A Season Inside (65 page)

“But we’re hurt,” Smith insisted before the game. “Jeff [Lebo] is sore and I’m not even sure [Steve] Bucknall can play.” Bucknall would play. People don’t take the day off because they’re “sore”—not with a Final Four spot at stake. Smith, ever stubborn, bet a reporter a dollar that Bucknall wouldn’t play. When Bucknall was introduced as a starter, Smith took a dollar out of his pocket and waved it. It was a bet he was more than willing to lose.

By the time Kerr was introduced, his stomach was churning. “It was the first time I ever caught myself thinking in terms of, ‘This could be my last game,’ “he said later. “It sort of unnerved me for a minute.”

The butterflies slowly began to fade once the game started. Both teams were tentative early. Arizona had an early 5–0 lead, but Carolina came right back to go up 7–6. The first half was a cautious one, each team afraid to be the aggressor for fear of making critical mistakes. Kerr, after missing his first shot, made two straight three-pointers midway through the half.

The Wildcats were playing zone, laying back to deny the inside to the Tar Heels’ J. R. Reid and Scott Williams. As a result, North Carolina was taking close to forty-five seconds on almost every possession. The slow pace of the game, combined with what was at stake, made the crowd feel as if it were in a dentist’s chair. Everyone kept squirming uncomfortably, hoping the waiting would end soon.

The half ended badly for Kerr and Arizona. A Ranzino Smith three-pointer with forty-five seconds left put Carolina up 27–26. Arizona came down and set up for a final shot. But, to the amazement of everyone, Kerr threw as poor a pass as he had thrown all season, tossing the ball right to Carolina’s Rick Fox. As Fox broke away for a
lay-up, Kerr seemed to compound the error by intentionally fouling him.

The Tar Heels, instead of getting two points out of the mistake, had a chance to get as many as five—the two free throws plus the ensuing possession. Instead, Fox only made one of the free throws and King Rice’s jumper was long at the buzzer, so the halftime lead for Carolina was only 28–26.

Lute Olson was not a happy man during intermission. He didn’t feel his team had been aggressive enough. To combat that problem, he decided to switch to a man-to-man defense to shake his team out of its lethargy. Tom Tolbert, in particular, had struggled. Olson asked him a simple question: “Do you want to go to Kansas City?” Tolbert didn’t have to answer.

Both teams picked up the pace as the second half began, sensing that the time for playing chess games was past. Sean Elliott and Craig McMillan quickly hit three-pointers for Arizona, while Scott Williams hit twice inside for Carolina. Kerr stole a pass and fed McMillan for a dunk. Arizona led 34–32.

The game stayed tight. Tolbert put Arizona on top with a circus shot, an over-the-head flip that went into the basket just as Reid crashed into him. Reid answered that seconds later and Carolina led 44–43. But then Kerr hit a three-pointer and Tolbert produced another spectacular move, driving under the basket and reversing the ball up and in as he was fouled. The free throw made it 49–44.

Kerr fouled Scott Williams—“Oh my God, no! That was no foul!” he screamed in frustration—but Williams missed the first free throw. Then Reid stepped into the lane as Williams was shooting the second. On the bench, Smith looked a little shell-shocked. His team was unraveling and he knew it. Tolbert hit inside again. Reid dunked to make it 51–46 with 9:20 left but that was the last field goal for the Tar Heels until a Fox fifteen-footer with 1:45 left.

By that time, Arizona had put the game out of reach. Tolbert and Elliott had taken command, leading the Wildcats on a 13–4 run, giving them a 64–50 lead. Just as it had done against Duke, Carolina had fallen apart on offense during the last ten minutes. Nothing would fall for any of the Tar Heels. As the lead mounted, Kerr began to realize that he was, at last, going to the Final Four. When the buzzer sounded and Arizona had won, 70–52, Kerr felt as if a giant weight had come off his shoulders.

“I can’t even remember how many times I fantasized going to the Final Four,” he said. “It was just an unreal feeling, looking up at the scoreboard and knowing we had it. I couldn’t believe Carolina fell apart the way it did. You just don’t expect that from them. We expected the game to go right to the end but they just didn’t seem to have anything left. It was really kind of shocking.”

There were more shocks left for Kerr. As he was being guided toward the CBS camera for the postgame interview, the on-site producer, Roy Hamilton, who had played at UCLA when Kerr was a ballboy there, whispered to him, “When you go on the air, Steve, do us a favor and say, ‘We’re going to Kansas City!’ ”

CBS, it seems, not only pays for the NCAA Tournament and determines when the games will be played, it now also feels it must script the postgame interviews. Kerr shrugged. “What is this,” he wanted to know, “a Disneyland commercial?”

But Hamilton had been a friend since boyhood. Kerr delivered the line. When the interview was over, CBS’s Brent Musberger asked Kerr how his mother would hear about the game. “I guess I’ll give her a call,” Kerr said.

“If you’d like,” Musberger said, “you’re welcome to use the phone in our truck to call.”

Kerr thought this was a generous offer and would save him quite a few dollars on a phone call to Egypt. “That would be great,” he told Musberger.

“We’d love to put a camera on you while you make the call,” Musberger said.

Kerr was stunned. And embarrassed. “Calling my mother is kind of a private thing,” he said politely. “I guess I’ll just do it later.”

It was later that Kerr learned CBS had been told by the NCAA that Kerr could make the call from the truck as long as he later reimbursed the network for the call. So Kerr would not even have saved any money by accepting the CBS offer. As always, the NCAA was right on the case in a matter that should have meant absolutely nothing.

By the time Kerr was finished with all the interviews, he was exhausted. It had been a grueling game, one surprisingly full of trash talk back and forth. Kerr had not expected this from North Carolina. In fact, afterwards, Bucknall had claimed that if he had been playing on two good legs, Elliott would not have scored 24 points. When he heard this comment, Elliott laughed.

“At least,” he said, thinking back to December, “Billy King took it like a man.”

Now, Billy King was in the Final Four. So was Elliott—and Kerr. Two hundred and eighty-seven teams were done. Four were left and, as the people at CBS would tell you again and again, they were all going to Kansas City.

Once upon a time, fifty years ago, when the NCAA Tournament was played for the very first time, a total of eight teams participated and four of them came to Kansas City to decide the championship. Oregon State won that first tournament and it has never again been so quiet in Kansas City.

Now, the Final Four ranks with the World Series and the Super Bowl among the great annual events in American sports. It is covered by several thousand members of the media, it dominates whatever town it is played in for an entire week, and it is a major television event around the country.

When the NCAA awarded the 1988 Final Four to Kansas City, it did so with tradition and nostalgia in mind. Kansas City had hosted nine of the first twenty-five Final Fours; since this was to be the fiftieth anniversary of the tournament, it would be a nice touch to return there.

All well and good. It would be wonderful if all Final Fours could be played in basketball gyms like Kemper Arena. Basketball is an intimate sport and when it is played in domes, it loses intimacy, especially for those fans sitting miles and miles from courtside. But the future of the Final Four is, without question, in domes. In 1990, the Final Four will be played in Denver’s twenty thousand-seat McNichols
Arena. It is unlikely to be played in a real basketball arena any time after that.

So, in more ways than one, this Final Four was a tribute to the past—very shortly this kind of Final Four will be a thing of the past. With only 16,200 seats for sale in the arena, scalpers were asking—and getting—close to $2,000 a ticket.

The Final Four is much more than three basketball games. It is a week-long convention of the entire sport. The National Association of Basketball Coaches actually holds its annual convention during the week. The rest of the college basketball world has its own less-formal convention at the same time. Nobody skips the Final Four. A lot of people come for the week with absolutely no chance of getting in to see the games. They come to see the people.

Until 1973, the national championship game was played on Saturday afternoon. In fact, until 1969, the Final Four was, basically, a twenty-four-hour affair. Two games were played Friday night and one game was played Saturday night. By Sunday morning, everyone had gone home.

In 1969, when NBC–TV first took over the television contract, the semifinals were moved up to Thursday night and the final was played Saturday afternoon. Back then, NBC only televised
one
semifinal nationally. Four years later, the format was changed again. The semifinals were moved to Saturday afternoon and the final was pushed back to Monday night so it could be televised in prime time. In that first prime-time final, Bill Walton hit 21 of 22 shots for UCLA as most of America watched open-mouthed. From there, the tournament simply got bigger and bigger and bigger.

Its growth is difficult to measure, but consider this: In 1986, when Syracuse hosted the first and second rounds of the East Regional, it had more requests for press credentials than the NCAA received for the Final Four in Atlanta in 1977.

Now, the Final Four is a week-long social occasion, beginning for many people on Wednesday and not ending until the following Tuesday. There are more parties than anyone can keep track of, even more rumors than there are parties, an extraordinary number of hotel-lobby arguments and, just by the way, these three basketball games. It is, in short, a celebration of a greatly flawed but truly great sport by the people who have flawed it and made it great.

To begin at the beginning in 1988 …

The city is just beginning to fill up when the first bombshell of the week hits. Word comes out of Los Angeles that, to almost no one’s surprise, Walt Hazzard has been fired at UCLA. The Bruins have just finished a 16–14 season marked by shoddy play, embarrassing losses at home, and constant battles between Hazzard and almost everyone around the program.

Everyone knows Larry Brown wants the job. But he is tied up right now with the small matter of preparing Kansas to play Duke in the first semifinal on Saturday. On Wednesday evening, the story breaks: Jim Valvano is going to be the UCLA coach.

The main perpetrator of this story is Dick Vitale of ESPN. On Wednesday evening Vitale goes on the air with a story that says Valvano has been offered the job and is likely to take it before the weekend is over. In the lobby of the coaches’ hotel, the word spreads like wildfire. In the coaching world, this is what is known as a domino job. If Valvano moves to UCLA, it starts a series of dominoes: N.C. State will hire a head coach from somewhere to replace Valvano. Rumors are starting already: Gary Williams of Ohio State? Jeff Mullins of UNC–Charlotte? Lefty Driesell? (Did someone say Lefty Driesell????) Yes, someone said Lefty Driesell.

Moments after “breaking” the story, Vitale appears in the lobby, clearly delighted with himself. “It’s done, baby, it’s over, I just broke the story, we went with a bulletin,” Vitale says. “Jimmy V. is goin’ to UCLA. He’s gone. It’s a done deal.” Vitale is taking bets he is so sure. “Dinner, baby, you name the place,” he says. “Anyplace.”

It is tough getting angry at Vitale even when he is as full of himself as he is right now. He is a genuinely nice person who loves basketball and can’t quite believe what a celebrity he has become in recent years as a TV analyst. He says he won’t reveal his sources on this story but he’s locked in and he’s got it right. Standing right behind Vitale is Sonny Vaccaro, the maven of Nike shoes who is tight with all the coaches who are paid by Nike to wear their equipment. Vitale is a Nike man. So is Jim Valvano. Vaccaro is also betting Valvano is going to UCLA. Any guesses as to who Vitale’s source might be?

“This is unreal,” Virginia Assistant Coach Dave Odom says. “If Valvano goes, who knows how many jobs could open up?”

By now, the lobby is crowded. Most of the coaches arrive on Wednesday because their annual golf tournament is on Thursday morning. Usually, Wednesday is warmup night. Everyone arrives, has dinner, and takes things easy. No wild nights—yet. But the Valvano rumor has energized everyone. The lobby is alive.

In one corner, Bill Foster and Dick Stewart are sitting, fending off questioners. Foster, the Northwestern coach, coached Valvano at Rutgers. They remain close friends. “If he takes the job I’m going with him and sit on the bench and keep track of the time-outs,” Foster says. “I’m old enough to do that job. They can just call me Father Time.”

Stewart, who also played for Foster, is Valvano’s top assistant. “I don’t know anything,” he says over and over again. “I wish I did. Jimmy’s coming in tomorrow and I’ll talk to him then.”

Jim Boeheim joins the conversation. A year ago, Boeheim was still working during this week. Now, he will coach the annual coaches’ all-star game on Thursday night. His opponent in that game will be Jerry Tarkanian of Nevada–Las Vegas. Boeheim is not very happy with Tarkanian at the moment. Recently, Boeheim’s star recruit, Billy Owens, has qualified to play as a freshman by improving his SAT score from 590 to 730. Tarkanian thinks Owens’s improvement is miraculous—too miraculous—and he has said so, implying that someone took the test for Owens.

“I don’t see anyone questioning Alonzo Mourning,” Boeheim says. “His score went up a lot more than Billy’s.” But Alonzo Mourning is a Georgetown recruit. Basketball people will privately question John Thompson—but never publicly. Thompson is the Olympic coach. He is tied closely to Dean Smith and Dave Gavitt. He is too powerful to take on publicly. So it is Boeheim who gets ripped. “All I know is Billy studied like hell in that SAT course before he took the test again,” Boeheim says.