A Season Inside (10 page)

He was stunned when the agents who started hounding him from that night forward told him he could be worth $2 million a year. Robinson had been thinking that $100,000 to play basketball was an awful lot of money. Now he was being told his
shoe contract
would be worth a lot more than that.

Still, there was the Navy side of his life. Graduation came in May and Robinson was assigned to King’s Bay. “South Georgia?” he thought. “A great place for a seven-one black guy to be hanging out.” Then he got lost driving down there, and then the Americans lost the Pan American final to Brazil and everyone wanted to know what happened. The summer couldn’t end soon enough for Robinson.

In the meantime, he had hired an agency, Advantage International, and negotiations with the San Antonio Spurs were going forward. When he finally signed, Robinson thought it all quite wonderful.

“Except for this: Here I am being given all this money. I’ve worked four years to get here. Now I’m a pro and what am I doing? Sitting behind a desk. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

But then neither story, Houston’s nor Robinson’s, made much sense as their first year out of college began. The nation’s leading scorer had his wife rebounding for him. And the highest-paid basketball player in the world had to ask permission to go to lunch.

Rollie Massimino is a man of sayings and slogans. Some are eloquent: “Complacency is the foundation of failure.” Others are more Rollie-like: “In the face of adversity, the true guy comes out.”

But as he sat in the middle of a second-floor ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Hotel three weeks before Villanova’s opening game, Massimino’s favorite slogan passed through his mind more than once: “You don’t have to be Jewish to be a schmuck.”

“Schmuck” is a Massimino word, along with “straphanger” and “jag.” Everyone in his life, with the exception of his wife Mary Jane, is at some point a schmuck, a straphanger—strap for short—or a jag. More often than not, they are terms of endearment, because if Massimino doesn’t like someone, there are other words he uses to describe them. There is no explaining why he uses these terms and there is no making sense of them, just as there is no making sense of why Massimino calls his sophomore forward Rodney Taylor “Duke.”

Ask him why Taylor is Duke and he will say: “I don’t know. It’s just what I call him.”

Schmuck had been a Massimino word since boyhood. The son of a shoemaker, he grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in northern New Jersey. He likes to joke that “some of my best friends are Italian,” because many of his close friends were Jewish. The Italians were his relatives.

He was a good small-college guard at the University of Vermont and has coached ever since he graduated, first in high school, then in college. He was an assistant at Pennsylvania when the job that would make him a star came open at Villanova.

November 5 was the annual Big East Media Day at the Grand Hyatt. All nine league coaches attend along with two of their players. The setup is simple. First, the coaches go into the room where all the TV crews set up and answer TV questions while the players sit in the next room with the print media and answer their questions. Then, after an hour, everyone switches.

The only exception to this is Georgetown Coach John Thompson. When Thompson is with the print media, so are his players. When he goes to do TV, they go with him. No one from the Big East has ever asked Thompson to follow the same system everyone else uses. They are just thankful that he shows up at all.

Once upon a time, when Villanova was the defending national champion—that was all of two years ago—trying to get near Massimino or his players on Media Day was a little bit like trying to get Springsteen tickets. But in 1987, Massimino, Mark Plansky, and Doug West would have had a tough time finding a fourth for bridge if they had been together during the interviewing period.

As the press moved around the room, studiously avoiding Villanova, Plansky nudged West. “The ’Neers are out in force today,” he said. “We’ll bring them back, though.”

’Neers is a Villanova expression, short for “Wagoneers.” Wagoneers as in Bandwagon, as in people who jump from bandwagon to bandwagon. The Villanova bandwagon was empty in November and everyone at the school was aware of it.

In May, Massimino had called his players together after the networks had finalized their television schedules for the following winter and told them that Villanova hadn’t been selected for one network TV game for the first time in years.

“That’s where we are,” he told them. They were a little angry and very embarrassed. That was what Massimino wanted.

All summer he suspected he had a team that would surprise people. Because of the recruiting disasters and because of the previous season, the Wildcats would be picked to do very little in 1988. That was fine with Massimino.

But he knew he had a rebuilding project to do and he knew it had
to start at the top. The McLain drug debacle had left him drained the previous season. He had internalized his anger so much that friends had worried he was driving himself to a heart attack. He had to get Rollie back to being Rollie.

So, he started to eat again. His weight had dropped to 210 during 1987, not exactly thin for someone who is barely 5–8, but thinner than in the past. “I coach better,” he said, “when I’m fat.” He ate his way back up to 225.

He abandoned the pretense of being an elder statesman. He couldn’t be Dean Smith on the bench. He had to be Rollie. That meant controlled hysteria. Even in expensive clothes, Rollie had always looked disheveled during games. That was where the Danny DeVito image came from. It worked for him too. Rollie was Everyman, screaming at injustice until his hair stood on end.

There was more. He and his coaches had to work harder than they had in the past. “If we had a letter in 1987 it was ‘S,’ “he said. “S as in
soft
and
sucks
. We were soft and we sucked. That started with all of us coaches.”

It would be the same for the players. Tom Greis, who had been unable to run up and down the floor as a freshman, was ordered to lose thirty pounds. “Lose it or don’t bother showing up on October fifteenth,” was the word from Rollie, Greis lost it. Kenny Wilson, the tiny jet of a point guard, had to be more disciplined. West had to be more consistent. Plansky, the only senior starter, had to be more confident. Taylor had to be healthy after playing only five games as a freshman.

“We had good players,” Massimino said. “What we didn’t have was confidence. That had always been our trademark. On the road, in close games, we always found a way. Somewhere the year before we had lost that. We were losing the close ones. I told them whatever we did this season we were going to do it aggressively. If we lost, we lost, but we were going to go down swinging.”

When the team came together on October 15, Massimino gave them not one, but two mottoes. One was “Find a way.” The other was “The Wildcats are back.” The latter was a throwback to 1973, Massimino’s first year on the job. It made sense because this team was starting all over again.

The perception, though, was that Villanova was in trouble. That was why the ’Neers stayed away in New York. Villanova was a nonstory.
They were picked sixth or seventh in the league, depending on which poll you looked at. Some people thought they might finish ninth.

The season would begin in Hawaii, in a tough tournament that included teams like Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Baylor, Stanford, and Nebraska. The opener was against a decent Nebraska team and, if that game produced a victory, the next opponent would probably be Illinois. The third game in three days would in all likelihood be against Kansas or Iowa.

Massimino would know quickly whether his team was as good as he thought or as bad as the world thought. For now, though, he sat in the solitude of the crowded room, puffing on a cigar, looking every minute of his fifty-three years, watching the ’Neers do their work.

Across the room from Massimino sat Paul Evans. He was as much in demand as Massimino was not. Along with Syracuse, which had been picked No. 1 nationally in many polls, Evans’s Pittsburgh team was seen as a dominant factor in the Big East.

This was a new role for Evans—playing the favorite. He had always coached underdog teams in the past, first at St. Lawrence, then at Navy. But one of the reasons he had left Navy for Pittsburgh was that he wanted to be at a school where the Final Four—and the national championship—were not unreasonable goals.

For this Pitt team, even with the loss of point guard Goodson, those did not seem to be unreasonable goals. Lane, the leading rebounder in the country, was back, along with silky-smooth center Charles Smith, standout sophomore Rod Brookin and three-year starter Demetrius Gore. What’s more, Evans had recruited four excellent freshmen to go with the veterans returning from a team that had won twenty-four games the preceding season.

One of those freshmen was 6–10 Bobby Martin. It was Martin’s decision to go to Pitt, after initially committing verbally to Villanova, that had put Evans and Massimino at odds.

But the story wasn’t that simple. Evans and Massimino were bound to be at odds because of their personalities. Both were competitive men and good coaches. The similarities ended there. Massimino never made a move without his wife. Where he went, she went. They had been married for thirty years. Their five children were as much a part of the Villanova team as the Villanova team was part of the family.

Evans was completely different. It wasn’t so much that he had been married and divorced three times, because he was as devoted in his own way to his two children (one by each of his first two marriages) as Massimino was devoted to his children. It was more of an approach problem. Evans was a maverick, an ask-no-quarter, give-no-quarter guy. He had come into a league with a very definite pecking order—Commissioner Dave (Mr. Television) Gavitt was at the top along with Massimino, Thompson, and St. John’s Coach Lou Carnesecca—and said screw the pecking order. He had spoken his mind in a league where speaking your mind was frowned upon.

The older coaches didn’t think he had paid his dues. Evans thought dues-paying was for unions. And so, when Massimino accused Pittsburgh of cheating to get Bobby Martin, Evans told the press what Massimino had said. When Gavitt told Evans to be quiet, Evans told the press that Gavitt had told him to be quiet.

His bluntness was not going to win him any popularity contests. But Evans didn’t really care. The only contests he cared about were the ones on the basketball court.

Evans had always wanted to be a coach. He was born in Pennsylvania but had grown up in upstate New York with his parents, who adopted him after his natural parents died while he was an infant.

He was a good athlete, a three-sport star in football, basketball, and track. By the time he was a junior in high school, Evans knew he wanted to coach. “I had one of those career meetings with the guidance counselor at the end of my junior year and I said, ‘I want to be a coach.’ She looked at me and said, ‘But what do you want to do for a living?’ ”

He went to Ithaca College and became a dean’s list student when an ankle injury forced him to give up all sports but track. After graduation, he married his high school sweetheart and became a successful high school coach. During his second year as a coach, late in the season, he was called up to active duty by the National Guard.

His team was undefeated. Only six games were left to play. Evans didn’t mind being called up but not
now
. There was only one solution—or so he thought. He and a friend went into the weight room and, while Evans closed his eyes, his friend brought the full force of one of the weights down on Evans’s arm. They raced to the hospital for X rays. The nurse came out with a smile on her face. “Good news, Mr. Evans,” she said. “There’s no sign of a break. You should be all right in a few days.”

Evans didn’t bother trying to break the arm again. The unbroken one hurt too much.

He moved into college coaching as a freshman coach at Geneseo before getting the job at St. Lawrence, as much because he had coached some football and taught some math as anything. He was a big winner at St. Lawrence on the Division 2 level but wondered when he would get a shot at a Division 1 job. In 1979, he interviewed for the Dartmouth job but lost out to Tim Cohane. That annoyed him since he had beaten Cohane in the Division 2 playoffs two years in a row.

The following year, the Cornell job became available. The athletic director was Dick Schultz, now the executive director of the NCAA. Schultz interviewed Evans at length and told him he would be in touch. Evans finished a 22–5 season that Saturday with an easy victory over his alma mater, Ithaca, but was disappointed that Schultz wasn’t at the game.

The next day Schultz called. He was sorry but because of public relations he had decided to hire a Bob Knight assistant, Tom Miller. Evans was crushed. “I was thirty-four and I had decided a few years earlier that if I didn’t have a Division One job by the time I was thirty-five I was going to get out,” he said. “I just didn’t want to spend the rest of my life driving a bus.”

Four days after telling him he couldn’t hire him at Cornell, Schultz called Evans back. Would he be interested in the Navy job? Navy Athletic Director J. O. (Bo) Coppedge had called Schultz looking for names. Schultz had mentioned Evans.

Evans was thrilled. He never stopped to think about Navy’s complete lack of basketball tradition; about the height restrictions; about the five-year service commitment required of all graduates. “I was too stupid to know I couldn’t do it there,” he said, smiling. “I figured Knight had gotten it done at Army, why couldn’t I do it at Navy?”

It wasn’t easy. Evans’s first two teams were 9–17 and 12–14. He was criticized for trying to play an up-tempo game at a school clearly not fit to play up-tempo basketball. But Evans was putting the pieces together. His third team set an Academy record for victories by going 18–8. Evans was shocked when the NIT never noticed his team and no other schools noticed his victory total.