A Season Inside (33 page)

In his place is his top assistant, Gordon Chiesa. Already, promising sophomore center Marty Conlin has quit the team and, even though the Friars did upset Georgetown, they are struggling. Naturally, Evans is worried. “The way our team is, they’re apt to come in here just figuring showing up is enough, he said. “I’m a lot more comfortable when we’re playing a ranked team. Then I know they’ll come to play.”

Since the loss to Georgetown that opened the Big East season, Pitt has come to play pretty consistently—which doesn’t mean that the road has been a smooth one for Evans.

He was gratified and somewhat surprised by the reaction he got to
his comment after the Georgetown game that John Thompson had run roughshod over the school administration. “I’ve got a bunch of letters from people, a lot of them Georgetown people, saying they agreed with what I said. They seem to think that there’s more to a college than winning basketball games.”

There was more controversy waiting for Evans ten days after Georgetown. After victories over St. John’s, Duquesne, and Connecticut, the Panthers hosted Villanova. This brought Rollie Massimino to town, Evans’s off-season antagonist. Neither coach was looking for a confrontation, yet one occurred.

A few days before the game, Evans was quoted in the
Philadelphia Daily News
as saying, among other things, that Massimino had “fallen in love with himself” after winning the national championship in 1985 and had alienated many of his friends in the process.

Massimino was enraged. Evans insisted that he thought he was talking off the record. Either way, the comments were ill timed, to say the least. Pitt won the game easily, but when it was over, the coaches didn’t shake hands. Massimino said he looked for Evans but Evans had left. Evans said Massimino never looked for him. Either way, there were headlines … again.

A week later, Pitt went to Oklahoma for a national TV game. For twenty minutes, the freshman guards couldn’t handle the Oklahoma press. The deficit was 14. But the Panthers rallied in the second half, getting the ball to Lane and Smith inside. They lost, 84–81, but Evans was pleased. On the road, against a top team, his team could easily have folded—but had not. They were 13–2.

“There are a lot of good signs with this team right now,” Evans said. “They’re finally beginning to show some maturity.”

Evans’s reference was not to the four freshmen—Sean Miller, Jason Matthews, Darelle Porter, and Bobby Martin—who were playing extensively. It was to the three talented veterans: Charles Smith, Demetrius Gore, and Jerome Lane. All had been recruited by Evans’s predecessor, Roy Chipman, and even after a season and a half under Evans, they still lacked discipline and toughness. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn’t. When it wasn’t, they clashed with their coach, who didn’t think his team could come anywhere near its potential until the three older players grew up.

“I still think we’re going to play our best basketball in this program when I get all my own players here,” Evans said. “That’s why no matter
what happens this year, the experience the freshmen are getting is bound to help us.”

Evans is working on the future throughout the day. That and his basement. At lunch, he and his assistant coaches are joined by Darren Morningstar, a recent Naval Academy dropout. Like Nathan Bailey, who is currently a sophomore on the Pitt team, Morningstar ran afoul of the Academy’s honor code. He is 6–9 with potential and Vanderbilt is also interested in him. He will eventually enroll at Pitt.

Back in his office, Evans gets a call from Don McLean, the 6–10 blue chipper from California. It was McLean that Evans and Calipari were visiting when they got caught in the earthquake and were on the plane that lost the engine. They have put in a lot of effort trying to get him already.

Evans is not one of those coaches who gets on the phone with a recruit as if hearing the kid’s voice has transformed his life. He isn’t capable of that kind of false enthusiasm.

“You doing all right?” he asks, picking up the phone. “I hear you’re playing pretty well.”

They talk for a while. Calipari, who has been out of the office, comes back and Evans turns McLean over to him. Calipari is the enthusiastic one in the group. While Calipari is talking to McLean, Evans slips out so he can go home and check on his basement.

It is just starting to snow when Evans gets in his car to drive back to campus. Once, basketball was little more than a sideshow at Pitt. And, ironically, football is making the headlines today because running back Craig (Ironhead) Heyward has decided to turn pro with one year of eligibility left. Evans has been through all that once with Charles Smith and will go through it again in the spring with Jerome Lane.

Now, though, his mind is focused only on Providence. “If you guys don’t play with the kind of intensity you had during the second half against Oklahoma, you’ll be right back where you were at halftime of that game,” Evans tells his players. “This team can beat you if you don’t realize it can beat you.”

Even on an ugly, snowy night, Fitzgerald Field House is packed. Basketball was meant to be played in gyms like this one. The crowd is on top of the court and into the game, the ceiling is low and the noise-level high.

The start is routine. Two Lane free throws give Pitt a 6–5 lead with 15:45 left. Providence comes down and Carlton Screen misses a
jumper. The rebound comes long to Miller, who feeds it quickly to Lane, racing down the right side.

Lane has a step on Screen as he goes to the hoop. He goes up, the ball tucked in his right hand and
slams
the ball through. As soon as Lane’s arm makes contact with the rim, it collapses and the backboard shatters, shockingly and stunningly, into thousands of pieces. The effect is similar to that of a supernova exploding. The glass goes flying in all directions. It is amazing that no one is hurt.

For a second, Lane stands stunned, looking at what he has done. Then, as his teammates come to greet him, he goes wild—and so do they. Everyone is hugging and high-fiving and generally losing it. The crowd is doing the same thing. No one is quite sure what to do next. Lane has just become the first player in college basketball history to shatter a backboard during a game.

The coaches and the officials consult. It will take at least thirty minutes to bring in a new backboard and get it in place. The teams are sent to the locker room.

“What happens if you do that in the NBA?” Lane asks Gore.

“You get ejected.”

“Coach,” Lane asks Evans, “you ever see that before?”

“Not live,” Evans says. “Anyway, at least now I know where you’ll be the next forty-eight hours. You’ll be home replaying the damn thing on television a thousand times and getting turned on every time you see it.”

The players have already decided on a new nickname for Lane: Conan, as in “the Barbarian.” Evans leaves them to relax.

“I hate this,” he says. “Once the game starts you get over the nervousness and the butterflies. Now, I’ve got them all over again. Plus, I don’t know how the players will react to this.”

Evans reminds his team that the score is only 8–5; he says they should forget about the dunk and think about the game. But, heading back for the court, he says to Smith, ‘Why don’t you let Jerome lead you guys out.”

The delay is thirty minutes. As soon as they start playing again, Evans’s worst fears are realized. The first two times Lane touches the ball, he throws it into about the fourth row. Evans takes him out. “Wake up,” Evans yells. “Forget the damn dunk!”

Slowly, the Panthers get their act together. They build a 37–24 lead—including another Lane dunk—but a careless flurry in the last minute allows Providence to creep within 39–28.

Evans isn’t happy at halftime. “Eleven turnovers!” he yells. “Eleven! How many times have I told you not to dribble against the zone press?”

Lane starts to argue. Evans cuts him off. “You see, you guys still don’t have the fucking mentality to be great. You make one dunk, Jerome, and then the next two times you touch the ball, you throw it into the stands! That’s ridiculous. If you don’t learn to put teams away, it will do you in, I promise you it will.”

Evans has no idea how prescient his words will turn out to be. On this night, he gets what he wants, though. The Panthers score the first nine points of the second half, building the lead to 48–28. From there, it is a joyride to a 90–56 victory.

Lane is the center of attention afterwards. “This is like a dream,” he says. “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up.” He smiles. “Oh well, another fantasy gone.”

In the meantime, Evans heads for Hemingway’s, the hangout at the bottom of the hill where he and his friends go to eat and drink. His team is 14–2 and he is upbeat. But not overwhelmed.

“This is still an immature team,” he says. “I’m still not sure how we’re going to react when it matters most. It’s still only January.”

And there is still water on Evans’s bathroom floor.

Rick Barnes walked into his basketball team’s empty locker room, walked to the blackboard and wrote in large red letters:
9–0
. Just below that he wrote:
0–9
. It was forty-five minutes before George Mason would play American and Barnes’s players were on the floor loosening up. He wanted these numbers waiting for them when they returned.

“They’ve never beaten us,” Barnes said, talking about American. “We’ve won nine straight and I know it’s got to end sooner or later. I just don’t want it to be tonight.”

Even as a rookie coach, Barnes had already developed one characteristic of a veteran: He lost sleep over every game. George Mason, after struggling through December with a 5–4 record, had played well in January and was coming into this game with a three-game winning streak.

Nonetheless, it had not been an easy month for Barnes. He had started to wonder if his hard-line regime might not be
too
hard-line.
The team wasn’t playing badly, but he wondered if anyone connected with the team was having any fun.

“We went on the road trip at the end of December to St. Bonaventure and West Virginia and when I got back I was just so depressed I thought the season was never going to end,” he said. No doubt, part of it was losing both games and the fact that Olean, New York, and Morgantown, West Virginia, are not the most wonderful places to be in December.

“But it was more than that. I didn’t let Earl [Moore] play at St. Bonaventure because he was late for practice. We might have won if I’d let him play but I couldn’t go changing the rules just because we needed him. I just wasn’t enjoying myself, even after wins. If we won, I started worrying about the next game. If we lost, I brooded about it. Either way, I wasn’t happy.”

Part of Barnes’s anxiety related to his wife, Candy, who was expecting their second child at any minute. He hated going on the road knowing he might miss the birth of his child. Finally, on the morning of January 9th, Candy woke him at 4:30
A.M.
saying she thought she was going into labor. George Mason was opening conference play that night against East Carolina at home, and Barnes had been lying in bed awake worrying about the game most of the night.

He took Candy to the hospital and stayed with her until the baby was born, shortly after 1
P.M.
He was excited and thrilled watching the birth. Within an hour, though, he had left the hospital to drive back to Fairfax for his team’s pregame meal. The Patriots won that night, making Barnes two-for-two on the day. But two nights later, they lost at home to North Carolina—Wilmington, then went to Richmond and lost, dropping their record to 7–6.

Barnes knew he needed to back off, for his sake and the team’s. He decided to stop going to pregame meal, hoping that would take some pressure off the players. He decided to drop the Pride Sheet. Instead, he and the academic counselors met individually with each player once a week to talk about class work. “This way, if a kid is having trouble it’s a private thing, not something everyone on the team knows about,” Barnes said.

He began trying to work the younger players into the games more to make them feel more a part of the team; that also let the older ones know that if they didn’t produce or work hard he wasn’t afraid to take
them out. None of these changes happened overnight. Barnes was learning on the job and he told the players that. “I can make mistakes too,” he said. “As long as all the mistakes we make are because we’re trying like hell to do the best we can, we’ll be okay.”

The team responded. They beat Liberty—as they were supposed to—William and Mary, and Navy. That made them 10–6, 3–2 in the league, and brought American to the Patriot Center on this cold January night. It seemed as if everyone at the game was secretly wishing to be home, curled up in front of a fire.

American was a team that after a slow start, was just beginning to find itself. The Eagles were also 3–2 in league play and were as healthy as they had been all year, except for Coach Ed Tapscott, who had been sideswiped by a falling tree branch while taking out the garbage. He had scratched the cornea in his right eye and was wearing a Captain Hook eye patch.

Barnes had a lot of respect for Tapscott as a coach and a person. “I can’t figure Eddie out though,” he said. “How can anyone smart enough to be a lawyer [Tapscott has a law degree] be stupid enough to be a coach?” Tapscott often wondered the same thing.

In spite of all the talks he had given himself about loosening up, Barnes was tight. “This game could make or break us,” he said to the assistants, probably marking the seventeenth time in seventeen games he had made that statement. “What kind of crowd we got out there? Nothing, I’ll bet. This weather on a Wednesday night, we won’t have any kind of crowd.”

Frank Novakoski, the trainer, walked in. He had started a pregame ritual in which he handed Barnes a safety pin for good luck just before he went in for his last pregame talk to the team. “This one is number four,” Novakoski said.

Barnes looked at the pin like a scientist studying a specimen. “Looks lucky to me,” he said, and stuck it in his pocket as he walked across the hall from the coaches’ dressing room to the players’.