Chapter Thirty-Three

Iput in a forty-hour week watching game tapes. Evaluating USA’s six new recruits, as well as the seven holdover players. Coach Lee also tasked me with coming up with a scouting report of the nine games the team played after he took over. Then I shared my opinion with him over lunch in the faculty dining room.

For the most part I liked the new kids, all them talented and unselfish. But only one of them, and only three of the returnees, played energetic defense.

“You’re right,” he said. “And that’s going to something we’re really going to emphasize this season.”

I also thought tha, during the nine games that I studied, the offense featured the same overabundance of isolation plays as it did under Coach Woody.

“I didn’t have much choice,” Lee said. “It was so late in the season that I couldn’t put in the stuff I wanted.”

And for another three eight-hour days, Lee clued me in to his preferred offense sets: a multi-option Flex format. An open-middle passing game. Lots of high screens, weakside screens, pin-down screens, and double-screen baseline snakes. Against zones, Lee would install a Wheel offense.

His planned defenses included various full-court and half-court trap-presses, some assorted zones, and switching man-to-man designs.

After absorbing the Thunder’s various and intricate game plans at both ends of the court, I thought that Lee’s stuff was fairly simple. Just by moving pieces around on a magnetic clipboard, I was positive I could get onto the court and perfectly run every aspect of every alignment.

“But these kids will have trouble,” Lee warned me, “because they only know how to play one-on-one, two-on-two, or maybe three on-three basketball. Even the guys who’ve been here for a few years still don’t know how to play five-man ball. It’ll take months before they get in gear. And defense will always be a problem. But I promise you, E, if anybody fails to execute the offense or doesn’t play hard on defense, he’ll sit. No matter who he is. Believe me.”

Okay.

My fellow assistants arrived on campus during the Friday of the Labor Day weekend, four days before classes would commence. That same night, the three of us met at the campus rathskeller for pizza, beers, and bullshit.

Paul looked like he’d gained maybe fifteen pounds during the fourteen months since I last saw him. He said that the competition in Belgium was awful, but the food was terrific.

“I was the best player there, so you can imagine how bad the games were. Even though the refs gave every close call to the Belgians, I still scored like twenty-six points a game. Then I sprained my ankle in the last game before the playoffs. It was a bad one and it still hurts if I try to run or jump. So they cut me like the next morning and made me pay my own airfare home. You know? I had a fully guaranteed contract and they simply refused to pay me like sixty-five hundred American dollars. But fuck it. I’m glad to get out of there. I mean, everybody looked like a Nazi.”

Sidney was a coffee-colored, wiry six-eight, with a trim mustache and goatee, a shaved noggin, and a tattooed ring of barbed wire circling his right bicep. He laughed easily and listened carefully.

When Paul hobbled off to “make a pit stop,” Sidney moved his chair closer to mine and said this: “This place is a fucking gold mine.”

“Really? How so?”

“You supposed to be doing any recruiting?”

“Some.”

Then he leaned closer and said in a soft whisper, “Every time you go on a recruiting trip, you take your own suitcase with all your stuff in it, and Giambalvo gives you a briefcase to take with you too. You know him?”

“Coach’s high-school buddy who handles the money. But I haven’t met him yet.”

Sidney laughed. “You will, bet on it. . . . And you know what’s in the briefcase? What’s always in the briefcase? . . . Cash money. Twenty thou in hundred-dollar bills. . . . And you know what that money’s for, doncha?”

“Airfare, hotel, car rental, food?”

“Nope. It’s for the kid you’re trying to recruit. Twenty thou if he comes here.”

“For real?”

“For real. And here’s the best part. . . . What if you was to keep ten and only give him the other ten? He’d be happy as a pig in shit to get the ten and he wouldn’t know the difference. And even if he did, would he report you to the NCAA for shorting him? Ha! It’s perfect, man. Free money. The perfect gig.”

“Jesus! Does Paul do that?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe he slips himself a grand or something. . . . But why am I telling you this? So you won’t be surprised if you hear any shit. And also to clue you in on where the gold is so’s you can get married, buy a house, or do whatever the fuck you want to do. You know what I’m saying?”

“I do.”

Then we engaged in the shake-grasp-thumb-lock-flip-away handshake like we were in a secret fraternity.

And I wondered if, when I was called to go a-recruiting, I would succumb to the same temptation. Fortunately, I was never asked to make a recruiting trip.

Anyway, the three of us would periodically repeat our bull sessions until preseason practice began. And I was alerted to several more of their recruiting adventures.

“Shabazz Winslow,” said Sidney. “The big kid from Dayton?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I saw some game tapes. He’s really good. Very advanced for a freshman.”

“You know what I had to do to sign him up? . . . Fuck his mama . . . for real. Otherwise she said it was a no-go. She was single and hot like a bonfire. And horny? Man! She worked me out all night long. One of the side benefits of recruiting.”

“Jimmy Puma?” said Paul. “The little point guard from Indianapolis? The pizza-faced kid with all the zits? Well, when he came down here for his visit, he came up to me all private like and says he’d only sign up if I got him laid while he was here. He said he was a virgin and he would be ashamed to still be one by the time he entered college. So I went straight to Marty Taylor and he set the whole thing up. That’s why the kid is smiling all the time.”

My only contributions dealt with the routine in-game fuckups committed by Brook Davis.

“Un-fucking-believable,” was Sidney’s response. “That’s even worse than the coach I had in Turkey that made us run laps while we had to keep tapping these balloons to keep them in the air. He said it would improve our shooting touch.”

“Ha,” said Paul. “So I played last season in Belgium, right? Anyway, we had this point guard from Italy who wasn’t any good. But he never passed to me. Never. So I asked him what the fuck was going on. And he said he wanted a present from me. A present? What kind of present? A gold watch. What? So I went out and bought him some cheapo watch that looked like it was made of gold, and from then on, he passed to me and not to anybody else. But then, at the end of the season, the watch started to turn green and stopped working. So, before and after the watch, I averaged about ten points a game. During watch-time, I averaged thirty-five,”

One afternoon I heard the familiar sounds of a ball bouncing and sneakers squeaking as I passed the arena, so I opened a door and poked my head inside to investigate. No surprise that a bunch of the guys were playing a pickup game. According to NCAA rules this wasn’t a problem, but I was prohibited from watching them. I was spotted before I could duck away.

“Lookee here,” said Barry Malone, who was a junior when I played there, and was two years older than me. “If it ain’t the junior coach.”

The game stopped, and all of them approached.

“Hey, Junior,” said another ex-teammate.

“Yeah,” Barry said. “I heard you just came from the infirmary to get alla those splinters outa your ass from sitting alla time on the bench.”

Their knee-slapping laughter was so insulting that I couldn’t contain myself. “All right, you bozos.” I stepped out of my sweats and onto the court. “Let’s go.”

“Oh. Junior wants to play with the big boys!”

“Come on, Junior. We’ll make sure not to hurt you.”

“Or embarrass you.”

If I hadn’t played much with the Thunder, I’d matched up against Rashon Williams and Darren Mosley in dozens of scrimmages. So, playing against these guys was like playing one-on-none.

I drove and dunked at will, rarely missed a jumper, stole clearly telegraphed passes, and ripped predictable dribbles. Then, after embarrassing them for about thirty minutes, I simply walked off the court.

“Damn,” said Barry.

I’d arranged with Coach Lee to absent myself for a long weekend before preseason practice commenced. So, early on the preceding Monday morning I called Monica to make arrangements.

“Sorry, but the number you have dialed has been disconnected.”

Say what? There must be a mistake. Some crossed wire between Tucson and New York. But the same message was repeated.

In frustration, I even sent her an e-mail. But it was quickly kicked backed as “undeliverable.”

What the fuck was happening?

My emotional distress didn’t improve when the season turned out to be a shit storm.

Although the squad was loaded with talented players, and although, based on my performance in that preseason scrimmage, they all respected me, I didn’t like the way any of them played. It was the four senior starters who set the negative example. Their primary motivation was to rack up their own personal numbers to enhance the chances that they’d be drafted. The result was a contagious me-first attitude along with a quarrelsome jealousy that quickly infected even the incoming freshmen.

During a water-break pause in one midseason practice session, I heard one of the seniors saying this to a freshman: “I’d rather score twenty and we lose than score ten and we win.”

And I blamed Coach Lee for this because of his casual attitude about on-court discipline. I began to feel that he was afraid to get involved in confrontations with his players. Having the players think he was a nice guy seemed to be his main concern.

When he did bark at them, they nodded obediently, then rolled their eyes when he turned away. And when I tried to berate any of them for their sticky-handed play, Lee would get upset with me for “undermining” his authority.

Lee’s in-game strategies were also awful.

He was in the habit of substituting five new players at a time. Since getting any one player warmed up and in sync with his teammates usually takes about two to three minutes, putting five guys in this situation invariably resulted in stretches of a few minutes at a time when we’d be noticeably outplayed. But whenever I protested, Lee would simply wave me away.

Also, his freelancing passing game made it impossible to get the ball to the right player in the right space whenever we needed a clutch score.

For sure, many of the players approached me for personal advice. How to smooth their shot release, or make their change-of-direction dribbles more effective. Since they tuned out everything I told them about the benefits of team play, engaging in this one-on-one teaching was really the only positive effect I had on the players.

To these new-age players, the pointers offered by any coaches who lacked the same athletic ability that they had were totally ignored. Which was why they paid no attention to anything Paul told them.

Although Sidney was an NBA veteran, he was afraid to undergo surgery to replace an arthritic hip, so his limping movements made his low-post instructions inept. As such, his NBA glow had already dimmed to the vanishing point.

We had enough sheer talent to beat the bad teams we played, but the better teams routinely roasted us.

No wonder we finished at 12–13 and lost our initial game in the conference playoffs. Yet, the athletic director still voiced his support for Lee and his staff.

However, after the season, the shit storm became a Category 5 shit hurricane.

Remember Shabazz Winslow, the big kid from Dayton? Whose mother Sidney had to sleep with to get him to USA?

Well, during the natural gabfests among the players during all the time they spent together on bus rides, in airports, hotels, and locker rooms, the black kids were dismayed to discover the difference in the illegal bribes they had received against those dished out to the white recruits. Whereas Sidney pocketed half of the $20,000 he carried, Paul only kept one or two thousand. The kids didn’t know this, of course. But they did mark the difference between the $10,000 the brothers got and the $18,000 or $19,000 the white kids got.

They figured that the only reason for this discrepancy was racism on the part of the athletic department. But what could they do about this?

Report to the police? The NCAA? The athletic director? Coach Lee?

Never.

Instead, they came up with a plan that devastated USA’s basketball program and dramatically changed my life.

Shabazz’s mother charged Sidney Johnson with rape.

Dayton’s district attorney dismissed the charge without even convening a grand journey on the grounds that had she indeed been raped, it would have been inconceivable that she would have allowed her son to enroll at USA.

Even so, the NCAA’s sleuths were activated, and quickly discovered a huge slush fund left over from Coach Woody’s reign, which Lee had amplified. The procedure was to greatly overestimate the funds required by the basketball program for equipment, travel, and hotel expenses. For example, $350,000 was annually allocated to a local sporting goods company to pay for basketballs, ball racks, uniforms, jocks, socks, tape, Ace bandages, and the like. But, in actuality, the total bill came closer to $250,000. The company issued a bill for the 350 grand, then split the leftover money with Coach Woody and, later, his successor.

However, because of Coach Woody’s universal canonization, only Lee’s crime was revealed.

As a result, everybody in the basketball program except the trainer and me were summarily fired. Moreover, the full scholarships available to the program were reduced from seven to a measly three.

Two days after Dr. Jeffrey R. Randolph, the new athletic director, took over, he summoned me to his office.

He was a crisply neat, middle-aged man, who had steely eyes, manicured fingernails, and a tailored gray suit that made him look more like a dollars-and-no-nonsense businessman than someone whose primary interest was sports. Accordingly, his stern manner made sure I knew that he was the boss and I was just another employee.

“I’ve heard nothing but good reports about you, Coach Hersch. Nothing about you getting involved with any of the program’s rather shady dealings.”

“Thank you, sir. I just try to do my job the only way I knew how.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Of course.”

Then he was silent as he stared down at his watch and then his cluttered desk.

“What I’d like to do, Coach Hersch, is to offer you the head coaching position in light of the recent unfortunate developments in the program.”

“Wow! That’s a tremendous honor!”

Yes! I’d be free to install an honest, truthful program! This was it!

“Dr. Randolph, I’d be thrilled to accept.”

“Wonderful,” he said as he stood and reached out to shake my hand. “Make an appointment with the bursar—I’m not sure I know his name—to be apprised of the financial and other details.”

Still gripping my hand with surprising strength, he said, “But know this . . . There are many wealthy alumni who were terribly disappointed with last season’s results. It was the team’s first losing season in fifteen or so years. And as I’m sure you know, the athletic department greatly depends on generous contributions from these proud USA grads. This university is not a charitable institution. The duty of the athletic department is to make a sufficient profit to help pay for other, nonprofit departments like the sciences and the humanities. That’s the bottom line.”

Still crunching my hand, he continued, “So, it’s incumbent on you to do everything possible to achieve a winning record.” Then his eyes twitched in what might have been the suggestion of a wink. “Everything, of course, in compliance with NCAA regulations. If you have any problems or questions, please feel free to consult me. Thank you, Coach Hersch. Glad to have you aboard.”

“Thank you, sir. For the wonderful opportunity.”

My contract called for two guaranteed years at $500, 000 per, plus the off-campus house and Lincoln Town Car that were no longer Lee’s. The bursar’s office would henceforth dispense any monies that the program required as well as arranging for the purchase of equipment. And I was allotted another $90,000 to hire two assistants—who had to be hired ASAP to be able to bring in three recruits who could make a difference.

Terrific! Wonderful!

I didn’t know who the fuck-all to hire, so I called Collison. He had two suggestions. One was Harvey Carmichael, an elderly gent with vast NBA experience who had been forced to retire when the Memphis Grizzlies hired a new general manager. “Harve knows everybody and everything worth knowing,” said Collison, “and he can’t stand being retired.”

The other was Ray Gilbert, a young kid looking for a break. “His dad did college scouting for the Nets, Pacers, Sixers, Clippers, and Spurs for nearly thirty years. So the kid is well connected, will work hard, and his dad can help him.”

Meeting with these two guys wasn’t really necessary and, after two ninety-minute phone calls, both of them agreed to join my staff as assistants-cum-scouts.

But Carmichael had a warning: “I’m sure you understand, Coach, that literally all of the blue-chip prospects are already signed. So, finding three . . . or even one, impact player won’t be easy.”

Okay. Two weeks later, Gilbert called to say that he had connected with a pair of junior college players who had both been accused of assaulting girls who came up to their apartments but wouldn’t sleep with them. One of the guys punched the girl in the face and broke her nose. The other guy just slapped her around. Drugs were involved, but not rape. Just a few days ago, the charges against both had been dropped, presumably because their respective agents had paid the girls hush money.

“They’re both good enough to start,” Gilbert said. “One of them could be a third scoring option, the other a rebounding, nonscoring center. Since their arrests scared off everybody, they’ll commit without making a visit. They’re the best that’s available, and they’re technically clean.”

Oh, well. Okay. Two down and one to go.

Shortly thereafter, Gilbert called to say that he had connected with a player who had NBA talent. “But there’s a reason why he hasn’t signed with anybody. He’s a heroin addict.”

“What?”

“That’s right. Other scouts know that he’s heavily involved with drugs, but they don’t know that it’s heroin.”

“So why should I be interested in him?”

“Because I’m familiar with your roster and, with last season’s three top-scorers all gone and playing overseas, what you have left is garbage. You’ll be lucky to win ten games, and from what I know about your new AD, you’ll be shit-canned the day after the season ends. Okay?”

“You’re probably right.”

“But with this guy, Lamar Sweeney, I guarantee you’ll win twenty games and at least get an invite into the NIT. However, to get him, there’s a big catch. . . . You’ll have to have somebody supply him with his heroin.”

“What? That’s crazy!”

“Not so crazy, only because Marty Taylor could get that done with no problem.”

“I can’t agree to that.”

“It’s up to you. Either get canned in March or not. I should also tell you that there was another player a few years back who played for a powerhouse top-ten team who was also a heroin addict. And the school . . . which will not be named . . . made sure his hypodermic needle was always loaded with grade-A stuff. The guy . . . who also will not be named . . . went on to have a decent five-year career in the NBA, where he had enough money to keep his habit going. Until he was so loaded that he drove his car into a telephone pole and killed himself.”

“Jesus!”

“Listen, young man. Everybody’s dirty. Everybody’s lying. That’s the name of the game in top-tier D-One basketball. Look at what Woody had been doing, that fucking hypocrite. Believe me, the only D-One schools who run honest programs are the Ivy League schools.”

“Let me think about it.”

“Okay. I’ve got this kid on the hook, but if we don’t reel him in in a couple of days, there’s a school up north that’s interested. But he’s from California, see, and doesn’t like cold weather. So . . .”

“I’ll get back to you.”

Holy fucking shit! Was this kind of stuff merely business as usual in the college game?

What to do?

I certainly didn’t want to get fired after only one season. But the only alternative was disgusting.

This conundrum almost made me forget about the soul-deep wound caused by Monica’s sudden and mysterious disappearance.

Then I got a brainstorm.

“Hofstra University. How may I direct your call?”

“The English Department, please.”

“Certainly, sir.”

. . .

“English Department. How can I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to Dr. John Roth. Or maybe leave a message for him.”

“Sorry, sir. Dr. Roth is no longer a member of the department.”

“What? I mean what happened?”

“He resigned and went to another school.”

“Where? I mean, when?”

“Sorry, sir. I can’t divulge where he is now, but I can tell you that he resigned on August first.”

“Oh . . . Okay. Could you tell me, then, about Monica Raymond? She was a PhD candidate working under Dr. Roth.”

“Yes, I remember her. Let’s see . . . She got her degree on . . . ummm. . . . August fifteenth.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Why would I do that, sir?”

“Ummm. Any idea where she is now? Did she leave anything like a forwarding address?”

“I do know that she had her grade transcripts and a recommendation by Dr. Roth sent out, but I can’t divulge any further information.”

“Okay. Thank you anyway.”

“Have a great day, sir.”

A great day, right?

She fucking lied to me up, down, and sideways. Ha! For sure she ran off with the Roth guy. She called him “John,” right? And said he was good-looking.

Let me fuck you and I’ll pass your dissertation. Then come away with me and I’ll get you a good job and we’ll live happily ever after.

So where did it all leave me?

Not as brokenhearted as expected. Maybe I was bullshitting myself all along. Maybe I was really in love with love. How does anybody know what real love is anyway? Right?

Or maybe I really did love her and was trying to protect myself with some kind of “sour grapes” attitude.

I was more angry than soul-struck. And I vowed never to trust anybody again. Including myself.

Which, of course, was inherently absurd, because by definition I couldn’t trust myself to honor these vows.

Anyway, the show had to go on.

So in addition to having had my “love” being so ruthlessly assassinated, I had to arrange for a kid to be supplied with heroin if I wanted to have anything resembling a career at USA.

By the next morning I came to a decision.

Fuck all of it.

I submitted a letter of resignation to Dr. Jeffrey R. Randolph. Bought still another car—a two-year-old BMW—and headed back to New York.