A Season Inside (4 page)

What’s more, Valvano, even though he was criticized at times for not focusing enough on coaching, continued to win games. His teams
reached the final eight in 1985 and 1986 and after a bad regular season in 1987, won the ACC Tournament, shocking a vastly superior North Carolina team in the final in an upset faintly reminiscent of 1983.

Valvano was rich. He was a winner. He even did a stint on the
CBS Morning News
for a while, jokingly claiming to his friends—and his wife, of course—that Phyllis George, then the show’s anchor, was madly in love with him.

But inside Valvano’s head, the old Peggy Lee song kept playing: “Is That All There Is?” He had accomplished everything he had wanted to accomplish in life by the age of forty: He had married his childhood sweetheart and produced three beautiful daughters. He was a millionaire. He had won a national championship. He was a hero where he lived and his own boss since 1986 when he had become N.C. State’s athletic director in addition to everything else he was doing.

It was all very simple. What’s more, Valvano knew his 1987–88 team could be pretty good. With a little luck, very good. The key was junior center Charles Shackleford, an immensely talented but just as inconsistent 6–10 specimen who could shoot the ball with either hand but often seemed willing to take the worst shot he could find. If Valvano could get Shackleford to concentrate every game for forty minutes, the Wolfpack would be terrific. All the other pieces were in place. There were four good guards—two seniors and two freshmen—and an excellent power forward in Chucky Brown. The only question mark was at small forward.

And yet, as he began his eighth season coaching State, Valvano wondered how much longer he wanted to go on doing it. There had been plenty of chances to get out. If he wanted to be a TV commentator, he could do that. If he wanted to be a full-time athletic director and not coach, he could do that. If he wanted an NBA job—the New York Knicks had approached him during the summer—he could undoubtedly do that. Hollywood was even a possibility. During the summer, Valvano had taped a TV variety show pilot.

But he was still coaching—at State. There were reasons for this. First and foremost, there was his family. Even though he and his wife Pam had grown up in New York, they were comfortable in Raleigh and their children considered it home. Their oldest daughter, Nicole, was a State freshman who would finish her first semester with a 4.0 grade point average. “All that proves,” Valvano cracked, “is that she is the first child in history to take after neither one of her parents.”

Once, Valvano had called a family meeting to discuss his giving up coaching to be a full-time athletic director. “It would mean more time at home,” he told his daughters. They liked that. “It would mean less pressure,” he added. They liked that too. “It would mean more family weekends together.” They were loving it by now.

“And it would mean less money. Nicole, you might have to give up your car.”

Nicole and Jamie, the middle daughter, looked at one another. “New information has just come in,” Nicole said. “We vote you coach.”

So he coached. Often, he wondered why.

While Valvano wrestled with his choices, Don DeVoe had no doubt in his mind about where he wanted to be and what he wanted to do. He was starting his tenth season as the coach at the University of Tennessee and his fondest wish was to start his eleventh season there on October 15, 1988.

But that was no sure thing. DeVoe had two years left on his contract. If the University did not extend that contract at the end of the season, it would leave him a lame duck coach, something neither the school nor he could tolerate. Already, recruiting had become extremely difficult because the whispers were everywhere that DeVoe would not be back the next season.

DeVoe was human and he was aware of the whispers. He couldn’t avoid them. After seven solid seasons at Tennessee—five NCAA bids, five twenty-victory seasons—DeVoe had suffered through two straight losing seasons. There had been injuries and problems, but most of all there had been losses. The University was about to open a brand-new $37 million, twenty-five-thousand-seat basketball arena and a losing record would mean rows and rows of empty seats. Another losing season and DeVoe would definitely be gone. He knew that. What he didn’t know was how many wins he needed to survive. When he asked athletic director Doug Dickey the question, Dickey was direct, but not specific: “Show me improvement, Don,” he said. “I need to see improvement.”

The record the previous season had been 14–15, 7–11 in Southeast Conference play. That was the starting point for DeVoe.

Improving on that record might not be that easy. Already, on October 15, there were headaches. The previous spring, feeling he needed help in recruiting, DeVoe had hired Bill Brown as an assistant coach
from California State at Sacramento. Brown had gone back to California before moving to Knoxville and while he was there had been arrested along with several others during a drug bust. DeVoe had no choice: Brown resigned immediately.

Then, the night before practice started, the Volunteers’ best player, Dyron Nix, had been in a car accident. Nix lost control of his car and hit a telephone pole. His passenger, a member of the Tennessee women’s basketball team, was injured so seriously that she didn’t play all season. Nix, after a scary night in intensive care, came through without any serious injuries. He would be back practicing after two weeks.

But as practice started, DeVoe couldn’t help but think, “What else can happen to us?”

If ever a coach and a program had reason to feel jinxed, it was DeVoe and Tennessee. The new arena, two years late already, had been plagued from the day it got off the planning board. A construction worker had died on the project, one construction company had been fired, and two law suits were still pending. As if that wasn’t enough, the man who had contributed the first $5 million to get the project started, B. Ray Thompson, a man whose fondest wish had been to see Tennessee play in the new building, was dying of cancer. Everyone at Tennessee hoped he would live to see the inaugural game, scheduled for December 3 against Marquette.

B. Ray Thompson died on October 22. The season was still six weeks away. DeVoe knew it might be a long one.

For Rick Barnes, October 15 was the Christmas morning he had dreamed of all his life. And, like any little kid, he just couldn’t wait to open his presents. That is why his George Mason basketball team was on the floor that day at 6
A.M.
There was no midnight practice only because George Mason isn’t the kind of school where thousands of people will show up to celebrate the opening day of basketball practice.

But Barnes didn’t care. All he knew was that he was a head basketball coach. He knew that outside the Washington, D.C., area very few people had heard of George Mason, a commuter school in Fairfax, Virginia, twenty-five miles from downtown Washington. But he also believed that with a two-year-old, ten-thousand-seat arena, an evergrowing student body, and a spot in a very respectable conference—the
Colonial Athletic Association—GMU had the potential to get noticed in the near future. If it had the right coach.

Barnes believed that it did.

Rick Barnes was thirty-two but looked twenty-two. Ten years ago, when he had been twenty-two and no doubt looked twelve, he had managed to get an interview with Eddie Biedenbach, then the coach at Davidson, for a graduate assistant’s job. Barnes had grown up in North Carolina and played at Lenoir Rhyne, a decent player in a decent small college program. When he graduated he knew his playing days were over. He also knew exactly what he wanted to do: coach.

Through a friend he managed to arrange an interview with Biedenbach. It was scheduled for nine in the morning. Not wanting to take any chances on being late, Barnes left his house at 6
A.M.
and was at Davidson by eight. He sat down in the bleachers to wait for Biedenbach. An hour went by. Then two. Barnes asked the assistant coaches if they knew where Biedenbach was. On the road recruiting. He would be in, but they weren’t sure when.

Barnes kept waiting. At noon, he thought about going to get something to eat but decided against it. What if Biedenbach came in briefly and he missed him? He waited. His suit, the only one he owned, was beginning to stick to him, the weather in North Carolina being warm in the springtime. The assistants kept saying they knew Biedenbach was coming in. Barnes nodded, famished and exhausted, but stubborn.

At six o’clock, the assistants went home. They were sorry they had made a mistake about Biedenbach coming in. He must have gotten tied up because he hadn’t called in either. Barnes decided to wait just a little longer. Finally, at 7
P.M.
, he gave up. Eleven hours was enough. He walked to the gym door, opened it, and in walked Eddie Biedenbach.

Barnes had never met him, but he knew him from pictures. “Excuse me,” he said, “but you are Coach Biedenbach, aren’t you?”

A look of horror crossed Biedenbach’s face. “Oh my God,” he said, “you’re Rick Barnes!”

Biedenbach had forgotten the appointment. He felt so guilty he offered Barnes the job—for $2,500 a year—on the spot. That was all Barnes wanted. The wait had been worth it. From Davidson, he went to George Mason as Joe Harrington’s assistant coach and then to Alabama and Ohio State for one year each. When Harrington resigned in the spring of ’87 to take the job at Long Beach State, athletic director Jack Kvancz knew exactly who he wanted to hire.

“When Rick was here as an assistant, I always thought he would be a great head coach,” Kvancz said. “When Joe left, I talked to some other people, but I knew I wanted Rick.”

Harrington knew that too. The day he took the Long Beach job he called Barnes on the phone. “Pack your bags, Barney,” he said. “You’re gonna be a head coach.”

He had held the title for six months by the time October 15 rolled around. He had already made it clear to his players that if they missed class, missed a meeting, missed anything, they would be in trouble. But the first practice was different. This made it real. The first game was five weeks away. For the moment though, Barnes was a rarity: a head basketball coach who had never once been second-guessed.

There were, of course, many schools where October 15, while significant as the first day of practice, was not that big a deal. No midnight practices, no first years or last years, just another season with high expectations.

One of those places was Duke. After struggling his first three years, Coach Mike Krzyzewski had put together one of the top programs in the country. In the four previous seasons, the Blue Devils had gone 108–30. They had played for the national championship in 1986; and in 1987, a so-called rebuilding year after the graduation of four seniors off the ’86 team, they went 24–9 and made it back to the round of sixteen.

Now, with four starters back from that surprising team, there was Final Four talk around Duke again even though nationally, few people ranked Duke in the top ten. Top Twenty yes, top ten, no.

But Duke was a confident team and no one on the team was more confident than Billy King. He had come to Duke three years earlier as a good-field, no-hit freshman. In other words, he could guard people, but he couldn’t shoot. That reputation had grown—in both directions. King was, to put it kindly, an awful shooter. He had hit less than 50 percent of his free throws in his career and anything other than a layup was an adventure for him.

But oh could he play defense! He guarded point guards and power forwards and everyone in between. King was 6–6, quick enough to handle a little guy, big enough to handle people up to 6–8. He and Kevin Strickland, his roommate from day one at Duke, were the two
seniors on this team. Realistically, King knew that a player who can’t score in college isn’t too likely to play in the NBA. He would get his degree in political science in May and hoped for a career in television. With his good looks, easy smile, and quick, sharp wit, King was a natural for that profession. Or almost any other. One of his nicknames was “Senator,” because a lot of people who knew him expected him to talk his way into politics someday.

“If there’s one thing Billy can do better than anybody,” Strickland said, “it’s talk.”

But politics and television and anything else would come later.

Right now there was only basketball. King was the youngest of four children. His father had died when he was four and Billy had started playing basketball when he was six. It had been, outside of his mother, the most important thing in his life since then. He was 5–2 in the second grade and 6–2 by the seventh grade. He had gotten his first recruiting letter—from the University of Maryland—at the age of ten after he had attended summer camp there. Yes, age ten. He was now twenty-one. He had never even dabbled with any seriousness in other sports. “Once, I played soccer and in the first game I played in, I tripped over the ball, took a bad spill and twisted an ankle,” he said. “I decided it was an omen and that someone was telling me to stick to basketball.” He now had one more year of his life to devote to basketball. He wanted to be certain that it was a special one.

“A lot of seniors just want to get through their last year and get their shot at the money in the pros,” he said. “I know the odds are that I won’t get that money and that a year from now I won’t be playing basketball anymore. In a way, that’s scary—because for as long as I can remember I’ve played basketball. There’s nothing I love doing more than playing basketball.

“But this is probably it for me. I don’t want to look back next year at this season and say, ‘What if I had done a little more?’ I want to walk away from it knowing I did everything I could do. And that means making sure everyone on the team does that. Kevin and I are the captains now. This should be
our
team. If it messes up, it’s our fault.”

While King felt responsible for the rise or fall of his team at Duke, Walker Lambiotte knew very well, as practice began at Northwestern,
that he would have nothing at all to do with the success or failure of the Wildcats.

Lambiotte was a transfer. He had left N.C. State after two frustrating years and, after a confusing summer, had landed at Northwestern playing, ironically, for Jim Valvano’s college coach, Bill Foster. The choice was not an easy one for Lambiotte. He had left a team that had won forty-five games during his two seasons there for a team that had won fifteen during that same time.