Basketball
Page 29
It was Saturday evening, March 22, 1969, and Alcindor lay on his motel bed in Louisville, the three straight NCAA championships won, the three MOP awards received, the quest resolved. How many men, athletes or otherwise, ever achieve their full potential? “I’ll just say it feels nice,” he said. “Everything was up in my throat all week. I could see ahead to the end, but there was apprehension and fear. Fear of losing. I don’t know why, but it was there. Before the other two, it didn’t feel that way. But this one did. Wow, I was excited! We just had to bring this thing down in front again, where it belongs.”
The annual convention of the National Association of Basketball Coaches is nearly as important a part of the Final Four as the games. Question: What is the easiest way to get one of the most coveted tickets in the universe? Answer: Join the NABC. Just convince the association you’re a coach—even if you’re not. An associate membership costs $15 a year and might entitle you to purchase a ticket to all Final Four games.
Nowadays exhibitions, displays, free meals—a cornucopia of basketball commerce—envelop the coaches’ hotel headquarters. But in antiquity, a floor-finishing company known as Hillyard’s supplied a lively hospitality room, a veritable den of crusty immortals, where Rupp and Henry Iba, for two, would debate strategy, yaw and growl and move chairs around the room as X’s and O’s while younger coaches packed around them 10-deep, enthralled. Much of the action now takes place in the lobby, where younger bucks swap recruiting information and other lies, seek out patsy schedules and knife each other for the open jobs.
One observer’s Coaches’ All-Lobby team: Pete Newell, former USF and Cal coach, now guru emeritus, the captain of the Dawn Patrol.
George Raveling, Iowa coach and basketball’s Liz Smith of gossip. He beat every reporter in America to the John Wooden Retires scoop.
Joe Dean of Converse Rubber Company and “String Music” telecaster fame. Not really a coach, but don’t tell him. Hires and fires and knows more coaches than the NCAA thought existed.
Abe Lemons, Oklahoma City coach, the delightful hoopsologist who once said of the Final Four: “It’s just another UCLA bullfight. You gore the matador all night. In the end, he sticks it in you and the donkeys come on and drag you out.”
Jim Valvano, before he went high-toned, not to mention off his rocker. “O.K., O.K., I was one of the guys who didn’t even need a room,” says V. “The best way to attract attention in a crowd of coaches is to stand up and say, ‘I’m looking for two road games.’ Gets them every time.”
Final Four as recruiting tool? Between the 1981 semifinal games, Dartmouth coach Tim Cohane stood in the lobby of the Spectrum in Philadelphia, pumping quarters into a telephone and calling every prospect he knew. Holding up the receiver so the clamor of crowd noise could be heard at the other end, he bellowed something like, “With you, we could be here next year!” The following season, Dartmouth won 10 games. Cohane is now a stockbroker in New York.
In the 1952 NCAA championship game, St. John’s strongman, Solly Walker, stuck a finger in the eye of Cumulus Clyde Lovellette, the massive 6′9″ Kansas center who was in the process of scoring 33 points, establishing seven individual tournament records and offensively dominating a Final Four as no other player has ever done. As the enraged Lovellette came to the bench, he blurted to KU coach Phog Allen, “Dammit, Doc, I’m going to kill the ——.” Lovellette’s mother, sitting nearby, stepped in and reminded Clyde as to how she’d raised him to be “a good Christian.”
“O.K., Mom,” Lovellette answered meekly. “I won’t kill him, but I’m sure going to mark him up.”
On the night of March 30, 1981, with the President of the U.S. lying wounded in a hospital bed, Indiana’s Bob Knight, North Carolina’s Dean Smith and tournament committeeman Dave Gavitt—America’s last three Olympic coaches—huddled in a broom closet in the bowels of Philadelphia’s Spectrum, awaiting word on whether the championship game would proceed. At one point the three men just stared at each other, whereupon Smith said, “Co-champions?”
The Siege of the King’s Inn began tamely enough when several hundred Marquette fans arrived in Greensboro for the 1974 Final Four. Compared to Wisconsin winters, the weather in Carolina was moderate, which still didn’t help the police understand why 25 lawn chairs, two chaise lounges, one soda machine and 14 forms of human life were found floating in the inn’s swimming pool at different times. On three occasions Greensboro’s tactical squadrons were called to the King’s Inn, once in response to a complaint that Marquette coeds were roaming naked through the halls, carrying television sets.
This behavior ultimately ceased following negotiations with the motel’s management, for which occasion a Marquette student committee purchased several more cases of beer. It was not exactly the Treaty of Ghent. The King’s Inn representative, who, alas, found himself drinking one-on-seven, finally said, “Awwww, yew gahs are awwwwright,” and went to sleep.
Later the Marquettes encountered a couple of ACC fans who had innocently wandered in upon the carnage. “We’re glad you boys aren’t in the league,” one of the locals said. “Nobody down here’d be alive.”
Basketball was five years young when Nat Holman was born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1896. One of 10 children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Holman’s first basketball was a sack stuffed with rags. Holman once estimated that in 53 years as player, coach and spectator, he had been involved in more than 7,000 games, the most notable of which were those played by his team at City College of New York in 1949–50. That team—C’mon, let’s hear it: “Allagaroo, garoo, garah. Allagaroo, garoo, garah. Ee-yah, ee-yah, Sis, boom, bah!”—became the first, last and only one to win both the NIT and NCAA championships in the same season.
What were the effects of such an accomplishment? When CCNY crushed Kentucky in the NIT final by 39 points—weep some more, my ladies—the Cats’ Rupp told his team, “Thanks, boys, you bring me up here and then you embarrass the hell out of me.” A member of the Kentucky state legislature proposed that state flags fly at half-staff.
But that was nothing compared to the emotional distress suffered in Peoria. For, you see, with 15 seconds left in the NCAA final at Madison Square Garden and CCNY ahead 69–68, Bradley’s Squeaky Melchiorre picked off a pass and drove the opposite way for the winning basket. By all accounts, what happened next wouldn’t play in Iwo Jima, much less Peoria. Melchiorre’s drive was cut off by the entire CCNY team, which converged upon poor Squeaky, smacked him around and knocked his shot “actually sideways,” according to Pete Newell, who was there. “Squeaky was hammered so hard, the ball looked like a horrible golf shank. It was the most flagrant non-call of all time.” CCNY intercepted the shank, sped the other way, scored again and had its coveted double, 71–68.
Weeks later, local theaters in Peoria still ran newsreels of the alleged assassination, the marquee of the downtown Madison reading: WAS SQUEAKY FOULED? YOU BE THE JUDGE.
What CCNY had fouled, it turned out, was all of sport. Within a year of the grand slam, some of the Beavers were convicted of shaving points during the golden season. A spiritually broken Holman—and the college game—would never be the same.
Trivia. The Defender of the Faith Award goes to what poor soul who held Jerry West to 38 points and Oscar Robertson to 39 on successive nights in the Final Four of 1959? Answer: John Turner of Louisville.
The Fan. Since 1978, Merrill Lamb, the president of Cozzoli’s pizza parlors in Miami, has traveled to the Final Four with a group of friends and business associates. “It’s like real therapy,” he says. “We play cards, we laugh. We feel like we’re back in college again.” Tickets? “We wait till we get there and deal with the students,” says Lamb. “See, the television network wants a lot of them downstairs to generate excitement so the students get the best seats. We see where loyalty to the school parts company with the dollar. We try to get the business majors. I’d say it’s usually at the $100 per ticket level that he hands over his girlfriend’s ticket.
/> “The easiest ticket in America is the one to the Monday night final because the losing teams want to get the hell out of town. You’ve never seen anything as depressing as the two schools that lose on Saturday afternoon.”
So Lamb cases the stands where the losers are sitting as the semifinal games near conclusion. “If you want the good seats, you have to move fast,” he says. “I’ve bought tickets from kids as the buzzer sounded and their team just lost in overtime and they had tears running down their faces.”
Would you buy a pizza from this man?
At halftime of the 1960 NCAA championship game, Ohio State had made 16 of 19 shots and taken a 37–19 lead over defending champion California. Cal coach Pete Newell slammed the door to his locker room. “Men,” he said, “we have to get more defensive rebounds.”
“Coach,” center Darrall Imhoff said, “there’ve been only three, and I got ’em all.”
Tribute. Iowa’s Bob Hansen on Darrell Griffith of Louisville, the Outstanding Player of the 1980 Final Four: “I’ve guarded guys who could leap high before. But all of them came down.”
Non-tribute. North Carolina’s Bones McKinney, while guarding and woofing at Bob Kurland of Oklahoma A & M, the Outstanding Player of the 1946 Final Four: “All-America? You’re not even all–Madison Square Garden!”
Trivia. What father of a famous 1984 U.S. Olympian made two free throws in an NCAA championship game? Answer: Ron Retton (Mary Lou’s dad) for West Virginia in 1959.
By the time UCLA’s Walton had made 21 of 22 shots and scored 44 points against Memphis State in the championship game of 1973, it had already been forgotten that the best individual 12 minutes of that or any other Final Four might have been played in an earlier game and in defeat. In the first half of Memphis State’s semifinal victory over Providence, the Friars’ 6-foot Ernie DiGregorio was simply the greatest guard who ever lived. With an assortment of exquisite shots, whiplash dribbling, lob bomb passes and between-the-limbs playmaking, DiGregorio blew the helpless Tigers out of the St. Louis Arena. He sent an 80-foot behind-the-back bounce pass to Marvin Barnes for a layup; then a 60-foot chest pass to Kevin Stacom for another; and again a 40-foot behind-the-backer to Barnes for a third. This marvelous athlete had astonished witnesses roaring and itching to see what Walton and mighty UCLA could possibly do against his brilliant legerdemain.
At halftime, Providence led 49–40; DiGregorio had scored 17 points and was responsible for 15 of the team’s 22 baskets. But Ernie D did not step inside that Friar locker room. At the 12½-minute mark of the opening period Barnes had gone to the bench with a knee injury, and so DiGregorio paced furiously in the corridor, pounding his fist against the wall, seething with frustration and hurt. He knew that with Bad Marvin down, the Friars were out. And he was right.
Pete Blackman played for UCLA in 1962, Wooden’s first Final Four team, the Bruin club that finished fourth. In January 1963, while he was serving in the Navy in Hawaii, Blackman received a letter from Wooden, which included a bit of free verse:
However, Pete, there’s optimism
Beneath my valid criticism
I want to say—yes, I’ll foretell
Eventually this team will jell,
And when they do, they will be great,
A championship could be their fate,
With every starter coming back
Yes, Walt and Gail and Keith and Jack
And Fred and Freddie and some more
We could be champs in sixty-four.
Twelve years and three months later, the Bruins had been NCAA champions 10 times over.
The Player. Benny Anders was something of a mythic figure before he reached the Final Four. Hip, flashy, and bright, Benny already had learned how to act and talk on his feet and look like a movie star. At Houston, however, he got the reputation of being the puerile Akeem Olajuwon’s walk-around guy. In reality, Akeem was Anders’s foil. “All I get is some vicious pine,” said sixth-man Anders in a memorable State-of-the-Phi Slamma Jamma message, “but I got the utensils. I drop a dime on the big Swahili, he got to put it in the hole.”
In the 1983 semifinals against Louisville, Akeem did just that and so did Benny and the rest of the Houston fraternity, 14 phenomenal dunks’ worth, in as electrifying an athletic performance as has ever been seen in a Final Four.
Anders was in full, glorious cry, once fashioning the most spellbinding slammer of them all: a quarter-court leap over a flock of taller Cardinals followed by a dive across Albuquerque’s “Pit” in which, he said in another classic line, “I took it to the rack and I stuck it.” He arose from this incomprehensible play to stomp and parade in front of the enraptured Houston rooting section, clapping and crowing while some of his awestruck teammates rushed from the bench to watch the replay on a nearby TV monitor.
In the championship game, Houston met sudden doom at the hand of N.C. State. But even with that, Benny almost won it. Barely an inch more, and the lunging Anders would have intercepted a shaky Wolfpack pass and gone the distance for the winning jam.
The following year Houston and Olajuwon and Anders were back in the Final Four but trouble was abrewing. Benny had temporarily quit the team and now he was at the far end of the vicious pine. Still, he arrived in Seattle duded out in a tuxedo with a smashing pink bow tie and cummerbund. What Anders wore to the semis, however, was, he claimed, “the wrong brand of sneakers,” and that’s why coach Guy Lewis did not put him in against Virginia.
In Houston’s championship-game loss to Georgetown, Anders played briefly (10 minutes) and rallied the Cougars with his quickness, smarts and zest for combat. But, as he said, “This was a battle of the benches. How can the man [Lewis] forget the athletes he has on the bench? I could have scored at will.”
Nonetheless, as Benny lolled around the huddles, a banner was unfurled in the Kingdome stands, reading: BENNY ANDERS FOR PRESIDENT. Back at the hotel Anders met his constituency: two guys from Jackson, Ky.
A week later, one of the Kentuckians, John Gambill, received a package in the mail. Inside was Benny Anders’s Phi Slamma Jamma warmup. “I’ll never let it go,” Gambill says. “But the best part was Benny in the flesh. We met the man behind the legend.”
Anders sat out the ’84–85 season at Houston with a knee injury. Then, in May, things took a turn for the worse. One day at Jeppesen Fieldhouse on the UH campus, he got into an argument with a fellow student “because the guy wanted to play basketball with Benny,” according to prosecuting attorney Cheryl Turner, “and Benny didn’t want to play. The argument got heated, and the other guy threw a [sprinter’s] starting block at him.” Anders went outside to his car, got a gun, returned and aimed the pistol at the guy who wanted to play basketball with him.
A university police officer arrived, and Anders ran off. Eventually, Benny returned and took the police to the weapon. Fully loaded and cocked, it lay in a gymnasium shower. Anders, sentenced to three years’ probation, is still enrolled at Houston, and once in a while he showed up at a basketball game. “Finishing school, that’s my main priority,” he says. He is majoring in sociology and intends to graduate even if he doesn’t play basketball, which he won’t.
It is a shame, but wonders do cease. Benny Anders has sat on the vicious pine and taken it to the rack and worn a tuxedo with a pink bow tie and cummerbund and run for President at his last Final Four.
Bob Ryan and Terry Pluto
Though you could hardly tell from his longtime base in Boston, the sports beginnings of Bob Ryan (b. 1946) go back to a childhood in central New Jersey and college basketball, including Big Five tripleheaders at the Palestra in Philadelphia. After his graduation from Boston College in 1968, Ryan took an internship and soon a full-time job at the Boston Globe, auspiciously while the Boston Celtics’ dynasty remained enthroned. For nearly a half-century he filed knowing copy on a range of sports and enjoyed a high public profile with frequent appearances on television. But nothing brought Ryan to life quite like a writing assignment on basketball, on d
eadline. Terry Pluto (b. 1955), when not working the Cleveland Cavaliers’ beat for the Akron Beacon-Journal, has proved to be one of the great listeners in the profession, honing his ear with two oral histories, Loose Balls, an account of the old ABA, and Tall Tales, in which he debriefed NBA characters of the 1950s and 1960s. Inspiration for Ryan and Pluto’s collaboration, Forty-Eight Minutes: A Night in the Life of the NBA (1987), came from Nine Innings (1985), Daniel Okrent’s deep dive into a Major League Baseball game. Before and during the Cavs’ visit to Boston Garden on January 16, 1987, each reporter gathered all he could from the vantage point of his respective team. Then, using follow-up interviews and breakdown of videotape, they deconstructed and reconstructed critical moments, folding digressions on NBA culture and conventions into their narrative. This excerpt is pegged to a call late in the third quarter, when referee Mel Whitworth whistles Boston’s Kevin McHale for a three-seconds violation. Lesser players in the microdrama include Cleveland trainer Gary Briggs and Cavs’ rookie John (Hot Rod) Williams.
from
Forty-Eight Minutes
2:45 McHALE CALLED FOR THREE SECONDS.
MCHALE POSTED Hot Rod in the lane. “Three seconds,” yelled Gary Briggs. Mel Whitworth agreed. “About time they called it. It was more like six seconds. Why don’t they just let McHale lease an apartment in the lane?” asked Briggs.
NBA referees are much like the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences in that they sometimes make cumulative calls rather than actual calls. To wit, the 1987 Oscar for Best Actor went to Paul Newman for his performance in The Color of Money. He was a heavy favorite for the honor, not because he had threatened the best of Olivier when he reprised the role of Fast Eddie Felson (although he was certainly very good), but because the Academy was known to feel it was Newman’s “time” to win the award. Though one of the most respected and well-liked men in Hollywood, Newman was a perennial also-ran when it came to Oscar nominations. He was good enough in The Color of Money that a guilt-ridden Academy saw fit to give him what amounted to a meritorious service Oscar. Nobody complained.