The college basketball season formally began on Friday night, November 20, when the third annual preseason National Invitation Tournament opened up with seven first-round games—the eighth would be played Saturday—at various sites around the country.
Once, college basketball began everywhere on December 1, never earlier. But in recent years, with the proliferation of holiday tournaments, the first games have been staged earlier and earlier. Now, in addition to the sixteen-team NIT, there is the annual tip-off game held at the birthplace of basketball, Springfield, Massachusetts. There is the Great Alaska Shootout on Thanksgiving weekend, not to mention the Maui Classic and dozens of other classics and nonclassics held, quite literally, around the world. Clemson and Oregon State began their seasons in Taiwan. Truly, a neutral court.
No one was more ready for the start of the season than Rick Barnes. He had intentionally made life difficult for his team almost from his first day at George Mason. He honestly believed that discipline—a lot of discipline—was the only thing that would allow the Patriots to improve on the 17–14 record they had compiled the previous year.
What’s more, the team was filled with academic question marks and Barnes wanted to avoid that kind of trouble. He had devised something he called the “Pride Sheet.” Each Friday, the players had to come into Barnes’s office and sign the sheet.
The sheet read as follows:
I have attended and have been on time for all my classes, met with all my tutors, met all study hall requirements, taken care of all meetings with the academic coordinator and professors and I am up to date on all my current assignments. I have also left a copy of my next week’s schedule on Coach Barnes’s desk.
I understand the academic office will send a weekly report to Coach Barnes concerning my progress and attendance to my academic commitments. These reports will be supplemented by information from my professors. The reports will go on record without question.
I understand by signing this statement, I am giving my word that I have fulfilled all of my stated commitments. If for any reason I was unable to meet a certain commitment, I had made prior contact with the coaching staff and receive permission. IF I SIGN THIS AND HAVE NOT BEEN TRUTHFUL, I UNDERSTAND THAT I WILL BE PENALIZED A GAME. If I have failed my responsibility, I will meet with Coach Barnes and explain my reason. I am aware that my failures could result in disciplinary actions against myself and teammates at Coach Barnes’s discretion.
Heavy stuff. If anyone could not sign the sheet on a given Friday, the whole team got up at 6 A.M. to run. If a player signed the sheet when he should not have, he was automatically suspended one game. Punishments became more serious for second and third offenses.
“If these guys don’t have the discipline to go to class, they aren’t going to have the discipline to be any good,” Barnes said. “I know this isn’t going to be easy and we may lose some guys. But the ones who stay will be better off.”
Even with the Pride Sheet, it was not an easy fall. There were a lot of early mornings for the players and coaches. If Barnes didn’t like practice in the afternoon, he brought the players back at night. If he didn’t like it at night, they came in early the next morning.
Everyone was pointing for November 20, the date of the NIT opener against Seton Hall. But three days before the opener, disaster struck No one had worked harder during the offseason than senior point guard Amp Davis. Barnes had told him that he wouldn’t play if he didn’t lose weight and Davis had lost thirty pounds. At 5–10, he had gone from 195 down to 165.
Davis, Barnes felt, would be a key to how the team played. Then, three days before the season began, Davis came to see him. He had been accused of cheating on a test—for a second time. The first time, Davis had admitted he was guilty. This time he insisted he was innocent.
It didn’t matter. Guilty once, Davis was considered guilty until proven innocent this time. He wouldn’t make the trip. Barnes made Davis tell his teammates what had happened. When Davis began to cry during his confession, star forward Kenny Sanders grabbed him and hugged him. If nothing else, Barnes thought, the tough preseason had produced a close team.
But he was going to New Jersey without his point guard to play a Seton Hall team that would be very tough to beat under any circumstances. Additionally, Barnes had suspended freshman reserve forward Harold Westbrook for one game for missing a class.
Playing in the NIT, even in the role of sparring partner for Seton Hall, was a big thing for George Mason. The school had only been playing in Division 1 for nine years; this was a major opportunity to get people to notice a school few even knew existed.
Barnes was tense on game day, a frigid, gray day. The game would be played at Rutgers because the NIT insisted that all its games be played in gyms with at least 8,000 seats. So instead of playing before a sellout crowd of 3,000 at Seton Hall, the teams played before 1,200 people in the 9,000-seat Rutgers Athletic Center.
At 11 A.M., the Patriots went to the gym for their pregame shoot-around. The players were so tight they couldn’t make a shot. Barnes was worried. Back in the hotel, he called his old boss, Gary Williams, looking for advice and encouragement.
“You’ve waited so long for this you think it’s the only game you’re ever going to coach,” Williams told him. “It’s a very long season. Win or lose, you’ve got a hell of a lot left to do.”
And what about Davis, how should he deal with that? “You let the kid dictate your actions by his,” Williams said. “See how he responds to all this.”
Barnes felt better after talking to Williams. He had learned a lot from him, including how to curse. “I swear, I never used any of those words until I worked for Gary,” he said. “Now, I use them all the time.”
Everyone seemed looser at the pregame meal. Later in the season, Barnes would start skipping pregame meals because he felt his presence made the players nervous. Today, though, he was there, watching them eat pretty much whatever they wanted. This was one decision Barnes had made when he became a head coach. Most coaches spend a lot of time worrying about what to feed their players at pregame meal. Not Barnes.
“The best these guys play is in summer league,” he said. “And all they eat then is McDonald’s. So why worry about it?”
The team arrived at the gym two hours before tip-off so Barnes could take them through videotape of Seton Hall one more time. As the players warmed up, Barnes talked calmly with Seton Hall Coach P. J. Carlesimo.
In truth, Carlesimo had a lot more to be concerned about than Barnes. He was entering his fifth year at Seton Hall, the last year of his contract. The administration had essentially given Carlesimo a “make the NCAAs or walk” edict. And yet, Carlesimo seemed unbothered by the extra pressure. He had grown a beard during the offseason and had taken a “so what” approach to his ultimatum.
“If the ship sinks,” he said, “I think there’ll be a lot of people around to throw me a life raft.”
All true. Carlesimo was one of the best-liked people in the sport. In the Big East, a league full of jealousies and antagonism, everyone liked P. J. Carlesimo. But he wanted to keep this job. If he was going to survive, Seton Hall could not afford to lose to anyone like George Mason.
Barnes knew his team was supposed to lose. He knew no one was going to judge him on one game, or for that matter, one season. But logic wasn’t at work here. He was a wreck. “How much time?” he kept asking his coaches while the players were on the floor warming up. “God,” he finally said, standing up, “it seems like we’ve waited forever to play this game.”
The locker rooms at Rutgers are tiny, so narrow that if two players are trying to dress at the same time on opposite sides of the room, they can’t do it. The players crowded together—because they had no choice—as Barnes gave them final instructions.
“Remember what we’ve said all week,” he began softly. “Make them prove to us they can hit the outside shot. Take the ball to them every chance you get. Head-hunt out there, put your bodies on them. And rebound. We have to have all five guys on the boards to have a chance against this team.”
He paused. They had heard all of that before. “Only you guys know how hard you’ve worked to get here tonight. The NIT has put us here for one reason—so Seton Hall can advance. That’s fine. This is our opportunity to prove a lot of things.
“One more thing. I’ve waited ten years for this night. Sometimes, when I was out recruiting, I wondered if this was what I really wanted. But working with you guys these last six months, I know it is. You’ve done a great job preparing for this …”
Barnes stopped. He was getting choked up. You aren’t supposed to break down before your first game. “Okay,” he said, gathering himself. “Get out and work for forty minutes and you’ll come back in here a happy team.”
Out they went. Barnes shook hands with his assistants and walked onto the floor. It was not exactly the scene he had envisioned for his first game. The gym was practically empty and, if not for the Seton Hall pep band, would have been virtually silent. But Barnes was exactly where he wanted to be.
Or so he thought. It took Seton Hall seven seconds to score. It took Mason’s Steve Smith fifteen seconds to toss an air ball. In seventy-seven seconds, Seton Hall jumped to a 7–0 lead. The Patriots looked frightened. Before his team had scored a point for him, Barnes had to call the first time-out of his coaching career.
“We’re all right,” he said. “Just do what we do every day in practice. Don’t try to do anything special.”
They calmed down. Smith scored the first basket on a pretty feed from Brian Miller. Steadily, the Patriots came back. When Earl Moore hit two free throws with 4:32 left in the half, they had the lead 26–25. “They can’t guard us,” Barnes screamed during a radio time-out. “Just keep taking the ball at them.”
On the other bench, Carlesimo, who might have had reason to panic, didn’t. “Basketball is a game of runs,” he said later. “They were bound to come back on us.”
It was 28–28 with four minutes left before the half, but the Patriots couldn’t keep pace. Seton Hall put together a 13–2 run, capped by a Nick Katsikis jumper at the buzzer.
Barnes was calm at the half. “That was their twenty minutes,” he said. “This will be ours. Take good shots, take it to them, and you’ll be the most talked-about team in college basketball tomorrow.”
The Patriots tried. But the Pirates were just better than they were. George Mason got within 56–50 with twelve minutes left but Katsikis hit two straight three-pointers and it was 62–50. From there it was a coast, Seton Hall winning 85–63.
Barnes was resolute in the aftermath. “Stay together,” he said. “We need to learn from this and not bicker about who messed up. We all did. We’ve got a lot of work to do but it’s a long way from here to March.”
He walked out of the locker room. One game into his coaching career, Barnes couldn’t avoid the oldest coaches’ lament in the book: “Men,” he said, looking at his assistants, “we’ve got to get some players.”
Although the NIT gets a twenty-four-hour jump, the official start of the basketball season is the annual tip-off game played in Springfield. This is “The Peach Basket Classic,” named of course for the famous peach basket that Dr. James Naismith put up in 1890 at the very beginnings of basketball.
This game was born in 1979, the idea being to promote the Basketball Hall of Fame by bringing two big-name college teams to Springfield to start each season. Duke and Kentucky played that first game, a rematch of the 1978 national championship, and Duke came from behind to win in overtime. Since then, the game has grown. It is now an automatic sellout each year and it comes at the end of a full week of events.
This year’s matchup is an intriguing one. Syracuse and North Carolina had played in the Eastern Regional final in March. Syracuse had won the game by killing Carolina on the boards. Dean Smith had been so upset by his team’s performance that it was August before he could look at the tape.
In the interim, Syracuse had come up one point shy of the national title, losing to Indiana 74–73 in the final, while Smith’s best player, J. R. Reid, had been charged with assault during a preseason fight in a Raleigh nightclub. Reid and teammate Steve Bucknall had gotten into an altercation with an N.C. State student, and it had ended with Reid spitting at their antagonist.
As a result, even though neither player had been convicted of anything yet, Smith had suspended them for this game. “When children make a mistake,” Smith said, “you discipline them immediately.”
The suspensions pleased no one. The game’s organizers were less than thrilled that Reid wouldn’t be playing. ESPN, which would televise the game, wasn’t too pleased that it couldn’t push the Reid-Rony Seikaly matchup during pregame hype.
And of course there was Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim, the most put-upon man in college basketball. In truth, Boeheim is one of the nicer guys in the game. He has a sharp wit, is charmingly blunt—“That story you wrote really sucked,” is one way he greets reporters he knows—and is a very underrated coach.
But Boeheim is the victim of his appearance and of his voice. Always, he looks unhappy. He can’t help it. And he does whine. Shortly after the Orangemen had beaten North Carolina in March, Boeheim launched into a diatribe about how difficult it was to get Seikaly to play hard. Seikaly, sitting next to Boeheim, looked at him and said, “Hey, Coach, cool it. We won.”
“Oh yeah,” Boeheim said, remembering.
Even when he isn’t whining, Boeheim sounds like he’s whining. His voice is high-pitched and shrill. It was best described by a reporter listening to Boeheim during a press conference who shook his head and said, “You know, if a hemorrhoid could talk, it would sound just like Jim Boeheim.”
Now, Boeheim was in a no-win, yes-whine situation. If his team beat Carolina without Reid, everyone would shrug and say, “Big deal, Reid didn’t play.” If his team should lose to the Tar Heels, people would say, “Can you believe Dean found a way to win that game?”
Smith, naturally, relished this role. Rarely was his team a legitimate underdog, although Smith always tried somehow to make it one. He was always claiming that his opponent had a psychological advantage. Always. In 1981, before playing Virginia in the Final Four, Smith insisted the Cavaliers had a psychological advantage because they had already beaten UNC twice that season. “They’ll be very confident because they know they can beat us,” he said.
Carolina beat Virginia. Then, getting ready to face Indiana in the final, Smith said, “You know Indiana will have a psychological advantage because we’ve beaten them and they’ll want revenge.”
Makes perfect sense.
Now, Carolina really did have a psychological advantage. Smith couldn’t avoid it. There was revenge. There was the underdog role. There was Reid’s absence. Another Smith saying: “You can always play one great game without a key player.”
So what was Smith’s comment before the game? “I just hope we don’t get blown out.”
Of course.
Carolina didn’t get blown out. Even without Reid, the Tar Heels still had a very talented club. Rick Fox was a freshman with a pro’s body. Pete Chilcutt, a redshirt freshman, played superbly. Combined, they scored 29 points and had 20 rebounds. It would have been tough for Reid and Bucknall, the two players they replaced in the lineup, to match those numbers.
Still, in the early going, it looked like Syracuse might turn the game into a rout. The Orangemen built a 50–39 lead at the half, finishing with a 13–5 spurt that was keyed by Sherman Douglas, the brilliant point guard. By intermission, he had 17 points. Seikaly had 14. Only Fox, playing in his first college game, had kept the game even that close, scoring 12 points.
But Carolina came back. It kept creeping closer and closer, finally tying the score at 81–81 with 1:18 left on a Kevin Madden lay-up. The Tar Heels took the lead at 83–81 on a Jeff Lebo steal that led to a Ranzino Smith lay-up. But Seikaly tied the game with eleven seconds left with two free throws, and Derrick Coleman made it 85–83 by making two more free throws after stealing the inbounds pass.
When Lebo couldn’t get open with time running down, it looked like Syracuse would survive. But Lebo shoveled the ball to Chilcutt, who spun in the lane, tossed up a fourteen-foot jumper and watched it bounce off the side of the rim, off the backboard and in—as the buzzer sounded.
Overtime. When a shot like that drops, destiny has taken over. Syracuse led briefly in the overtime, but Madden put Carolina ahead for good with two free throws and Fox ended the game with a thunderous dunk for a 96–93 win.
Syracuse, the top-ranked team in the country, was 0–1. Smith was a genius … again. Boeheim was a goat … already. Rick Fox and Pete Chilcutt were tabbed as stars. Smith was thrilled. “Gee, I hope J.R. can get his spot back in the lineup,” he joked.
All was right with the world in Chapel Hill. And in Syracuse, too. Boeheim was unhappy. That meant basketball season was officially under way.
With its victory over George Mason, Seton Hall was one of eight teams to advance to the second round of the NIT. The other winners were Purdue, Iowa State, New Mexico, UCLA, Florida, Georgia Tech, and Middle Tennessee State.
For the second round, the NIT came up with these matchups Georgia Tech at Florida, UCLA at New Mexico, Iowa State at Purdue, and Middle Tennessee State at Seton Hall. This was part of the problem with the NIT, both the three-year-old preseason version and the fifty-year-old postseason version. Ever since the postseason tournament fell on hard times in the 1970s, every move the NIT makes is based on dollars.
Once, the NIT was as glamorous a tournament as the NCAA. Madison Square Garden was the mecca for college basketball and winning the NIT was just as prestigious as winning the NCAAs. Even after that changed during the 1950s, the NIT was still a very successful tournament. But in the 1970s, when the NCAA began expanding its field, first from twenty-five to thirty-two teams in 1975 and then to forty, forty-eight, fifty-three and, ultimately, sixty-four teams, the NIT fields became weaker.
As the fields got weaker, attendance dropped steadily. By 1977, the tournament was in serious trouble. The games weren’t drawing, CBS had canceled its TV contract, and there was talk of folding the tournament. That was when Pete Carlesimo came up with the idea of holding the early rounds at campus sites.
Carlesimo had just been named the executive director of the tournament and his move probably saved his new job, as well as the old tournament. The semifinals and final stayed in New York. The first three rounds—the tournament expanded from sixteen to twenty-four to thirty-two teams—were played on campus. The money made from those games wiped out any potential deficit in New York.
At the same time that it moved the tournament out of New York, the NIT committee began “reseeding” after each round. What that really meant was that it could create any matchups it wanted. In 1985, when Carlesimo came up with the idea for a preseason NIT, the same “reseeding” formula was used.
Often that means fairness gets left out of the picture. The committee wants certain teams in New York to sell tickets and boost cable TV ratings. Those teams usually get to play at home and play weaker teams whenever possible.
Why then would UCLA, clearly a more attractive team than New Mexico, be sent to play at New Mexico? Easy: The Bruins had drawn an embarrassing 2,100 fans for their opening game in Pauley Pavilion against Oral Roberts. New Mexico had drawn 17,000 for Weber State and would draw 17,000 again. That was a lot of revenue.
The pairings that raised eyebrows, though, were Georgia Tech–Florida and Middle Tennessee–Seton Hall. The consensus was that Tech, Florida, and Purdue were the three strongest teams in the tournament. What’s more, Seton Hall had drawn poorly playing George Mason at Rutgers. Why hadn’t Middle Tennessee been sent to Florida and Seton Hall to Georgia Tech?
The answer was simple. The committee wanted Seton Hall in Madison Square Garden. They were semilocal, they were Big East, and they were coached by Peter John Carlesimo, who just happened to be the oldest of Peter A. Carlesimo’s ten children. The father was retiring at the end of the season as the NIT’s executive director. The son was trying to save his job at Seton Hall. If the Pirates made it to New York, it was a good story. If the committee gave Seton Hall a little extra shove, well, it certainly wasn’t the first time they had greased the skids to get a team to the Garden.
Given a second home game and a beatable opponent, the Pirates kept their end of the bargain, easily beating Middle Tennessee before another tiny crowd at Rutgers. The other winners were New Mexico, Florida, and Iowa State. The surprise of the group was Iowa State, which went into Mackey Arena, shot the lights out, and upset Purdue. It was a loss that created a good deal of anxiety at Purdue. For the Cyclones, it meant a chance to get some media attention in the East.
Coming to New York is still a big deal for a college basketball team. The Garden is still, after all, the Garden. John Condon, who has done the PA for forty years, is still doing the PA. Feets Brodie, who has sat by his side running the clock for the last thirty-one years, is still there running the clock. “I’ve done over two thousand games,” Brodie said. “One of my stopwatches is in the Hall of Fame.”
If there was a way to put his voice in the Hall of Fame, Condon’s would be there. Anyone who grew up in New York can recite all his little sayings: “Score the goal, score the goal, credit the goal to _____. That was goaltending.” And: “New York has ten seconds to attempt a goal. Ten seconds New York.” Condon often wears sunglasses while working to protect his eyes from the bright lights. It gives him an air of mystery.
Of course, New York isn’t just bright lights and glamor. It’s dangerous too. Stuart Greenberg, a manager for New Mexico, found that out the hard way when he was sent back to the hotel before the opening game Friday night to retrieve the contact lenses that Lobo Kurt Miller had left in his room.
As he walked out of the Garden, three young men approached Greenberg, stuck something hard in his ribs, and demanded his wallet. Greenberg had $240 in meal money stolen. Shaken, he still got to the hotel to get Miller’s contacts. They didn’t help. Miller was zero-for-three and New Mexico got blown out by Seton Hall, 88–67.
This was no committee setup. New Mexico had a solid team but the Pirates blew them out from the first minute, leading 50–28 at halftime and never looking back.
No one enjoyed the victory more than Pete Carlesimo. He sat in the stands with his wife, almost motionless the whole game, arms folded, face never changing expression. It was only afterward that he cried like a proud father.
“I’ve been in sports fifty years,” he said softly, “and I can’t remember ever feeling like this. When P.J. took over the program at Seton Hall he had to start from zero. He’s had tough times there but look how far he’s brought them.”
Pete Carlesimo, who is seventy-two, looks like a cross between former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Jabba the Hutt, the Star Wars character. He is known as a tough guy, a hard bargainer who gets his way more often than not. There was no toughness in him now, though. Only pride. “A lot of people asked us to explain the draw the first two rounds,” he said. “Look, we take a lot of factors into account and attendance is one of them. But P.J.’s team proved it belonged.”
True. But the attendance was disappointing, only 7,311. Carlesimo didn’t make excuses. “It breaks my heart,” he said. “Fortunately, we’ve done so well with the early-round games outside New York that we’ll still make money.
“If you go to New Mexico, Florida, Iowa, you see headlines about the NIT. Here, though, New York, it isn’t that big a deal. New York fans only respond to the big names. It hurts me to see crowds like this. But we’ll survive. The field next year is unbelievable [North Carolina, Louisville, Indiana among others] and we’ll build on that.
“Two years ago, the committee wanted to abandon the Garden completely, play the whole tournament at campus sites. We would make more money that way. But this is where the NIT was born and where it will always be. Seton Hall should draw more here. Maybe, tomorrow night.”
P. J. Carlesimo was as aware of the NIT’s tradition as his father. Growing up in Pennsylvania, he had driven to New York with his high school team each year as a teenager to see the semifinals and finals of the NIT. “We would always eat at Tad’s Steak House after the games,” he said. “Ninety-nine cents for a steak. It was heaven. Of course in those days the NIT was all we cared about. The NCAA was just the tournament that UCLA won every year.”
But even with those memories, Carlesimo’s thoughts that Friday evening were not about tradition or, for that matter, his father. “After it’s over,” he said. “Then, I’ll have time to think about those things.”
After the victory over New Mexico, Carlesimo sat in the stands watching Florida beat Iowa State in the second game. Then, as planned, he went to have a late dinner with his coaches and with Loyola–Marymount Coach Paul Westhead, who was in town to play in the annual Joe Lapchick tournament at St. John’s on Saturday and Sunday.
Westhead and Carlesimo were not your average college coaches out for a late-night dinner. Carlesimo had majored in the classics at Fordham. Westhead was an English teacher who specialized in Shakespeare. He had coached at LaSalle before coaching the Los Angeles Lakers to the NBA title in 1980, only to be fired the next year during a dispute with Magic Johnson. Now, he was back in college coaching at Loyola, a school located a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport. Westhead had a bunch of Pacific 10 transfers and high hopes in his second season.
Dinner was at Vagabondo. Dinner in New York with Carlesimo is always at Vagabondo. An ex-girlfriend once said of him (Carlesimo is thirty-eight and single): “He’s the only man in the world who thinks there’s only one restaurant in New York City.”
She was wrong of course. There were two: Vagabondo and Tad’s.
“How do you feel about Florida?” Westhead asked Carlesimo.
“They’re a bitch,” Carlesimo said. “We’ve got three tapes to look at tonight but I don’t know why. I know [center Dwayne] Schintzius is great, I know [guard Vernon] Maxwell is great and I know [forward Livingston] Chatman is as good as any freshman I’ve seen. We’ll look at the tapes and see if we can figure something out.”
Westhead said, “I don’t need to figure anything out. We just run, run, and then run. If we get to play St. John’s Sunday, I’m sure Looey [Carnesecca] will have Mickey Crowley waiting for me. Maybe he’ll bring Steve Honzo out of retirement while he’s at it.”
Crowley and Honzo are longtime eastern referees who most visiting coaches would swear have worked at least twenty-five St. John’s games a year for the last twenty-five years. Westhead is wrong, though. Crowley is nowhere in sight Sunday. But Saturday he works St. John’s–Harvard.
The NIT final was everything a final should be. The crowd was better—9,729—and the game superb. For twenty minutes, Florida was exactly what Carlesimo had said it would be: a bitch. Chatman, the 6–7 freshman with the biggest rear end seen in college basketball since Mark Aguirre played at DePaul, was dominant inside. Seton Hall, trailing 43–23 a minute into the second half, looked completely over-whelmed.
Suddenly, with shocking quickness, the Pirates rallied. John Morton, the up-and-down point guard, made two steals. Mark Bryant began to control the boards. A 13–0 run closed the gap to 43–36 and forced Coach Norman Sloan to call time. Maxwell hit a tough baseline jumper to stop the skein but The Hall kept coming. A three-point shot by James Major cut the margin to 51–49, and there was still 10:38 left. The Garden was rocking. Suddenly the empty seats were invisible.
Seton Hall couldn’t quite pull this one off, however. A three-point play by Bryant tied the game at 64–64, but the Pirates never got the lead. Morton tied it one last time at 68 with twelve seconds to go, but Martin Salley was called for a silly foul twenty-five feet from the basket on Maxwell with six seconds left.
Calmly, the senior guard made both free throws. Morton, rushing, shot too soon, a thirty-footer with four seconds still left. The ball rolled off the rim as the buzzer sounded and Seton Hall had come up just short, 70–68.
Carlesimo’s immediate reaction was to grab Morton, put his arm around him, and say, “It’s all right, it’s all right.”
A few minutes later, when Carlesimo went out to receive the runner-up trophy, the man presenting it was his father. Their hug was long, lingering, and emotional. “I wanted to win because of what it would have meant for the program,” Carlesimo said later. “But I wanted to win for my dad, too. I’m prejudiced, but I think he saved the NIT.”
In 1987, it was the son—and his team—more than the father that saved the NIT.
The atmosphere the next afternoon at the Joe Lapchick Tournament final was decidedly different from the one in downtown Manhattan the night before.
St. John’s has staged this tournament to open the season for thirteen years now. It is named for the legendary St. John’s coach who retired in 1965. His replacement back then was a diminutive assistant coach named Lou Carnesecca. He has coached the Redmen ever since, except for a three-year break when he tried his hand at the pros, coaching the New York Nets in the old ABA.
To everyone in Queens, Carnesecca is just Looey. In his favorite Italian restaurants, he is Looey. On the street corners and in the schoolyards, he is Looey. And in Alumni Hall, he is Looey.
The Lapchick is a Thanksgiving weekend tradition. Looey usually invites three turkeys to Alumni Hall and the Redmen carve them up while 6,006 pack the old building to get an early look at what Looey has this season.
Always, it seems Looey has something. He has never coached a losing team in twenty years at St. John’s and never failed to make postseason play. And, he has never lost a game in the Lapchick Tournament.
“Why shouldn’t we win?” he will say defensively. “If you come to my house for dinner, don’t you want me to enjoy the evening?”
This is typical Carnesecca logic. He is, in his own words, a master at ignoratio elenghi—Latin for “circumventing the issue.” Looey can circumvent the issue in several languages. It is part of his charm.
This year, though, Looey may have miscalculated. Loyola–Marymount, Westhead’s team, fit the profile of a good Lapchick team when it was scheduled: last in its conference and going nowhere. Harvard and Tennessee Tech, the other two teams, certainly cooperated, losing easily on Saturday. But Loyola is another case. With transfers like Corey Gaines and Hank Gathers and a solid player in Mike Yoest, the Lions are good. Very good, in fact.
What’s more, they like to take about ninety to a hundred shots a game. Carnesecca is much more comfortable when there are about a hundred shots in the game total. This final will not be your typical Lapchick blowout.
The fans wander in shortly before tip-off on a rainy Sunday afternoon. This is a family crowd. They go to church, get in their cars and drive to Alumni Hall, one of the few places in New York City where parking is both easy and free.
Looey has a brand-new backcourt this season, a pair of jets imported from San Jacinto Junior College—Greg (Boo) Harvey and Michael Porter. Harvey and Porter would probably fit in better with Loyola’s run-and-gun style. That is apparent early in the game when Looey jumps off the bench as Harvey races past him and screams, “Boo, slow down!”
This is a fascinating game from start to finish. Loyola keeps sprinting while St. John’s filibusters. The fans are confused: The game is close, something is wrong, and yet they sense that their team is playing pretty well.
Carnesecca doesn’t want the Lapchick streak to end during his reign. When his Italian center, Marco Baldi, makes two horrendous plays in a row, Looey curses him out—in Italian. Still, the Redmen lead 44–40 at halftime.
The game seesaws the whole second half. The difference is Shelton Jones, this year’s designated senior star for St. John’s. He finishes with 25 points and 16 rebounds, showing the kind of spark he never had his first three years.
But Gathers, who wears white tassles on his sneakers to emulate his hero, Muhammad Ali, keeps the Lions close. When Jeff Fryer hits a jumper with thirty-eight seconds left, an 11-point St. John’s lead is down to 85–84.
The Redmen spread out, trying to kill the clock. Loyola lets it run to fifteen seconds before fouling Porter. Calmly, Porter makes the first free throw. But he misses the second. Gathers rebounds and tosses an outlet pass toward Gaines. Remarkably, Porter flashes between them, steals the pass and lays the ball in with six seconds left to make it 88–84. Ball game.
But no. As the ball comes through the net, St. John’s Matt Brust grabs it. Technical foul. All game long, the Redmen have been touching the ball coming through the basket to try to slow the Loyola fast break. Westhead’s complaints have been heard and this is the fourth technical called for delay of game.
Looey is so exorcised he leaps in the air and one of his hearing aids pops out. “I’ve seen a thousand games,” he will say later, “and I’ve never seen the rule interpreted like that in my life.” Where is Steve Honzo when you need him?
Yoest makes only one of the technicals, making it 88–85. A three-pointer can still tie, but Fryer comes up way short and time runs out. The Lapchick record is intact: 26–0 and thirteen first-place trophies. Everyone goes home happy.
“That’s a heck of a club,” Looey says. “They’re an NCAA team.” He’s right. Loyola will win twenty-three straight games and finish 26–4, but Looey doesn’t know that in November. He once called U.S. International a heck of a club after beating them and added, “They’re going to beat a lot of people.” U.S. International was 1–17 at the time.
But Looey is happy … sort of. “We made enough mistakes to put Goodyear out of business,” he says. What???? And: “Running was their idea, not ours.” And: “I don’t understand the technical fouls. We’re just poor Ascensions. Someone else will have to explain what happened.”
Someone asks if playing a tough game this early in the season might help the Redmen in the long run. Looey laughs. “You ever hear a coach say to his team, ‘Let’s go out and have a tough one tonight?’ Who needs it? It’s like when you hear a kid say, ‘I wasn’t up for the game.’ What does that mean? Does a kid sit there and say, ‘I’m going to stink tonight?’
“It’s a funny game. We won. It’s nice. If we lost, would the school close tomorrow? It isn’t that important. Nobody remembers who won this tournament five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago.”
Wrong, Looey. Everyone remembers who won five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago. It was St. John’s, St. John’s, and St. John’s.
Looey smiles. “Oh yeah,” he says, “I forgot.”
By the time Thanksgiving weekend is over, almost every college basketball team in America has opened its season. Some like to start with walkovers—Georgetown begins every year in Hawaii playing a team called Hawaii-Loa—while others seek out the tough holiday tournaments to get extra games against top competition.
One team that coveted an early challenge was Arizona. The Wildcats had wiped out the Soviet Union in their preseason exhibition game and were wound up for the Great Alaska Shootout, knowing that Syracuse and Michigan, both ranked in most top fives, were waiting for them there.
For Steve Kerr, this would be a weekend when he would find out a lot about himself and his knee’s progress, since he would be facing Michigan’s Gary Grant and Syracuse’s Sherman Douglas, two of the top point guards in the country.
Even if he never scored another basket, Kerr’s story was already extraordinary. It is a story that reads like a movie script, except that if you sent it to Hollywood you’d be laughed right off the lot. “It has to be believable to sell,” they would tell you. “This one will never fly.”
It wouldn’t fly as fiction. Too corny. Think about it: Bright, articulate kid comes out of California recruited by no one and lands, thanks in large measure to his father, in a rebuilding program at Arizona. Four months after he enrolls, his father is assassinated by terrorists in Lebanon. Two nights later, the kid comes off the bench and leads his team to a dramatic victory. He becomes a star and a hero. Then, he tears up his knee playing for the U.S. and is told his career might be over. He comes back and becomes the leader of a top ten team.
Never happen, right? But that’s the catch: The story’s true. The only person who doesn’t see anything terribly remarkable in it is Steve Kerr. “To me, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal,” he said. “I guess that’s because I lived it. For a long time, people looked at me as a victim. I think now, they see me as a person. I prefer it that way. I really don’t think of myself as being all that different than other guys.”
But Kerr is different. Every time life has knocked him down he has gotten up. It isn’t that nothing bothers him, it’s just that nothing is going to defeat him.
He was born in Beirut, the third child of Malcolm and Ann Kerr. Malcolm Kerr had also been born in Beirut and it was there that he met his wife. He had just graduated from Princeton and was doing postgraduate work. She was on her junior year abroad from Occidental College. They were married in 1957 and eventually had four children: Susan, John, Steven, and Andrew.
The Kerrs lived all over the world while their children were growing up: Beirut, Cairo, Oxford, the south of France, Tunisia, and Los Angeles. Steve was always the family jock. “My first memories are of wanting to play ball,” he said. “I learned to read by reading the sports pages of the newspaper. Whenever we were in L.A. my dad would take me to Dodger games and UCLA basketball games all the time. He loved it almost as much as I did.”
Malcolm Kerr was on the UCLA faculty for twenty years, even when teaching abroad. For a couple of years, Steve Kerr was a UCLA ballboy. His first close-up heroes were college basketball players. He played all sports when he was young, although his quick temper as a baseball pitcher unnerved his parents.
“He just didn’t handle losing very well at all,” Ann Kerr said. “It was especially bad when he was pitching. Malcolm and I were actually sort of relieved when he started playing basketball all the time. You can’t afford to lose your temper every time something goes wrong in that sport. We were much more comfortable with that.”
By ninth grade, basketball was Kerr’s sport. The family was living in Cairo and Kerr played for the American school team. They mostly played adult club teams, often on outdoor courts that had rocks in them. The games were rather crude, but Kerr was happy.
“People don’t understand what Cairo is really like,” he said. “They think of Egypt and they think of pyramids and camels. Actually, for an American teenager, Cairo is a great place. There are Americans all over and there aren’t very many rules you have to follow. I had a great time over there.”
He returned to Los Angeles for his sophomore year at Pacific Palisades High School, largely to play on a more competitive level. By his junior season, his parents had come back to the U.S. and Kerr was starting to attract notice from college scouts because of his range as a shooter.
With Malcolm Kerr back in the Middle East, Ann Kerr stayed behind in Los Angeles during Steve’s senior season to help him deal with the recruiting process. There wasn’t very much to deal with. The scouting services had labeled him too slow. No one called. Finally, Gonzaga asked him to fly up for a visit.
“I flew up there and what they did was try me out,” Kerr remembered. “I had to play against John Stockton [now a star with the Utah Jazz] for two hours. I didn’t do very well. When it was over, the coach, Jay Hillock, said to me, ‘It wouldn’t be a problem if you were a step slow, but you’re two steps slow.’ ”
Kerr was crushed. When he graduated from high school that spring he still had no idea where he would be going to college.
In the meantime, Malcolm Kerr’s lifelong dream had come true: He had been offered the job as president of the American University in Beirut. Being an expert on the Middle East, this was what he had always wanted. But he also knew there was danger associated with the job. Beirut was very different from what it had been in the 1950s, when it was known as “The Paris of the Middle East.”
Now it was caught in the middle of an ugly war. The man Malcolm Kerr would succeed, David Dodge, had been kidnapped in 1982 and held hostage for a year. Malcolm Kerr called a family meeting to talk about the job.
“We all knew the risks involved,” Ann Kerr said. “But this was the job Malcolm had always dreamed about. There was never really any doubt about going.”
Steve was seventeen at the time. He remembers that family meeting. “I didn’t say much,” he said. “I never really considered what was happening. Obviously, I was kind of naïve but it’s the kind of thing where you think, ‘This can’t happen to me.’ This was just my dad’s job. I never thought about it any differently.”
His older brother John did think about it differently. Hauntingly, Steve can still remember John saying to his father, “I just don’t want Mom to end up a widow.”
Steve looks back now and knows that hindsight is useless. “When I think about it,” he said softly, “I don’t feel any bitterness. Just sadness. My dad is the reason I’m at Arizona, he’s the reason I’m the basketball player that I am. Sometimes, when I think of the success I’ve had I think about how much he would have enjoyed it all. I just wish he was here for all of this.”
It was Malcolm Kerr who brought Arizona and Steve Kerr together. During the summer of 1983, after graduating from high school, Steve played summer league basketball in Los Angeles. His father was home for the summer and they spent a good deal of time together. Often, when Steve played, Malcolm watched. Malcolm Kerr once said that his greatest joy, next to being president of AU-Beirut, was watching Steve play basketball.
Kerr’s play in the summer league attracted attention. Colorado was interested but didn’t have a scholarship to offer. Kerr was welcome to come there and walk on if he liked. Cal State Fullerton was not only interested but was willing to offer Kerr a scholarship. A first. And then there was Arizona.
Lute Olson had taken the Arizona job that spring, knowing he had a major rebuilding job ahead of him. He was scouring the California summer leagues in search of underclassmen with potential when he spotted Kerr. He was surprised—and intrigued—when he learned that Kerr was a high school graduate without a college.
“We had a scholarship left, we weren’t very good to say the least, and this kid could shoot,” Olson remembered. “I thought he was worth looking at again.”
Olson sent Assistant Coach Kenny Burmeister to look at Kerr. Burmeister wasn’t sold. Olson went back again, this time taking his wife Bobbi with him. Bobbi Olson had seen a lot of basketball. When she saw Kerr she turned to her husband and said, “Lute, are you kidding?”
Olson was hesitant. In the meantime, Fullerton was pressing Kerr for a decision. He wanted to go to Arizona—sight unseen—but suspected Olson was delaying in the hope that someone better might come along.
“I spent three days trying to get the Arizona coaches on the phone to find out whether they wanted me or not,” Kerr said. “They were all out on the road. Finally, I just gave up, figured they were ducking me and called Fullerton and told them I would come. They were really nice and back then they had a better team than Arizona did. But to tell you the truth I wasn’t that thrilled about going to college just off the freeway next to Disneyland.”
Two days after Kerr had committed to Fullerton, Olson finally called back. Kerr told him he was going to Fullerton. Olson wished him luck and said he was sorry Arizona had lost him. Kerr was baffled. Arizona had never offered him a scholarship.
“Somewhere, our communication broke down,” Olson said. “I had the impression we had simply lost Steve to Fullerton. I didn’t realize he wanted to play for us.”
Malcolm Kerr did. He noticed his son moping around the house, clearly unhappy about the way things had turned out. So, he sat him down and said, “Where do you want to go to college?”
“Arizona.”
“Fine, then. Let’s call Coach Olson and tell him that.”
Olson remembers the phone call vividly. “Malcolm asked me if we wanted Steve at Arizona. I told him we did. Then he said to me, ‘This is a very important question. Steve is torn up about having made a commitment to Fullerton. He doesn’t want to renege. But he really wants to go to Arizona.’
“I told Malcolm that it might sound self-serving but if a kid wanted to go to another school after committing to mine, I wouldn’t want him to come because no one wants someone in their program who is going to be unhappy.”
Malcolm Kerr talked with his son again. He pointed out that nothing had been signed and that four years was a long time. The decision was made. Steve would enroll at Arizona.
That done, he went off on vacation with his family to Beirut. Malcolm Kerr was taking up residence there as the president of AU-Beirut. On the day Steve was supposed to leave Beirut to fly home and start school, his mother took him to the airport.
“While we were in the terminal, they started shelling the airport,” Steve said. “They were trying to get planes as they sat on the runway. The driver who had taken us to the airport told us to get away from all the windows. Then, he decided to get us out of there and back to the embassy.”
Two days later the same driver took Kerr on a terrifying ride through Syria to Amman, Jordan. They were stopped a number of times but the driver, who knew the route and the games, talked them through. Kerr flew home from there. Several months later he learned that his driver had been killed by a sniper shortly after that ride.
Kerr fit in quickly at school and with the basketball team. He was the third guard, the shooting specialist off the bench on a lousy team. But he was happy.
Then, on January 18, 1984, Kerr was awakened shortly after midnight by a telephone call in his dorm room. His brother’s nightmare had become reality: Malcolm Kerr had been shot and killed by two assassins outside his office in Beirut.
The first member of the Arizona coaching staff to hear the news was Assistant Coach Scott Thompson. He raced over to Kerr’s dorm and found Kerr sitting motionless on his bed, paralyzed by what he had been told. When Thompson sat down, the first thing Kerr said to him was, “I’ve got to talk to my mother.”
It took several hours, but Kerr finally got his mother on the phone. She and his brother Andrew were both okay. The next two days are a blur in Kerr’s memory. What he does remember is that the only escape from his grief came when he was on the basketball court. Arizona State was coming to Tucson to play two days after the murder. Olson asked Kerr if he wanted to play. Kerr said absolutely.
“It was the only thing to do,” he said. “My dad would have been very disappointed in me if I hadn’t played. What’s more, there was nothing I could do at that point. I knew my family was safe. I was going to the memorial service the next day. It just wouldn’t have made sense not to play.”
A moment of silence for Malcolm Kerr was planned before the tip-off. Initially, Olson intended to keep the team off the floor until it was over. But Kerr came to him and said he felt he needed to be there. Olson then decided the whole team should be there with him.
It is difficult to imagine the emotion of that evening. Even with Arizona’s arch-rival in the building, few people in the McKale Center that night were really focused on basketball. The violence of the shooting that had taken place thousands of miles away was tangible as everyone stood in silence. Kerr broke down. So did many in the crowd.
Eight minutes into the game, Olson sent Kerr in as part of his normal rotation. The first time he touched the ball—eighteen seconds after coming in—Kerr was open. Instinct took over. He shot from twenty feet. Swish. It is unlikely that a shot to win a national championship was as electrifying as that one.
“I’m not sure I can describe the feeling in the building that night,” Olson said. “All I know is, I cried and I certainly wasn’t alone.”
The legend of Steve Kerr was born that night. He scored 12 points—shooting five-of-seven from the field—and the inspired Wildcats destroyed a superior Arizona State team 71–49 for their first Pacific 10 victory under Olson. From that night forward, Kerr became Tucson’s adopted son. Whenever he scored a field goal and the PA announcer screeched, “Steeeeeve Kerrrrrrrrr!” Thirteen thousand people screeched it right back. Everyone in town wanted to invite Kerr to dinner. Every school wanted him to speak to its students.
Almost always, Kerr accepted. At times, being such a hero was embarrassing to him. He had never thought of himself as special, and that attitude is exactly what made him special. Also, he kept his self-deprecating sense of humor even amid the constant adulation.
He became a starter as a sophomore, then, as a junior moved to point guard. There he became a star, the leader of a very young team, picked in preseason to finish eighth, that shocked people by winning the Pac-10 title. When people asked Kerr about his emergence as the team’s leader, he laughed.
“You want to know why I’m the leader,” he said. “It’s simple. Last summer we went to France. I speak French. The other guys don’t. Every time they wanted to hit on a girl, they needed me to interpret. That’s when I became the leader.”
Olson, who was continually amazed by Kerr’s improvement as a player, didn’t buy that line. “He’s the best leader I’ve ever seen,” he said. “If he told this team that green was orange, they would all believe him.”
During the summer after Kerr’s junior year, Olson coached the U.S. team in the World Championships in Spain. Kerr made the team and was a key player. Then, during the semifinal game against Brazil, he drove the lane looking to create a play against Oscar, the Brazilian shooting specialist who would torture the U.S. a year later in the Pan American Games final.
“I remember going by Oscar easily because he couldn’t guard anyone,” Kerr said. “I saw Charles Smith open and I jumped in the air to pass him the ball. But someone stepped in front of him so I sort of twisted in the air to get a shot off. When I came down my whole body was off-balance. I felt my knee just blow out when I landed. The pain was unbelievable.”
David Robinson, the center on that team, was sitting on the bench when Kerr fell. He can still see the play in his mind’s eye: “When Steve came down it was one of the most horrifying sounds I’ve ever heard. You knew it was bad right away.”
It was torn ligaments, bad enough that team doctor Tim Taft felt he should immediately tell Kerr that this was often a career-ending injury. When that diagnosis reached Tucson, hysteria broke out. The word was that Kerr was through as a player. Kerr never believed that for a minute, although when someone asked him what he would do if he couldn’t play again he grinned and said, “I’ll just have them fire Coach Olson and take his job.”
There was no need. Kerr went through reconstructive surgery, worked all through the ’87 season on rehabilitation, and began playing again in the spring. Slowly, his confidence was coming back. But as the Wildcats flew into Anchorage the day before Thanksgiving, Kerr had misgivings. In the cold weather, the knee felt stiff. He wondered if he could compete with Grant and Douglas.
The answer to that question was an emphatic yes. In the semifinals, he completely outplayed Grant. Kerr was so excited that when Grant started talking to him during the game, he talked back to him. And when he buried a key three-pointer late in the game, Kerr pointed right at Grant as if to say, “Take that.”
Two days later, after enduring an earthquake in the morning—“A nice way to start the day,” Kerr said—the Wildcats upset Syracuse. Suddenly, people were taking notice of them. Dick Vitale was screaming on ESPN that Sean Elliott was an All-America. Kerr, people noticed, wasn’t just a good story, he was a good player.
“I finally feel as if people have completely accepted me as a person, not just as a victim,” he said. “This is a great feeling to be on a team with this kind of potential. I hope we can keep it going all year.”
They were certainly started in the right direction.