A Season Inside (66 page)

Foster and Stewart nod politely. More coaches drift over. “What about Lefty?” asks Joe Harrington of Long Beach State, a former Driesell assistant. “Is he going to James Madison or not?”

“Nothing’s final,” Driesell keeps insisting. “It’s up to the lawyers. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ beyond that.”

The coaches agreed that Lefty would go to James Madison. But what if Valvano went to UCLA, would State want to hire Lefty? And who would James Madison hire then? On and on it went.…

Across town, in the lobby of the press hotel, the Valvano rumor was spreading rapidly. “I don’t believe it,” said Billy Packer of CBS. “He may be talking to them, but I guarantee you nothing is final yet. It’s just too fast.”

By now, Vitale, having worked his way through the coaches’ lobby, was in the press lobby. It was late, though, almost 2
A.M.
, and Vitale had talked about the story so much even he seemed to be getting tired. Finally, he looked up from a rare silence and said, “So what do you think, will Jimmy take the job?”

That seemed a perfect time to end the opening evening. Four hours after insisting that Valvano
was
UCLA’s new coach, Vitale was asking if he would take the job. It could only happen at the Final Four.

This is the day when the four teams get to town. The team that will travel the shortest distance, Kansas, will be the last to arrive. The Jayhawks will bus the forty miles from Lawrence after a late afternoon practice in time to see the coaches’ all-star game. They also must wait until their bus driver arrives. The ever-superstitious Brown has flown his bus driver from Pontiac in for the weekend. This is a first: the bus driver flying in while the team busses in.

No one is happier to get to Kansas City than Steve Kerr. The three days since the victory in Seattle have been exhausting. After the team flew back to Tucson on Sunday—a trip highlighted by Bobbi Olson dancing in the aisle of the team—bus—they were taken straight to McKale Center. There, more than thirteen thousand people awaited their arrival.

“When we walked in, the place just went crazy,” Kerr said. “I think I knew, at least for a minute, what it feels like to be a rock star. It was just unbelievable.”

Each member of the team had spoken, Kerr going last of course. He had to wait for the “Steeeeeve Kerrrrrrr” chants to die. When he finally got quiet, he played the rock star bit to the hilt. “Hi,” he said, “my name is Steve Kerr.”

The party at McKale was followed by a party at Kerr’s, a wild and wet one. Kerr’s last memory of the evening was joining about thirty other fully-clad people in the complex’s swimming pool.

He had finally reached his mother—without a CBS camera present—that evening. She already knew of the outcome, having listened on Armed Forces Radio, and was making plans to fly to Kansas City. In fact, the arrangements were already made. Ann Kerr was still a member of the board of American University in Beirut. One of her fellow board members was the president of Royal Jordanian Airlines. As a courtesy, whenever he could, he flew his friend Ann Kerr for free on his airline. Ann and John Kerr would fly first class from Amman, Jordan, on Royal Jordanian Airlines. They would be in Kansas City on Saturday morning.

The next three days after the Sunday victory party were a blur to Kerr. He was forced to have his roommate screen all his phone calls because the phone never stopped ringing. There were dozens of interviews to do with a whole new crew of reporters wanting to hear the whole Steve Kerr story all over again. The mail was piling up so fast Kerr couldn’t keep track of it.

“I just want to get to Kansas City and play,” he said. “Practice is about the only escape I have right now.”

Arizona’s practices were simple. The reserves, the so-called ‘Gumbys,’ were mimicking Oklahoma’s offense every day in practice. There wasn’t very much to it: three players out and two in. One day, the Gumbys called ten different plays in a row and ran the same play every time. That was what Oklahoma did. Stopping it was the problem.

Arizona arrived in Kansas City late Thursday. Kerr had only been in his hotel room for a few minutes when one of Arizona’s assistant athletic directors asked to see him. The NCAA had called. Apparently, the ever-vigilant ones had spotted an item in the paper noting that Ann and John Kerr would be flown to the U.S. courtesy of Royal Jordanian Airlines.

According to the NCAA, if the Kerrs were getting their free airline tickets because Steve Kerr was a basketball player, this might be a violation of the extra benefits rule. Of course, the free tickets had absolutely
nothing
to do with Kerr playing basketball.

This was remarkable. The NCAA couldn’t even begin to police the real cheating in college basketball. In 1985, the Lexington
Herald Leader
had produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of stories in which twenty-six former Kentucky players admitted—on the record—that they had received payoffs while at Kentucky. Almost thirty months later, the NCAA had reported the findings of its Kentucky investigation:
nothing
. Kentucky, it said, had not done a good job undertaking
its own investigation of the matter. This comment was a little bit like Richard Nixon saying that Ronald Reagan’s administration had been rife with corruption.

The NCAA almost never caught the big-time cheaters. Its member schools had little
interest
in catching the big-time cheaters. Why mess with a goose that is laying a golden egg? The NCAA investigative staff was woefully undermanned, and any suggestion that maybe a tiny percentage of the $55.1 million CBS was annually paying the NCAA for the rights to the basketball tournament should go to enforcement was laughed off. What would happen if the enforcement staff was increased from 25 to 250 by an influx of, say, $5 million to its annual budget? What would happen is that cheaters might get caught. Few people really wanted that.

Kentucky was an important part of the TV package. No one wanted it on probation or ineligible for the tournament. The same was true of any other big-name school. So the NCAA cracked down on schools like Marist and Cleveland State and called Steve Kerr in to explain why his mother was flying free to see him play in the biggest game of his life.

Kerr, of course, was flabbergasted when the “extra benefits” question was raised. He explained the situation and walked out of the room wondering what the NCAA people did with their spare time.

The only arrival more heralded than that of the four teams was the arrival of Valvano. He and his wife Pam arrive at midafternoon and walk into the coaches’ lobby to find a cordon of media waiting for them. Valvano is playing it cool. “There is an appropriate time to comment and an inappropriate time,” he says. “When the time is appropriate, I will certainly comment.”

Each time the question is asked in a different way, Valvano pulls an imaginary string on his neck and repeats his little speech. Somehow, though, the word is out. He is flying to Los Angeles in the morning, will meet with UCLA people on Friday and Saturday, look at possible places to live and then fly back to Kansas City Sunday. Sunday evening he is guest-hosting Bob Costas’s weekly radio show on NBC.

Valvano is amazed that people know this. But he is saying no more. He goes off to do a taping with Al McGuire at a studio on the other side of town. McGuire does an annual show for NBC on Final Four Sunday and Valvano is always part of the show. The taping finished,
Valvano is handed a bourbon in a plastic glass, then gets in a car to go back to the hotel. Driving along he spots a sign: “Welcome to Westwood.”

It is a section of Kansas City. But Valvano is thrown. “Holy shit, is that an omen or what?” he yells. UCLA, of course, is in the Westwood section of Los Angeles.

Valvano is genuinely interested in this job. And, he has already met with UCLA Chancellor Charles Young and Athletic Director Peter Dalis earlier in the week. “I was in San Diego for a speech and they asked me to stop in L.A. on the way back,” he says. “They wanted me to check into the hotel there under an assumed name. I said, ‘Fine, how about Biff?’ They undoubtedly thought I was crazy right away.”

Valvano met with Young and Dalis for three hours. He and Young hit it off. Part of Valvano wanted the job. UCLA was still, after all, UCLA. He was very happy at N.C. State but there was only one UCLA. And, living near Hollywood intrigued him. He had taped a TV pilot the previous summer and enjoyed the experience. One could almost see Valvano fantasizing himself as Carson’s Monday night stand-in. “Heeeeeeeere’s Jimmy!”

But there were problems. For one, Valvano’s middle daughter, sixteen-year-old Jamie, didn’t want to leave Raleigh. She was happy, she had a boyfriend, and she considered it home. “She told me, ‘Dad, I am a southerner,’ ” Valvano said. “If she can’t handle it, I don’t go. I just can’t do it.”

There was also a buyout clause in Valvano’s new contract. If he left, he had to pay State a lot of money—close to half a million dollars. Even for Valvano, that was a lot of money. And yet, the idea of coaching in Pauley Pavilion excited him. “I wish,” he said quietly, “this had happened two years from now.”

Vitale would lose his dinner bet. The deal was far from done.

Two major events took place that night. One was the fiftieth anniversary dinner for the NCAA Tournament. To say that it was filled with luminaries was a vast understatement. Every coach who had ever won a national championship was invited. Most came.

The room was filled with members of the Hall of Fame. The largest ovation of the night was reserved for John Wooden, the man who had
won ten national titles and made UCLA such a tough job that five men had come and gone since he had retired in 1975. At seventy-five, Wooden still looked like he could coach the Bruins. Maybe he should have been offered the job.

While the history of the Final Four was being relived, the coaches’ all-star game was taking place in the building that had hosted nine Final Fours, the old Memorial Auditorium. It was fifty-two years old now, an ancient barn of a building with ten thousand seats but still a good place to watch a game.

Larry Brown brought his team in to watch to a huge ovation from the many Kansas fans in the crowd. Danny Manning and the rest of the Jayhawks happily munched on popcorn while the twenty-four senior all-stars ran up and down the court. Neither Boeheim nor Tarkanian made any attempt to coach, they just let the players play. David Rivers was the MVP, a nicer final memory than the opening-round loss to SMU and Kato Armstrong.

Troy Lewis was one of the all-stars. Six days after Purdue’s loss, he still hadn’t recovered. “Every time I walk on the street and I see that building that has the huge copy of the draw on it, I get sick,” he said. “I keep thinking, ‘How can we not be here?’ ”

Gene Keady, watching the game, was going through the same thing. “Every time I turn around, someone comes up to me and says, ‘Gee, Gene, we thought you’d be playing here,’ “he said. “Well, dammit, I thought we’d be here too. This is kind of hard to take.”

John Thompson, the Olympic coach, was at the game, scouting. This made perfect sense. At his side was his academic coordinator, Mary Fenlon. This made no sense. Thompson and Fenlon had worked together since Thompson became Georgetown’s coach in 1972. They were, without question, basketball’s oddest couple.

Thompson is 6–10 and black; Fenlon is perhaps 5–4 and white. She is an ex-nun, a squat, wide woman who considers the Georgetown players her surrogate children. She calls them all “Honey,” and all but snarls at anyone, especially members of the media, who get too close to them. If you want to incur Thompson’s wrath, say something bad about Fenlon.

One rarely sees Thompson without Fenlon. Not just at games but in Las Vegas when he flies out there for fights or on scouting trips like this one. No one in college basketball thinks for a second that there is anything more between Thompson and Fenlon than a strong professional
relationship and a warm friendship, but her omnipresence in his life baffles everyone.

“It is the strangest relationship in sports since Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich,” Keith Drum, the national college basketball writer for UPI once said. Peterson and Kekich were New York Yankee pitchers who swapped families in the early ’70s.

Thompson watches the game with Sonny Vaccaro. Thompson is Nike’s highest-paid coach, a pal of Vaccaro’s, and was no doubt aided in the recruitment of Alonzo Mourning by Vaccaro’s “friendship” with Mourning. That “friendship” included supplying Mourning’s team with Nikes and being in town the week before Mourning chose his college. Vaccaro claims this was coincidence.

The coaches’ lobby is hopping after the dinner and the all-star game. Some of the coaches are going out on the town, others are looking for rumors. Tonight’s rumor du jour is a dandy: Rollie Massimino (who is skipping the convention to play golf in Florida) is going to the Miami Heat as coach of that NBA expansion team and Bob Staak, the Wake Forest coach, will take his place at Villanova.

“I love that one,” Staak says. “Spread it, will you?”

Joey Meyer, the DePaul coach, and his wife Barbara are standing near the elevators. “You never miss anything standing here,” Meyer says.

Virginia Coach Terry Holland comes by. He has been besieged by people who want to know if his old boss, Driesell, is going to James Madison. He insists he knows nothing. Someone suggests to Holland that if Driesell goes to JMU he should help him out by agreeing to play at James Madison. “No way,” Holland says, grinning. “I like him, but I don’t want him to beat me.”

Valvano, back from the NCAA dinner, whisks through the lobby, Pam on his arm, pulling on his imaginary string. He will fly to Los Angeles in the morning. By the time he arrives, there will actually be basketball at this Final Four. The teams will be practicing in Kemper Arena.

This is the day when everyone starts to get serious. The teams have finished celebrating their victories in the regionals and are thinking about Saturday’s games. The coaches actually move out of the hotel lobby and begin to hold meetings as part of their convention. The media gets a chance to interview someone other than each other. And scalping prices skyrocket.