A Season Inside (6 page)

“When he asked me where I thought he would play, I said, ‘Inside.’ He said, ‘Have you seen me play?’ I said, ‘No, not really, not yet, but I’d be very surprised if you aren’t better off playing inside.’ I could tell by looking at him that we were done.”

Mustaf, who is a Maryland freshman, confirms the story and Boeheim’s notion. “When he said that, I knew for sure I wouldn’t be going to Syracuse.”

What makes coaches truly crazy are the often wacky reasons that players use to choose a school. Rarely does a player choose a school simply because he believes it will be the best place for him athletically and academically. Sometimes the weather on a particular visit decides. Sometimes a pretty date on that visit decides. Sometimes nice uniforms decide. Sometimes, it is even sillier than that.

Tapscott, who needs all the breaks he can get coaching at a small school like American, lost a player last spring because of Kermit Washington, the best player in AU history.

“We were recruiting a kid from Florida named Deron Hayes,” he explained. “The kid was about six-five, not a great player but a good one, the kind who could help us. He had a great visit to campus. He even told me when he was here that he’d like to settle in the Washington, D.C., area after college. Then, a few days later he calls me up and says he’s going to Penn State.”

Tapscott said his question to Hayes was direct: “Why the hell are you going there?” From there, the conversation went like this:

Hayes: “Well, coach, they have a lot of tradition.”

Tapscott: “That’s in football, not basketball.”

Hayes: “Well, coach, I think a degree from Penn State would mean more than a degree from American.”

Tapscott: “Come on, Deron, that’s not it, you know our board scores are higher on the average than theirs are.”

Hayes: “Well, coach, a lot of my friends from home are going to school up there.”

Tapscott: “Deron, you told me you were ready to leave high school behind and move on to college. That’s not it either. Now come on, why Penn State?”

Hayes (softly): “Coach, I can wear number twenty-four there.”

Tapscott knew he had hit the real reason. Kermit Washington had worn No. 24 and American had retired it after his graduation. Hayes wore No. 24 in high school. He could not have worn it at American.

“If I had been smart, I would have told him I could arrange for him to wear it and then after he signed, explain that I couldn’t work it out,” Tapscott said. “But I’m not that smart.”

Or that dishonest. In recruiting, that is a weakness.

One of the more unusual recruiting stories in the country was that of Jerrod Mustaf. In many ways, Mustaf was every college coach’s dream. He was 6–10, a gifted, graceful athlete who could run, shoot, and pass. He could play inside when he had to although, as he made clear to Jim Boeheim, he preferred to be outside. He came from one of the great high school programs in America, DeMatha High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, where he played for the legendary coach Morgan Wootten. He was a good student, a bright youngster who would do well academically anywhere he decided to go.

What made Mustaf different was the involvement of his father in the recruiting process. Parental involvement—to the point of being interfering and domineering—was certainly nothing new in recruiting. It is something coaches deal with all the time. Often, in their recruiting folders coaches write notes that say things like: “The father is the key here.” Or, “Johnny will go to college where his mother wants him to go.” Thus the phrase, “recruit the parents.”

That was the case with Jerrod Mustaf. Although Sharr Mustaf insisted, as all parents do, that the decision on where to attend college was Jerrod’s and Jerrod’s alone, that was clearly not so. In fact, Sharr Mustaf readily admitted that he had gone to his son before his senior season and said, “Son, please let me use you.”

At least, unlike many parents, Sharr Mustaf wanted to use his son
for a good cause. Born and raised in North Carolina, a former Greyhound sales officer who had retired on disability, Sharr Mustaf was a handsome man of forty-six who felt deeply about the exploitation of blacks in athletics. That was where Jerrod came in. His son’s ability gave Sharr a chance to do something. That was why he had convinced his son to leave his mother in Whiteville, North Carolina, and move in with him and his second wife in order to play at DeMatha.

“I can remember when Jerrod was a freshman, Sharr saying to me, ‘Coach, this boy has a chance to do something for his race,’ ” Morgan Wootten said. “It was something that I think was in his mind when he brought Jerrod to DeMatha.”

As a DeMatha freshman, Jerrod Mustaf had played with Danny Ferry, then a senior. He was comfortable with Ferry and liked him but was pleased as a sophomore when Ferry had gone on to Duke and he became the focal point of the DeMatha offense. Ferry’s last team had lost the city championship game, the big game every year for DeMatha, and the Stags lost again in Mustaf’s sophomore and junior years. “I don’t want to leave here without having won a city championship,” he said at the outset of his senior year. “That’s the most important thing to me this season.”

That and choosing a college. In late August, Sharr Mustaf sent Morgan Wootten a copy of a letter he was sending to the eight coaches who were being invited to make home visits to the Mustaf home. The eight schools on the Mustaf visit list were Maryland, Howard, Georgia Tech, North Carolina, Duke, Syracuse, Villanova, and Notre Dame. The coach at each of those schools received the following letter, dated August 29, 1987:

The intent of the letter was clear. Each school recruiting Jerrod was to be graded on its response to the letter. Of course, there was no doubt that Howard, a black school, would easily grade the highest. And, in fact, Howard would be one of the three “finalists” eventually chosen.
But Howard was just a smoke screen. At no point was there any chance that Jerrod would end up there.

When he read the letter, Wootten was thrown at first. He knew this letter would cause controversy, but he also thought many of the questions quite legitimate. “The only thing I suggested to Sharr was that he not pin each coach down to such a specific time because the recruiting period (three weeks) was so tight,” Wootten said. “He understood that.”

The letter, though completely different in nature, brought back memories of the infamous “Ewing letter” of 1980 in which “the committee” helping Patrick Ewing choose his college had informed the schools recruiting him that, among other things, Ewing would need untimed testing while in college. Some of the schools that lost out on Ewing—all of whom would have accepted him in a second—used that letter to try to prove that Georgetown was admitting someone who was academically unqualified.

This was different. But it was still controversial. When word leaked out, as was inevitable, that the Mustafs had written a letter to the coaches demanding statistics on black involvement in their school, a lot of people were quick to judge Sharr Mustaf as some kind of racist.

Sharr Mustaf is no racist. Talk to him for five minutes and that will become apparent. But he is extremely race conscious. He believes that blacks have an obligation to do for other blacks because more often than not, whites won’t do for them. This, he felt, was his chance.

Exactly how Jerrod felt about this is tough to say. He was quick to explain that he agreed with everything his father was doing and that these were questions that were important to him too. “I went along with it and I was behind what my father was doing,” he said. “I would like to be an example to other blacks in the future.”

All well and good. The problem, according to those who became familiar with the situation, was that Sharr Mustaf had made up his mind where Jerrod would go to college before any coach set foot inside his house. Almost everyone agrees that Jerrod Mustaf was destined to play for a black coach because of his father’s beliefs. John Thompson, the most successful and visible black coach in the country, was out; the Georgetown coach did not recruit DeMatha players because of his long-standing twenty-year feud with Wootten. Quite correctly, Sharr Mustaf saw this as foolish: “Even if John doesn’t end up taking the kid at Georgetown or the kid doesn’t want to go there, why should any of
them be denied the chance to be recruited by Georgetown because of something that happened between John and Morgan before any of these kids were even born?” he asked.

Good question. But Georgetown was still out. So was Howard, even though A. B. Williamson was a proven winner and his school would easily score the best on the letter test. Jerrod Mustaf wanted to play for a school that could legitimately contend for a national championship. Howard did not meet that requirement. That left Maryland. There, Bob Wade was black, the chancellor was black. Sharr Mustaf felt comfortable with them and with the school. By the time the eight coaches had finished their visits, the word was out on the coaching grapevine: Mustaf is a lock for Maryland; the father has decided.

Father and son deny this vehemently. “My favorite team from the time I was in the ninth grade on was North Carolina,” Jerrod said. “I always thought back then that I would end up playing there. But I also liked Duke a lot. I liked Coach [Mike] K’s [Krzyzewski] motion offense and I liked the idea of playing with Danny [Ferry] again. Also, Coach [Mike] Brey had gone down there from here [DeMatha] and I liked that. The coach I think I liked best of all as a person was [Georgia Tech’s] Bobby Cremins. I thought he was a great guy. Any of those schools had a good chance.”

Villanova, Syracuse, and Notre Dame had been invited in more out of curiosity than anything else. When Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim told Mustaf that even though he hadn’t seen him play, he believed he was an inside player, that eliminated the Orangemen from contention. “I was shocked that the man would come into my home without having seen Jerrod play,” Sharr Mustaf said.

The Villanova and Notre Dame visits were without incident but neither school did anything to really move itself up on the list. “Coach Massimino was a lot of fun, though,” Jerrod remembered. “There was no doubt in my mind I could be comfortable playing for him.”

The most rancorous visit was the one made by Krzyzewski and Brey. Sharr Mustaf asked Krzyzewski at one point why he didn’t have any black assistant coaches. Krzyzewski had been prepared to hire Stu Jackson the previous summer before Jackson decided to follow Rick Pitino from Providence to the New York Knicks. At that point he had hired Brey. Krzyzewski didn’t feel the need to tell Sharr Mustaf this. Instead, he just said, “I hire coaches, not blacks or whites.”

According to everyone present, one could feel the icicles in the room
from that moment on. “My father didn’t like that answer at all,” Jerrod Mustaf said. “I didn’t think Coach K. did a very good job with the visit. It’s probably fair to say they were eliminated after that.”

Sharr Mustaf goes further. “If the man hadn’t come to my house, he might have gotten my son.”

Krzyzewski, who liked Jerrod Mustaf very much as a player and a person, is philosophical. “I told them the truth, which is more than a lot of guys do. I think if Jerrod had visited and spent time with our players, black and white, all his questions would have been answered. But I don’t believe we were ever going to get that chance.”

Dean Smith’s visit didn’t go much better, at least from the Mustaf point of view. Smith told the Mustafs that if Jerrod really wanted to do something for blacks, he would go and play for John Thompson at Georgetown. Sharr Mustaf found this silly. “If there’s one thing John Thompson doesn’t need it’s more black faces on his bench,” he said. “He’s already got plenty.”