A Season Inside (35 page)

During that game, Knight had shoved his own player, Steve Eyl, as
Eyl was coming out of the game, and a rare sound had been heard in Assembly Hall—boos for the IU coach. The next day Knight decided to radically change his lineup for his next game, against Ohio State. He decided to elevate two freshmen, Jay Edwards (who had briefly been off the team—academic ineligibility) and Lyndon Jones. Benched were Rick Calloway and Keith Smart.

This was the most radical lineup move Knight had made since the disastrous 1985 season when he had benched four starters, including Alford, for a game at Illinois. Calloway, a junior, had been a starter since his second game as a freshman. Smart, a senior, was merely the hero of the ’87 national title game, having hit the winning shot with five seconds left.

Clearly, Knight was desperate. Such a move can go one of two ways. It can cause panic on a team and make a bad situation worse. Or it can be a tonic, the new players giving everyone else a boost. This time, the latter proved true. Jones and Edwards played excellent basketball at Ohio State and the Hoosiers beat the Buckeyes 75–71.

But it easily could have gone the other way. That morning, during the game-day shootaround, Knight had thrown Calloway out for not working hard as part of the second team. Calloway never moved off the bench that night. Smart played two minutes. If Ohio State had managed to win the game, who knows what would have happened next?

But Indiana won and that same lineup was intact for Purdue. With Assembly Hall as loud as it ever gets, the Hoosiers roared out of the blocks like a sprinter who has timed the start. It was 4–4 after two minutes. Indiana scored the next 10 points. Purdue scored to cut the margin to 14–6. Indiana scored 7 more. Finally, Purdue awakened, scoring 6 straight points to trim the margin to 21–12 nine minutes into the game.

Jones hit a jump shot and then Edwards made a play that seemed to stun Purdue. He reached in on Mitchell, stripped him of the ball, raced the length of the court and hit a spectacular spinning lay-up to make it 25–12. A moment later, center Melvin McCants was called for a charge and Coach Gene Keady hurled his sports coat into the stands—the second time in three years his jacket had failed to make it to halftime in Bloomington.

After a Todd Jadlow jumper, the next, Dean Garrett scored six straight points and, by the time Keady had called his second time-out,
the score was an amazing 33–12. Indiana, which less than a week ago had looked ready to go completely down the tubes, was humiliating the No. 2 team in the nation.

“We’ll make a run,” Lewis thought to himself. “We know they can’t keep this up and we know we aren’t that bad.” But, glancing at the scoreboard, Lewis also thought, “We sure have dug ourselves a hole here.”

It was Lewis’s running mate, Stephens, who finally stopped the bleeding, hitting two straight three-pointers to nudge the margin down to 33–18. But, with seven minutes still to go in the half, Knight was so confident he even let Smart get into the game briefly, and Smart responded by immediately hitting a baseline jumper. It was 40–22 and it was Indiana’s day—or so it seemed.

Except Purdue didn’t die. A three-point play by Mitchell cut the lead to 43–32. IU built the margin back to 50–34 before Mitchell hit a three-pointer with eighteen seconds to go, 50–37. But Joe Hillman ended a near-perfect first half with a jumper just before the buzzer and it was 52–37 at intermission.

“During that first half,” Knight would say later, “I thought we played the best basketball I’ve seen anywhere this year.”

It wasn’t a boast, just a fact. But, as Knight expected, Purdue came back. “They’ve played everywhere, seen everything,” he said. “Those seniors weren’t going to just roll over because we had a good half.”

Lewis, zero-for-four in the first half, finally found the basket three minutes into the second period, hitting a three-pointer, chipping the lead down to 56–48. The lead went back up to 12, then down to 8 and back to 12 at 67–55. But Lewis hit a short pop and Stephens stripped Edwards for a lay-up to make it 67–59. After a Lyndon Jones turnover, Stephens hit a three-pointer. Suddenly, it was 67–62. Garrett missed inside and Lewis bombed from three. Amazingly, it was 67–65. Knight called time, hoping to regroup.

Purdue had now made this a game that would be remembered regardless of outcome. Would this be the day Indiana built a 21-point lead and hung on to upset the No. 2 team in the country? Or would it be the day the Hoosiers blew that big lead and allowed this Purdue team to truly establish greatness?

When Lewis tied it at 69–69 with a baseline drive, greatness seemed very possible. A minute later, after Indiana had missed three shots inside, McCants posted up and put Purdue in front, 71–69. In a span
of less than twenty-three minutes, the Boilermakers had come all the way back, outscoring IU 59–26 to take the lead.

But Bob Knight teams don’t usually fold their tents and go home. Edwards, who would finish with 22 points, calmly swished a three-pointer. It was 72–71. Purdue went back ahead 74–72 on a McCants free throw and a Mitchell lay-up. So Edwards simply nailed another three to make it 75–74 with 3:45 left. Then, with the score 76–76, Stephens hit what appeared to be a huge shot, a three-pointer. With 1:51 left, Purdue was up 79–76. Garrett came back, cutting it to 79–78, then Purdue, trying to spread the floor, turned the ball over with less than a minute to go.

The Hoosiers didn’t call time. They came down the court with everyone standing—the crowd, the benches, the coaches—looking for the lead. The ball went inside to Garrett. He missed. Jones rebounded.
He
missed. The ball was alive on the board and then there was Todd Mitchell, grabbing it in his huge hands and covering up, holding the ball like a mother protecting her child from the rain. Quickly, Indiana fouled. Mitchell, who had been superb during the second-half rally, scoring 15 of his 24 points, was going to the line with fifteen seconds left. If he made both ends of the one-and-one, Indiana would have to hit a three-pointer to tie.

“It’s exactly the kind of situation you dream about being in,” he said. “You’ve come all the way back, on the road against your arch-rival, and now you have a chance to just about clinch it. I knew I was going to make the shots. I just knew it.”

Indiana called time to let Mitchell think about it. He thought about it, knowing he was going to make the shots, squared himself to the basket, spun the ball off his right hand and then watched in horror as the ball hit the back rim.

Garrett grabbed the rebound and quickly flipped the ball to Hillman. Indiana rushed down. Again, as usual with a Bob Knight team, no time-out. Hillman swung the ball to Jones. The freshman had no intention of shooting. Garrett was planted in the low post to the right of the basket, a spot he had been in so long all afternoon he should have been paying an occupancy tax. Jones threw him the ball. Garrett turned and softly shot the ball over McCants.
Swish
—his 31st point. Four seconds left. Purdue screamed for time-out. There was still time.

“No need to panic,” Lewis said. “We had time to get a good shot.” Instead, they got no shot. Tony Jones inbounded to McCants, who
quickly threw the ball back to him. Jones was to take the pass and race upcourt and either shoot or, if there was time, find one of the seniors for a shot. Instead, Jones’s brain got ahead of his body and he started running before he remembered to dribble. Traveling. It was over. Lyndon Jones’s lay-up at the buzzer was just a twist of the knife that made the final score 82–79.

If a January basketball game can have major implications, this was it. Purdue had showed guts coming back but hadn’t been able to finish Indiana off. “It’s a shame when you have seniors,” Keady said, “and they can’t get it done at the end.”

He was angry and frustrated and it showed. Once again, Indiana had stolen the show. Purdue, with a sixteen-game winning streak, was ranked No. 2 in the nation. The headlines all week had been about Indiana’s lineup changes. Now, the headlines would be about how they had worked and how Knight had proven himself a genius once again. Keady wanted to scream.

“All I know is we work our ass off to get recognition in this state and we don’t get it,” he said. “Obviously, you’ve got to win in March to get recognized. Winning the Big Ten doesn’t mean anything. Nothing means anything.”

Someone asked Keady if he was surprised by Knight’s new lineup. “Are you shitting me?” he roared. “Nothing surprises me over here!”

It was Mitchell who took the loss hardest. He sat on the bleachers waiting for the bus to leave to go back to West Lafayette, his head down, looking up only when Dean Garrett and Rick Calloway came over to offer condolences. “Hey Todd, you played really well,” Calloway said.

Mitchell nodded, and in a voice that was barely a whisper said, “Good players play well. Great players win games.”

Joe Forte felt good. In fact, he felt better than good. He was an hour outside Philadelphia, the weather was beautiful, and he was about to spend the evening doing what he loved to do best: referee a basketball game.

“This is my favorite time of year,” he said. “Once you hit February, it’s all downhill. You can see the finish line so you don’t feel tired. And the games are better because everyone is sharp. I walk on the floor every night and look around and say, ‘This is exactly where I belong.’ There is nothing I would rather do than referee a basketball game. To me, it’s like I’m still playing the game. Only now, my shots are my calls and my goal is to hit at least ninety-five percent of them.”

On any list of the top officials in college basketball, Joe Forte’s name will appear, usually right at or very near the top. At the age of forty-two, he is one of the most respected men in his profession, a fact reflected by five Final Four appearances in the last eight years and two appearances in the national championship game.

To Forte, like most of the men who officiate college basketball games, refereeing is a profession. True, most college officials have another job, but during the winter that job usually takes a backseat to refereeing. A top college basketball official will work about eighty
games during a season, usually averaging a minimum of four games a week.

Forte has gone a step further than other officials. He has just quit his job as a salesman for a food products company to devote full time to the marketing of the new whistle he and fellow official Ron Foxcroft invented. The whistle is called, cleverly enough, “The Fox40.” Forte’s name is pronounced “Fort-A,” but Fox40 is close enough.

The whistle is the product of four years of work. It came about after Forte and Foxcroft, working a tournament together in South America, realized that in certain situations, their whistles couldn’t be heard over the din of the crowd. “What if we could invent a whistle with a higher pitch that could be heard anywhere?” they said to each other one day, and the concept was born.

It took four years, lots of time, and lots of money, but eventually they developed a pealess whistle with a higher pitch than the old whistle. Now, more and more officials are using it, Forte and Foxcroft are marketing it nationally, and they are starting to make some serious money.

“A lot of people say to us now, ‘Gee, I wish you’d have told me, I would have invested in you guys at the beginning,’ “Forte said. “But the fact is, when Ron and I first started doing this, a lot of people laughed at us.”

No one is laughing now. Except perhaps for Forte.

He has been involved in sports all his life. He was born in the Bronx and one can still hear the twelve years he spent there in his voice. His parents moved to Levittown when Forte was twelve and there he played high school baseball and basketball. One incident, his sophomore year, may have had as much influence on the way Forte works today as anything that ever happened to him.

“We were playing in a big Christmas tournament,” he said. “You know, big deal type games if you’re a kid. In the second quarter, I was bringing the ball up and this guy was guarding me tight. I went by him and he tripped me. It was an accident, but the ref didn’t see it at all. I fell and he called me for traveling.

“I got up, really upset and said, ‘Come on, call the damn foul!’ He nails me with a technical. My coach was a really strict guy. He yanked me out of the game right there. I sat down, figuring I wouldn’t play until the second half. Then, at halftime, the coach tells me I’m off the team for cursing at the ref and getting a technical. I couldn’t believe
it. I went home that day and it wasn’t until five days later that I got reinstated after a lot of negotiations.

“Now, when I work a game and a kid gets upset at a call, you know, reacts instinctively and says something he shouldn’t, I try to remember what happened to me. I know it isn’t personal, it’s just an emotional reaction. It takes a lot for a kid to get a technical from me.”

Having survived his outburst, Forte went on to star in both sports first at Brevard Junior College and then at High Point College in North Carolina. In basketball, he played on two teams that reached the NAIA Final Four. In baseball, he was a good enough prospect that the Cincinnati Reds signed him and sent him to the Florida State League.

But after one season of minor league baseball, Forte figured out that the major leagues wasn’t in the cards for him. When a friend of his from college landed a job coaching football at Ballou High School in Washington, Forte went there as an assistant coach and a physical education teacher. Two years later, looking to make more money, he got into sales.

It was during this time that Forte began to officiate. He had done a little refereeing in college, working intramural games to make some extra money, and he had enjoyed it. When he got out of coaching, he looked into refereeing some junior high school games to keep his hand in the game. “I just wasn’t ready to grow up completely and give up sports altogether,” Forte said. “I’m still waiting to grow up I guess.”

Forte got hooked on refereeing. He started working any game he could get—at any level. “There were nights when I refereed four ten-and-under games,” he remembered, laughing at the memory. He was dating his future wife, Lois, at the time, and she got so tired of his obsession with refereeing that for a while she told him not to bother to call. “She dumped me,” Forte said. “I had to beg her to take me back.”