A Season Inside (30 page)

This was a cheap shot. DeVoe had been divorced and was remarried. But that certainly had nothing to do with basketball or recruiting. Before the game on January 13th, DeVoe and Brown talked. “I should have called to apologize,” Brown said.

DeVoe shrugged him off. “Dale, I just think you’re wrong recruiting this way. You make us all look like prostitutes. It’s bad for the whole profession. And you know what else? You don’t need to do it. You’re a damn good coach.”

Brown was certainly a good coach that night. With Tennessee leading 51–44 and a little more than two minutes left, it looked like the Vols had a victory wrapped up. But the Tigers held them scoreless the rest of the game and pulled out a 52–51 victory that left twenty thousand Tennessee fans in shock. DeVoe too. He tossed and turned all night, replaying the last two minutes in his mind over and over again.

“That’s exactly the kind of game we’ve been losing the last few years,” he said, pulling his car safely into a restaurant parking lot without any further trouble with the law. “We had a big game won and then, somehow, we find a way to lose it. We go from being on top of the world to somewhere underneath it. You just can’t lose games like that.”

The timing hurt too. Tennessee had its roughest weekend of the season coming up right after LSU; a trip Saturday to Kentucky followed by a game Sunday at Illinois. It would take a Herculean effort just to stay in those games and now the team was going into them depressed.

It showed. Kentucky, pressuring Tennessee’s guards every step of the way blew to a big first-half lead and cruised to an easy victory. The next day at Illinois, things didn’t get any better. The Illini overpowered the Volunteers, DeVoe, frustrated, drew two technical fouls in the second half.

“We were never in either game,” DeVoe said. “I just didn’t do a very good job of getting the team ready to play over the weekend. The LSU thing definitely lingered with all of us. At our very best it would have been hard for us to win either one of those games. But we weren’t even close to our best. When we aren’t near our best, teams like that are going to make us look bad.”

So now, Tennessee stood 9–4 with Auburn, a team that had just beaten Florida and Kentucky, coming to town that evening. DeVoe is a man who does not get down very easily. He is almost always upbeat and gets excited talking about his basketball team. But as he sat eating a club sandwich for a game-day lunch, he sounded like a man searching for a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

“It just boggles my mind to think that I can’t get this team playing well enough to get the wolves off my doorstep,” he said. “A week ago, we were the big men in this town, sitting at 9–1. Now, we’re a bunch of dogs. LSU was a killer. We sent twenty thousand people home angry. Tonight, the boo-birds will be out. I always say that’s just fine, let ’em boo just so long as they keep coming out. But it is frustrating when you have a team that does some things well, then does some other things so poorly. There’s just no consistency.”

The only consistency at Tennessee seemed to be in the luck department—all of it bad. The latest mishap, hardly a minor one, had occurred the night after the victory in the SEC opener over Mississippi. Rickey Clark, a freshman whose play had prompted DeVoe to seriously consider moving him into the starting lineup, had gone out with a group of friends and ended up out late in a Knoxville bar.

Clark and his friends were drinking and they weren’t alone. An argument started. Clark ended up in the men’s room with a couple of antagonists. Outnumbered, he reached for what he thought was a beer bottle sitting on a wall. It was a broken beer bottle, the jagged edges
hanging loose. Clark put his hand practically through the jagged edges, ripping it open.

“He was lucky he didn’t hurt himself worse than he did,” DeVoe said. “As it was, he tore tendons in the hand, lost a huge amount of blood. And it still could have been worse than it was.”

It was bad enough that Clark was through for the season. DeVoe, in need of every break he could get, was only getting bad ones.

There was also the continuing problem of Doug Roth, the one-time prodigy center. DeVoe had come to understand that, because of his vision problem and a lack of quickness, Roth was never going to be a great player. But there were things Roth could be doing, DeVoe thought, that he wasn’t. Like taking the ball aggressively to the basket.

“We throw the ball in to Doug, he catches it, but instead of going to the basket, he just throws it back out,” DeVoe said. “We’ve played thirteen games and he’s shot ten free throws. That just shouldn’t be with a guy his size who also has good hands.

“I still look at our guys and think we can win eighteen or twenty games, get this thing turned back around. But other times, I wonder. It’s a battle just getting them to battle.”

DeVoe had talked to his wife, Ana, about the possibility of having to leave Tennessee. Since she was from Knoxville, she was not thrilled about the possibility. But Ana DeVoe is a religious woman. When her husband talked about getting fired, she would often tell him that, either way, it was God’s will and he should accept it.

DeVoe laughed when his wife said this. “I wish,” he said, “God would will us some wins.”

It was ironic that Auburn was in town at such a crucial time. Years ago, Auburn Coach Sonny Smith had been DeVoe’s top assistant at Virginia Tech. Now, with DeVoe in trouble, one name being mentioned as a possible replacement was Sonny Smith, who had been born and raised in East Tennessee. DeVoe heard the same rumors everyone else heard. But he wasn’t about to lose his sense of humor. In fact, he clung to it like a life raft.

Shortly before tip-off that night, Smith walked up behind DeVoe. He put his arm around him and said, “I’d like to wish you luck tonight, but the hell with you.”

DeVoe laughed. “You better be nice to me,” he said. “You may need a job someday.”

“Would you take me back?” Smith asked.

“Hell no,” said DeVoe.

If he was tight, it didn’t show. His prediction about the boo-birds was half right. Many of the 20,380 who had bought tickets for the game didn’t show up. The actual turnstile count was 14,771—almost six thousand people had paid
not
to see the game. Those who came didn’t do much booing, but they didn’t do much cheering either. Thompson-Boling Arena had the atmosphere of a bright orange mausoleum.

If it bothered the Volunteers, they didn’t show it. They raced to an early 13–4 lead with Roth nailed to the bench. DeVoe had decided that it was time to be aggressive with Roth in order to try to get him to be aggressive. The first eighteen minutes could not have gone much better for the home team. With the exception of 6–11 freshman Andy Geiger, Auburn was cold. When Dyron Nix hit a fall-away baseline jumper with 1:58 left to make it 40–29, the once-silent crowd was suddenly alive and noisy.

But careless basketball the last two minutes allowed the Tigers to close the margin to 40–33 at halftime. Given that impetus, they came out of the locker room and promptly scored the first six points of the second half to cut the margin to 40–39. Nix hit two foul shots to stop the 10–0 run, but Geiger made a gorgeous spinning lay-up, was fouled, and tied the game at 42–42 with his free throw.

Tennessee was in trouble. With the score tied at 44, Derrick Dennison hit a jumper after a Nix miss to make it 46–44. A moment later Travis Henry, one of the favorite targets of the boo-birds—his nickname among many fans is Travesty Henry—turned the ball over. When Chris Morris of the Tigers swished a three-pointer, it was 49–44 with 11:37 left.

Silence would have sounded golden to DeVoe at this moment. The boos were coming from all over. The Auburn run was 20–4, going back to the first half. If the Volunteers folded here, the season could become a very long one for everyone.

They didn’t fold. Down 54–51, Nix made a steal for a lay-up to cut the lead to 54–53. Ian Lockhart, who had been as far down the bench as Roth during the first half, hit a jumper in the lane and Tennessee had the lead back, 55–54. He hit again thirty seconds later to make it 57–54.

DeVoe had tried some zone defense to sag on Geiger earlier in the half. But now he had his team playing man-to-man, and the players were playing it for dear life. Chris Morris missed with Nix in his face,
then Nix came down and drilled one to make it 59–54. When Lockhart scored his third basket in ninety seconds, it was 61–54 and Smith took a time-out. The crowd had changed direction once again and, as Tennessee set up on defense, DeVoe turned and waved his arms to the crowd. They responded.

A few seconds later, Roth actually caught the ball in the low post, turned and shot—and was fouled. DeVoe was jumping up and down with excitement now. Down the stretch, Roth suddenly wanted the ball inside. He went to the line seven times during the last five minutes and helped ice the 75–64 victory.

DeVoe heaved a huge sigh of relief and walked off with a win he knew he had to have. Still, the tension he was feeling showed through in the postgame press conference. When Ron Bliss of the Kingsport
Times-News
, a reporter who had been critical of DeVoe at times, asked about the switch to man-to-man that had turned the game around, DeVoe said to him, “Give me credit for that one, Ron, okay? You get on my ass enough times, give me credit when I do something right.”

He stopped. “I’m just joking, Ron, you say what you want. I’m coaching this team right now and that’s something you’ll never have a chance to do.”

This was not typical DeVoe. But these were not typical days. They were tough ones, with or without the Knoxville police.

In the annals of college basketball, among the thousands and thousands of games that have been played, one stands out as more meaningful, more important, more significant than all the rest.

It was played on March 18, 1966, in Cole Field House on the campus of the University of Maryland. On that night, tiny Texas Western College defeated all-powerful Kentucky, 72–65, to win the NCAA basketball tournament. What made the game significant was not that Texas Western beat oh-so-lordly Kentucky. What made it important was that Texas Western did it with five black players in the starting lineup. It would be five more years before Kentucky Coach Adolph Rupp would recruit a black player.

That game marked a turning point in the history of the game. Until
then, very few southern schools had recruited black players. Most schools that did recruit had quotas. You could have only so many blacks on your team and you could put only so many on the floor at once.

Texas Western changed all that. It didn’t happen overnight. In fact, even now, in 1988, there are southern coaches who will tell you they wouldn’t dare start five blacks. But it did happen.

Adolph Rupp, who won four national championships, the last in 1958, never made it back to the Final Four. Kentucky forced him into retirement when he turned seventy in 1973 and he died several years later. The man who beat him that night, the man who profoundly changed college basketball, has never been back to the Final Four either.

But Don Haskins still coaches. He hasn’t changed schools in twenty-seven years, although his school has changed names. Texas Western is now the University of Texas at El Paso, and the man they call “The Bear” is still churning out twenty-victory seasons and getting his team into the NCAA Tournament more often than not.

If Haskins coached in the ACC or the Big East, he would probably have a building named after him by now. He would be a media star. But because he has done all his coaching just across the border from Mexico in a corner of West Texas, he remains almost anonymous to most people who follow his sport.

Not here, though. Here he is just “The Bear” to most people, a legendary figure who really has little interest in being a legend. This is a man who wears a clip-on tie to games because he is so uncomfortable wearing a real one. He walks down the ramp to the floor wearing his tie, then simply pulls it off when the game begins.

UTEP’s Special Events Center is a modern, handsome twelve thousand-seat arena. Like most arenas that house successful teams, it is full of banners ballyhooing various conference titles and tournament appearances. But one banner stands out. It is older and more worn than the others but it catches your eye as soon as you walk into the building. It reads: “Texas Western College, NCAA Champions, 1966.”

This is, make no mistake about it, The Lair of the Bear, and very few teams come in here and win. UTEP plays in one of the most underpublicized conferences in America, the Western Athletic Conference, better known to one and all simply as the WAC.

No conference has ever been as far-flung as the WAC. UTEP sits on one end and Hawaii sits on the other. In between are schools like
New Mexico, Utah, Brigham Young, Wyoming, San Diego State, Colorado State, and Air Force. There is no such thing as an easy road trip in the WAC.

Even if you didn’t need the Pony Express to help get you to many of the WAC locations, the road in the WAC would be difficult. No place in America is tougher to play in than New Mexico’s Pit. But the Special Events Center at UTEP is right up there, and so is the Marriott Center at Brigham Young. As for Wyoming, few people have lived to tell about how tough it is to play there.

Into the Bear’s Lair on a windy, snowy night came Brigham Young. The Cougars are always one of the country’s more interesting teams, even when they aren’t one of the best. Because most of their players are Mormons, there are inevitably several who have gone on two-year Mormon missions overseas.

Religious missions are the only exception to the NCAA’s rule that requires an athlete to use his four years of eligibility within five years. A player who goes on a religious mission is exempt from this rule. Other WAC schools cry quietly about the fact that BYU has an unfair advantage because it constantly has teams filled with older, more experienced players. New Mexico Coach Gary Colson refers to some of the Cougars as “those seven-year guys.”

Brigham Young is also one of America’s whitest teams. There are very few blacks in the Mormon Church and very few non-Mormons at BYU. There are exceptions of course. Jim McMahon played quarterback there and Jeff Chatman, who is black, is one of the captains on this year’s team.