ONCE EVERYONE WAS SEATED, the breakfast didn’t take very long. Stevie calculated that the two acceptance speeches lasted about ninety seconds—seventy-five of them for Paul Hewitt; no more than fifteen for Raymond Felton, who thanked his teammates and his coach and sat down. Bobby Kelleher introduced both Stevie and Susan Carol, complimented them on the quality of their work, and then talked about how important the writing contest was because it was vital that older writers encourage younger writers.
“We’ve got too many kids today who want to grow up and be on television,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with TV work except that it’s shallow and requires that you spend most of your life screaming into a microphone about how great every coach is. We need to encourage real reporting because it’s important.”
Stevie was relieved when neither he nor Susan Carol was asked to speak. They just had to pose with their plaques and Kelleher for a couple of pictures. It was almost eleven o’clock by the time the breakfast was over. Weiss found him as he and his dad were heading for the door. Stevie introduced him to his father. “Read you as a kid,” Bill Thomas said, shaking Weiss’s hand.
“You’re making me feel old, okay?” Weiss said, laughing.
He then suggested to Stevie that they meet in the lobby in about fifteen minutes. “Did you bring a laptop?” he asked.
Stevie said he had. The USBWA had made arrangements with twenty small-town papers that couldn’t afford to cover the Final Four to use Stevie and Susan Carol as their correspondents for the weekend. They were supposed to write features—one story each day, beginning today.
“Once you decide what you want to write about today, I think it will be easier to do it from the Dome than from back in your room,” Weiss said. “Have you ever written on deadline before?”
“Only when he waits until the last minute to finish a paper for school,” his father answered.
“I remember that feeling,” Weiss said. “You’ll be fine. I’ll be there to help and there will be guys all over who can feed you quotes if you need them.”
Stevie had already given some thought to what he would write. His first idea was a story describing his impressions—what it was like to be at the Final Four with a press pass for the first time. But then he decided that would make him sound like a wide-eyed little kid. He had thought about profiling a benchwarmer, or maybe about how each practice that afternoon was different. Or maybe he would try to talk to some fans about what it meant to them to be at a Final Four. They were all decent ideas, but his secret wish was to do a feature on Chip Graber—you had to root for the short guy.
“One thing you ought to do,” Weiss added, “is talk to Susan Carol to make sure you don’t write the same type of story.”
Stevie nodded. He told Weiss he would go get his computer, then he and his dad headed to the elevator. The Andersons were standing there waiting. “I guess we need to bring our computers to the Dome,” Stevie said. “Mr. Weiss said it would be easier to write our stories from there.”
“Oh, well, I guess you should,” Susan Carol said. “But I’ve already written my story for today.”
“You have?”
“Yes, well, the people at Duke were so nice to me when I did my story on Coach K, so I called on Monday and asked if there was any way at all to get an interview with Coach Boeheim from Syracuse to find out how he feels being here after finally winning the championship a couple of years ago. Well, Coach K is a friend of his, and he actually called him for me, and I met with Coach Boeheim yesterday afternoon at his hotel! He could not have been nicer. So, I wrote my story last night.”
“Knowing Coach K was certainly a big help,” said Mr. Anderson.
“I guess the key to success is knowing Coach K,” Stevie said.
His father gave him a sharp look. The Andersons said nothing. Fortunately, they had reached their floor and were able to escape into the hallway.
“That was a snotty thing to say,” Bill Thomas said.
“Yeah, I know. But Dad, how much of that Coach K stuff can you take?”
“Well, it was nice of him to help her out. And give her credit. She got an interview with Jim Boeheim because of him. It was a good idea.”
Stevie groaned. This fair-and-unbiased-reporter thing was harder than it looked.
Things got better once he and Hoops began their walk over to the Dome. It was a perfect early-spring day and the ramp leading from the hotel to the Superdome was filled with people: fans in the colors of the four teams were everywhere; vendors hawked “official” Final Four memorabilia; and every few yards they would walk past someone with a cell phone in one hand and tickets in the other. “Anybody selling?” they would ask.
“Why are they trying to buy tickets?” Stevie asked Weiss, who laughed at the question.
“They’re not trying to buy tickets,” Weiss answered. “They’re scalpers.”
“Then why are they asking if people are selling?”
“It’s a code they use in case there’s an undercover cop around. It’s illegal to solicit someone to buy a scalped ticket in Louisiana. But not to ask if someone wants to sell them a ticket.”
“But you can see they’ve got tickets in their hands.”
“Right. So if someone is looking to buy, they just stop and say, ‘I’m buying.’ Then they go off someplace quiet and make the sale.”
“How much are people paying for the tickets?”
“Someone told me yesterday the scalpers were getting twenty-five hundred bucks a ticket downstairs; closer to fifteen hundred upstairs.”
Stevie’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my God! My dad was going to try to get a ticket—what’s the lowest price? How much do they normally cost?”
“I think it’s two hundred and fifty bucks for downstairs. Of course, most people who get the chance to buy tickets paid a lot more for the right to buy those tickets in the first place.”
“Huh?” People paying for the right to pay for something?
“Most people who get tickets go through the schools that make the Final Four,” Weiss explained. “Even though there are sixty-five thousand seats in the Dome, most of them are so far away from the court, you can barely see. The really good seats go to the coaches’ association, the NCAA for its sponsors, and to the schools. The way the schools decide who gets to buy the tickets they are allotted is by how much people contribute to their athletic department.”
“How much do you have to contribute to buy tickets?”
Weiss shrugged. “Usually at least fifty thousand dollars.”
“Each?”
Stevie shook his head in wonderment. “Must be some rich people.”
“At the Final Four,” Weiss said, “there are no poor people.”
“What about students?” Stevie asked. “They can’t pay fifty thousand dollars.”
“No, they can’t,” Weiss said. “Which is why each school usually only sells about seventy-five to a hundred student tickets.”
They had reached the ramp leading up to the walkway that, according to the signs, would take them to the media entrance. Another cell-phone-carrying man approached. “You guys selling?” he asked. He was wearing a white cowboy hat, black leather pants, and cowboy boots.
Weiss smiled and stopped. “If we were selling, how much would you be paying?” he said.
The man eyed Weiss suspiciously from under the cowboy hat. “You a cop?” he asked.
“No, not a cop, a reporter,” Weiss said. “I’d just like to know how much you guys are getting.”
The scalper smiled and looked behind him for a minute. “What we’re asking may be different than what we’re getting,” he said. “I got seats in the lower bowl, twenty rows up from midcourt, that I’m hoping to get three grand apiece for.”
Stevie almost gagged. Three thousand dollars? For one ticket?
“People paying it?” Weiss asked.
“Not right now,” the scalper said. “But it’s early. By Saturday morning, I’ll get it. Maybe more. If you know anybody, tell ’em to look for Big Tex. They’ll know me by the hat.”
“Big Tex” was about Stevie’s height. He wondered how Susan Carol Anderson would react to meeting Big Tex and vice versa.
“I’ll be sure to tell them to look for you,” Weiss said.
“You do that,” Big Tex said. He reached into his pocket, produced a card, and handed it to Weiss, who looked at it, smiled, and passed it on to Stevie. There was a big white cowboy hat on it with the words “Big Tex” in red letters. At the bottom was a phone number. “That’s this,” Big Tex said, as if reading Stevie’s mind, holding the cell phone up. “I got it on all the time.”
Stevie stuck the card into his back pocket and they moved on.
“If you want to do a piece that’s a little different, you might talk to some of these scalpers,” Weiss said. “I guarantee you they’ve got some stories to tell, okay?”
Yeah right, Stevie thought. Susan Carol would be sending an exclusive Jim Boeheim interview, and he would respond with a Big Tex interview. That would really impress people.
“I’ll give it some thought,” he said.
Weiss laughed. “No you won’t. You’re going to want to write about the people inside this place, not the ones outside.”
Stevie breathed a sigh of relief. He had thought for a second Weiss was going to push him to chase down Big Tex. They made it to the door labeled MEDIA ENTRANCE without any further encounters with scalpers or anyone else dressed in loud colors or cowboy hats. They had to wait in line for a few minutes because the security people were checking everyone’s bags and wanding people the way they did in airports. Weiss sighed as they waited.
“Not like the old days,” he said.
“What was it like in the old days?” Stevie asked.
Weiss laughed. “Where to begin? I’m old enough that I remember when games were played in about ninety minutes,” he said.
“Ninety minutes?” Stevie repeated. “How could they possibly have done that?”
“Easy,” Weiss said. “There weren’t five TV time-outs in every half, and when there was a time-out, it lasted one minute, not three. And halftime didn’t take twenty minutes.”
Stevie couldn’t imagine a college basketball game only taking an hour and a half. To him, anything under two hours and fifteen minutes was a fast game.
The security check didn’t take long. Getting their credentials did, because the guy handing them out kept saying he had to see Stevie’s driver’s license. “It’s right in the handbook,” he said, producing a phone-book-thick booklet. “You see, it says right here in section eighteen, paragraph three, line four: ‘To receive a credential, one must produce a government-issued ID, i.e., driver’s license or passport.’ ”
Weiss rolled his eyes. “Come on, Mike. He’s thirteen years old. He doesn’t have a driver’s license and probably doesn’t have a passport, right?” Stevie nodded to confirm that Weiss was correct. “He’s one of the winners of our writing contest. You have a pass there for him. And I’ll vouch for him.”
The NCAA guy, who was wearing a blue blazer complete with a name tag and a pass dangling around his neck that said “All Access,” eyed Stevie and Weiss suspiciously, shaking his head as if to say, No can do. “Just because I have a pass for Steven Thomas doesn’t mean he’s Steven Thomas.”
“I have my school ID card,” Stevie said. “It has a photo on it. They accepted it at the airport.”
“Not government-issued,” the blue blazer said.
“Hang on a minute,” Weiss said. “Stevie, give me your ID.”
Stevie pulled out his wallet and handed Weiss the ID. Weiss looked at, turned it over, and smiled. “Look here at the bottom. It says, ‘Issued by Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.’ He goes to public school. The IDs are issued by the county. That’s a government. Hand over his pass.”
The blazer took the ID, looked at it for a minute as if it contained hieroglyphics that would unlock the secret to eternal life, then handed it back to Stevie with a disgusted look on his face.
“Okay,” he said, riffling through the envelopes and coming up with the one that said “Steven Thomas, USBWA.”
“Technically, it is supposed to be a U.S. government ID, but I’ll let it slide this once.”
“It’s that kind of out-of-the-box thinking that makes the NCAA the great organization it is,” Weiss said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Stevie was liking him more every minute. The blazer said nothing. He shoved a pen at Stevie and told him to sign the envelope.
“Next time,” he said, “bring your driver’s license.”
Stevie couldn’t resist. “If you can convince my father and the DMV to let me get one when I’m fourteen, I’ll gladly bring it,” he said.
Before the blazer could reply, Weiss pulled him away and, putting the credentials around their necks, they headed into the building. They followed various signs that pointed them to FLOOR, MEDIA AREAS, and LOCKER ROOMS. They stopped briefly in the huge media work area to drop off their computers, then walked out to the floor. After walking through an empty section of seats that was curtained off from the floor, they maneuvered around the curtain and found themselves at one end of the court.
Stevie had never been inside a dome before. Normally, domes were used for football and seated about 80,000 people. He couldn’t get over how big the place was. The entire Palestra would fit into the curtained-off area that wasn’t being used. He looked up at the upper-deck seats on the far side of the building. “People sit there?” he said, pointing.
“Absolutely,” Weiss said. “And they’re thrilled to be there.”
“How do they see? It looks like they’re about nine miles up.”
“They don’t,” Weiss said. He pointed at the hanging telescreens that hovered over each end of the court. “They watch the telescreens. I’ve gone up there. You should take a look at some point. It’s even higher than you think.”
They walked toward press row, which was filled with people lingering, chatting, killing time. The scoreboard clock read 8:30—and counting down—when Stevie and Hoops walked in. A few Duke players were on the floor, stretching or just talking. Managers stood near a couple of ball racks, as if waiting for their orders.
“What’s with the clock?” Stevie asked.
Weiss explained. “They can’t start practicing until noon,” he said. “Each team gets exactly fifty minutes on the floor. No more, no less. They can’t actually touch a basketball until that clock hits zero. And if a coach decides he doesn’t want to use the entire fifty minutes, his team has to stay on the floor until the fifty minutes is up, because that’s what the rule book says.”
“Do they need a government-issued ID to leave?” Stevie asked.
Weiss laughed. Behind them, someone was screaming at him. “Hoops! Hey, Hoops!”
Weiss and Stevie turned in the direction of the voice, and Stevie did a double take when he saw the source of the screaming. It was Dick Vitale, the ESPN announcer and probably the most famous person in the world of college basketball—more famous than Coach K or Bobby Knight and certainly more famous than any of the players. Stevie remembered Dick Jerardi telling him that the most amazing thing about Vitale was that he screamed and bounced off walls as much off the air as he did on the air. “It’s not an act,” Jerardi had said. “That’s who he really is.”
“Come on,” Weiss said. “I’ll introduce you to Dickie V.”
“Does he bite?” Stevie asked.
“Nah,” Weiss said, “the only thing he might do is break one of your eardrums.”
They walked over to a makeshift podium set up on one corner of the court. There was a neon sign on the front of it that said ESPN’S FINAL FOUR FRIDAY. Stevie had completely forgotten that the Final Four was now so big that ESPN actually televised all four practices live. As much as he loved basketball, he couldn’t imagine sitting around all afternoon watching teams practice and listening to coaches tell Dickie V and his fellow announcers how happy they were to be here.
As Weiss and Stevie approached, Vitale, who had been standing next to the podium, threw his arms open and screamed Weiss’s nickname again: “Hoops, my main man, how awesome is it to be in the Big Easy, baby?!!”
He hugged Weiss, who said something Stevie couldn’t hear in reply. Then Weiss said, “Dick, I want you to meet one of the winners of our writing contest—this is Steven Thomas. He’s a Philly guy.”
“Steve, baby!” Vitale screamed, pumping Stevie’s hand. “AWESOME to meet you, really AWESOME! Philly, huh? Gotta love the Big Five, baby, right? Who’s your favorite team? Saint Joe’s, like my Italian paisan Phil Martelli? He’s a PTPer, baby, he’s one of the best. Lemme tell you another thing, THIS is a PTPer right here, baby, my man Hoops. You want to be a big-time writer someday? This is the man right here. You just watch him in action, baby. Knows everyone. EVERYONE. Hey, he’s written three books on Dickie V! How awesome is that? So who do you like here, Stevie? You gotta love the Dookies, right? Wait, you’re from Philly, you’re probably a Big East guy! The Huskies, baby, all the way, right?!!”
Stevie was nodding his head, trying to remember what a PTPer was—it came to him, Prime-Time Player—and take in all that Vitale was saying while Vitale was still pumping his hand as if expecting water to come out of it.
Without waiting for Stevie to answer any of his questions, Vitale turned back to Weiss. “Hey, Hoops, did you hear the big rumor? Knight’s retiring. Got it from a great source. Check it out.”
“You going with it when you go on the air?” Weiss asked.
“No, the source isn’t THAT good. Hey, speaking of ‘on the air,’ we’re on in two minutes! Gotta go, baby! Stevie, great talking to you, kid! Come by anytime! Hey, let me get your address, I’ll send you some Dickie V stuff! I’ll send you my new book! Hoops wrote it for me! I’ll autograph it for you!”
Stevie started to say thank you and pull out his notebook to write down his address, but Vitale was off and running, jumping onto the podium. “Hey, give it to Hoops, okay, he’ll get it to me! Great meeting you! Hoops, you’re the best, baby! Check out that rumor; I’m telling you, it’s the real deal!”
“So, how was that?” Weiss said as Vitale put his headset on and they turned back to the court, where the clock was now under a minute.
“He’s actually kind of calm today,” Weiss said. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Krzyzewski. You can tell him what a big fan you are.”
Stevie laughed nervously. He had been at the Final Four for less than eight minutes and he was already feeling a little overwhelmed.
The buzzer sounded. The clock reset to fifty minutes and the Duke managers began grabbing balls and feeding them to the waiting players. He heard a cheer coming from a corner of the court where a group of Duke fans, dressed in blue and white, had gathered. He looked over and saw Krzyzewski walking out of the tunnel, dressed in sweats with a whistle around his neck.
“Showtime,” Weiss said.
Behind him, Stevie could hear Vitale. “I am just PUMPED to be here in the Big Easy! Hey, it’s Final Four Friday! It’s gonna be AWESOME, BABEEE!!!!”