A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  The second player invited to dinner is freshman Perry Carter, who knows both Riley and Baker from the Nike camp. After dinner, the recruits will be turned over to the players for a night on the town.

  According to Williams’s schedule, dinner is set for 7:30. He shows up on time, along with Carter and Francis. The coaches and the recruits are nowhere in sight. They wait. At 7:45, Williams is getting antsy. He paces for a while, then sits down and shakes his head.

  “You know, I’m really not sure I want to be doing this when I’m fifty,” he says. “As I get older, I wonder about it more and more. This is all I’ve ever done but maybe I’d be happy doing something else. It’s all so consuming. Look at me now. It’s Friday night and I’m spending it with a bunch of teenagers. Nothing against them but if I’m going to be with a teenager, I’d like it to be my daughter. Sometimes it seems like I never see her.”

  He stops at that thought. “You know, I have a picture of her in my mind that’s so vivid. She’s nine years old, just a little girl going to school. Now, she’s seventeen, driving a car and getting ready for college. What happened? How can she not be nine anymore? Where did all that time go? Tomorrow, it will be the same thing, I’ll be working with these guys all day. That’s been my life for twenty years.”

  Williams looks at his watch. It’s almost eight. The softness in his voice disappears. “Where the hell are those guys?”

  They arrive at eight. As the group is being seated, Williams takes Fraschilla aside, not wanting to demand an explanation for their tardiness in front of the players. “Gary, the reservation was for eight.”

  Williams shakes his head. “My schedule says seven-thirty.” It was a minor issue, but in the middle of a vital weekend, the kind of annoyance Williams could have lived without.

  The dinner came off without a hitch. No one drank any alcohol. This is an interesting side of recruiting. The coaches would have loved a drink but weren’t about to have one in front of the players. The players would love a drink but wouldn’t dare order one in front of the coaches. So everyone drinks iced tea.

  Dinner over, it is time for Francis and Carter to take over. As the five players drove off, Williams stood with his coaches in the restaurant’s parking lot. “All you can do now is hope everyone shows up in one piece in the morning,” he said, echoing every coach’s lament. He turned to his coaches. “I need a beer.”

  Undoubtedly, so did the players.

  Everyone turned up in one piece the next day. The weekend was a success. Ten days later, Jent and Baker both signed with Ohio State. Robinson formalized what he had told Williams, and Hall also signed. Riley was still undecided. Then, four days after the signing period began, Ohio State fired football coach Earle Bruce, a move that brought national outrage.

  Bruce had the best record in the Big Ten during his eight years as coach but that wasn’t good enough for many powerful OSU alumni. So, ignoring the recommendation of Athletic Director Rick Bay, University President Edward Jennings fired Bruce. Bay was so upset by Jennings’s decision that he resigned.

  This turn of events stunned Williams. Bay was the man who had hired him, someone he liked and respected. The firing wasn’t just unfair, it was an embarrassment to the entire school. Two days later, Riley announced that he was going to Michigan. Williams was convinced that any chance to get him went out the window after the Bruce firing. His suspicions were confirmed when Riley’s coach told him that everyone had felt the firing was a sign of instability in the leadership at Ohio State. Williams couldn’t really argue. He just felt lucky that the other four players had signed before the firing.

  Still, he felt they needed reassurance. He called all four to tell them the basketball program would not be affected by what had happened. He still had a long-term contract and wasn’t going anywhere.

  It was a disturbing turn of events, though. Just when Williams should have been basking in a smashing series of recruiting victories, he was caught in the middle of a major controversy. The new athletic director was a quickly-moved-up assistant named James Jones. Williams didn’t know him well. He would shortly.

  While Williams was focusing a lot of his attention on the future at Ohio State, no one at Purdue was looking past the upcoming season. The Boilermakers’ attitude was perhaps best summed up by Coach Gene Keady’s annual list of ten goals that was posted in the locker room. At the top of the list were two words: “FINAL FOUR!”

  The other goals didn’t really matter because all of them could be reached—but if the first one wasn’t, the other nine would be meaningless. No one was more aware of this than the senior trio of Troy Lewis, Todd Mitchell, and Everette Stephens.

  But already, ten days before the season began, there were problems. On October 23, Jeff Arnold and Dave Stack, the two seniors who were academically ineligible for the first semester, were arrested during an on-campus party. The cops had been clearing the place out when Arnold went back for a coat he had forgotten. Apparently, Arnold had not moved quickly enough in leaving to satisfy the police. When they told him to get moving, he didn’t. Words were exchanged and Arnold ended up in handcuffs. When Stack tried to go to his aid, he ended up in handcuffs too.

  The story was in the student newspaper that Monday. Lewis, Mitchell, and Stephens were reading it at lunch when the assistant coaches wandered by. “They’re gone, aren’t they?” Lewis asked, pointing to the story.

  The coaches nodded glumly. Like the seniors, they remembered Keady’s “one more chance” edict of the summer. That chance had been used up.

  Arnold was really the issue here. Stack was a little-used player who had never really fit in at Purdue. If he was a good guy and sat on the end of the bench, that was fine. If he was a bad guy, there was no room for him.

  But Arnold could be a key player. He was 6–10 and a pretty good athlete who had improved steadily since migrating to Purdue from California four years earlier. Arnold was a flake and everyone knew it. Mitchell, Lewis, and Stephens all liked him and knew that he could help this team, perhaps even as a starter.

  But they also felt his continuing escapades could hurt the team. Arnold liked to party, have a good time. That didn’t make him unusual. But he seemed incapable of drawing the line between fun and trouble. When he had first become ineligible Lewis had told him bluntly: “You fucked up again, Jeff, just like you’ve been doing for four years.”

  Arnold hadn’t argued. Now, Arnold and Stack were certainly gone. The three seniors had mixed emotions about it. They felt empathy for them, especially Arnold, but they also felt that if Keady didn’t show who was boss, things could get out of hand on the team.

  “We walked into practice that day,” Lewis said later, remembering that Monday in October, “and Jeff and Dave were there. Well, there was a recruit in, so we figured maybe Coach Keady was waiting to tell them. But that night, we had a meeting. Coach said that Arnold and Stack were going to run after practice every night and that if anyone screwed up they were going to be in trouble. I was sitting in the back of the room thinking, This is wrong. These two guys don’t deserve to be on this team.’ What I should have done was stand up and say, ‘Coach, I don’t want to play with these guys anymore.’ ”

  Mitchell and Stephens agreed with Lewis. But they didn’t say anything either. That night, back in their apartment, Mitchell and Lewis found themselves talking about Bob Knight. Both had been recruited by Knight, though not terribly hard. Lewis had dropped Indiana from consideration when Knight had cursed in front of his mother. Mitchell kept remembering then-Assistant Coach Jim Crews saying, “It takes a special person to play at Indiana.”

  “I decided right then,” Mitchell said, “that I just wasn’t that special.”

  Mitchell and Lewis had become friends during a recruiting visit to UCLA. Lewis was one of those players everyone wanted. Mitchell attracted less attention because many people thought he would play football in college, rather than basketball.

  The two stayed in touch after the UCLA visit and when Mitch
ell decided to go to Purdue, he called Lewis to tell him. Lewis had been hounded so badly by recruiters that he was hiding out at his father’s house to stay away from the constant phone calls at his mother’s. When Mitchell called to tell him he was going to Purdue, Lewis said, “You know, I think I’ll go there too.”

  They had been roommates and best friends from day one. Stephens, who had come to Purdue from Evanston, Illinois, joined their circle as a freshman but didn’t get as much attention as “TNT” (Todd’n Troy) until he became a key player his junior year. Now, the three often seemed inseparable, although Stephens tended to go off with his own set of nonbasketball friends more often than TNT did.

  None of them had ever regretted choosing Purdue, except perhaps during the snowstorms that buffeted West Lafayette during the winter, when they thought about the warm-weather schools that had recruited them. But now, they thought Keady could use a shot of Bob Knight’s toughness. “If this had happened with Knight,” Lewis said, “he would have called the two guys in and said, ‘You fucked up one time too many, you’re gone.’ But Coach just isn’t that way. He wants everything to be right this season, exactly right.”

  There was more. Although Keady is known as “the bulldog,” as much for appearance as approach, he is, underneath the tough veneer, a softie. Throwing a player off his team was a very difficult thing for him to do, regardless of whether the player was a star or a scrub.

  These problems were exactly what Keady had hoped to avoid during the preseason. During his first seven years at Purdue, he had carefully built one of the strongest programs in the country. But because of the repeated March failures, the Boilermakers still weren’t getting the recognition they felt they deserved.

  No one was more aware of this than Keady. A week before practice began, he had been asked to appear on Roy Firestone’s ESPN talk show. Great, Keady thought, some national exposure. He had flown to Los Angeles and then squirmed for twenty minutes while Ted Green, subbing for Firestone, asked him a series of questions about Bob Knight, Digger Phelps, and his former boss, Eddie Sutton.

  Keady knew that he could win twenty games for the next one hundred years in a row and no one was going to notice Purdue until it got to the Final Four. This team should be a Final Four team. It had a superb point guard in Stephens, a deadly shooter in Lewis, an outstanding inside-outside player in Mitchell, a solid center in Melvin McCants, and good, young depth.

  “This team should have a better chance in March than any we’ve had,” Keady said. “We’re bigger and stronger and we’ve got the experience. The way we’re playing right now [November 10] we don’t belong in the Top Twenty. But if we had Arnold and Stack in there, I wouldn’t be uncomfortable being ranked Number One.”

  And Keady fully expected to have Arnold and Stack back in January, when they would become academically eligible. In the meantime, though, there were nagging worries: Lewis had broken his foot in September and Mitchell had undergone arthroscopic knee surgery on October 28. Both were now back practicing but weren’t yet 100 percent.

  And the memories of ’87 nagged, the blowout loss at Michigan that gave Indiana a share of the Big Ten title, followed by the Hoosiers’ success and the Boilermakers’ failure in postseason.

  “I think Indiana doing as well as it did blew our not doing well out of proportion for all of us, starting with me,” Keady said. “I think the Florida game was my fault. We played as if we were afraid to fail. That’s not any good. This year, I just want us to go out and play every game.”

  The games would begin on November 20. Already, it had been a tough season at Purdue. And March was still a long way off.

  6

  TIP-OFFS

  November 20 … Piscataway, New Jersey

  The college basketball season formally began on Friday night, November 20, when the third annual preseason National Invitation Tournament opened up with seven first-round games—the eighth would be played Saturday—at various sites around the country.

  Once, college basketball began everywhere on December 1, never earlier. But in recent years, with the proliferation of holiday tournaments, the first games have been staged earlier and earlier. Now, in addition to the sixteen-team NIT, there is the annual tip-off game held at the birthplace of basketball, Springfield, Massachusetts. There is the Great Alaska Shootout on Thanksgiving weekend, not to mention the Maui Classic and dozens of other classics and nonclassics held, quite literally, around the world. Clemson and Oregon State began their seasons in Taiwan. Truly, a neutral court.

  No one was more ready for the start of the season than Rick Barnes. He had intentionally made life difficult for his team almost from his first day at George Mason. He honestly believed that discipline—a lot of discipline—was the only thing that would allow the Patriots to improve on the 17–14 record they had compiled the previous year.

  What’s more, the team was filled with academic question marks and Barnes wanted to avoid that kind of trouble. He had devised something he called the “Pride Sheet.” Each Friday, the players had to come into Barnes’s office and sign the sheet.

  The sheet read as follows:

  I have attended and have been on time for all my classes, met with all my tutors, met all study hall requirements, taken care of all meetings with the academic coordinator and professors and I am up to date on all my current assignments. I have also left a copy of my next week’s schedule on Coach Barnes’s desk.

  I understand the academic office will send a weekly report to Coach Barnes concerning my progress and attendance to my academic commitments. These reports will be supplemented by information from my professors. The reports will go on record without question.

  I understand by signing this statement, I am giving my word that I have fulfilled all of my stated commitments. If for any reason I was unable to meet a certain commitment, I had made prior contact with the coaching staff and receive permission. IF I SIGN THIS AND HAVE NOT BEEN TRUTHFUL, I UNDERSTAND THAT I WILL BE PENALIZED A GAME. If I have failed my responsibility, I will meet with Coach Barnes and explain my reason. I am aware that my failures could result in disciplinary actions against myself and teammates at Coach Barnes’s discretion.

  Heavy stuff. If anyone could not sign the sheet on a given Friday, the whole team got up at 6 A.M. to run. If a player signed the sheet when he should not have, he was automatically suspended one game. Punishments became more serious for second and third offenses.

  “If these guys don’t have the discipline to go to class, they aren’t going to have the discipline to be any good,” Barnes said. “I know this isn’t going to be easy and we may lose some guys. But the ones who stay will be better off.”

  Even with the Pride Sheet, it was not an easy fall. There were a lot of early mornings for the players and coaches. If Barnes didn’t like practice in the afternoon, he brought the players back at night. If he didn’t like it at night, they came in early the next morning.

  Everyone was pointing for November 20, the date of the NIT opener against Seton Hall. But three days before the opener, disaster struck No one had worked harder during the offseason than senior point guard Amp Davis. Barnes had told him that he wouldn’t play if he didn’t lose weight and Davis had lost thirty pounds. At 5–10, he had gone from 195 down to 165.

  Davis, Barnes felt, would be a key to how the team played. Then, three days before the season began, Davis came to see him. He had been accused of cheating on a test—for a second time. The first time, Davis had admitted he was guilty. This time he insisted he was innocent.

  It didn’t matter. Guilty once, Davis was considered guilty until proven innocent this time. He wouldn’t make the trip. Barnes made Davis tell his teammates what had happened. When Davis began to cry during his confession, star forward Kenny Sanders grabbed him and hugged him. If nothing else, Barnes thought, the tough preseason had produced a close team.

  But he was going to New Jersey without his point guard to play a Seton Hall team that would be very tough to beat under any cir
cumstances. Additionally, Barnes had suspended freshman reserve forward Harold Westbrook for one game for missing a class.

  Playing in the NIT, even in the role of sparring partner for Seton Hall, was a big thing for George Mason. The school had only been playing in Division 1 for nine years; this was a major opportunity to get people to notice a school few even knew existed.

  Barnes was tense on game day, a frigid, gray day. The game would be played at Rutgers because the NIT insisted that all its games be played in gyms with at least 8,000 seats. So instead of playing before a sellout crowd of 3,000 at Seton Hall, the teams played before 1,200 people in the 9,000-seat Rutgers Athletic Center.

  At 11 A.M., the Patriots went to the gym for their pregame shoot-around. The players were so tight they couldn’t make a shot. Barnes was worried. Back in the hotel, he called his old boss, Gary Williams, looking for advice and encouragement.

  “You’ve waited so long for this you think it’s the only game you’re ever going to coach,” Williams told him. “It’s a very long season. Win or lose, you’ve got a hell of a lot left to do.”

  And what about Davis, how should he deal with that? “You let the kid dictate your actions by his,” Williams said. “See how he responds to all this.”

  Barnes felt better after talking to Williams. He had learned a lot from him, including how to curse. “I swear, I never used any of those words until I worked for Gary,” he said. “Now, I use them all the time.”

  Everyone seemed looser at the pregame meal. Later in the season, Barnes would start skipping pregame meals because he felt his presence made the players nervous. Today, though, he was there, watching them eat pretty much whatever they wanted. This was one decision Barnes had made when he became a head coach. Most coaches spend a lot of time worrying about what to feed their players at pregame meal. Not Barnes.