A Season Inside (48 page)

Brown was not unhappy with his team. But he felt they could have won the game. “If you guys play a little smarter, take care of the ball after you get a rebound, we win,” he said.

In the press conference, Brown couldn’t resist a swipe at the officials. “Danny plays inside all the time, goes to the basket constantly, and he takes four free throws,” he complained. “I don’t understand it. I don’t like to bitch but every other coach in this league does it so tonight I will too.”

Manning, overrun by writers who want to talk about the record, shrugs it off. “Tonight, it doesn’t mean anything because we lost,” he said. “But in a few years when I look back I think it probably will.”

As he walks out of the locker room, Manning isn’t as down as he often is after a loss. “We’re not that far away,” he says softly. “We may still be a good team before this is all over.”

If you are looking to get off the beaten path of college basketball, this is the place to come. They love football and oil down here but lately there hasn’t been very much of either. Surprisingly, though, they have always played pretty good basketball.

Lamar University is located eighty miles east of Houston and forty-five miles from the Gulf of Mexico. It has slightly more than fourteen thousand students—average age twenty-four—and a basketball tradition that is largely unknown yet fairly illustrious.

Billy Tubbs played and coached here; Pat Foster, now the Houston coach, followed him and continued to have success. In Tubbs’s last three seasons and in all six of Foster’s seasons, Lamar made either the NCAA or the NIT. In 1980, Tubbs’s last season, the Cardinals reached the round of sixteen. When Foster left in 1986 and Lamar needed a new coach, no one in college basketball could have known who the school was going to hire. When the word went out who the new coach was, basketball people shook their heads in amazement.

The new coach at Lamar was Tom Abatemarco. To the casual follower of the sport, the name Tom Abatemarco means nothing. To those inside the sport, Abatemarco is a legend in his own time.

He has been an assistant coach at six different schools. At Iona, working for Jim Valvano, he was largely responsible for the recruitment of Jeff Ruland, a player every big-time program in the country wanted. Abatemarco drove to Ruland’s house each morning that winter and, knowing that contact with him was against the rules, would leave a note on his car windshield each morning, telling Ruland how much he could do for Iona and how much Iona could do for him.

From Iona, Abatemarco went to Davidson, Maryland, and Virginia Tech before finally landing at N.C. State back with Valvano. It was there that he wrote to Chris Washburn over two hundred times while the Wolfpack was recruiting the 6–11 center. Once again, Abatemarco got his man—even though Washburn ended up making more impact at State as a stereo thief than as a player.

Abatemarco is the ultimate recruiter. Unlike most of his peers, he loves it. He loves to talk to teenagers on the phone at night—“Why not, he thinks just like them,” Valvano often says—and he will do just about anything to get a player. One of his favorite tricks while at State was to howl like a wolf into the telephone to let a player know just how much the Wolfpack wanted him.

Abatemarco was the perfect foil for Valvano. Whenever State, at Abatemarco’s urging, signed a player who turned out to be more suspect than prospect, Valvano would just roll his eyes and say, “You know T-man.” Next to Abatemarco, Valvano came off as low-key. They were a perfect combination.

Lost occasionally in all the stories and jokes about Abatemarco was the fact that the guy was, in fact, one hell of a recruiter. In 1983 when State was guard-desperate after winning the national championship, he convinced Valvano to bring in a junior college guard from Texas for a visit. The guard’s name was Spud Webb.

When Spud arrived at the airport in Raleigh, he went right to the baggage carousel, somehow missing Valvano and Abatemarco, who were waiting for him at the gate. When the two coaches finally went downstairs they found him waiting for his bags. Looking at the baby-faced, five-foot-seven-inch, 145-pound Webb, Valvano turned to Abatemarco and said, “If that’s Spud, you’re fired.”

It
was
Spud, Abatemarco
wasn’t
fired, and Webb went on to be a star for them (and the Atlanta Hawks). By the spring of 1986, Abatemarco had been with Valvano at State for four years and there was no reason to believe he would go anywhere else. He was making good money, he had the V-man (V-man and T-man—get it?) at his side and all was right with the world. And then he took the Lamar job.

“I know everyone in the world thought I would stay with V the rest of my life, but I didn’t want to do that,” Abatemarco is saying in the rat-a-tat, rapid-fire way he talks, the words gushing out. “See, I always thought I could coach. I know no one else thought I could but I could. At least I wanted to find out. So, they have a pretty good program here, they’ve got some tradition, the money is, you know, not that bad, so I come.”

Abatemarco stops for a second to catch his breath. He is sitting in the living room of his house a few hours before his team is going to play New Orleans. This is a vital game for Lamar. The Cardinals are 18–8, a major improvement from the 14–15 record of Abatemarco’s first year. Abatemarco just wants to get into postseason play. The new league Lamar is in, the American South, does not have an automatic NCAA bid. That may mean that all four teams in the league with winning records will be NIT candidates. “We need to win twenty to get into the NIT,” he says. “And we need to get into the NIT because last year when we didn’t make postseason it was the first time in nine years and holy shit, were people pissed.

“See, the problem here is that they don’t really understand the real world in college basketball. They think, like, Lamar is a big deal. Hey, we’ve got a real nice new building. Montagne Center seats ten thousand, it’s only four years old, it’s nice. But we almost never sell it out.
There’s interest here but it’s not the ACC. Or the Big East or any of those leagues. But the people here don’t understand that. They think this is, like, the best job in the country or something.”

He stops for a moment as his three-year-old daughter, Tracy, toddles in. Tracy loves going to games because the Cardinal mascot always comes over to talk to her. “I’m glad I took this job, I really am, because I think I’ve proven to people I can coach. That was important to me.

“But you know what?” He lowers his voice and leans forward. “I gotta get out of here.”

Strange thing about southeast Texas. It’s a whole lot different from Long Island, where Abatemarco grew up, or, for that matter, Raleigh. Recently, a Raleigh newspaperman had put together a story on ex-Valvano assistants who had gone on to head-coaching jobs. When he asked Abatemarco about Lamar, Abatemarco had told him that he liked the job but he missed Raleigh. “All the Italian food down here is canned,” he joked. He also said that basketball fans in Texas didn’t know the sport quite the way the ones in North Carolina did.

Well, he might as well have said the mayor of Beaumont’s wife had fleas. The folks here were ticked—especially the proprietors of the local Italian restaurants. Abatemarco responded with a letter to all the local newspapers explaining his comments. That soothed matters a little but didn’t change the basic problem: Boys from New York don’t fit in down here unless their record is about 25–2. Abatemarco was 18–8. Not good enough, Yankee.

Driving to the game, Abatemarco stops at a 7—Eleven for his good luck cup of coffee. He is as superstitious as any coach, maybe even more so. He is also excited about the team he will have a year from now. “If I can take it down here one more year, I can have a great team,” he says. “Wait till you see this guy Adrian Carwell. He’s a transfer from SMU. The guy is huge. Boy, could we be good in a year.”

He sips the coffee and stares glumly ahead. It is almost seventy degrees as the sun sets, delightful for February but a reminder of the summer months ahead. “Whatever happens,” he says, “at least I found out I can coach.”

To basketball people, Abatemarco has been a revelation as a head coach. Brad Greenberg, chief scout for the Portland Trail Blazers, is in town to scout New Orleans’s Ladell Eackles and Lamar’s James Gulley. He has seen Lamar earlier in the season.

“I like Tom and I was really concerned the first time I saw them play
that they would look really uncoached, as if they didn’t know what they were doing,” he says. “I was so impressed by what he was doing I wrote him a note and told him so. He’s done well.”

Abatemarco’s teams mirror many of the things Valvano does, but it is common for an assistant to do the same things his old boss did. What is most amazing is to stand in the locker room before the game and listen to Abatemarco talk to his team. Close your eyes and you will swear you are hearing Valvano.

“You see that number on the board?” Abatemarco says, pointing to where he has written a ‘1,’ and circled it just like Valvano would. “That is how many games you need to win to get into the NIT. One. Get this one tonight and you’ll be in the NIT.

“Okay, do we understand? Are we ready to go get this club? Okay, let’s go!”

As the team heads for the floor, forward Anthony Bledsoe pauses long enough to take his earrings out. Abatemarco won’t tell him not to wear them but won’t let him wear them on the court. College basketball is a different game in 1988 than in the old days.

The crowd is one of the largest of the season, 7,504, and the game is a good one. Lamar trails 39–32 at halftime and Abatemarco is so wound up his assistants have to calm him down. “The only good thing,” he tells his players, “is that you’re playing terrible and only down seven.”

Carwell, the SMU transfer, is screaming at his future teammates. “Enough of this shit! Enough! Let’s go back out there and kill those suckers!”

They try. They lead briefly but can’t hang on against New Orleans’s consistency. The final is 75–69.

Abatemarco is disconsolate. He tries to be calm—“Keep your heads up, okay?” he tells the team initially. “I saw some good things out there. Now we have to beat Southwest Louisiana to get into the NIT.” Finally, though, he explodes.

“
Goddamn it, how could you let them come into your own house and beat you!
You just played yourselves right out of the NIT!” He takes the six markers sitting on the board and hurls them across the room. “You could have had ten thousand people here Saturday. Now you’ll have five thousand. I wouldn’t come to see you play either.”

He starts scribbling numbers all over the board à la Valvano and finally says, “Practice is at three-thirty. Anyone who is one minute late
doesn’t play Saturday. It’s time we get some fucking discipline on this team.”

He walks into his office and opens a beer. “I wonder,” he says, “if V would take me back.”

He is joking … sort of.

For a man who is doing perhaps the best coaching job of his life, Gary Williams looks exhausted. Somehow, with a team that really isn’t ready for prime time, he has entered the last two weeks of the season fighting for an NCAA bid. Ohio State has beaten Michigan, Iowa, and Illinois and, with five games left in the season, has a 14–9 record, including 7–6 in the Big Ten. Before the season began, Williams thought he had no chance to finish at .500 in the league.

But today is a Big Day. A game the Buckeyes must win to stay in contention for the NCAAs. Michigan State is in town, and though they are one of the league’s doormats this season, they have the kind of athletic talent that gives Ohio State trouble. In East Lansing four weeks earlier, they had beaten the Buckeyes rather easily.

After today there are home games left with Minnesota and Purdue and road games at Indiana and Michigan. Realistically, the best Williams can hope for is a split of these four games—and that is being optimistic. So if Ohio State is to get the seventeen victories Williams figures will lock up an NCAA bid, it has to beat Michigan State.

It has already been a hectic week for Williams. His wife, Diane, has been away visiting her parents for a few days; he and his seventeen-year-old daughter Kristen have been keeping house. In truth, it means Kristen has been keeping house.

“Hey, Kristen,” he yells, pulling frozen orange juice from the freezer on game morning, “do you know how to make this stuff?” Kristen, who is blond like her mother and fortunate enough to have inherited her looks, knows how to make the juice. And coffee. Williams sits in the living room, glances at skier Alberto Tomba on his television set, and worries.

Williams has been going in three different directions all season. He has tried hard to focus on
this
team, not wanting to shortchange his seniors, trying to get the most he can from
this
group. That’s why he
was so excited that they still had a chance to get into the NCAAs; at the start of the season he honestly thought a losing record was all too possible.

At the same time, Williams has been looking ahead. For the second straight season he has put together what he thinks is an excellent recruiting class. Four players, three of them from Ohio, are signed while a fifth will sign in the spring. Two of this year’s freshmen are sitting out as Proposition 48 victims. When he assembles his team in October of 1988, Williams will have seven new players to work with. That is a lot of turnover—and a lot of inexperience.

“But also a lot of talent,” Williams says. “I’ve been a head coach ten years now [four at American, four at Boston College, two at Ohio State] and people have always said my teams have overachieved. Well, that’s nice, it’s a compliment to me. But I’ve always wanted to see how I could do with a lot of talent.

“Sure, we’ll make mistakes next year, but we’ll do a lot of good things too. And, if I am any good, we’ll get better. We’ll be pretty good by the end of next year. The year after that we should be very good. And, if we add Jackson to the group, then, well, we can be what I really want to be—a national contender.”

Jackson is the third direction that Williams’s mind has been going in this season. James Jackson is a 6–6 high school junior who lives only a little more than an hour from the Ohio State campus. He has also become a big name in the basketball cult world, considered a “franchise” player. Rudy Washington, an Iowa assistant coach who is vigorously recruiting him, describes James Jackson this way: “A-
Men
. James Jackson is A-
Men
.”