A Season Inside (55 page)

He pointed his cigar. “Just remember what I said before the season started. The true guy comes out in adversity. We got some more games to win this season. If I’m wrong, I don’t know my kids.”

Almost everyone on the planet has a conference tournament these days. When the Big Ten eventually gives in and starts playing one, only the Ivy League and the fabled American Mid-Continent Conference will not have a postseason tournament.

The reason these tournaments exist is money. People buy the tickets, television shows the games, and the cities that host them rake in all sorts of revenue from the fans who pour in for the weekend.

But there is one conference tournament that is different from all the others. The basics are the same. Money created the tournament and sustains it. But because the Atlantic Coast Conference has had a tournament since it first came into existence in 1954, it is special. The other league tournaments have only been around for a couple of years. The ACC Tournament has always been there.

The nature of the ACC Tournament has changed over the years. Now, the regular season champion comes into the weekend knowing it is in the NCAAs. In fact, most years, the top
four
teams come in knowing they have bids locked up. Some coaches now talk about sitting players out to rest minor injuries. “It just ain’t life and death anymore,” Lefty Driesell said. “If you win, great. But if you don’t, it’s no big deal.”

Wrong. The coaches could talk all they wanted about the tournament
not meaning as much as it once did. Tradition is tradition. Many of the players in the league had grown up watching the ACC Tournament on television. They remembered Maryland–N.C. State. They remembered the infamous 12–10 game between Duke and State in 1968.

They knew that if you won the ACC Tournament you could walk around all summer wearing a T-shirt that said “ACC Champions” on it and they knew it was for, as players like to say, “a banner.” If you won, you could hang a banner in your gym that said “ACC Champions” on it.

And then there were the fans. Some had been to all thirty-five tournaments. Most planned the first weekend in March around the tournament every year. Year in and year out, there was no tougher ticket in sports than the ACC Tournament. There was never a public sale. To buy a ticket you either had to be a student and be selected in your school’s lottery or you had to be a member of one of the school’s booster clubs.

The ACC Tournament, more than anything else, provides the booster clubs with their revenue. It is a simple case of blackmail. Would you like ACC Tournament tickets? Yes. Well, they’re easy to get. Just contribute
x
thousand dollars annually and you will have the privilege of buying them. Did people object? Heck no. At some schools, there were waiting lists of people hoping to get a chance to fork over their money.

The ACC Tournament is more than just a tournament. It is a social occasion, a part of the lives of the people who participate each year. “It’s like being the king of your neighborhood,” Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “It’s great to have recognition in other places. But it isn’t the same as being considered the best in your own backyard.”

For the eight ACC teams, this was their backyard. The rest of the country didn’t much care who won the ACC Tournament, but from College Park, Maryland, to Atlanta, Georgia, just about everyone who followed basketball
did
care. A lot.

Winning the tournament could save an entire season. In 1987, N.C. State had dragged into the tournament with a 17–14 record. The Wolfpack needed overtime to beat Duke in the first round. It needed double overtime to beat Wake Forest in the semifinals. And then, in a game it never should have won, it upset North Carolina 68–67 in the
final. Carolina had also gone two overtimes the day before to get by Virginia.

When the final was over, the State players celebrated as if they had won the national championship. The Carolina players were crushed. So were the coaches. Assistant Roy Williams, normally as outgoing and friendly as anyone in the profession, sat on a stairway, inconsolable.

To an outsider, this kind of emotion can’t be explained. In 1988, it would be no different. When the eight teams gathered in Greensboro, four of them had already locked up NCAA bids: Carolina, N.C. State, Duke, and Georgia Tech. All four had twenty victories. Maryland, the fifth-place team, was 16–11. Most people thought that an opening-round victory over Georgia Tech would lock a bid for the Terrapins and that even with a loss, they might still get in.

The bottom three teams—Virginia, Clemson, and Wake Forest—were going nowhere unless they found some miraculous way to win the tournament. This was not terribly likely. Between them, the three schools had won the tournament three times: Wake twice, in 1961 and 1962, and Virginia once, in 1976. Clemson was the only school in the league that had never won the tournament. In fact, the Tigers hadn’t reached the final since 1962 and hadn’t won a
game
since 1980.

But, as State had proven in 1987, strange things could happen in the ACC Tournament.

Each of the top four teams had a motive for wanting to win. Carolina had not won since 1982, a slump that mystified most ACC people since, prior to that, Dean Smith had won the tournament nine times in sixteen years. Starting in 1983, the Tar Heels had been the top seed three times, but hadn’t won. The State loss had been the most crushing, and this year, for the first time since the NCAA expansion, Smith actually admitted that he and his team badly wanted to win.

“We’re coming in here pretending it’s the old days and we have to win to get to the NCAAs,” Smith said. “I think this is important to this team.”

Bobby Cremins and Georgia Tech had beaten Smith and Carolina to win the tournament in 1985. The next year, Tech had lost the final, 68–67, to Duke when Craig Neal missed a jump shot with nine seconds left. Since then, Tech’s star had faded; to get back on the map the Yellow Jackets needed to do well here or in the NCAA Tournament. They had the toughest first-round game, though, since Maryland felt it
had
to win to get into the sixty-four-team NCAA field.

As for State, Valvano had made a big thing after the ’87 tournament victory that winning in March and hanging banners was what his program was all about. Smith, who had had some trouble winning in March since ’82, really chafed at that one. Now, after a 23–6 regular season, Valvano had to convince his team that March was as important this year as it was last year.

“Last year, we had a mission because we felt we had to win the whole thing to get into the NCAAs,” he said. “The mission should be the same this year. Win, hang a banner, get to play the first two games in our backyard instead of being shipped out west somewhere.”

On Thursday, the night before the tournament, Valvano showed his team three tapes: the ACC championship game against Virginia in 1983, the NCAA championship game that year against Houston, and the ’87 ACC championship game. When the tapes were over, Valvano reminded his team that this was what the entire season was about. “This is what we’ve worked for all year,” he said. “The chance to do that [celebrate] again. That’s what this is about.”

But Valvano was concerned. He didn’t feel that sense of mission he wanted to feel. They were just a little too comfortable with the twenty-three wins.

The same could not be said for Duke. Like Valvano, Krzyzewski wanted his team to rise to the occasion of a championship. He still remembered the feeling of winning in 1986 and wanted that feeling again. He had been bitterly disappointed the year before when his team had come in as the defending champion, played horribly in the first round and lost to State. On Tuesday, sensing that his team was still basking a bit in the Carolina victory, he threw the whole team out of practice.

“You guys have the chance to do something special and you’re throwing it away,” he told his team. “Do you want to go into the tournament like you did last year and embarrass yourselves? Or do you want to play like you’re capable and win it? You decide.”

The opening round of the tournament is always the most unpredictable. Sometimes, the underdogs rise to the occasion to produce remarkable games. Sometimes, they are beaten down by the long season and aren’t capable of competing.

Wake Forest certainly tried. Perhaps no team in America had been crippled by injuries more than the Deacons. Even semihealthy, Wake had managed to pull January upsets over Carolina and State. But by February, with only three of his first seven still able to play, Coach Bob Staak was lucky to be able to field a team.

Still, the Deacons came out flying at the start of their game with Carolina. The Tar Heels acted as if noon was just too early to play and were quickly down 13–4. There were some rumblings in the Greensboro Coliseum but for the most part, everyone just waited. Wake would have to stay in the game for a lot longer than seven minutes to win over any fans.

This is one of the phenomena of the tournament. The crowd is divided equally into eight groups. But if an underdog has a legitimate chance to win, the fans from the other six schools will join their fans in trying to pull them through. No one is more conscious of this sort of thing than Dean Smith.

“I noticed the Duke students waving their arms when we were shooting free throws,” he would say after the Wake game. “They did a good job. They made it feel like a road game.”

Sure, Dean. Two hundred students waving their arms in an arena of sixteen thousand made it feel like a road game. But that was Dean. Before the game, given the choice of benches as the higher seeded team, he had taken what is normally the visitor’s bench—because the Wake fans were at the home bench end of the building. The man misses nothing.

The 13–4 start didn’t last. Carolina went on a 21–1 spree late in the first half to build a 39–28 halftime lead and eventually cruised home with an 83–62 victory. “We just hit the wall,” Staak said. “The kids had hung together and played tough through it all but today we hit the wall. We had nothing left.”

Game two of the afternoon doubleheader was, on paper, the best of the day. That is normal since the No. 4 and No. 5 seeds figure to be the most evenly matched. Georgia Tech had beaten Maryland ten straight times. But Maryland needed this game more and played like it. All season, the Terrapins had shown flashes of great talent. But they had never been consistent.

In truth, they were a team in flux. Many of the players were unhappy with Coach Bob Wade. Perhaps no coach in the history of college basketball had been given the free ride granted to Wade when Maryland
hired him in the wake of the Len Bias tragedy. Chancellor John Slaughter, after forcing Lefty Driesell out, hired Wade on a recommendation from Wade’s good friend John Thompson.

Maryland had gone 0–15 in ACC play and 9–17 overall in Wade’s first year. Certainly, under the circumstances, judging Wade on that record would have been unfair. But it was just as stupid to run around shouting that Wade had done a great job—which many people did. CBS voted him the “rookie coach of the year,” one of the more absurd acts of that or any season.

This season, with many players who had been forced to sit 1987 out and with two excellent recruits added, junior-college point guard Rudy Archer and freshman center Brian Williams, the Terrapins were vastly improved. They were 16–11 and a respectable 6–8 in ACC play.

Within the team there were problems, however. Even though Slaughter and Wade kept trumpeting a new commitment to academics, the team was full of academic question marks. Reporters’ questions about whether several players were in academic trouble were being met with answers like “No comment” and “That’s a team matter.” What’s more, two players, Hood and Williams, were thinking of transferring (and would do so at the end of the semester). Wade could claim that Hood’s departure was over playing time. But Williams’s departure was a devastating blow. He was the cornerstone of Wade’s program and his leaving said, in essence, that he didn’t like the way he was being coached and that the so-called new academic emphasis was a crock.

In the short term, though, Maryland had one job: beat Georgia Tech. The Terrapins did that, dominating the game from the start. Ironically, the hero was fifth-year senior Keith Gatlin, a good friend of Len Bias and a man Wade had been ready to write off after he signed Archer. Gatlin had almost left college in the wake of the Bias tragedy. He had lost his eligibility, dropped out of school, wondered if he would ever play again and then come back for one last semester.

A gifted player, he had forced Wade to play him with his brilliance, and today he scored 25 points, knocking in one three-pointer after another when the Terrapins needed them. Tech never could get going and the final was 84–67.

“I never thought I would have this feeling again,” Gatlin said. “The funny thing is, after what I’ve been through, I doubt if losing a basketball game will ever really bother me again.”

There were many twists in this story. The last time Gatlin had played
in an ACC Tournament game had been in the 1986 semifinals—against Georgia Tech. In that game, with five seconds left and the score tied, Gatlin had tried to throw a crosscourt inbounds pass to Bias. Duane Ferrell had intercepted it and dunked at the buzzer. He was the hero, Gatlin the goat. Two years later, Ferrell had played poorly and Gatlin superbly. Their roles were reversed. Gatlin just smiled when someone mentioned that.

“You know, I barely remember that game,” he said. “It was at least a couple of lifetimes ago.”

Indeed.

That evening, the favorites each had brief scares. State, after a 22–6 start against Clemson, looked to have a virtual off night. For some reason, Cliff Ellis, whose team was on something of a roll, coming off wins over Duke and Georgia Tech, started the game in a spread offense. His players had no clue what they were doing and were soon in a deep hole. Ellis abandoned that bit of foolishness and the Tigers came all the way back to tie the game at 63–63 with 4:30 left.

Now the crowd was aroused. During the first half it had been so quiet you could hear the sneakers squeaking as players made their cuts. But Clemson is Clemson. With a chance to take the lead, senior Grayson Marshall missed a jump shot. Vinny Del Negro hit at the other end, then stole the ball and fed Charles Shackleford for a dunk. That was that. The final was 79–72. Time for spring football at Clemson—as usual.