Knoxville is, in many ways, a typical southern college town. It is neither big nor small. On the ride in from the airport one passes, among other things, a flea market, Madame Rene’s palm readings, the Baptist Exercise Center; a strip joint, and a sign that says: “HAVING AN AFFAIR? … Rodeway Inn Convention Center.”
Once across the Tennessee River one turns right, and there on the banks of the river loom both the Thompson–Boling Arena and Neyland Stadium, which has been expanded over the years to now seat 103,000. Both the stadium and the arena are completely orange inside. There is no doubt that this is Big Orange Country.
And, while they love their football here first and foremost, they take their basketball quite seriously. Ray Mears, DeVoe’s predecessor, brought in players like Bernard King and Ernie Grunfeld and challenged Kentucky for SEC supremacy. DeVoe, even with his recent troubles, has a record of 10–9 against Kentucky. That goes a long way toward keeping your job at Tennessee. But a third straight losing season will finish DeVoe and he knows it.
On opening night though, the past is forgotten … at least for one evening. The opponent is Marquette. Once, this would have been a very tough opener, especially back in the days when Al McGuire was coach. But Marquette has fallen on even harder times than Tennessee. It is a perfect opening night foil.
And so, all goes well. Well, almost all. The bathrooms in the new arena back up when suddenly confronted with 25,272 people and the two locker rooms are flooded. There is also some leakage from the roof. Only a little, though. And when the band plays “The Tennessee Waltz” just before tip-off, the new place is rocking.
Tennessee struggles for a half, leading just 33–30 at intermission. But a 13–4 run at the start of the second half breaks the game open, and the Vols cruise to an 82–56 victory before what will be the only sellout crowd in the new building all season.
“It’s as big a win as I can remember since I’ve been at Tennessee,” DeVoe says when it is over. “To open the new place like this in front of all these people is terrific. We’ve had some fun wins, some wins we didn’t deserve, but I can’t remember one that was bigger.”
DeVoe is genuinely excited. His team played good defense and his three new players—junior college transfer Clarence Swearengen and freshmen Greg Bell and Rickey Clark—played well. The kind of spark he has been looking for was evident.
Bell may have a distinction that no other player in America can claim: He is playing in a building he helped build. A year ago, Bell enrolled at Tennessee as a Proposition 48 freshman. At the time, the rule (since changed) said that a player could retain all four years of his eligibility if he paid his own way to school during the year he was forced to sit out. Bell paid his way by working on the construction crew that built the Thompson–Boling Arena. Having helped build the place, Bell would now be asked to help fill it. Against Marquette, he shoots three-for-four in his college debut.
It is a big night for Tennessee and a big night for DeVoe. But it is only one night and one game. No one knows that better than DeVoe.
December 5 … Indianapolis
This was the joke they were telling in the Hoosier Dome today: Question: What is the one thing about the first annual Big Four Double-header that isn’t like the Final Four?
Answer: Notre Dame is playing.
Well, that may be just a bit unfair but there is little doubt that this is a gala event. They will sell 43,000 tickets to these two games and it could have been a lot more. When you put Indiana, Kentucky, Louisville, and Notre Dame in the same building in a central location for one afternoon, there is virtually no limit to the number of tickets that could be sold.
In the twelve years since John Wooden retired, Indiana (3), Louisville (2), and Kentucky (1) have won exactly half of the twelve national championships. Even Notre Dame has made a Final Four appearance during that period (1978), although Digger Phelps still hasn’t won a Final Four game.
This extravaganza was a long time in the making. It was originally discussed in the early 1980s when the Hoosier Dome was first opened. Since all four schools are within a couple hours’ drive of the Dome, the notion was to put the four of them there at the same time and rake in the money. Not to mention playing some pretty good basketball in the process.
Naturally, there were holdups during negotiations. The Kentucky schools didn’t like the idea of going into Indiana every year. They wanted to rotate the site. But neither Louisville nor Lexington had a building comparable in size to the Hoosier Dome and neither city was nearly as centrally located.
Then there was the question of format. Bob Knight wanted a two-day day tournament. Eddie Sutton wanted a one-day doubleheader. What about matchups? It was finally resolved this way: a four-year contract and a one-day doubleheader, Kentucky schools playing Indiana schools with the opponent switched every year. In other words, Big Four Classic 1 would match Notre Dame–Louisville and Indiana–Kentucky. Big Four Classic 2 would be Indiana–Louisville and Notre Dame–Kentucky, and No. 3 would have the same matchups as No. 1.
Each school would get 25 percent of the ticket allotment and the TV revenue would be split four ways. It was a can’t-miss deal. All four schools were perennially good to excellent, all four coaches were national names, and all four had truly fanatical fans.
The whole weekend had all the trappings of a Final Four. The coaches closed their practices on Friday and the city began filling up that evening. By noon on Saturday, two hours before tip-off, I-65 was jammed with cars coming up from Kentucky.
Notre Dame was the only one of the four teams not in the Top Twenty. Kentucky was sitting second behind North Carolina. Indiana was fifth and Louisville, even though it had yet to play a game, was fourteenth.
Indiana was 2–0, including an impressive victory earlier in the week over Notre Dame.
But it had already been a tough season for Bob Knight. Perhaps in the future he should consider sitting out the next season after a major victory in his life. In 1977, following Indiana’s 1976 national title, he had thrown three players off the team after an incident in Alaska and gone 14–13, his worst record ever at Indiana. In 1982, after his 1981 national championship, Knight thought about giving up coaching, was distracted all season, and watched his team struggle to win nineteen games. In 1985, the year after the Olympic gold medal, he threw the infamous chair.
Now came 1987. In March, the Hoosiers had won the national title. In November, they opened their season with an exhibition game against the Soviet Union. Knight had complained publicly that American colleges shouldn’t play the Soviets because all they were doing was helping prepare them—the enemy—for the Olympics. But he then scheduled them himself, largely because he thought he could beat them.
He was wrong. The Soviets played perhaps their best game of the tour in Bloomington and were up 60–43 early in the second half when Knight began ranting at referee Jim Burr about one of the Soviets’ taking a place on the foul lane illegally during a free throw. Burr gave Knight one technical. He raged on. Two technicals. Still, he continued. Finally, three technicals. Knight was ejected. Burr told him he had to leave. Knight refused.
“If you don’t leave,” Burr said, “then the game is forfeited.”
“I’m not leaving,” Knight said.
“Is that final?” Burr asked. Knight nodded. Burr marched to the scorer’s table to make the forfeit official. In the meantime, Knight was screaming at Bill Wall, the executive director of ABA-USA and the sponsor of the tour and the game, to do something—intervene. Wall was not going to intervene during a game. Burr signed the forfeit. Knight took his team off the floor.
It was an awful and humiliating moment for Knight, for Indiana, and for the United States. The Soviets were completely bewildered, as were the Indiana fans. The next day Knight “apologized,” as only he can, blaming his past relationship with Burr for the incident and saying he was sorry Indiana’s fans didn’t get to see the last fifteen minutes of the game.
Two days later, Indiana President
Thomas Ehrlich, undoubtedly delighted that Knight would pull such a stunt during his first year as IU’s president, issued a “strong reprimand” to Knight for his actions. Exactly what a “strong reprimand” was no one knew for sure, but one thing was fairly certain: Ehrlich had no desire to begin his tenure at Indiana by having a confrontation with the most popular man in the state.
Knight’s apology was meaningless. During the next few days he told friends that the incident was Burr’s fault and that it was unfair that he had been accused of pulling his team off the floor since he had only told his players to leave after the game had been forfeited. The fact that his actions caused the forfeit didn’t affect Knight’s semantical game at all.
Perhaps most amazing was Knight’s reaction to Wall’s refusal to step into the debacle. Wall had been a Knight loyalist throughout his tenure as Olympic coach, a good friend who let Knight do exactly what he wanted even if it angered others. Even in the aftermath of this incident—which had made a mockery of an international game—Wall refused to be critical of Knight.
And yet, Knight was furious with Wall because he hadn’t intervened during the game. The incident, in Knight’s mind, was Burr’s fault and also Wall’s fault. He, of course, was not at fault in any way. He cut off all communication with Wall, who accepted his fate like any good soldier would, never once suggesting that perhaps Knight’s behavior might make him a less-than-appropriate cochairman of the 1988 Olympic selection committee.
Indiana had other problems that would become public during the season. Knight was unhappy with Rick Calloway, the two-year starter at small forward who was being asked to play inside more this season. Knight considered benching him for the Kentucky game but decided against it. That would come later.
And then there was Keith Smart. The hero of New Orleans after making the jump shot that beat Syracuse in the national championship game, Smart had spent most of the preseason in the doghouse. One day in practice, Knight had told Smart that he was “the worst player in America.”
This was hardly unusual. Knight likes to keep his stars from getting big heads, and with Smart’s New Orleans success he had reason for extra concern. But unlike the seniors of 1987, Steve Alford, Daryl Thomas, and Steve Eyl, Smart had not had three years of preparation to deal with the constant mental pounding Knight’s seniors are expected to take. Because he was a junior college transfer he had only been in the program for one year, and much of that year he had been sheltered by the presence of those three seniors.
Now he was getting blasted and having a tough time with it. His early play reflected that. One day in practice, Knight got so angry with Smart that he took the entire team into the locker room and made the players tell Smart how bad he was. Insiders insisted this was not merely “BK Theater,” the tag the players put on Knight’s infamous mind games. Smart really was playing poorly.
And yet the Indiana team that came into the Hoosier Dome appeared capable of defending its national title. Smart was bound to come around, and two precocious freshmen, Jay Edwards and Lyndon Jones, had been added to an already deep team.
The other teams were question marks. Kentucky had the 1988 version of Steve Alford in Rex Chapman, the sophomore guard so beloved in Kentucky that he was tagged “The Boy King” by the media. To think that race is not a factor in these things is naïve. Most of the fans who get in to see Indiana and Kentucky play are white. Most of the players they watch are black. When a truly gifted white player comes along, he quickly becomes a hero to the white fans. Alford had been through this at Indiana, now Chapman had that status at Kentucky.
Indiana-Kentucky was clearly the feature game, so much so that ABC-TV, which was televising the doubleheader, asked that it be made the second game, a reversal of the original schedule. Louisville had won the national title in 1986 but hadn’t even made the NCAA Tournament in 1987. Notre Dame had reached the round of sixteen in 1987, but that was the first time it had made any noise at all in postseason play since Danny Ainge had gone ninety-four feet through five players in five seconds to beat the Irish in the 1981 round of sixteen.
Since then, Digger Phelps had been a well-dressed coach who spent a lot of time winning games against Yale and Pennsylvania. Notre Dame’s schedule contained so many walkover games that the joke around the Midwest was that the Irish were going after a fourth straight Ivy League championship.
They did have one very special player, though, in David Rivers. Beyond being a superb guard, Rivers was a profile in courage. He had almost died in a serious automobile accident in August of 1986, but had come back to play the entire season. Phelps sang Rivers’s praises so often and so highly that, as good as he was, Rivers could not possibly live up to his billing.
Except in the Hoosier Dome, he did. From the start, it was apparent that Louisville wasn’t ready to play. Perhaps the Dome background affected the Cardinals’ shooting, but their zero-for-fourteen from three-point range was pathetic any way you looked at it. And Rivers was giving LaBradford Smith, Louisville’s talented freshman, a lesson in college basketball.
Rivers did everything but freshen up Phelps’s flower. He penetrated over and over for easy baskets. When the Cardinals tried to lay back, he bombed from outside. Rivers is small at six feet and perhaps 160 pounds, but he can take a pounding. He has a knack for bouncing off people like a pinball running back and never losing his balance. He scored 32 points and had 7 rebounds. Smith, who would become a very good player during the season, fouled out with 5 points on 1-of-5 shooting and 5 turnovers. He had a cut lip to boot. Welcome to the big time, kid.
Notre Dame won 69–54 and it really wasn’t that close. The Cardinals shot 37 percent for the game and weren’t totally embarrassed only because center Pervis Ellison, missing in action for much of his sophomore year, started his junior season with 23 points and 9 rebounds. That was an encouraging sign for Denny Crum, who had gone through a strange three seasons: 19–18, 30–7 (national championship), and 18–14.
But that game was only the warmup act. Rivers had been a man among boys, but now it was time to bring the men in blue and the men in red out.
This is not your average rivalry between two programs that always produce good teams. There is genuine animosity between the two schools. Knight and Sutton are on-again, off-again friends. Publicly, each tries to be complimentary of the other, but privately there is no love lost.
Beyond that, Kentucky fans greatly resent the aspersions Knight has cast on their program over the years. Once, during an interview on the Kentucky radio network, Knight said the Kentucky-Indiana rivalry didn’t mean very much to him, “because of all the crap that’s gone on down here [Kentucky] in recruiting over the years.”
That sort of “crap” would rear its head again in the spring when a Kentucky assistant was accused of putting $1,000 in $50 bills in a package containing a tape that he had sent to the father of Kentucky recruit Chris Mills.
Knight had even told friends as recently as 1986 that he wanted to discontinue the series with Kentucky. But since Sutton was only in his third year at Kentucky, Knight had decided, at least for the moment, to take him at his word when he said the program was now clean. The money involved in the doubleheader might have had a little to do with that liberal stance on Knight’s part.
If Kentucky-Indiana occasionally got ugly off the court, it was never anything less than fabulous on the court. From the start, this was a game worthy of all the hoopla surrounding it. Calloway, whose Indiana career would end unhappily in March, was superb, scoring 26 points and pulling down 11 rebounds. He kept the game close because Smart and Dean Garrett were cold most of the day, shooting two-for-nine and eight-for-twenty-four respectively.
Their performances mirrored those of Chapman and UK forward Winston Bennett, who were six-for-eighteen and three-of-eight, respectively. The Kentucky heroes on this day were Ed Davender (22 points) and previously little-used senior big men Rob Lock (14 points, 8 rebounds) and Cedric Jenkins (14 points, 10 rebounds). Jenkins would become
a forgotten man after New Year’s but on this day he was formidable.
No one ever really had command of the game. Kentucky took a 22–17 lead, helped by an intentional foul call that almost made Knight crazy. “Jesus Christ!” he shrieked at the referee, kicking (fortunately) the air in disgust. The Hoosiers came back to lead 27–24 and led 38–36 at the half on a rebound basket by Edwards, the gifted freshman.
Indiana pushed the lead to 46–40 early in the second half, forcing Sutton to call time. Just as the teams broke their huddles, a huge cheer went up from the Notre Dame section. Their fans, listening to various Walkmans throughout the stands, had just heard football player Tim Brown announced as the Heisman Trophy winner in New York. David Rivers never got a cheer that loud.
Kentucky came right back to lead 50–49 on a Jenkins ten-footer, then got a six-point lead of its own at 57–51 with 8:03 left. Indiana came back, tying the score at 59. Back and forth they went, the defensive intensity at both ends remarkable. Truly, this was a March atmosphere in December. During one possession, Garrett blocked three different Kentucky players’ shots.
They finally came to the last minute even at 67–67. Kentucky went inside to Lock, who was fouled with forty-seven seconds to go. He made both free throws for a 69–67 lead. Indiana wanted to go to Garrett. Steve Eyl got it to him, but he bobbled the ball and Lock grabbed it. He quickly passed it to Chapman, who was fouled with twenty-five seconds left.
The Boy King doesn’t miss free throws. He made both and Kentucky had control at 71–67. Smart missed another shot, but this time Garrett rebounded and hit the follow with nine seconds left, making it 71–69. IU called time.
During the time-out, Sutton set up an inbounds play to get the ball to Lock, who had made all sixteen free throws he had taken during the season. The ball went to Lock and he was fouled immediately. Naturally, he missed. Indiana raced down, out of time-outs. Calloway drove from the right, where he was cut off by Jenkins and Lock. His shot was way short. But Edwards grabbed it in midair and in one motion tossed it through the hoop just before the buzzer sounded.
A Season Inside Page 13