A Season Inside (58 page)

The senior white shooter in the family and his team were touring the West Coast and ripping teams up. Their record was 19–2, including four victories over the Navy team that would be playing at Camp Lejeune. “But that’s without Robinson,” Houston said. “The guys keep asking me what Robinson’s like to play against. I tell them I don’t know that much. All I know is I’m 0–5 against him.”

The difference in the lives of the two former military academy stars was perhaps best illustrated by the way they arrived at Lejeune for the tournament. Houston came with his teammates after a barnstorming stop at Fort Hood on the way east. They arrived two days before the tournament was to begin and found themselves quartered along with the Air Force and Navy teams in an old style barrack—one huge room filled with bunk beds—the kind you see in the movies. All it lacked was the gruff drill sergeant waking them up at reveille.

Robinson spent the day before the tournament began in Kansas City, working for ABC—TV as the color analyst on the Big Eight championship game between Oklahoma and Kansas State. He flew into Lejeune on Monday afternoon and joined the Navy team without having practiced and without having picked up a basketball for most of the past two months. He had spent those months in Oxnard, California, at a civil engineering school.

“All I want to do tonight,” he said before the opening game, “is be able to run up and down the court without dying.”

Actually, Robinson was in very good physical shape. He just wasn’t in basketball shape. “I haven’t had the chance to work out with anyone, all I’ve done is a little work on my own,” he said. “The two months in California were just so hectic there was no time to play or even work out, except for some time working with weights.”

Robinson’s hectic schedule was at least partly self-inflicted. Whenever he had free time, he ran off to do something basketball-related,
continuing to live the double life of Navy ensign and millionaire ballplayer. One weekend he judged a slam dunk contest. On another, he went to the NCAA convention in Nashville. There, he bumped into John Thompson. “Keep yourself in shape,” Thompson said, tapping Robinson on the stomach.

The Navy was certainly doing its best to keep Robinson in shape. One week, Robinson and his classmates were shipped to Camp Pendleton for a week of field maneuvers. “Toughest week of my life,” Robinson said. “I came back and said, ‘I hope I’m never in a war.’ ”

Every morning, Robinson would wake up at 4:40
A.M.
from a half-sleep caused by the too-small sleeping bag he’d been given. Bathing was no picnic either since Robinson hadn’t brought a towel. “I spent the week drying off with a T-shirt,” he said.

That was the easy part. The hard part was going into the field for sixteen hours a day under simulated war conditions. “We were supposed to be an advance force,” Robinson said. “We were doing these laser drills where they have simulated snipers. If they hit you in a certain spot, you were killed. The only good thing was that you got to stop running for a while if you got killed. I got killed three times.”

He wasn’t alone. In a group of seventy-three people on the final day, forty-six were killed by the five snipers. “I came back from that more tired than I had ever been in my life,” Robinson said. “But I couldn’t relax. I had commitments all the time.”

Robinson was enjoying himself, though. He played on a softball team in Oxnard, ran into a fence making a catch in center field—“It was an awesome catch”—and was immediately ordered by the officer in charge to get out of center field before he hurt himself.

But in the back of his mind, Robinson was concerned about his basketball. By the time he got to Lejeune, it had been a year since his last game at Navy and seven months since his last game with the Pan American team. He knew he wasn’t sharp and he wondered when he was going to get the chance to play. He knew the Navy brass wanted him on the Olympic team but now the trials, scheduled to begin May 18, were only a little more than two months away.

“There’s such an irony in all this,” he said. “All these years I worked to get better at basketball. The last couple, it really became important to me and, sure enough, I’m the number one draft pick and I’m going to be paid all this money to play basketball. Only I’m not playing.
Here I am, with all this other stuff: The contract, a shoe deal, all the attention, but I’m not
playing
.”

Most of the time, Robinson was able to deal with his situation. He was resigned to the fact that he would be in the Navy until May 20, 1989, and that was fine with him. He wanted to play in the Olympics, a feeling distinctly different from a year ago.

“Losing the Pan Ams certainly affected me,” he said. “I can still remember sitting on the bench [in foul trouble] watching that lead disappear during the final. I’ve talked to guys who played in the Olympics and they all say it was one of the great experiences of their lives, one they wouldn’t trade for anything. So I’m really looking forward to having the chance to play.”

Occasionally Robinson felt pangs though. Watching his future team, the San Antonio Spurs, struggle was difficult, because he knew he could be helping them if he were in uniform. And some nights it hurt just being detached from the game he had grown to love.

“When I was still stationed back at King’s Bay [Georgia] I was in a bowling league one night a week,” he said. “One night after we had finished we were all sitting around watching a game on television. I looked at the game and then I looked around me and saw myself sitting in this bowling alley and I said, ‘This sucks.’ ”

But before he concerned himself with his future in the pros, Robinson wanted to concern himself with his more immediate future: the Olympic trials. Unlike Houston, he had no concern about receiving an invitation; in fact he didn’t have that much concern about making the team. “But I don’t want to just show up and make the team because I’m 7–1 and can run and jump,” he said. “I want to go to the trials in shape and really dominate.”

That road would start in this tournament. Goettge Memorial Field House was a long way from Seoul. It was an old, dimly lit, 5,194-seat arena. Anyone who wanted to see the tournament simply had to walk in and take a seat. There was no charge for admission. About 1,500 people, many of them in Marine fatigues, showed up on the first night.

In the opening game, Houston shot poorly (5-for-14) but finished with 18 points as his team beat Air Force, 107–106. “We never thought they would be as good as they were,” Houston said. “They caught us by surprise.”

It was the Navy team that Houston and his teammates were interested in. The Navy had brought two of Robinson’s former Academy
teammates, Kylor Whitaker and Vernon Butler, in to join the team along with Robinson. Navy routed the Marines; Robinson, looking very rusty, scored 13 points and had 7 rebounds. It wasn’t anything wondrous, but it was a start.

“Just playing basketball in a real game feels great,” he said afterward. “Hearing myself introduced, the lights, seeing people in the stands—it feels like I’m alive again. I feel like I’ve been away from the game forever.”

While Robinson played, Houston sat in the stands with his wife and watched. “Anything David gets, I’m happy for him,” Houston said. “He’s going to be a key to our Olympic team. Me, I just want a shot to try out. I know whatever happens, this is my last hurrah.

“But as long as I get the chance to have that last hurrah, one way or the other I can walk away and smile. I just want to show them that I can play.”

In a sense, that was the bond between Robinson and Houston. All the ensign and the lieutenant wanted was a chance to play.

Walker Lambiotte could relate to the way Robinson and Houston felt. He had not played in a real college basketball game for a year. Now the 1987–88 season was over and he knew his next college game was more than eight months away.

But when he had made his decision to transfer from N.C. State to Northwestern, Lambiotte had known what he was getting into. He’d hoped the year he had to sit out as a transfer would be a learning one and would give him a chance to get his confidence back after two tough years at State.

For the most part, all had gone according to plan. “I feel much better about myself as a player now than I did last year,” Lambiotte said, two days after Northwestern’s season had ended with a second straight 7–21 record. “I really feel like I’m going to help this team next year because my game is starting to get where I think it should be.”

Clearly, Northwestern needed plenty of help. In Bill Foster’s second season, there had been some moments of hope: a win over DePaul and a miraculous victory over Indiana that had set off a net-cutting celebration worthy of a conference championship. Lambiotte had reveled in that victory even though he had only been a spectator.

“We played an almost perfect game to win, which is what we have
to do against Big Ten teams,” he said. “When it was over, everyone went crazy. We all knew that, great as it was, we had to have more wins like that. You can’t build a program on just one win, no matter how big it is.

“What worried me coming here was the losing. I knew I’d get a good education and a chance to play against good players in the Big Ten. That’s all there for me. But I want to be part of a team that can compete. I think we’ve had a pretty good recruiting year this year and I hope we’re going to be better for it. We had some bad luck with injuries this year, but with guys coming back and the recruits and me, I think we have a chance next season. I just wish it would get here quick because I’m ready to go.”

Unfortunately, Northwestern was losing its best player, center Shon Morris. Often, when he and Morris would work two-man plays in practice, Lambiotte would find himself fantasizing about playing in real games with Morris as a teammate and an inside threat. Early in the season, he would half-joke with Morris, telling him to get hurt so he could redshirt and come back for another year. If anyone deserved the chance to play for a good team, it was Morris.

All season, the Wildcats had chances to add to the Indiana upset. They came close against Ohio State, close against Michigan State, close against Wisconsin. They played Illinois down to the wire in the last game of the season. But the big plays just weren’t there at the end. “It would seem like whenever we got in position to win we just didn’t know
how
,” Lambiotte said. “That’s when the sitting was hardest to take. I would sit there on the bench envisioning what I could do if I was in the game. Sometimes I could actually
see
the move I would make on a guy if he was guarding me in an endgame situation. But that was all I could do, fantasize.”

One thing that encouraged Lambiotte was the way his coach, Bill Foster, was dealing with the losses. When he was younger, Foster had trouble handling defeat, any defeat. When he coached at Duke, Foster would often get in his car after a loss and drive around all night listening to country music, trying to escape from the questions gnawing at his brain. Starting over at Northwestern, Foster understood he couldn’t drive himself so. He didn’t take the losing all that well, that just wasn’t in his nature. But Lambiotte was impressed by the way Foster kept coming back, loss after loss, insisting that there was no reason why the Wildcats couldn’t win the next one if they would just play as well as
they were capable. Like Lambiotte, Foster honestly believed that better things were ahead if he could just make himself stay patient and wait for better players to arrive while the younger ones currently on the team matured. And, there was Lambiotte.

“He definitely will make a big difference in the nature of our team next year,” Foster said. “I can’t tell you how many times this season, if we had just had that shooter who could knock down the big shot from outside, we might have won ball games. That alone would have made a big difference. Also, he’s the kind of player who makes the guys around him better players. We need some of that, too.”

Lambiotte had never been part of a losing team in his life, and that was tough to take. But he kept his mind focused on the future in basketball and enjoyed the present away from the floor. Once he got used to the weather, he found himself enjoying Northwestern. “At first, when The Hawk [the wind that blows in off of Lake Michigan] blew through here I said, ‘No way can I take this,’ “he said, laughing. “I mean it was so cold it was unbelievable. I walked around campus with one of those ski masks that covers your whole face.

“Everyone told me I was the only person on the entire campus wearing one. So for a while I stopped. But I was freezing. So, I said, ‘The hell with it, I don’t care what anyone thinks,’ and I started wearing it again. After a while, though, I started to get used to the cold. The only time I wore the mask was when the temperature went below zero.”

A true midwesterner. Lambiotte’s grades were solid although he did struggle with a computer science course. One night he locked himself into the computer room at 10
P.M.
to figure out a program and didn’t come out until 6 the next morning.

“If there’s an advantage to not playing basketball, that kind of thing is it,” he said. “If I was in the middle of the season, I would never think of staying up all night that way. But because I’m not playing, if I lost a night of sleep it was no big deal. If I’d been playing I might have flunked that course. It was hard as hell.”

There were other advantages. Lambiotte got to go home for a real Christmas vacation for the first time in years. “My mom really spoiled me while I was home,” he said with a laugh. And, when he suffered through a spate of minor injuries, he didn’t have to worry about missed playing time, although he wasn’t thrilled to miss practice. “Coach Foster told me he hopes I’m getting all the injuries out of my system
this year,” he said. “I hope so too because even now they aren’t any fun.”

More than anything, though, Lambiotte just tried to be patient. In a sense, even though he was sitting and sitting, he was at a point where he could finally see the proverbial light at the end of a long tunnel. For two years at N.C. State he had wondered when his time would come, had wondered
if
it would come. Finally, he had made a very tough decision, one that many ballplayers make without giving enough thought to the consequences. He had decided he would sit for twenty months—from March of 1987 until November of 1988—so that he could start all over again.