrying so much hype lives up to its billing," wrote Dan Shaughnessy in 1995, "but the long-awaited clash of Minutemen and Eagles turned out to be even better than we'd hoped. The sellout crowd and national television audience were treated to 40 minutes of nonstop emotion and action, and the outcome wasn't decided until Marcus Camby's rejection of Danya Abrams' baseline bunny with 59.6 seconds left on the clock.
"BC coach Jim O'Brien said, 'This may have been the single best atmosphere for a game that I've been involved in,'" wrote Shaughnessy. "It was second to none and certainly good for basketball in the city."
The old Big East and Atlantic-10 Conferences battled one another in their hometowns because of their forced relationships. Providence had Rhode Island. Villanova contended with Temple. Georgetown is less than two miles away from George Washington and marginally shorter than Duquesne's distance from Pittsburgh. St. Bonaventure and Syracuse were close enough to inhabit the same region. Rutgers was outside of the city limits but close enough to pester Seton Hall and St. John's and eventually left the A-10 to join the Big East alongside West Virginia. Their replacements started shifting the league towards a less-localized footprint and included Virginia Tech, which departed after less than five years to likewise join the Big East.
BC long departed that conversation after joining the Atlantic Coast Conference, and even the Minutemen moved into the Mid-American Conference after spending 50 years as an A-10 founder. Things are different, a necessity in the modern era of finding and carving the right path into the right league and the right position in college sports.
Wednesday night doesn't care. Wednesday night doesn't worry about results or leagues or anything beyond the 80-mile stretch of road that separates Amherst and Chestnut Hill. BC's traveling into the Western Massachusetts hostility for the first time since 2008. The Eagles will play UMass for the first time since the Minutemen claimed three straight wins in the mid-2010s.
The Commonwealth Classic is back.
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