A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  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:

  Dear Coach,

  Thank you for the interest you have shown in our son’s academic and athletic future. Your institution has a rich tradition of scholarship and athletic achievement which recommends it highly to us. The decision that Jerrod has to make, relative to which university to attend, is a critical one that our family must take very seriously. We have given it considerable attention and have decided that there is some specific information that we require to make an informed decision. We have outlined the components of this information below. We would like for you to address these points and be in position to discuss them with us when you visit our home.

  We are concerned to know the following:

  —What percentage of your university’s faculty positions is held by Blacks?

  —What percentage of your university’s tenured faculty positions is held by Blacks?

  —What is the nature of the academic and social support services available to Black students designed to address the unique circumstances many of them bring to the higher education environment?

  —What percentage of Black students who enroll at your university actually graduate?

  —What percentage of Black members of your basketball team have graduated during the last ten years?

  —What has been the academic major distribution of your basketball players during the last five years?

  —What percentage of your athletics department’s procurement budget is awarded annually to Black-owned businesses?

  —Is there an academic advisor, full or part-time, attached to your basketball team?

  —What percentage of your university’s top administration positions is held by Blacks?

  —What positions do Blacks occupy on your athletic department staff?

  As you can see, these inquiries are designed to get a fuller picture of life at your university. Jerrod has indicated a desire to attend a university that has an excellent academic program, a positive athletic tradition, and a demonstrated awareness obligation to provide access to all segments of our society. We are sure that there are many things about your program that you would like to bring to our attention. We are eager to consider them along with the information we have requested.

  We would like for you to join us on [fill in a different date for each coach] from 6 P.M. to 7:30 P.M. to discuss Jerrod’s academic and athletic future. We would be happy to clarify any aspect of this request. Please feel free to contact us. You may contact us through DeMatha High School. We look forward to welcoming you into our home.

  Sincerely,

  Mr. and Mrs. Sharr Mustaf

  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.”

  What Smith was doing was fairly obvious. Sensing that he had no chance to get Mustaf, he was trying to deflect him to Thompson who was a good friend and, just as important, not in the ACC. The strategy failed. “There was a time when I was almost sure I would play for North Carolina,” Jerrod Mustaf said. “But to tell you the truth, the system there is almost exactly like DeMatha. I had four years at DeMatha. I felt like it was enough. I was ready for something new.”

  Five schools were out, three were left. Except Howard really never had a chance and Georgia Tech was a long ways off. Sharr Mustaf had told Wootten he wanted his son close to home. During Wade’s visit, Chancellor John Slaughter took part in a conference telephone call, telling the Mustafs all the things he was doing for blacks at Maryland. Slaughter would resign as chancellor before the school year was out, but the Mustafs had no way of knowing this.

  After the home visits, Jerrod Mustaf made two of his five official visits: to Maryland and to Howard. He briefly saw the Georgia Tech campus during a clinic in November but he never officially visited there or anywhere else. In December, he announced he had narrowed his list to Maryland, Howard, and Georgia Tech. No one in college basketball had any doubt about who would win that battle.

  “We’re not even working the kid,” Georgia Tech assistant Perry Clark said. “The decision’s been made.” And no one in college basketball, fairly or unfairly, believed that Jerrod Mustaf had made that decision. It would be March before an announcement, though. In the meantime, Jerrod Mustaf would lead DeMatha to the city title and his father would go to work as an employee of the state of Maryland, working as a bailiff in the Prince George’s County courthouse.

  The 1987 recruiting season, while important to every coach in the country, was absolutely essential to Gary Williams. Entering his second season at Ohio State, Williams had earned a reputation as a coach who could get the most out of his talent. The question was, could he recruit big-time talent to get the most out of?

  In four years at American and four at Boston College, he had been one of those coaches who won more games per season than he was supposed to. He had done the same thing in the 1987 season at Ohio State: He took a 14–14 (regular season) team in 1986 that then lost its leading scorer to the NBA, and coached them to a 19–12 record. That mark earned an NCAA bid, and the Buckeyes had beaten Kentucky in the first round before narrowly missing what would have been a stunning upset against Georgetown.

  The 1987–88 Ohio State team would not be as good. Dennis Hopson, who had emerged as a star in his senior season under Williams, was gone, the first-round draft pick of the New Jersey Nets. Three impressive freshmen had been signed, but two of them were victims of Proposition 48, the two-year-old NCAA rule that required minimum academic standards for a player to be eligible. They could not play until they were sophomores.

  That meant Williams had one good recruiting class—with an asterisk. Because he had taken two Prop 48s his first year, he could not afford to take any more in his second. It was impractical and it wasn’t good for the school’s image to start loading up on academic question marks.

  Put simply, Williams had to prove himself as a recruiter this fall. There were four excellent seniors in Ohio. More than anything, Williams’s predecessor, Eldon Miller, had been hurt by his inability to keep top Ohio players in the state. Williams had to reverse that trend and prove he could bring in at least one key player a year from out of state.

  Ohio State is not an easy coaching job. It is a school that once was one of the dominant powers in the game, reaching three straight NCAA championship games from 1960 to 1962 (winning the title in 1960) with players like Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek, Mel Noell, Larry Siegfried, and a foul-prone bench warmer named Bob Knight.

  But the Buckeyes have not won a Big Ten championship since 1970. Miller had some excellent teams, reaching five straight NCAA Tournaments at one point. But he never won the league and never got past the round of sixteen. One bad year and he was gone, fired at midseason.

  Williams knew as he began his second season that 20–13 the first year was okay, especially because it exceeded expectations. He knew that a less-than-great second year could be survived too. But after that, the honeymoon was over. He had to have a top recruiting class to go with the first one. One good class is never enough.

  There were four Ohio players Williams was focusing on: Bill Robinson, a seven-foot center from the Akron area, whose height and excellent grades made him a must; Eric Riley, a 6–11 forward from Cleveland who came from the same high school as Treg Lee, one of the two Prop 48s sitting out; Mark Baker, a 6–1 jet from Dayton, the kind of point guard Williams craved; and Jeff Hall, a 6–6 country kid who could shoot the ball. The key out-of-state recruit was Chris Jent, a 6–7 shooter from Sparta, New Jersey. Jent was a kamikaze-type player. His attitude reminded Williams a little bit of Larry Bird.

  For Williams this would be a difficult fall. He is a man who has lived and breathed basketball for as long as he can remember. He was a good player at Maryland in the 1960s, a coach-on-the-floor type who still brags about holding the school record for most consecutive field goals—eight.

  He began coaching straight out of college and quickly worked his way up the coaching ladder from high school to college assistant to head coach at American at the age of thirty-two. For years he has been hailed as one of the bright young coaches in the country. Now, he knew, it was time to take the next step.

  “It’s nice when people say we do a good job getting the most out of our talent,” he said. “But I want to get to the point where if we do that, we win all the time. I want to attack people and not worry about it.”

  Williams’s coaching style is an attacking one, pressing all over the floor, fast-breaking at every opportunity. It fits his personality. He is as intense as anyone in the sport. He coaches every possession as if it is his last one. Fortunately, he has the kind of sense of humor where he can laugh at himself when the game is over—though not always right away. He is the same way about recruiting.

  Williams’s two full-time assistants—his recruiters—are about as different as two men can be—which is ideal. Randy Ayers played at Ohio State. He is 6–5, black, and has the dignified air of a judge. He is quiet, but articulate, someone who makes an excellent first impression and then builds on it.

  Fran Fraschilla is a compact bundle of energy, a talker, someone who leaves few thoughts unspoken. He came to Ohio State in 1987 from Ohio University and he knows every nook and cranny of the state.

  On September 23, Williams, Ayers, and Fraschilla visited Eric Riley. The basics of a recruiting visit in this day and age are almost always the same: set up a date and time. Try to know who will be there. If the parents are divorced or separated, find out if the parent the player doesn’t live with will be there. Get good directions to the house so as not to get lost. Leave early in case you do get lost.

  The three Ohio State coaches left Columbus at 3:30 P.M. for the two-hour drive to Cleveland. The visit was scheduled for 7:30. One of t
he advantages Ohio State has is being smack in the middle of the state. Almost every place in-state can be reached in two hours.

  Williams’s mood was good. He felt the school was in very good position with Robinson and Baker. Riley could go either way. The presence of Treg Lee would seem to be an advantage but Williams was concerned that, having played in Lee’s shadow in high school, Riley might be worried about doing that again in college.

  Still, he felt they had a shot at Riley. Both he and Ayers felt the mother, Beulah Riley, liked them; and they felt that she would play a major role in Eric’s decision.

  More often than not, a recruiting visit is the culmination of more than a year of work. Initial contact with a player starts early in the junior year—at the latest—and by the time a player is in his senior year the schools that are serious about recruiting him have written and phoned on several dozen occasions. In Riley’s case, he and his mother had received thirty-one letters and three telegrams from Ohio State dating back to the summer of 1986. Between the time of the visit in September and the day he made his decision in November, there would be nineteen more letters and one more telegram. Those figures are about average for a good, but not great player.

  In the car, the coaches reviewed the points they wanted to make: the education Riley would get—they knew that was very important to his mother. Playing time—it was there for him. And, how important it would be to have gone to Ohio State if he settled in Ohio after graduation.

  Williams made one other point to the coaches: “Let’s stay off the subject of Treg (Lee) unless they bring it up.”