A Season Inside (3 page)

Lute wasn’t kidding, he was desperate. And so Steve Kerr landed at Arizona. No one, not Kerr, not Olson, could imagine the extraordinary story Kerr would write there. Midway through his freshman year, Kerr’s father was assassinated in Beirut, shot twice in the head as he stepped off an elevator on his way to work. Two nights later, because he thought that was what his father would have wanted, Kerr played against Arizona State.

He broke down during a pregame moment of silence, but when he came into the game he hit his first shot—and ended up scoring 12 points during an easy Wildcat victory. From that day forward, Kerr was Tucson’s adopted son. He became a starter as a sophomore, an all-Pacific 10 player as a junior, and made the World Championship team coached by Olson during the summer of 1986. Late in the Americans’ semifinal game against Brazil, Kerr went up to pass, came down wrong, and landed writhing in pain, his knee torn up.

The initial diagnosis was simple: torn ligaments, a probable career-ending injury. Kerr cried that night, but he never gave up. He went through reconstructive surgery, spent the winter rehabilitating the knee and the summer getting back into playing shape. Now, as practice began, the knee felt fine and Kerr was eager, though nervous since it had been fifteen months since he had played in a real game.

In West Lafayette, Indiana, the trepidation on opening day had nothing to do with injuries, although Troy Lewis, Purdue’s leading scorer in 1987, had broken his foot in early September. Lewis would be fine long before the season began.

But Lewis knew, as did fellow seniors Todd Mitchell and Everette Stephens, that this was going to be a difficult season. During their first
three years at Purdue, the Boilermakers had won sixty-seven games. They had played in three NCAA Tournaments. They had been Big Ten cochampions in 1987 along with Indiana, the Bob Knight-coached team that had gone on to win the national championship.

Each March, however, Purdue had come up shy: a first-round loss to Auburn in 1985, a first-round loss to Louisiana State in 1986, a second-round loss to Florida in 1987. In ’85, they had been freshmen, a young team just learning. Okay. In ’86, they had been sent to play at LSU, an unfair draw since they were seeded higher than the Tigers. They lost in overtime. Okay. But in ’87 they played Florida in Syracuse, a perfectly reasonable place against a beatable team. They lost by 20.

No excuses were left. And Coach Gene Keady had made it clear all summer that he was miserable about the way the ’87 season had ended—a 36-point loss to Michigan in the regular-season finale, ending their chance to win the Big Ten outright, didn’t help Keady’s mood—and that the three seniors had better show from day one that they were going to be the leaders of this team. Keady wanted to make damn sure they weren’t going to accept any more March failures. He wasn’t.

“We know,” Todd Mitchell said, “that nothing we do before March really matters. We’ve done everything else. We’re going to be judged on one thing this season, the NCAA Tournament. That’s fine with us. That’s the way it should be.”

But already, even before the first practice began, there were tensions. There were two other seniors on the team, Jeff Arnold and Dave Stack, who were academically ineligible to play. When Keady had called the senior trio that August to ask them how they felt about the situation, their answer had been unanimous and blunt: Get rid of them. Arnold and Stack, in their minds, had been in trouble almost from day one at Purdue. They really didn’t deserve another chance.

Keady thought the team needed Arnold, who was 6–10 and could rebound coming off the bench. “One more chance,” he told the seniors.

Okay, they thought, one more chance. Arnold and Stack were at practice that first day. It was the beginning of their last chance.

The tension that existed as practice began at Villanova was very different from Purdue. Rollie Massimino, the little coach who had become a megastar almost overnight in his championship season of 1985, had been through the worst season of his coaching life in 1987.

His team wasn’t very good. The final record had been 15–16. But that was only a small part of the problem. In December, Massimino had learned that Gary McLain, the starting point guard on that miraculous 1985 team, was in the process of selling a story to
Sports Illustrated
in which he confessed, at length, to having used and sold cocaine while at Villanova. Even worse, McLain claimed in the story that Massimino had been aware of the problem but had never done anything beyond warning him to stop. The implication was that Massimino didn’t want to deal with McLain’s addiction just so long as McLain continued to play well.

Given a choice between being accused of that kind of exploitation or of having both his hands cut off, Massimino would have willingly given up his hands. Always, he had prided himself on the family atmosphere he had created at Villanova, not just because his players graduated but because even after they left, they were still part of Villanova and Villanova basketball. This was a coach who got his players up at 5:30 in the morning during preseason to work out, and then gave them milk and cookies after the workout.

Now, for a price, Gary McLain was going to tell the world Rollie Massimino
didn’t
care, that he was just another coach who cared only about winning. It would be March before the story appeared. But Massimino knew in December. He told no one. “We noticed something was wrong with him,” said Mark Plansky, a junior on that team. “He wasn’t himself. The emotion just wasn’t there. But we had no idea what it was.”

Massimino is known as the Danny DeVito of coaches. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of dollars he spends on clothes, he always ends up looking like an unmade bed at the end of a game. “He starts the game looking great,” his son R. C. once said, “but by halftime he’s sort of unraveled.”

Not in 1987. Massimino might as well have been Tom Landry on the bench. “I was,” he remembered, “a mannequin.”

When the story broke, his players and friends understood why he had been so distracted all season. Just before publication, Massimino talked to McLain. “He told me, ‘Coach, I’m doing this to help kids. Nothing will happen to you or the program because you are too big.’ ”

That was a little hard for Massimino to swallow since McLain had only told his story in return for a lot of money—about $20,000. But he had to live with it and deal with it.

“The whole thing was scary,” Massimino said. “Honest to God, I swear on my five children, if I had known, I would have tried to help him. I always tell our guys that if they have a problem and they come to me, I’ll help them. But if I catch them, they’re history.

“I always thought I knew my people and my kids. This time I didn’t. I take responsibility for that but it hurt me to think anyone could believe I would know what was going on and not do anything about it.”

A press conference was called to respond to the McLain story. For an hour beforehand, Massimino sat in his office with university lawyers poring through a carefully worded statement, rehearsing what to say and what not to say. Finally, it all kicked in.

“I got up, ran out of the office and said I couldn’t do this,” he remembered. “I went into [Assistant Coach] Steve Lappas’s office and I sat down and I cried. It all just got to me at once. Then I walked back in and I said, ‘Forget the speech, I’m just gonna go out there like I always have and say what I think. I’ve been Rollie for thirty-two years in this business and that’s who I still am.’ ”

So he went out and talked about how much it hurt. And, when he was finished, he said he only wished Gary McLain well. Later, that summer, he helped get him a tryout with a team in Holland. A lot of Massimino’s friends were furious with him for helping McLain. “He’s still one of my kids,” Massimino said in reply.

But now it was October. The 15–16 team was back, minus leading scorer Harold Jensen. Recruiting had been a disaster: One player reneged on a verbal commitment and had gone to Pittsburgh and one decided at the last minute to play baseball.

A few people picked Villanova as high as fifth in the Big East. A few more picked the Wildcats as low as ninth. The consensus: sixth or seventh. “The thought of being mediocre scares me,” Massimino admitted. “But I’ve always said the real guy comes out under adversity. Maybe I needed a shock like last year. Maybe it had all gotten a little too easy.

“I’ve told this team our job this season is simple: Find a way. I told them they
better
find a way. Because if we finish seventh in the league, they’ll find me in the Schuylkill River.”

One person who would not have minded seeing Villanova finish seventh—or lower—in the Big East was Paul Evans. Across the state from Philadelphia, Evans was assembling a very talented team at Pittsburgh. In his first season at Pitt, 1987, after moving there from Navy, Evans had put together a 24–9 record, tying for first place in the Big East.

This was no small accomplishment for what was largely the same team that had been 15–14 the previous year. Evans had come in vowing that the talented, undisciplined team would become a disciplined one or heads would roll. On the very first day he ran a practice at Pittsburgh, Evans threw Jerome Lane out of practice. The two fought most of that year, but when it was over Lane had become the first player under 6–7 to lead the nation in rebounding since Elgin Baylor, thirty years earlier.

But as he was earning respect for his coaching abilities, Evans was doing very little to win friends or influence people around the Big East. Evans is, to put it mildly, outspoken. What he thinks he says and if people don’t like it, tough. When Bobby Martin, a talented 6–10 high school center, changed his mind about his verbal commitment to Villanova and signed with Pitt, Massimino was angry and unhappy. When he made that unhappiness public, Evans lashed back at him, accusing him of doing a lousy recruiting job.

That began a war of words that would continue through the summer and only get worse during 1988.

Evans didn’t want a running feud with Massimino any more than Massimino wanted one with him. But neither man was about to back down from the other. The troubles with Massimino did not affect Evans’s coaching. But they didn’t make life any simpler for him. And this promised to be a difficult year. He had been a successful Division 2 coach at St. Lawrence, a highly lauded coach for six years at Navy, and surprisingly successful during his first year at Pitt.

Now, Pitt was being picked first by many in the Big East. It was in most top fives around the nation. With Lane, Charles Smith, Demetrius Gore, and Rod Brookin back, along with a very strong freshman class, the Panthers’ potential seemed unlimited.

But it was not that simple. Even before practice began, Evans had lost his starting point guard from the previous year, Michael Goodson, to academic troubles. Goodson was one of those kids plenty smart enough to do the work, but too cool to take the time. That left Evans with a choice between a former walk-on, Mike Cavanaugh, or a freshman, Sean Miller, at point guard. He would eventually choose Miller,
but starting a season with Final Four dreams with a freshman running your team was not exactly ideal.

“People are picking us too high,” Evans insisted, sounding like any coach dealing with high expectations. “We’re experienced in some areas but too inexperienced in others. If we had Goodson, it would be different. But we don’t.”

For much of his coaching career, Evans had been the underdog. Now, he was the favorite. It would be a new experience for him. It would not be an easy or a pleasant one either.

If Evans needed lessons in how to deal with attention, he might have picked up a phone and called Jim Valvano. In 1983, Valvano had become as big a name as there was in basketball when he took a North Carolina State team that had finished third in the Atlantic Coast Conference all the way to the national championship. It was a feat similar to the one that Massimino would perform two years later, but Valvano did it first.

And he did it with remarkable flair. The night before his team played in the national semifinals against Georgia, Valvano, pouring sweat from a fever, won a dance contest in Albuquerque. Then, in the final, the Wolfpack, given no chance against a great Houston team led by Akeem Olajuwon, not only won the game 54–52 but did it on a miracle shot at the buzzer, Lorenzo Charles snatching Dereck Whittenburg’s woefully short desperation shot out of the air and dunking it, to end the game.

That shot and the aftermath, Valvano running from corner to corner of the court trying to find people to hug, was rerun more times than all the episodes of
I Love Lucy
combined. If Valvano had been boring, those few moments would have made him a star.

And Valvano was not boring. He was funny, hilariously funny. He loved to talk—especially when he was being paid a lot of money for talking. He marketed himself and his championship into a business worth $750,000 a year. Huge money for speaking and clinics; radio and TV shows out the wazoo. Shoe and clothing contracts, outside businesses. Want a statue commemorating the accomplishment of a great athlete? Call JTV Enterprises.