A Season Inside (19 page)

Lambiotte wanted a program that played against top-caliber teams. But obviously, he didn’t want to repeat his mistake—he wanted to go where he was going to have a good chance to play. He visited California. He liked the school and he liked the coaches. He was tempted. But it was a long way from home.

And then there was Northwestern. Foster had just completed his first season and, having gone 8–20, knew he had a major rebuilding project on his hands. Foster had recruited Lambiotte when he was at South Carolina, so he knew the family and they knew him. And, since Foster had coached Valvano in college, he could pick up a phone and ask Valvano what kind of kid Lambiotte was.

Northwestern needed players. It was in the Big Ten so the competition would certainly be there. Then, at the last minute, Lambiotte almost canceled his visit there. “I’d been on the road so much I just didn’t want to go to the airport and get on another plane. I went back in the house and said, ‘Dad, let’s just skip this. I’ll go to Cal.’ He told me to make the visit, then I could rest all I wanted.”

Lambiotte made the trip. He liked the school and the coaches. It was a lot closer to home than Cal and he liked the idea that he would still be playing in one of the best leagues in the country. “In the end, the decision was easy: good school, very good league, a good chance to play and a good coach. The only thing that worried me was how cold they said it gets here. The first time I felt this wind [they call it “The Hawk”] it cut right through me.”

The wind wasn’t the only thing that made things tough for Lambiotte. There were days in practice when Foster had to ignore him to get the team ready to play a game. “Standing and watching, knowing you aren’t going to get a shot for the rest of the day is tough,” he said. “I understand it, but it’s hard.”

And the Wildcats truly were bad. They won their first two games, against Washington–St. Louis and Rutgers, but then Duke, Foster’s old team, came to town and blew them away in the last fifteen minutes. “I had played against those guys last year,” Lambiotte said. “I tried to talk to our guys on the bench about what they could do, but really, I can’t do much except keep working and wait for next year.”

In a sense, that summed up the situation at Northwestern.

One day, watching TV, Lambiotte saw
The Jim Valvano Show
suddenly pop onto his screen. The show’s opening was full of spectacular plays by the Wolfpack. And there, skying for a dunk, was a familiar figure: Walker Lambiotte.

Sitting in his dormitory at Northwestern, Lambiotte smiled. “I guess the dunk was so awesome,” he said, “that they couldn’t part with it even though they’ve parted with me.”

He smiled for a moment, thinking about the past, even knowing it was just that—past. The future, even in the middle of a cold Chicago December, looked pretty good.

George Bush was in Iowa today. Not many people outside of his entourage really cared. Lute Olson was also here.
Everyone
cared about that.

This was the return of the prodigal son. For nine years, Olson was an icon in this state, the man who rebuilt Iowa basketball, taking the Hawkeyes to five straight NCAA Tournaments and, in 1980, the Final Four.

But in 1983, feeling as if he wasn’t appreciated by
everyone
and lured by the warm weather, Olson migrated west to Arizona. There, he had done the same kind of rebuilding job. In the meantime, after three uncomfortable years under Olson’s successor, George Raveling, when Raveling also went west (to Southern California) Iowa had hired Tom Davis. Davis had gone 30–5 in 1987 and become an immediate hero.

Now, Olson and Arizona were coming to town and the two heroes, the old and the new, would meet in Carver–Hawkeye Arena, the five-year-old jewel that had been built for Olson. It was The House That Lute Built, but now it was The House That Tom Owned.

Six hours before tip-off, Steve Kerr sat in the coffee shop of the Highlander Motel sipping a soda, a grin playing at his features. “Coach really wants this one
bad
,” he said. “I can’t remember ever seeing him quite this tight for a game. He wants to come in and show these people he knew exactly what he was doing when he left here.”

Kerr shivered slightly. “The weather alone would make me want to get out of here,” he said. “This cold [25 degrees] is bad for my knee. When we were up in Alaska it really got stiff. The same thing here. It makes me worry about what it will feel like in twenty or thirty years if it hurts now.”

For the moment, Kerr was more concerned with Iowa’s press than with his knee. Like the Wildcats, the Hawkeyes were 6–0. While Arizona had been winning the Great Alaska Shootout, Iowa had been
in Hawaii (Kerr was jealous) beating Illinois and Villanova impressively to win the Maui Classic.

To say that there was huge anticipation surrounding this game would not do it justice. Even though the game was being televised locally, scalpers were getting $100 a ticket outside the arena. Lute’s return was about as big as it gets in Iowa City; the fact that both teams were ranked in the top five only added to the drama.

Olson is not a man who likes to admit to a lot of emotion. He has classic Scandinavian looks, topped off by silver hair that never—
ever
—moves. It looks as if someone painted it on. Kerr, because he is Kerr, can joke that it is a toupee. No one else would dare kid about the Olson locks.

But this will be an emotional night for Olson. He will enter the arena uncertain about how he will be received. When Olson left here for Arizona, many Iowa fans felt jilted. They felt that after the school had built an arena that was a monument to him, he had, more or less, done a pigeon routine on it and flown off.

But Iowans are not grudge-holders. They remembered the jilting a little, but they remembered all the wins a lot. Olson, proving that he has a flair for the dramatic, waited until everyone else was in place—players, coaches, fans—before he made his entrance. Everyone in the place knew he was coming because several TV crews and a horde of photographers came backing into view just ahead of him.

As he walked out of the tunnel and into the bright lights, the reaction was a bit hesitant. A few fans hollered, “
Loot, Loot
,” the cry they used to stand and scream in unison when he made his entrance. But then, after he had walked about five steps, they all just stood up together and cheered.

Olson would not have been human if he hadn’t reacted. His face broke into a huge grin and he waved in all directions to acknowledge the cheers. “They could have been a lot less kind than that,” he said later. “I was really touched.”

Of course once the game began the cheers were all for Davis and Iowa. That this was a big game emotionally for both teams was evident right away. It took 2:45 before anyone scored. At the first TV time-out, with 15:33 left in the half, Arizona led 2–0, Tom Tolbert’s jumper being the only points. Iowa didn’t score until its tenth possession, when Ed Horton hit a free throw with 14:17 left. At the second TV time-out, with 9:48 left, it was 9–3 Arizona.

“For a while there I thought we might have a scoreless first half,” Olson joked.

Kerr, who was handling Iowa’s press just fine, couldn’t believe how tight everyone’s shooting was. These teams had both played in big games already this season, but this one seemed to have grabbed everyone by the collar.

“I was just hoping that we’d snap out of it first,” he said.

They didn’t. Iowa did, thanks to a couple of three-pointers by point guard B. J. Armstrong, and built a 22–16 lead with 3:38 left. Carver–Hawkeye Arena was shaking with noise. But Kerr, who had missed his first two shots, shook loose for a three-pointer of his own and then, at the first-half buzzer, he hit another one to give Arizona a 26–24 lead.

Kerr was so fired up that he shook his fist right in Armstrong’s face. To most, that was a very un-Kerrlike move. To Kerr, it was very Kerrlike. “He’s a hell of a player,” he said later of Armstrong. “It had been a tough half. When I hit that shot, I just wanted to say, ‘Yeah!’ so I did. The fans got all over me about it in the second half but that was fine. They were entitled.”

Kerr is not easily intimidated. Neither are his teammates. This was the kind of game that seemed destined to come down to a last shot. But in the last seven minutes—shortly after the Iowa band had played “Hava Nagila,” a crowd favorite here, during a time-out—the Wildcats took command.

Tolbert took a pretty pass from Kerr and hit to make it 50–47. Then, after a careless Armstrong pass, Tolbert scored on the break to make it 52–47. Roy Marble missed at the other end, then Sean Elliott, quiet most of the evening, hit for a 54–47 lead with 4:42 left. The Hawkeyes never got closer than three after that and Olson walked off with a 66–59 victory that he readily admitted was special.

“I think the players sensed that this one was kind of big for the old coach,” he said. “I tried to downplay the whole thing but I don’t think I fooled’ em for a second. They knew. You don’t spend nine years of your life in a place without coming back and having special feelings.”

Kerr had played superbly, scoring 15 points, handing off for 6 assists and, most remarkably, only turning the ball over once in forty minutes against the Iowa press. “Without Kerr we don’t win this game,” Olson said. “He’s the difference between us being a good team and being a special team.”

Kerr was thrilled with the win and with his play. He was also thrilled the next day when the team headed home. It was 50 degrees warmer in Tucson than in Iowa City. After a week in Alaska and three days in Iowa, Kerr had seen all the winter he wanted to see, at least for a while.

College basketball is played in many different settings. There is the hugeness of the domes, the elegance of the Dean E. Smith Center (Deandome for short) in Chapel Hill and the rowdiness of Cameron Indoor Stadium just down the road at Duke. There is the tradition of the Palestra and Madison Square Garden and the sheer noise of The Pit in Albuquerque.

But nothing is quite like The Fort. For more than thirty years, college basketball has been played in the Fort Myer Ceremonial Hall, a four thousand-seat relic of a gym with dim lights, sporadic heat, and blacked-out windows. For a long time both George Washington and American played their home games here. When GW built its own gym in the early 1970s, it moved out. But AU stayed. Now, finally, in 1988, the Eagles will move into their own on-campus arena. But the season will start at The Fort because the new place isn’t ready yet.

Poetically, one of the last games to be played in the old place will be against George Washington. “Be it ever so humble,” AU Coach Ed Tapscott says with a grin, “I just hope the Fort Myer jinx is at work tonight.”

GW is 5–1 and on a roll. American is 2–3 and struggling.

Often, just getting a game started at The Fort is an adventure. The last time these two schools played here was two years ago, just two days after the Beirut bombings that had killed many American Marines. Normally, to get on the base one just drives to the main gate and is waved through by a saluting officer. But in the aftermath of the bombings, every car was being stopped and checked and everyone was being asked for ID, including all the players on both team buses.

The game began in a virtually empty building with no PA announcer, a missing referee, and one statistician. Tonight, that isn’t a problem. Driving through the gate, one is struck by the contrasting sights: There is barbed wire on the left side of the road but if you look
beyond it you can see a breathtaking panorama of the nation’s capitol all lit up with Christmas lights.

Parking is in the lot across the street from the Officer’s Club and the main entrance is across from the movie theater. The movie tonight is
Revenge of the Nerds II
.

There are, according to the official attendance figures, 1,284 people in the Ceremonial Hall, many of them GW fans. It is just as easy for GW people to hike across the river as it is for AU people. But things are looking up for the Eagles: Their band has actually found the place for the first year in memory and three of their cheerleaders are cute. Very cute in fact. This is a major upset in itself.

Fortunately for everyone involved, it is not that cold out. There have been nights in The Fort where one could see one’s breath at tip-off. One year, back when Georgetown still deigned to play American, John Thompson took his team into the locker room and refused to come out until the gym warmed up. Another year, a sliding door got stuck—open—before a game while concessions were being brought in and the game was played with a windchill factor well below freezing. AU won the toss that night and elected to kick and take the wind.

Tonight, the only real problem is with the forty-five-second clock. The four is a nine on the clock so the officials have to explain that ninety-five seconds actually means forty-five seconds.

Everyone agrees that’s just fine. At The Fort this is a very minor problem. The Jinx is evident early. AU falls behind 4–0 but then thirteen minutes into the game, roars back to lead 22–10. GW Coach John Kuester is beside himself, not sure who to rage at, his team, the officials, or The Jinx. The Colonials rally to within 32–24 at halftime and come back ready to make a run after the intermission.

There’s one problem, though. Both forty-five-second clocks have gone out completely. The man in charge of fixing the problem is Dick Myers, AU’s assistant athletic director. Once, Dick Myers was the assistant general manager of the Washington Redskins. That is a long way from fixing a forty-five-second clock in an Army base not named after you. It takes twenty-five minutes to get one clock functioning.

“Just another night at The Fort,” says AU Sports Information Director Terry Cornwall.

It is a bad night for Kuester and his team. They tie the game at 38–38, but with the score 48–45, the Eagles go on a binge, outscoring GW 12–4 for a 60–49 lead with 5:30 left. At one point, three GW
students become so frustrated that when referee Tom Fraim makes a call against their team, they jump off the bleachers and surround Fraim, waving their arms and yelling. Fraim isn’t pleased. One of them is escorted out.