A Season Inside (24 page)

Whittenburg came back the last week of the regular season. In the ACC Tournament, playing each game as if their NCAA bid was at stake—which it certainly was in the first two rounds—the Wolfpack beat Wake Forest by one, shocked North Carolina in overtime, and stunned Virginia and Sampson in the final. They had won the ACC Tournament and reached the NCAAs. Nice season, Coach.

It would have ended exactly that way if Pepperdine had made its free throws in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. State, down six
with a minute left, won in double overtime. Then, in the second round, heavily favored Nevada–Las Vegas missed
its
free throws and State won by one. A routine win over Utah and another miracle victory over Virginia—with Sampson somehow
not
taking the last shot with his team down one and his career on the line—and State was in the Final Four.

Great season, Coach.

But Valvano wasn’t done. The Wolfpack beat Georgia in the semifinals, setting up a final against a Houston team that had looked unbeatable—and had not been beaten—since December. “Have you got a chance, Jim?” they asked him the day before the game.

“We’ve got a better chance than all the teams that aren’t here,” he answered.

State jumped to an 8–0 lead. Houston came back and led by six late in the game. But Houston Coach Guy Lewis, who should be on top of Valvano’s Christmas list every year, held the ball, waiting for his players to be fouled, even though his team couldn’t shoot free throws. The Cougars missed and missed from the free throw line, State tied and finally had the last shot. Whittenburg’s forty-foot bomb was so short that only teammate Lorenzo Charles could touch it, leaping over everyone to dunk at the buzzer for a 54–52 victory.

Valvano raced around like a mad dervish, hugged everyone jammed into The Pit, and became a superstar. He made money so fast he didn’t have time to count it. Everyone wanted Jimmy V. to speak. Everyone wanted to hear him tell the story about Charles’s dunk. Everyone wanted a piece of him and Jimmy V. gave—for a price.

Even though State stayed good, reaching the final eight two of the next three years, the critics said he wasn’t spending enough time coaching. He flew off one weekend after a loss in Louisville to do the color on an NBC game in Champaign, Illinois. “He doesn’t care enough,” they howled.

Then he became athletic director, too. When the Knicks job opened up, some of his friends figured he would take the job, keep coaching at State, be the athletic director, continue all his TV and radio shows, do all his speeches, and perhaps, just to fill time, run for governor of North Carolina.

What the critics could not understand was that Valvano needs almost every minute of every day filled. He does not waste a lot of time sleeping and he is in constant need of a challenge—especially mental.
He is a voracious reader. On this trip to Hawaii he had brought along Mikhail Gorbachev’s
Perestroika
.

“I’m convinced that if we got into a war with them, they’d kick our butts,” he said one night. “They’re smarter than we are.”

Valvano loves coaching. And he hates coaching. He loves the games—on court. And he hates the games—off court. He really enjoys his players. And he hates going through the recruitment that gets them to State. He loves attention and being in the limelight. He hates not being able to spend time alone with his family for eight months of the year.

Jimmy V. will be forty-two in March. He knows, he says, he won’t be coaching at fifty. But what will he do? TV commentary doesn’t challenge him. He might like to work in Hollywood full-time, but wouldn’t that become shallow in a hurry?

He knows he is a very good coach. But he also knows he could be better if he was more driven. But if he was more driven would he be happy? He looks around at the driven coaches at the top of his sport and has no desire to follow in their footsteps.

For now, though, he is in Hawaii for a week he considers very important to his team. The first game is against Creighton. “The way we’re playing right now,” he says, “we could lose to anyone.”

Spoken like a true coach.

Although the Rainbow Classic has lost some luster because of the springing up in recent years of one tournament after another in Hawaii—UH will host three other tournaments itself this season—it is still
the
basketball event in Hawaii.

The tournament begins each year with a dinner at the luxurious Kahala Hilton Hotel, which is on the far side of Diamond Head away from the sprawl of hotels on Waikiki.

Because Hawaii basketball has fallen on hard times (the Rainbows are 1–7 entering the tournament), the hope for the host team going into the tournament is that it can win a game. The last time Hawaii won a tournament game was in 1984, and that was against Cornell. This year, the first-round opponent is Mississippi State, hand-picked because of a 7–21 record a year ago. But Mississippi State has a young, aggressive team and is 7–0, although Coach Richard Williams is quick to point out that the Bulldogs haven’t played anybody.

It still sounds like a tough game for Hawaii. “All we’re hoping,” says Jim Leahey, the master of ceremonies at the dinner, “is that Hawaii gets to play at night after the first round this year.”

The tournament’s consolation games are played in the afternoon.

Each coach is allotted three minutes to talk about his team. Valvano talks for ten. He introduces the crowd to a Mr. Fujita, who is the director of the three-team tournament held in Japan every December. “Please stand up, Mr. Fujita,” Valvano says, waving his arms at him to stand. Fujita stands. “Mr. Fujita is here looking for teams for next year’s tournament. He speaks no English. Right now, he thinks I am Dean Smith and we’re in. I have instructed all my players to only answer to the name J.R.”

Denny Crum from Louisville and Dave Bliss from SMU, both victims of Chaminade three years ago, say the same thing. “It’s great to be here, especially since we don’t have to play Chaminade.”

The Hawaii people, who won’t even schedule Chaminade, don’t laugh. Everyone else does. When you are 1–7, nothing seems that funny.

When the dinner is over, Valvano and his entourage head for a bar, where a group called The Love Notes is playing sixties music. They sit at a table right at the foot of the stage, a group of twelve that includes Pam Valvano, the assistant coaches and Valvano’s “host” for the tournament, Jeff Portnoy.

There are few things in life that Valvano enjoys more than oldies. He knows the words to every song and is singing along with the band—loudly. Pam, who is a good deal more decorous than her husband, thinks he should stop singing so noisily.

“Come on Pam,” Valvano says, “this is our past. You should sing too.”

Pam isn’t going to sing. But Jim is, late into the night. When the band plays “At the Hop,” Valvano jumps to his feet. “I used to have them play that song when my team came on the floor at Johns Hopkins,” he yells.

The band takes a break. The band members, five of them from New York, come over and Portnoy introduces them to Valvano. Valvano is nostalgic. “When I was dating Pam in college I used to spend all my money calling her on weekends,” he says. “The rest, anything I had left, I was saving for a ring. I never really asked her to marry me. When we were seniors, I just gave her the money, six hundred dollars, and her
uncle got us a ring. He worked in the diamond district. Can that really be twenty-one years ago?”

It can. The band starts again and Valvano is singing again. The music goes on until 1
A.M.
, but Valvano is still going when the bar is closing. “I’m really a good dancer, you know,” he says—Pam is rolling her eyes again.

He turns to Portnoy. “Do you know how to do the stroll? Here, let me show you.” He grabs Portnoy by the arm and, while tourists walk by giving them funny looks, he stands in the doorway leading out of the bar demonstrating the dance.

“I think I’ve got it,” Portnoy says.

“Nah, no way,” Valvano says.

He grabs Pam by the arm. “Come on, honey, let’s go to bed. These guys will keep us out all night if we don’t.”

Pam just nods. She has heard all of this before. She thinks her husband is quite silly—but also quite adorable. And she knows by morning he will have forgotten the dancing lessons and be worrying once again about Shackleford.

The Rainbow Classic opened on a Sunday night with a surprisingly large crowd of 2,703 in Blaisdell Arena.

Blaisdell is a story in itself. It rises out of downtown Honolulu like the humpback of a white whale, very out of place among the tourist stops, especially since it is barely a mile from Waikiki. It was built in 1964, one year after Red Rocha became the coach at Hawaii. Then it was a showplace with its 8,800 seats. Rocha built a powerful program at Hawaii, peaking in 1971 and 1972 when his team won twenty-three and twenty-four games. They called that team “The Fabulous Five,” and Blaisdell was almost always packed when the Rainbows played.

The arena has aged now, decaying, it seems, along with Hawaii basketball. But it still has its charms. To enter, one must cross a stream that runs around the building like a moat. On one side, one can see the mountains that cut through the middle of Oahu. On another side, one can see Diamond Head.

But what really makes Blaisdell unique is the kind of basketball played inside. All year, top college basketball teams play in packed arenas, usually on frigid evenings. In Blaisdell, they play in front of
small, often tiny crowds while most people on the island bask on the beach.

As the host team Hawaii had chosen to play a team, Mississippi State, it figured to beat. There was a problem though. Although Richard Williams was starting four freshmen, the Bulldogs were not without talent. What’s more, Williams, who was in his second year coaching at the school, had managed to convince his young team that it could win. For a half, Hawaii played excellent basketball, leading 30–21 at the intermission. But Mississippi State shook its jitters in the second half, held Hawaii to 22 percent shooting, and pulled away to win the game, 68–55.

For Hawaii, this was just the kind of loss that kept attendance and interest dwindling. Once, the Rainbows had a TV contract. It was gone. The only reason they still had a radio contract was that they tied their football deal to basketball. Riley Wallace, who had been hired because he “understood” Hawaii basketball, had a lot of work to do.

“Television is killing us,” he said. “Kids want to go where they’re going to be on TV. In the old days we could recruit on the East Coast, convince kids to come here and get out of the cold weather. Now, they all want to play in the Big East. They all want to visit, but very few of them want to come.”

Image had hurt Hawaii too. During Larry Little’s tenure—he had been the last coach with a winning record when he won seventeen games in 1983—it had come out that very few Hawaii basketball players were getting anywhere close to a degree. “It was exaggerated,” Little said. “Out of the kids who completed four years, we had close to 60 percent graduation.”

Note the words “completed four years.” Most players at UH weren’t lasting four years. They would come in, play a year or two, enjoy the sun, and move on. “We run into a lot in recruiting,” Wallace said. “It isn’t just the long trip or lack of attention. We actually lose kids because people tell them about demons and volcanoes exploding. It’s rough.”

Certainly it couldn’t be much rougher for Riley Wallace than it was for Richard Williams, whose job was to convince players that they wanted to spend four years in Starkville, Mississippi. Williams was different from a lot of previous coaches at the school, though. He had played at Mississippi State and he didn’t see the job as just a stopping-off point on his way somewhere else.

“I’ve got the job I want,” he said. “Now all I have to do is convince
people they want to play for us.” He laughed. “I know it isn’t easy. [Alabama Coach] Wimp Sanderson told me that the most exciting thing that goes on in Starkville is when they unload the Kroger trucks at midnight. It’s all right though, we’ll find a way.”

Beating Hawaii is no small victory for Mississippi State. It gives Williams’s team eight victories—one more than the year before. Still, his team is picked tenth in the Southeast Conference. “Once we leave here, there isn’t a game on the schedule I can look at and say we can definitely win it,” Williams said. “Ever since we got here, everyone’s been telling me to enjoy myself, spend time on the beach and all. I can’t do it. Yesterday, I walked down to the beach, looked at the water and said, ‘The hell with this.’ I went back to the room and looked at some more tape.”

The work has paid off with one victory. The trip, for Williams and Mississippi State, is already a success.

While the tournament was opening, Valvano and his team, given the first night off, were at Sea Life Park for the evening. Valvano was fighting the flu and still worrying about Shackleford. During the show, one of the acts was a Hawaiian woman who picked people out of the audience to teach them the hula. Naturally, confronted with the 6–10 Shackleford and 6–8 Avie Lester, she couldn’t resist grabbing them and pulling them onto the stage.

Within five minutes, she had Lester doing a respectable hula. Shackleford struggled, drawing hoots from his teammates. “See that,” Valvano said. “He just doesn’t concentrate. I ought to go tell that woman that now she knows what I put up with every day.”

Twenty-four hours later, when State played Creighton, Shackleford wasn’t in the starting lineup. He had been five minutes late for a team meeting. Lester, who had been offering people hula lessons all day, started in his place. Shackleford came in and played 28 minutes, scoring 14 points and getting 12 rebounds. Valvano was pleased—slightly. The Wolfpack won easily, 86–55. It would play Louisville the next night. That was the game Valvano wanted to win.

The Cardinals, coming off the disastrous 18–14 season and their awful opener against Notre Dame, were starting to come on. Pervis Ellison was playing hard again and LaBradford Smith was truly a gifted freshman. Louisville has such a fanatic following that in addition to several hundred fans with them in Hawaii, all their games were being televised back home, even though the time difference meant they
started at close to midnight. The two Louisville TV men did the telecasts in red-and-white aloha shirts. Jim Leahey, doing the local telecast of the final in Hawaii, worked in a jacket and tie.