A Season Inside (2 page)

A few feet away, Ed Manning was being a coach. He had sat on the Kansas bench almost paralyzed during those final seconds, his heart pounding so hard he was afraid his son might hear it. Twice, Danny had gone to the foul line in the last fourteen seconds with the game in the balance. Twice, he had calmly made both free throws. When the buzzer finally went off, Ed Manning wanted to race to his son, embrace him and tell him how proud he was and how much he loved him.

But Ed Manning is an assistant basketball coach, a professional. So he did the professional thing. He went looking for the losers to shake hands, to offer condolences. Two days earlier when Kansas had beaten Duke in the semifinals, he had sought out Billy King, who, as a high school senior, had chosen to play for Duke over Kansas. When they shook hands, King had started to cry and Ed Manning knew this could easily have been his son crying those tears. He had put his arms around the losing player and comforted him.

It was a good three or four minutes into the championship celebration before father and son finally found each other. The embrace was brief, but Ed Manning said what he wanted to say: “I told you so,” he whispered, and Danny nodded because his father was one person who had never stopped believing.

On the Kansas bench, Larry Brown sat dry-eyed, surrounded by close friends and family. He had always believed Danny Manning could be this kind of basketball player, that he was good enough to carry a team to the national championship. His job, for four years, had been to convince Danny that he was that good. Brown had screamed and pleaded and cajoled. He had called Danny names and looked
him in the eye as if to say, “If you were a man, you would deck me.”

Often, Manning just pressed a button inside his head and tuned the little coach out. He was sick of the yelling, to the point where he almost ignored his mother’s advice; he had wanted to get away from his last year with the intense little coach. Only at the end did he really understand what Brown had been telling him. “The best player has to be the leader, Danny. It has to be
your
team, not
my
team. You can tell them things I can’t. Don’t worry about the past or what people say or think. Just play.”

Finally, he had just played. Brown knew that for all the x’s and o’s he had drawn, for all the pep talks he had given, the one thing he had done to bring this about was get through to Manning. Often, he had thought that would never happen. As recently as February he had screamed at Manning for not breaking up a locker-room fight. “You sit there and watch like one of the guys,” he told Manning. “Goddamn it, when are you going to realize you’re
not
one of the guys!”

Just in time, Manning realized it. And so, this night was his. Within minutes of accepting the national championship trophy, Larry Brown would be asked where he planned to coach next year. “All I want to do,” he said, “is say the words, ‘We won the national championship.’ ”

He said them and smiled, totally happy. At least for a minute.

For every bit of elation Kansas felt, Oklahoma felt pain. While the Kansas players piled on one another, the Sooners watched. They didn’t see, of course, because each of them was, in a sense, blinded by his own thoughts. Like the Jayhawks, just like every player who has ever put on a college uniform, they had fantasized themselves in that pile. To be so close, only to end up watching, is a feeling so awful that the losers usually can’t describe it. It is a little bit like being shot. At first, the shock is so great you don’t quite understand how badly you have been hurt.

Thirty-five times, the Sooners had done their victory jig. They were the outlaws, the team so strong no one could kick sand back in their faces, even though everyone was dying to do it. This team was a bully, a big, frightening, lightning-quick bully that beat you to a pulp and then jumped on you with both feet while you lay on the floor bleeding and helpless.

But now, the bully had been transformed into a group of heartbroken kids. Too often, those who merely watch say it is only a game. When you focus your mind on one thing for 173 straight days and come up two or three plays short of achieving that one thing, it is not just a game. When your life has been devoted, first and foremost, to basketball for almost as long as you can remember being alive, there is more than just a game involved.

National championship games become part of forever, especially now when everything is on tape, when the media crush is so overwhelming. If Indiana’s Keith Smart had a dollar for every time his shot, the one that beat Syracuse in 1987, had been replayed, he could buy himself a team, an arena, and a couple of cities. Manning’s postbuzzer joy and King’s tears were now part of tournament history. Neither player would forget this night, could ever forget this night, nor could anyone else who took part.

In the front row of the arena, close enough to feel the game, to almost reach out and touch the game, sat the players from Duke and Arizona. That was as close as they would come, however. The Blue Devils, in coats and ties, and the Wildcats, in shorts and jeans, all wished desperately that they were in uniform that night. Each of them had believed two days earlier that they would be playing in this game, that they were good enough to be the ones cutting down the nets, the final act of any important championship celebration.

Now, like everyone else, they were spectators. They didn’t feel the pain the Sooners felt, just a dull ache at what might have been. “All I could think,” said Arizona’s Steve Kerr, “was that we were
supposed
to be out there.”

Ironically, players from the two teams had happened upon one another the previous evening in a bar. They ended up drinking together until dawn, drawn toward each other because of shared suffering. If things had been different, they would have met in front of millions of people and there would have been no room for friendship or camaraderie. Instead, while only several dozen people watched, they drank, told jokes, and clung spiritually to one another, trying to forget.

All four teams had gone through a lot to get to Kansas City. They were the last four among 291 who started. In the end, though, only one team can feel what Kansas felt. Everyone else becomes a spectator.

But in October, when the leaves are turning and the weather is just starting to get brisk, everyone is Danny Manning or Keith Smart. Some
know they can’t be The One, not really, but they dream about it anyway. Others know they have a chance and they think about it more often. Others believe it to be their destiny. Often, they become obsessed by it.

Unlike any other sport, they all begin at the same time. The same day every year. No other sport is as precise. They all begin together, each of them pointing for the same night. Only two make it there. And, among approximately 3,500 college basketball players, no more than fifteen get to feel the oh-so-pure joy of being The Champion.

Kansas won in 1988, but it was not the only winner. Winning and losing is certainly very much a part of college basketball, as with any other sport. But to those who point each year to October 15 the way little children point to Christmas, the season is a companion, a way of life, a certainty you can cling to. To those who love the sport, the feeling each spring as the national champions celebrate is a mixed one: There is joy for the winners, sadness for the losers, and an empty feeling because the season is over.

But there is also a bright side: While the hopes of last October are six months removed, the fantasies of next October are only six months away.

Larry Brown had one of those looks on his face that Danny Manning didn’t like to see. Manning was about to escape Allen Field House, having gone through the regimen of Kansas’s annual Media Day, to spend a few hours relaxing before coming back late that evening to start the basketball season. Practice began at
exactly
12:01
A.M.
on October 15. This was a three-year-old tradition at Kansas, something Manning looked forward to because it was like a giant coming-out party. But now, the man for whom the occasion was named—“Late Night with Larry Brown”—was calling his name, and it wasn’t to tell a joke.

“When are you guys going to come over tonight?” Brown asked the best player he had ever coached.

“Don’t know, maybe about ten-thirty or so.”

Brown stiffened. “Look, Danny, you decide what time and you tell the other guys. You make sure they’re here, okay? You’re in charge.”

Manning nodded. Practice didn’t formally begin for another nine hours and already Brown was starting again. He wondered again if he hadn’t made a mistake passing up the NBA for his last year of college. But, looking around the floor, Manning saw the reasons he had stayed. In one corner, Archie Marshall was answering reporters’ questions. Eighteen months earlier, in a Final Four game against Duke, Marshall
had crashed to the floor of Reunion Arena in Dallas, his knee torn up. He had sat out the entire 1987 season, rehabilitating the knee so he could come back and play with Manning one last season.

During the springtime, when Manning was in the throes of deciding whether to return to Kansas or take the pro money, Archie Marshall had said mournfully to Manning’s mother, “Mrs. Manning, Danny’s going to turn pro and I’ll never get to play with him again.”

“Archie, don’t you worry,” Darnelle Manning had said. “I’ll take care of that.”

She had done just that. Never once had she told her son he had to stay in school or wailed about him getting his degree. But Danny knew how she felt and he wanted to play with Archie. And, he wanted another year with his dad, who was standing quietly a few feet away while Brown was telling Danny one more time that he was in charge.

Ed Manning is one of those huge men who has never felt the need to be terribly verbal. He played pro basketball for nine years, a power forward at 6–7 ½, a player who made up for a lack of natural talent with desire and hard work. His son, so much more gifted, had yet to acquire his father’s toughness. That frustrated Ed Manning at least as much as it frustrated Brown. And, on occasions when Brown and Ed Manning would yell at her son during games, Darnelle Manning would sit in the stands and think, “Why are they always yelling at that child?”

She knew the answer, just as her son knew the answer. Both coaches saw one thing in Danny Manning: greatness. Both felt an obligation to bring out that greatness. It had not been easy for any of them. Now, standing on the brink of their last season together, Brown, Ed Manning, and Danny Manning all knew this was the last time around. October 15, 1987, was an ending as well as a beginning. Once midnight struck that evening, every hour of every day would put Danny Manning closer to the end of a college career that had begun with soaring hopes three years earlier. Many of those hopes had been realized, but there were still doubts, still questions about whether Manning would ever play up to his extraordinary potential.

One thing Manning knew for certain: His coach and his father would be on him nonstop from 12:01
A.M.
until whenever.…

While Kansas was gathering for its annual party, 290 other basketball teams were doing the same thing, many of them practicing at 12:01
A.M.
, too. In the last ten years, as the money available to the sixty-four
teams that make it to the NCAA Tournament has run amok—each Final Four team received $1.1 million in 1988—more and more schools have joined Division 1 of the NCAA hoping for a piece of that huge cake.

Because it only takes twelve players to field a team and only one or two stars to have a good team, Division 1 schools come in all shapes and sizes. The Big East, considered by many the most powerful basketball conference in America, has six schools so small that they do not field Division 1 football teams. (It takes at least forty players to man a football squad, often fifty or sixty. One star, or two or three, for that matter, cannot bring glory—or a million dollars—to a football school.) Georgetown, the 1984 national basketball champion, plays football in Division 3. So does Villanova, the 1985 national basketball champion. There are Division 1 schools with gyms that can barely hold two thousand people, Division 1 schools that most people don’t even know are in Division 1. How about Radford, Akron, and Winthrop, to name a few? Or, for that matter, Baptist, Monmouth, and Florida Southern. No Orange Bowl teams in that group.

That is why, on October 15, everyone has hope. If Cleveland State can beat Indiana in the NCAA Tournament, if Arkansas–Little Rock can beat Notre Dame, if North Carolina–Charlotte can be one shot away from reaching the national title game, then anyone with twelve uniforms, two backboards, and a few basketballs can think themselves next March’s David.

At Kansas, there was no talk about David. Only about this being Manning’s last shot. “Danny’s the best player in the country,” Brown said that afternoon. “And I feel good about the way we coach.” He paused and said something coaches aren’t supposed to say. “Deep down, I’d be disappointed if we didn’t win it all. That’s the only way I’d really be satisfied: if we won the national championship.”

Brown was not the only coach and Kansas not the only school with those kinds of thoughts on that Wednesday afternoon. At Arizona, Lute Olson looked at the team that took the floor for the first day of practice and thought back four years, to his first practice in Tucson, and couldn’t help but smile. “I remembered walking off the floor after that practice and looking at my assistants and saying, ‘What have we done? What have we gotten ourselves into?’ ”

Olson had left a Top Twenty program at Iowa to take over a 4–24 Arizona team; he opted for the sun over security. The only player who had been at that first practice in 1983 who was on the floor now was Steve Kerr. Olson offered Kerr his last available scholarship that first year, largely out of desperation. He had seen Kerr playing in the Los Angeles summer league. Kerr was too slow and couldn’t jump, but he could shoot. If Olson had still been at Iowa, he wouldn’t have given Kerr a second glance. But, starting from square one, he was willing to take a chance. Even though when his wife Bobbi saw Kerr play, her reaction was, “Lute, you’ve got to be
kidding
.”