“Dean,” I said. “You realize that you have been coming to this place for thirty-six years, right?”
“Yeah, but let’s not talk about that,” Dean said.
I ENJOYED THAT SEASON, but not as much as my year doing A Civil War. The access I had made it fun, and I enjoyed a number of the players I got to know, notably Tim Duncan, who had decided to stick around for his senior year at Wake Forest even though he could have been the number one pick in the NBA draft had he come out after his junior year. Duncan liked college, and he liked being around his teammates.
I would say it worked out pretty well for him.
I can’t say it surprised me to learn that just about every scholarship player in the ACC wanted to play professional basketball. What did surprise me was how convinced they all were they would play pro ball—if not in the NBA, then overseas. Many of them did. But the number of players who left ACC schools totally unprepared for Life After Hoops was a little bit of a shock to my system.
After A March to Madness, the ACC book, I wrote The Majors. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next until a hot summer day in July of 1999. I told the story of that afternoon in the introduction to The Last Amateurs. What happened, in a nutshell, was I got to the point where I needed a break from the big time. I had written nine nonfiction books, and eight of them had focused on athletes and coaches who could be described as big-time.
On that July day I was at one of those summer camps sponsored by a sneaker company where the elite high school basketball players come to show off their skills to the elite college coaches. The gym at Fairleigh Dickinson that was used for the camp was packed. It would be in this same camp that I would first lay eyes on LeBron James a few years later.
I remember I was sitting with several top coaches: Jim Calhoun, who had just won his first national championship that March; Mike Krzyzewski, who had lost that championship game; Jim Boeheim, who would win his first four years later; and Gary Williams, who would win a national title in 2002. Only Williams isn’t in the Hall of Fame at the moment, and he should be.
There were plenty of other coaches and media types sitting around us, but I remember those four because they were the ones who responded each time I asked about a player on the court. Each had an issue: SATs or grades, a couple had been at three different high schools, a couple more had a street agent, many played for AAU coaches who were asking for money or a job. Something inside me exploded. I needed to get away from all this.
I walked outside looking to get some fresh air. That’s when I ran into Don DeVoe, the coach at Navy, and Emmett Davis, his former assistant, who had just finished his first year at Colgate. To be honest, I was surprised to see either of them in a camp like this one. They told me they were looking for kids who might not be quite as good as they thought they were but who had good grades.
As Don and Emmett were talking about some of their players, I remembered something DeVoe had said to me shortly after arriving at Navy: “The best thing about coaching here [as opposed to his previous jobs at Virginia Tech, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Florida] is that when I go to bed at night, I’m ninety-nine percent sure my players are in bed too.”
It had been four years since I’d spent my year at Army and Navy. I still spent time at both places—especially Navy, which had asked me to become the color commentator on its radio network in 1997. I didn’t do all the games, skipping the long plane trips because it meant giving up two days with my family (I now had two children). But I still made it up to Army at least once or twice a year and watched from the sidelines. When Danny was five and asked me which team we rooted for when Army played Navy, my answer was the truth: whoever is behind. It is one of the few rivalries in which I’m truly unbiased.
It took me about five minutes after leaving Davis and DeVoe that afternoon to formulate the seeds of a book idea: Navy and Colgate were both in the Patriot League, which at that moment consisted of seven teams (Army, Bucknell, Lehigh, Lafayette, and Holy Cross were the other five; American joined the league in 2001).
The Patriot League was known for three things: David Robinson, who had played at Navy before the league was formed in 1990; Adonal Foyle, who had played at Colgate for three years (because his guardians taught there) before becoming a number one pick in the NBA draft; and the fact that the league had been formed on the Ivy League model of not giving athletic scholarships—recruited athletes were given a wider swath by admissions than non-athletes, but they had to go through the same process to apply for financial aid as anybody else.
If I could do a book on ACC basketball, why couldn’t I do one on Patriot League basketball? The Ivy League had more tradition; it played better basketball at the time and it was, well, the Ivy League. But in the end, the last was the reason not to do it: playing in the Ivy League gave you a special kind of cachet the Patriot League kids wouldn’t have. Plus, I thought the presence of Army and Navy would make for better storytelling based on my Civil War experience.
One of the ways I know I have hit on a good book idea is that I can’t get it out of my mind, can’t wait to get started on it. This was one of those moments. I called Esther from the camp and told her I was less than an hour from New York and wanted to come see her about an idea. I drove into the city the next day and told her what I wanted to do.
“Tell me the schools again?” she said.
When I told her she looked at me blankly.
“Is there anybody famous from there?” she asked.
“You mean besides people like Dwight Eisenhower and Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee?” I said.
“Basketball players,” she said, giving me her disgusted look.
“Bob Cousy played at Holy Cross. David Robinson played at Navy. Bob Knight and Mike Krzyzewski coached at Army.”
“Uck, I knew you’d find a book with Krzyzewski in it.”
“Please put aside your biases for one minute. You [Connecticut] just beat Duke to win the national championship. You need to get over Christian Laettner.”
“I think Michael [Pietsch, my editor at Little, Brown, who had played a key role in making Good Walk Spoiled such a success] will hate it.”
“Michael hated the idea for A Civil War.”
“True. He’ll let you do it, but he won’t pay you.”
She didn’t actually mean he wouldn’t pay me, she meant he wouldn’t pay me nearly as much as I had gotten for A March to Madness or The Majors. I knew that. In fact, Michael offered more than he had paid up front on A Civil War based on that book’s success. That meant I was paid (in advance) about 15 percent of what I had been paid for The Majors, and 25 percent of what I had been paid for A March to Madness.
I didn’t care. I was already looking forward to Lafayette-Colgate on a cold winter night in Hamilton, New York. Of course, adding cold to winter night in Hamilton—or almost any night—is a redundancy.
Shortly after I had signed the contract for the book, I had lunch with Bob Woodward, which is always educational. I respect Bob’s instincts as a reporter completely and unconditionally. When I told him what I was doing, he gave me a funny look. “Can’t you just write a good, solid magazine story?” he said. “A book, a whole book?”
So maybe I don’t trust his reporting instincts unconditionally. Or maybe I’m just very stubborn.
I began calling the league’s coaches, whose responses when I told them I wanted to spend a season chronicling their basketball teams wasn’t all that different from Woodward’s. Fran O’Hanlon at Lafayette asked me if I was joking. Emmett Davis, knowing my aversion to snow, explained very carefully to me exactly where Colgate was located. Pat Harris from Army started to laugh. “When I told you [after he had gotten the job] to call me if you ever needed anything, I didn’t think you were going to take me quite so literally,” he said.
The funniest call was with Carolyn Femovich, who had just come on board as the league’s executive director. This is Patriot / Ivy-speak for commissioner. Femovich was a lifelong administrator who I suspect
didn’t know me from Adam and who generally likes to check a rulebook or call a meeting to decide if lunch should follow breakfast.
I called her as a courtesy, since I knew I’d be seeing her during the course of the season. I explained to her what I was doing and that all the coaches—none of them had “Deaned” me—were on board. There was a long pause on the other end of the phone.
“Well,” she said finally, “the most important thing, of course, is making sure you don’t do anything that will jeopardize the eligibility of our student-athletes.”
I hadn’t actually realized that was the most important thing.
“Carolyn,” I said, “are there any rules against being interviewed?”
“Well, no.”
“Then I think we’ll be okay.”
I BEGAN MY TOUR of the Patriot League in September, spending a couple of days at each school so I could get to know as many players as possible and spend time with each coach. As with Army-Navy, I knew I’d made a good decision right away. One player after another—without jeopardizing his eligibility—came in and told warm, funny stories about realizing he wasn’t going to play in the NBA and what it was like to play on the road against the power teams, which all the Patriot League teams did to make money for the athletic department budgets.
Devin Tuohey at Colgate talked about his first college basketball game at Syracuse, when he had turned the ball over the first two times he had touched it, which led to thunderous dunks. The third time he turned it over he had taken one of the Syracuse players down going to the basket to avoid another dunk and had been booed by about thirty thousand people in the Carrier Dome. The worst part had been when he had come out of the game and found his roommate, another freshman, named Jim Detmer, laughing uncontrollably on the bench.
“He said, ‘I’m really sorry, Devin, but that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,’ ” Tuohey said, able to laugh at himself a year later.
That was the best thing about the Patriot League kids: they could laugh at themselves. This was completely different than what I’d experienced in the ACC. It wasn’t that they wanted to win any less; they just understood where they fell in the basketball pantheon and made a point of enjoying themselves along the way. You weren’t likely to catch them sneaking looks into the stands to see how many NBA scouts were watching. Most nights they knew the answer was a round number.
Much to my surprise, the best story turned out to be at Holy Cross. The best teams were Navy and Lafayette; Holy Cross was the best story. It had more basketball tradition—by far—than any other Patriot League school: Cousy, Tom Heinsohn, Togo Palazzi, not to mention a national title in 1947 and an NIT title (back when it meant something) in 1954.
When the Big East was forming in the late 1970s, commissioner Dave Gavitt had approached Father John Brooks, then the university president, about joining. It was a natural fit since Boston College was Holy Cross’s number one rival and the school was close to both Providence and Connecticut. Father Brooks said no, believing that the Big in Big East was literal—as in big-time—and he didn’t want Holy Cross going down that road. To this day, many Holy Cross alums revile Father Brooks because they believe Holy Cross could have been a factor nationally had it joined the Big East.
Instead, Father Brooks was very much involved in the formation of the Patriot League, which was about as far from the Big East as you could get with its no-scholarship rules. But cracks in that foundation began to form early: Fordham, one of the charter league members, wanted to start giving basketball scholarships again. When the league said no, Fordham bolted for the Atlantic 10, where it has now languished in or near the basement for most of two decades.
Holy Cross was next. Sick of losing—the Crusaders won the league in 1993, but when longtime coach George Blaney left for Seton Hall, they skidded to the bottom—the alumni pressured Father Brooks’s successor to start giving basketball scholarships again. This time the league couldn’t say no because if Holy Cross left, it would be down to six teams and would not be eligible for an automatic NCAA bid. Without that bid, the league would lose all viability—not to mention a lot of money.
So Holy Cross was again giving scholarships. Lehigh was next. By the mid-2000s, all the civilian schools (at Army and Navy everyone in the school is on a government scholarship) would be giving scholarships again.
During the transition from non-scholarship players to scholarship players, Holy Cross had hired Ralph Willard as its new coach. Willard had graduated from Holy Cross in 1967 but had been in the big time for a while. He’d been an assistant to Jim Boeheim at Syracuse and then to Rick Pitino with the Knicks and at Kentucky. He had become the head coach at Western Kentucky and had taken the Hilltoppers to the Sweet Sixteen in 1993, which led to his getting the Pittsburgh job.
But Pitt hadn’t worked out for Willard. He’d taken some players he probably shouldn’t have, been victimized by some untimely injuries, and had been fired after four seasons. That brought him full circle back to his alma mater, the Patriot League—and me.
Willard was the only coach in the conference I had any concerns about in terms of cooperation. My reasoning was simple: he was close friends with Rick Pitino, I was not.
I think Pitino is a great coach, and I’ve thought that since his days at Providence, when he was the first coach to really understand the impact of the three-point shot after it first came into existence in 1986. His understanding of how to take advantage of the shot had been the key to Providence reaching the Final Four in 1987.
I still remember watching Pitino do a clinic in the summer of 1986. Several players were demonstrating—under Pitino’s guidance—how to run a secondary fast break. When one of them caught the ball on the wing, took one dribble, and fired an eighteen-foot jumper from just inside the new three-point line, Pitino screamed, “No—stop!”
The gym went quiet. “That’s the worst shot in college basketball beginning this fall,” Pitino said. “You do not catch the ball and take one step inside that line and shoot. You either catch it and shoot the three or go all the way to the basket.”
If you are a basketball fan at all you will understand that, in that moment, Pitino described what college basketball has become: a game of catching and shooting behind the line or driving all the way to the goal. The mid-range jump shot has, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist.
As much as I admired Pitino’s coaching, his ego made me crazy. All coaches have huge egos—I’d spent a year with perhaps the biggest one in history—but Pitino had a way of saying things that made you cringe.
While he was coaching the Knicks he wrote a book modestly titled Born to Coach. Then, after the 1992 season, he cowrote a book with my pal Dick (“Hoops”) Weiss in which he took none of the blame for failing to guard the inbounds pass on the fateful play that led to Christian Laettner’s game-winning jump shot in the 1992 East Region final.
A year later, when Kentucky did make the Final Four but lost to Michigan, the lead on my Washington Post column was this: “For Rick Pitino, the numbers remain the same: two autobiographies, zero championships.”
Okay, a tad harsh.
A year later I was convinced the lead hadn’t been harsh enough. Kentucky played Marquette in a second-round tournament game that season in St. Petersburg. (It was, in fact, on the day I blew off Krzyzewski to go see Arnold Palmer.) Marquette had a little guard named Tony Smith who wasn’t much of a shooter and wasn’t especially dangerous in a half-court offense. But in the open court, he was a jet.
Pitino, as always, played ninety-four feet of pressure defense the whole game. For Tony Smith, this was a little bit like telling Tom Brady he could play quarterback all day with no one rushing the passer. Smith shredded Kentucky’s defense and set up his teammates for easy baskets all day. Marquette won the game.
Pitino walked into his press conference that day with his three seniors—who were, understandably, brokenhearted that their careers had ended with such a surprising loss to a team they no doubt th
ought they would beat with ease. Instead of questioning himself, as almost everyone in the room not bleeding Kentucky blue was doing at that moment, Pitino said, “This was a Kentucky team that lacked leadership, lacked chemistry, and lacked talent.”
Kentucky had finished 28–7. In one sentence Pitino had thrown his players, especially the seniors, so far under the bus they couldn’t even see the wheels as they rolled over them.
I coached good, they played bad.
There’s nothing that bothers me more than coaches who do that—especially on the college level. Knight had a tendency to do it, but more often it was in private and not in public. You would no more hear Dean Smith or Mike Krzyzewski do that than you would hear a Tea Party member praise President Obama.
After that I really was done with Pitino and ripped him at every turn, even when his team won the national championship in 1996. I gave him very little credit, which was no doubt unfair of me. Shortly after Kentucky won that title, Dave Kindred sent me a clip from something called The Cats Pause, which is, as you might imagine, a publication devoted strictly to all things Kentucky. There was a lengthy Q and A in it with Pitino, and he was asked if he was going to write another book in the wake of Kentucky’s championship.
“You know, I’ve said for a long time that I wasn’t going to write another book until we won a championship, because I wasn’t going to give people like John Feinstein the chance to rip me again for writing one, even though a lot of people have told me I should write again. But now that we’ve won, I’m going to do another one.”
Kindred had circled the quote and written, “Your fault.” Kindred had been asked by the Lexington Herald-Leader to review the book that Hoops had ghosted for Pitino. Trying mightily not to criticize Hoops, Kindred had said of Pitino, “Someone stop this man before he writes again.”
Even though the shot was directed at Pitino, Hoops took it personally, and he and Kindred—two of the nicest men in my profession—barely spoke for years after that. Which is one of many reasons I don’t write book reviews. Generally speaking, knowing how much it hurts when someone criticizes me (unfairly at all times, of course), I don’t want to be in a position where, if I don’t like a book, I have to rip it. I assume others who write books put as much into their work as I put into mine, and I just don’t want to do it.
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