Larry Brown had one of those looks on his face that Danny Manning didn’t like to see. Manning was about to escape Allen Field House, having gone through the regimen of Kansas’s annual Media Day, to spend a few hours relaxing before coming back late that evening to start the basketball season. Practice began at exactly 12:01 A.M. on October 15. This was a three-year-old tradition at Kansas, something Manning looked forward to because it was like a giant coming-out party. But now, the man for whom the occasion was named—“Late Night with Larry Brown”—was calling his name, and it wasn’t to tell a joke.
“When are you guys going to come over tonight?” Brown asked the best player he had ever coached.
“Don’t know, maybe about ten-thirty or so.”
Brown stiffened. “Look, Danny, you decide what time and you tell the other guys. You make sure they’re here, okay? You’re in charge.”
Manning nodded. Practice didn’t formally begin for another nine hours and already Brown was starting again. He wondered again if he hadn’t made a mistake passing up the NBA for his last year of college. But, looking around the floor, Manning saw the reasons he had stayed. In one corner, Archie Marshall was answering reporters’ questions. Eighteen months earlier, in a Final Four game against Duke, Marshall had crashed to the floor of Reunion Arena in Dallas, his knee torn up. He had sat out the entire 1987 season, rehabilitating the knee so he could come back and play with Manning one last season.
During the springtime, when Manning was in the throes of deciding whether to return to Kansas or take the pro money, Archie Marshall had said mournfully to Manning’s mother, “Mrs. Manning, Danny’s going to turn pro and I’ll never get to play with him again.”
“Archie, don’t you worry,” Darnelle Manning had said. “I’ll take care of that.”
She had done just that. Never once had she told her son he had to stay in school or wailed about him getting his degree. But Danny knew how she felt and he wanted to play with Archie. And, he wanted another year with his dad, who was standing quietly a few feet away while Brown was telling Danny one more time that he was in charge.
Ed Manning is one of those huge men who has never felt the need to be terribly verbal. He played pro basketball for nine years, a power forward at 6–7 ½, a player who made up for a lack of natural talent with desire and hard work. His son, so much more gifted, had yet to acquire his father’s toughness. That frustrated Ed Manning at least as much as it frustrated Brown. And, on occasions when Brown and Ed Manning would yell at her son during games, Darnelle Manning would sit in the stands and think, “Why are they always yelling at that child?”
She knew the answer, just as her son knew the answer. Both coaches saw one thing in Danny Manning: greatness. Both felt an obligation to bring out that greatness. It had not been easy for any of them. Now, standing on the brink of their last season together, Brown, Ed Manning, and Danny Manning all knew this was the last time around. October 15, 1987, was an ending as well as a beginning. Once midnight struck that evening, every hour of every day would put Danny Manning closer to the end of a college career that had begun with soaring hopes three years earlier. Many of those hopes had been realized, but there were still doubts, still questions about whether Manning would ever play up to his extraordinary potential.
One thing Manning knew for certain: His coach and his father would be on him nonstop from 12:01 A.M. until whenever.…
While Kansas was gathering for its annual party, 290 other basketball teams were doing the same thing, many of them practicing at 12:01 A.M., too. In the last ten years, as the money available to the sixty-four teams that make it to the NCAA Tournament has run amok—each Final Four team received $1.1 million in 1988—more and more schools have joined Division 1 of the NCAA hoping for a piece of that huge cake.
Because it only takes twelve players to field a team and only one or two stars to have a good team, Division 1 schools come in all shapes and sizes. The Big East, considered by many the most powerful basketball conference in America, has six schools so small that they do not field Division 1 football teams. (It takes at least forty players to man a football squad, often fifty or sixty. One star, or two or three, for that matter, cannot bring glory—or a million dollars—to a football school.) Georgetown, the 1984 national basketball champion, plays football in Division 3. So does Villanova, the 1985 national basketball champion. There are Division 1 schools with gyms that can barely hold two thousand people, Division 1 schools that most people don’t even know are in Division 1. How about Radford, Akron, and Winthrop, to name a few? Or, for that matter, Baptist, Monmouth, and Florida Southern. No Orange Bowl teams in that group.
That is why, on October 15, everyone has hope. If Cleveland State can beat Indiana in the NCAA Tournament, if Arkansas–Little Rock can beat Notre Dame, if North Carolina–Charlotte can be one shot away from reaching the national title game, then anyone with twelve uniforms, two backboards, and a few basketballs can think themselves next March’s David.
At Kansas, there was no talk about David. Only about this being Manning’s last shot. “Danny’s the best player in the country,” Brown said that afternoon. “And I feel good about the way we coach.” He paused and said something coaches aren’t supposed to say. “Deep down, I’d be disappointed if we didn’t win it all. That’s the only way I’d really be satisfied: if we won the national championship.”
Brown was not the only coach and Kansas not the only school with those kinds of thoughts on that Wednesday afternoon. At Arizona, Lute Olson looked at the team that took the floor for the first day of practice and thought back four years, to his first practice in Tucson, and couldn’t help but smile. “I remembered walking off the floor after that practice and looking at my assistants and saying, ‘What have we done? What have we gotten ourselves into?’ ”
Olson had left a Top Twenty program at Iowa to take over a 4–24 Arizona team; he opted for the sun over security. The only player who had been at that first practice in 1983 who was on the floor now was Steve Kerr. Olson offered Kerr his last available scholarship that first year, largely out of desperation. He had seen Kerr playing in the Los Angeles summer league. Kerr was too slow and couldn’t jump, but he could shoot. If Olson had still been at Iowa, he wouldn’t have given Kerr a second glance. But, starting from square one, he was willing to take a chance. Even though when his wife Bobbi saw Kerr play, her reaction was, “Lute, you’ve got to be kidding.”
Lute wasn’t kidding, he was desperate. And so Steve Kerr landed at Arizona. No one, not Kerr, not Olson, could imagine the extraordinary story Kerr would write there. Midway through his freshman year, Kerr’s father was assassinated in Beirut, shot twice in the head as he stepped off an elevator on his way to work. Two nights later, because he thought that was what his father would have wanted, Kerr played against Arizona State.
He broke down during a pregame moment of silence, but when he came into the game he hit his first shot—and ended up scoring 12 points during an easy Wildcat victory. From that day forward, Kerr was Tucson’s adopted son. He became a starter as a sophomore, an all-Pacific 10 player as a junior, and made the World Championship team coached by Olson during the summer of 1986. Late in the Americans’ semifinal game against Brazil, Kerr went up to pass, came down wrong, and landed writhing in pain, his knee torn up.
The initial diagnosis was simple: torn ligaments, a probable career-ending injury. Kerr cried that night, but he never gave up. He went through reconstructive surgery, spent the winter rehabilitating the knee and the summer getting back into playing shape. Now, as practice began, the knee felt fine and Kerr was eager, though nervous since it had been fifteen months since he had played in a real game.
In West Lafayette, Indiana, the trepidation on opening day had nothing to do with injuries, although Troy Lewis, Purdue’s leading scorer in 1987, had broken his foot in early September. Lewis would be fine long before the season began.
But Lewis knew, as did fellow seniors Todd Mitchell and Everette Stephens, that this was going to be a difficult season. During their first three years at Purdue, the Boilermakers had won sixty-seven games. They had played in three NCAA Tournaments. They had been Big Ten cochampions in 1987 along with Indiana, the Bob Knight-coached team that had gone on to win the national championship.
Each March, however, Purdue had come up shy: a first-round loss to Auburn in 1985, a first-round loss to Louisiana State in 1986, a second-round loss to Florida in 1987. In ’85, they had been freshmen, a young team just learning. Okay. In ’86, they had been sent to play at LSU, an unfair draw since they were seeded higher than the Tigers. They lost in overtime. Okay. But in ’87 they played Florida in Syracuse, a perfectly reasonable place against a beatable team. They lost by 20.
No excuses were left. And Coach Gene Keady had made it clear all summer that he was miserable about the way the ’87 season had ended—a 36-point loss to Michigan in the regular-season finale, ending their chance to win the Big Ten outright, didn’t help Keady’s mood—and that the three seniors had better show from day one that they were going to be the leaders of this team. Keady wanted to make damn sure they weren’t going to accept any more March failures. He wasn’t.
“We know,” Todd Mitchell said, “that nothing we do before March really matters. We’ve done everything else. We’re going to be judged on one thing this season, the NCAA Tournament. That’s fine with us. That’s the way it should be.”
But already, even before the first practice began, there were tensions. There were two other seniors on the team, Jeff Arnold and Dave Stack, who were academically ineligible to play. When Keady had called the senior trio that August to ask them how they felt about the situation, their answer had been unanimous and blunt: Get rid of them. Arnold and Stack, in their minds, had been in trouble almost from day one at Purdue. They really didn’t deserve another chance.
Keady thought the team needed Arnold, who was 6–10 and could rebound coming off the bench. “One more chance,” he told the seniors.
Okay, they thought, one more chance. Arnold and Stack were at practice that first day. It was the beginning of their last chance.
The tension that existed as practice began at Villanova was very different from Purdue. Rollie Massimino, the little coach who had become a megastar almost overnight in his championship season of 1985, had been through the worst season of his coaching life in 1987.
His team wasn’t very good. The final record had been 15–16. But that was only a small part of the problem. In December, Massimino had learned that Gary McLain, the starting point guard on that miraculous 1985 team, was in the process of selling a story to Sports Illustrated in which he confessed, at length, to having used and sold cocaine while at Villanova. Even worse, McLain claimed in the story that Massimino had been aware of the problem but had never done anything beyond warning him to stop. The implication was that Massimino didn’t want to deal with McLain’s addiction just so long as McLain continued to play well.
Given a choice between being accused of that kind of exploitation or of having both his hands cut off, Massimino would have willingly given up his hands. Always, he had prided himself on the family atmosphere he had created at Villanova, not just because his players graduated but because even after they left, they were still part of Villanova and Villanova basketball. This was a coach who got his players up at 5:30 in the morning during preseason to work out, and then gave them milk and cookies after the workout.
Now, for a price, Gary McLain was going to tell the world Rollie Massimino didn’t care, that he was just another coach who cared only about winning. It would be March before the story appeared. But Massimino knew in December. He told no one. “We noticed something was wrong with him,” said Mark Plansky, a junior on that team. “He wasn’t himself. The emotion just wasn’t there. But we had no idea what it was.”
Massimino is known as the Danny DeVito of coaches. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of dollars he spends on clothes, he always ends up looking like an unmade bed at the end of a game. “He starts the game looking great,” his son R. C. once said, “but by halftime he’s sort of unraveled.”
Not in 1987. Massimino might as well have been Tom Landry on the bench. “I was,” he remembered, “a mannequin.”
When the story broke, his players and friends understood why he had been so distracted all season. Just before publication, Massimino talked to McLain. “He told me, ‘Coach, I’m doing this to help kids. Nothing will happen to you or the program because you are too big.’ ”
That was a little hard for Massimino to swallow since McLain had only told his story in return for a lot of money—about $20,000. But he had to live with it and deal with it.
“The whole thing was scary,” Massimino said. “Honest to God, I swear on my five children, if I had known, I would have tried to help him. I always tell our guys that if they have a problem and they come to me, I’ll help them. But if I catch them, they’re history.
“I always thought I knew my people and my kids. This time I didn’t. I take responsibility for that but it hurt me to think anyone could believe I would know what was going on and not do anything about it.”
A press conference was called to respond to the McLain story. For an hour beforehand, Massimino sat in his office with university lawyers poring through a carefully worded statement, rehearsing what to say and what not to say. Finally, it all kicked in.
“I got up, ran out of the office and said I couldn’t do this,” he remembered. “I went into [Assistant Coach] Steve Lappas’s office and I sat down and I cried. It all just got to me at once. Then I walked back in and I said, ‘Forget the speech, I’m just gonna go out there like I always have and say what I think. I’ve been Rollie for thirty-two years in this business and that’s who I still am.’ ”
So he went out and talked about how much it hurt. And, when he was finished, he said he only wished Gary McLain well. Later, that summer, he helped get him a tryout with a team in Holland. A lot of Massimino’s friends were furious with him for helping McLain. “He’s still one of my kids,” Massimino said in reply.
But now it was October. The 15–16 team was back, minus leading scorer Harold Jensen. Recruiting had been a disaster: One player reneged on a verbal commitment and had gone to Pittsburgh and one decided at the last minute to play baseball.
A few people picked Villanova as high as fifth in the Big East. A few more picked the Wildcats as low as ninth. The consensus: sixth or seventh. “The thought of being mediocre scares me,” Massimino admitted. “But I’ve always said the real guy comes out under adversity. Maybe I needed a shock like last year. Maybe it had all gotten a little too easy.
“I’ve told this team our job this season is simple: Find a way. I told them they better find a way. Because if we finish seventh in the league, they’ll find me in the Schuylkill River.”
One person who would not have minded seeing Villanova finish seventh—or lower—in the Big East was Paul Evans. Across the state from Philadelphia, Evans was assembling a very talented team at Pittsburgh. In his first season at Pitt, 1987, after moving there from Navy, Evans had put together a 24–9 record, tying for first place in the Big East.
This was no small accomplishment for what was largely the same team that had been 15–14 the previous year. Evans had come in vowing that the talented, undisciplined team would become a disciplined one or heads would roll. On the very first day he ran a practice at Pittsburgh, Evans threw Jerome Lane out of practice. The two fought most of that year, but when it was over Lane had become the first player under 6–7 to lead the nation in rebounding since Elgin Baylor, thirty years earlier.
But as he was earning respect for his coaching abilities, Evans was doing very little to win friends or influence people around the Big East. Evans is, to put it mildly, outspoken. What he thinks he says and if people don’t like it, tough. When Bobby Martin, a talented 6–10 high school center, changed his mind about his verbal commitment to Villanova and signed with Pitt, Massimino was angry and unhappy. When he made that unhappiness public, Evans lashed back at him, accusing him of doing a lousy recruiting job.
That began a war of words that would continue through the summer and only get worse during 1988.
Evans didn’t want a running feud with Massimino any more than Massimino wanted one with him. But neither man was about to back down from the other. The troubles with Massimino did not affect Evans’s coaching. But they didn’t make life any simpler for him. And this promised to be a difficult year. He had been a successful Division 2 coach at St. Lawrence, a highly lauded coach for six years at Navy, and surprisingly successful during his first year at Pitt.
Now, Pitt was being picked first by many in the Big East. It was in most top fives around the nation. With Lane, Charles Smith, Demetrius Gore, and Rod Brookin back, along with a very strong freshman class, the Panthers’ potential seemed unlimited.
But it was not that simple. Even before practice began, Evans had lost his starting point guard from the previous year, Michael Goodson, to academic troubles. Goodson was one of those kids plenty smart enough to do the work, but too cool to take the time. That left Evans with a choice between a former walk-on, Mike Cavanaugh, or a freshman, Sean Miller, at point guard. He would eventually choose Miller, but starting a season with Final Four dreams with a freshman running your team was not exactly ideal.
“People are picking us too high,” Evans insisted, sounding like any coach dealing with high expectations. “We’re experienced in some areas but too inexperienced in others. If we had Goodson, it would be different. But we don’t.”
For much of his coaching career, Evans had been the underdog. Now, he was the favorite. It would be a new experience for him. It would not be an easy or a pleasant one either.
If Evans needed lessons in how to deal with attention, he might have picked up a phone and called Jim Valvano. In 1983, Valvano had become as big a name as there was in basketball when he took a North Carolina State team that had finished third in the Atlantic Coast Conference all the way to the national championship. It was a feat similar to the one that Massimino would perform two years later, but Valvano did it first.
And he did it with remarkable flair. The night before his team played in the national semifinals against Georgia, Valvano, pouring sweat from a fever, won a dance contest in Albuquerque. Then, in the final, the Wolfpack, given no chance against a great Houston team led by Akeem Olajuwon, not only won the game 54–52 but did it on a miracle shot at the buzzer, Lorenzo Charles snatching Dereck Whittenburg’s woefully short desperation shot out of the air and dunking it, to end the game.
That shot and the aftermath, Valvano running from corner to corner of the court trying to find people to hug, was rerun more times than all the episodes of I Love Lucy combined. If Valvano had been boring, those few moments would have made him a star.
And Valvano was not boring. He was funny, hilariously funny. He loved to talk—especially when he was being paid a lot of money for talking. He marketed himself and his championship into a business worth $750,000 a year. Huge money for speaking and clinics; radio and TV shows out the wazoo. Shoe and clothing contracts, outside businesses. Want a statue commemorating the accomplishment of a great athlete? Call JTV Enterprises.
What’s more, Valvano, even though he was criticized at times for not focusing enough on coaching, continued to win games. His teams reached the final eight in 1985 and 1986 and after a bad regular season in 1987, won the ACC Tournament, shocking a vastly superior North Carolina team in the final in an upset faintly reminiscent of 1983.
Valvano was rich. He was a winner. He even did a stint on the CBS Morning News for a while, jokingly claiming to his friends—and his wife, of course—that Phyllis George, then the show’s anchor, was madly in love with him.
But inside Valvano’s head, the old Peggy Lee song kept playing: “Is That All There Is?” He had accomplished everything he had wanted to accomplish in life by the age of forty: He had married his childhood sweetheart and produced three beautiful daughters. He was a millionaire. He had won a national championship. He was a hero where he lived and his own boss since 1986 when he had become N.C. State’s athletic director in addition to everything else he was doing.
It was all very simple. What’s more, Valvano knew his 1987–88 team could be pretty good. With a little luck, very good. The key was junior center Charles Shackleford, an immensely talented but just as inconsistent 6–10 specimen who could shoot the ball with either hand but often seemed willing to take the worst shot he could find. If Valvano could get Shackleford to concentrate every game for forty minutes, the Wolfpack would be terrific. All the other pieces were in place. There were four good guards—two seniors and two freshmen—and an excellent power forward in Chucky Brown. The only question mark was at small forward.
And yet, as he began his eighth season coaching State, Valvano wondered how much longer he wanted to go on doing it. There had been plenty of chances to get out. If he wanted to be a TV commentator, he could do that. If he wanted to be a full-time athletic director and not coach, he could do that. If he wanted an NBA job—the New York Knicks had approached him during the summer—he could undoubtedly do that. Hollywood was even a possibility. During the summer, Valvano had taped a TV variety show pilot.
But he was still coaching—at State. There were reasons for this. First and foremost, there was his family. Even though he and his wife Pam had grown up in New York, they were comfortable in Raleigh and their children considered it home. Their oldest daughter, Nicole, was a State freshman who would finish her first semester with a 4.0 grade point average. “All that proves,” Valvano cracked, “is that she is the first child in history to take after neither one of her parents.”
Once, Valvano had called a family meeting to discuss his giving up coaching to be a full-time athletic director. “It would mean more time at home,” he told his daughters. They liked that. “It would mean less pressure,” he added. They liked that too. “It would mean more family weekends together.” They were loving it by now.
“And it would mean less money. Nicole, you might have to give up your car.”
Nicole and Jamie, the middle daughter, looked at one another. “New information has just come in,” Nicole said. “We vote you coach.”
So he coached. Often, he wondered why.
While Valvano wrestled with his choices, Don DeVoe had no doubt in his mind about where he wanted to be and what he wanted to do. He was starting his tenth season as the coach at the University of Tennessee and his fondest wish was to start his eleventh season there on October 15, 1988.
But that was no sure thing. DeVoe had two years left on his contract. If the University did not extend that contract at the end of the season, it would leave him a lame duck coach, something neither the school nor he could tolerate. Already, recruiting had become extremely difficult because the whispers were everywhere that DeVoe would not be back the next season.
DeVoe was human and he was aware of the whispers. He couldn’t avoid them. After seven solid seasons at Tennessee—five NCAA bids, five twenty-victory seasons—DeVoe had suffered through two straight losing seasons. There had been injuries and problems, but most of all there had been losses. The University was about to open a brand-new $37 million, twenty-five-thousand-seat basketball arena and a losing record would mean rows and rows of empty seats. Another losing season and DeVoe would definitely be gone. He knew that. What he didn’t know was how many wins he needed to survive. When he asked athletic director Doug Dickey the question, Dickey was direct, but not specific: “Show me improvement, Don,” he said. “I need to see improvement.”
The record the previous season had been 14–15, 7–11 in Southeast Conference play. That was the starting point for DeVoe.
Improving on that record might not be that easy. Already, on October 15, there were headaches. The previous spring, feeling he needed help in recruiting, DeVoe had hired Bill Brown as an assistant coach from California State at Sacramento. Brown had gone back to California before moving to Knoxville and while he was there had been arrested along with several others during a drug bust. DeVoe had no choice: Brown resigned immediately.
Then, the night before practice started, the Volunteers’ best player, Dyron Nix, had been in a car accident. Nix lost control of his car and hit a telephone pole. His passenger, a member of the Tennessee women’s basketball team, was injured so seriously that she didn’t play all season. Nix, after a scary night in intensive care, came through without any serious injuries. He would be back practicing after two weeks.
But as practice started, DeVoe couldn’t help but think, “What else can happen to us?”
If ever a coach and a program had reason to feel jinxed, it was DeVoe and Tennessee. The new arena, two years late already, had been plagued from the day it got off the planning board. A construction worker had died on the project, one construction company had been fired, and two law suits were still pending. As if that wasn’t enough, the man who had contributed the first $5 million to get the project started, B. Ray Thompson, a man whose fondest wish had been to see Tennessee play in the new building, was dying of cancer. Everyone at Tennessee hoped he would live to see the inaugural game, scheduled for December 3 against Marquette.
B. Ray Thompson died on October 22. The season was still six weeks away. DeVoe knew it might be a long one.
For Rick Barnes, October 15 was the Christmas morning he had dreamed of all his life. And, like any little kid, he just couldn’t wait to open his presents. That is why his George Mason basketball team was on the floor that day at 6 A.M. There was no midnight practice only because George Mason isn’t the kind of school where thousands of people will show up to celebrate the opening day of basketball practice.
But Barnes didn’t care. All he knew was that he was a head basketball coach. He knew that outside the Washington, D.C., area very few people had heard of George Mason, a commuter school in Fairfax, Virginia, twenty-five miles from downtown Washington. But he also believed that with a two-year-old, ten-thousand-seat arena, an evergrowing student body, and a spot in a very respectable conference—the Colonial Athletic Association—GMU had the potential to get noticed in the near future. If it had the right coach.
Barnes believed that it did.
Rick Barnes was thirty-two but looked twenty-two. Ten years ago, when he had been twenty-two and no doubt looked twelve, he had managed to get an interview with Eddie Biedenbach, then the coach at Davidson, for a graduate assistant’s job. Barnes had grown up in North Carolina and played at Lenoir Rhyne, a decent player in a decent small college program. When he graduated he knew his playing days were over. He also knew exactly what he wanted to do: coach.
Through a friend he managed to arrange an interview with Biedenbach. It was scheduled for nine in the morning. Not wanting to take any chances on being late, Barnes left his house at 6 A.M. and was at Davidson by eight. He sat down in the bleachers to wait for Biedenbach. An hour went by. Then two. Barnes asked the assistant coaches if they knew where Biedenbach was. On the road recruiting. He would be in, but they weren’t sure when.
Barnes kept waiting. At noon, he thought about going to get something to eat but decided against it. What if Biedenbach came in briefly and he missed him? He waited. His suit, the only one he owned, was beginning to stick to him, the weather in North Carolina being warm in the springtime. The assistants kept saying they knew Biedenbach was coming in. Barnes nodded, famished and exhausted, but stubborn.
At six o’clock, the assistants went home. They were sorry they had made a mistake about Biedenbach coming in. He must have gotten tied up because he hadn’t called in either. Barnes decided to wait just a little longer. Finally, at 7 P.M., he gave up. Eleven hours was enough. He walked to the gym door, opened it, and in walked Eddie Biedenbach.
Barnes had never met him, but he knew him from pictures. “Excuse me,” he said, “but you are Coach Biedenbach, aren’t you?”
A look of horror crossed Biedenbach’s face. “Oh my God,” he said, “you’re Rick Barnes!”
Biedenbach had forgotten the appointment. He felt so guilty he offered Barnes the job—for $2,500 a year—on the spot. That was all Barnes wanted. The wait had been worth it. From Davidson, he went to George Mason as Joe Harrington’s assistant coach and then to Alabama and Ohio State for one year each. When Harrington resigned in the spring of ’87 to take the job at Long Beach State, athletic director Jack Kvancz knew exactly who he wanted to hire.
“When Rick was here as an assistant, I always thought he would be a great head coach,” Kvancz said. “When Joe left, I talked to some other people, but I knew I wanted Rick.”
Harrington knew that too. The day he took the Long Beach job he called Barnes on the phone. “Pack your bags, Barney,” he said. “You’re gonna be a head coach.”
He had held the title for six months by the time October 15 rolled around. He had already made it clear to his players that if they missed class, missed a meeting, missed anything, they would be in trouble. But the first practice was different. This made it real. The first game was five weeks away. For the moment though, Barnes was a rarity: a head basketball coach who had never once been second-guessed.
There were, of course, many schools where October 15, while significant as the first day of practice, was not that big a deal. No midnight practices, no first years or last years, just another season with high expectations.
One of those places was Duke. After struggling his first three years, Coach Mike Krzyzewski had put together one of the top programs in the country. In the four previous seasons, the Blue Devils had gone 108–30. They had played for the national championship in 1986; and in 1987, a so-called rebuilding year after the graduation of four seniors off the ’86 team, they went 24–9 and made it back to the round of sixteen.
Now, with four starters back from that surprising team, there was Final Four talk around Duke again even though nationally, few people ranked Duke in the top ten. Top Twenty yes, top ten, no.
But Duke was a confident team and no one on the team was more confident than Billy King. He had come to Duke three years earlier as a good-field, no-hit freshman. In other words, he could guard people, but he couldn’t shoot. That reputation had grown—in both directions. King was, to put it kindly, an awful shooter. He had hit less than 50 percent of his free throws in his career and anything other than a layup was an adventure for him.
But oh could he play defense! He guarded point guards and power forwards and everyone in between. King was 6–6, quick enough to handle a little guy, big enough to handle people up to 6–8. He and Kevin Strickland, his roommate from day one at Duke, were the two seniors on this team. Realistically, King knew that a player who can’t score in college isn’t too likely to play in the NBA. He would get his degree in political science in May and hoped for a career in television. With his good looks, easy smile, and quick, sharp wit, King was a natural for that profession. Or almost any other. One of his nicknames was “Senator,” because a lot of people who knew him expected him to talk his way into politics someday.
“If there’s one thing Billy can do better than anybody,” Strickland said, “it’s talk.”
But politics and television and anything else would come later.
Right now there was only basketball. King was the youngest of four children. His father had died when he was four and Billy had started playing basketball when he was six. It had been, outside of his mother, the most important thing in his life since then. He was 5–2 in the second grade and 6–2 by the seventh grade. He had gotten his first recruiting letter—from the University of Maryland—at the age of ten after he had attended summer camp there. Yes, age ten. He was now twenty-one. He had never even dabbled with any seriousness in other sports. “Once, I played soccer and in the first game I played in, I tripped over the ball, took a bad spill and twisted an ankle,” he said. “I decided it was an omen and that someone was telling me to stick to basketball.” He now had one more year of his life to devote to basketball. He wanted to be certain that it was a special one.
“A lot of seniors just want to get through their last year and get their shot at the money in the pros,” he said. “I know the odds are that I won’t get that money and that a year from now I won’t be playing basketball anymore. In a way, that’s scary—because for as long as I can remember I’ve played basketball. There’s nothing I love doing more than playing basketball.
“But this is probably it for me. I don’t want to look back next year at this season and say, ‘What if I had done a little more?’ I want to walk away from it knowing I did everything I could do. And that means making sure everyone on the team does that. Kevin and I are the captains now. This should be our team. If it messes up, it’s our fault.”
While King felt responsible for the rise or fall of his team at Duke, Walker Lambiotte knew very well, as practice began at Northwestern, that he would have nothing at all to do with the success or failure of the Wildcats.
Lambiotte was a transfer. He had left N.C. State after two frustrating years and, after a confusing summer, had landed at Northwestern playing, ironically, for Jim Valvano’s college coach, Bill Foster. The choice was not an easy one for Lambiotte. He had left a team that had won forty-five games during his two seasons there for a team that had won fifteen during that same time.
Foster was another in a long line of coaches hired to try to get Northwestern out of the Big Ten cellar. His track record said he had a chance. A coaching nomad, he had turned losers into winners at Bloomsburg, Rutgers (where he coached Valvano), Utah, and Duke. Only in his last job, South Carolina, had he failed. There, he had been fired after six years, three years after a heart attack had almost driven him out of the business.
Foster was fifty-five when South Carolina fired him. His family and friends would have been delighted had he taken his 407 victories and retired to an easier job in administration or scouting or promotions, a side of the business that had always interested him anyway. But Foster didn’t want to go out a loser and so, when Northwestern offered him a chance to rebuild a program that had been a consistent loser, he grabbed it.
“The good news is, I can get the job,” he told friends jokingly. “The bad news is, I’m going to take it.”
The first-year record was 8–20, the same as his predecessor Rich Falk. Foster had to get some players, that was clear. Suddenly, in the spring of 1987, Walker Lambiotte was available. Lambiotte had been one of those can’t-miss high school seniors in 1985. He starred at the summer camps, made every All-America team, and was recruited by every big-time program around.
He was from Virginia and the Cavaliers recruited him, but his older brother Kenny had gone there, transferring away after only two years, even switching sports—basketball to football—at the University of Richmond. Maryland wanted him. So did Duke. And so did N.C. State.
Valvano went after Walker Lambiotte hard. He was the kind of player his program really needed—Lambiotte could play and he was a good student. Valvano had been criticized for having a high transfer rate and a low graduation rate. Lambiotte was appealing because he was someone with a 3.4 gpa who, it just so happened, could run and jump. “Walker was a V job all the way,” Tom Abatemarco, then Valvano’s top assistant, remembered. “The father loved him right away and Jim knew it. We just stayed out of the way and let Jim do it all.”
Jim did it. Walker Lambiotte chose State, a decision that hurt Mike Krzyzewski and thrilled Valvano. Lambiotte started often and played a lot his first year. He still started as a sophomore but his minutes dwindled and then dwindled further. He began to worry what his junior year would be like. He asked Valvano. “You’ve had two years of learning here,” Valvano responded. “You should play a lot.”
But Lambiotte wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure if the way State played suited his own style. Lambiotte is a shooter, a lefty with a deadly touch. He is also a very good athlete. But he is not a ballhandler. He does not create his own shots. Most of State’s players do create their own shots, inside or outside. A guard who fit exactly that description, Rodney Monroe, had been signed. Lambiotte went home for spring break and talked it over with his parents. He had trepidations about transferring: the stigmas attached, sitting out a year from basketball—which all transfer student-athletes must do—and starting all over again. But transferring had worked out well for brother Kenny.
“In the end, I just thought to myself, ‘Am I getting better the way I want to?’ ” he said. “The answer was no. I talked it over with my dad and he agreed. He was the one who called Coach Valvano and told him. I didn’t want to do it. It would have been hard for me because it was never anything personal. I still like the guy.”
And Valvano liked Walter Lambiotte. But as practice began, the shooter was preparing to play—or in the case of this sit-out season, not play—for Bill Foster.
Nowhere in the country do they enjoy October 15 more than in Lawrence. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is the absolutely horrific record of the Kansas football team. In 1987, the record was 1–10 and the victory was 13–12 over Southern Illinois. By October, everyone is more than ready for hoops to begin.
It goes beyond that, though. This is one of the great traditional basketball programs in the country. Phog Allen Field House, named for the legendary Kansas coach, is one of the great old arenas in the country, a place that reeks with memories and rocks every time the doors open.
In 1985, Mark Friedinger, then a Kansas assistant, suggested to Larry Brown the notion of opening the season with a 12:01 A.M. practice. The idea was hardly original. Kentucky has done it for years and many others also do it now. But Friedinger and Brown came up with a twist of their own. They decided to call the event, “Late Night with Larry Brown.” On a college campus filled with David Letterman watchers, this was bound to get some attention.
The first “Late Night” was that October and more than eight thousand people showed up. The Jayhawks were coming off a 26–8 season and with Manning just a sophomore, expectations were high. It was also a novelty. People wondered how the second year would go. It went even better. This time twelve thousand people showed up. The Kansas Athletic Department was so excited that it wanted to charge admission for the third year. Brown wouldn’t allow it. But there were “Late Night” T-shirts ($10) and pizza for sale.
Allen Field House was packed. All 15,800 seats were filled, most of them by 10 P.M., an hour before the prepractice festivities were to begin. While the players were gathering, Brown sat in his office with a friend watching game seven of the Cardinals—Giants playoff series. Already, the annual rumors that he would leave Kansas at the end of the season had started—especially with Manning graduating.
Brown had thought about leaving the previous spring to coach the New York Knicks. At the same time, Manning had thought about leaving to turn pro. Both were still in Lawrence, however, for reasons of their own. Maybe that was why the T-shirts said “Still Late Night, still Larry Brown.”
The party began at 11 P.M. with a look-alike contest. The guy doing Larry Brown walked with a noticeable limp, a tribute to the hip surgery Brown had undergone the previous spring. “I thought I got rid of that thing,” Brown said, watching. “Pee Wee Herman” beat out “Letterman” to win the contest and got booed. All seemed right with the world.
Then came a search for the missing Jayhawk, the KU mascot for seventy-seven years. A contest was held to replace the Jayhawk. Just as the girl in the white hot pants and black high heels was about to be declared the winner, the Jayhawk showed up. Can’t win ’em all.
Finally, just before midnight, the players showed up dressed in sunglasses and raincoats. The seniors were the last to arrive. Only one of them—Manning—wasn’t in sunglasses. To thunderous cheers, he led his teammates in a truly atrocious version of “My Girl.” That Manning was willing to lead the song was a tribute to how far he had come since he had been an almost painfully shy freshman.
That his voice was lousy didn’t matter. Brown shrugged. “I’d rather be his agent as a basketball player than as a singer,” he said, laughing.
Finally, with all the lights turned out, the clock struck midnight, the Jayhawks took off their raincoats and practice, in the form of a scrimmage, began. Kevin Pritchard scored the first basket of the season, Manning gave him the first high-five, and everyone partied well into the night.
As the Jayhawks left the floor an hour later, the band played—what else?—“Kansas City.” One hundred and seventy-three days later, they would be in that city. But no one in the building could even begin to imagine the journey that would take them there.