A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  Jimmy V. will be forty-two in March. He knows, he says, he won’t be coaching at fifty. But what will he do? TV commentary doesn’t challenge him. He might like to work in Hollywood full-time, but wouldn’t that become shallow in a hurry?

  He knows he is a very good coach. But he also knows he could be better if he was more driven. But if he was more driven would he be happy? He looks around at the driven coaches at the top of his sport and has no desire to follow in their footsteps.

  For now, though, he is in Hawaii for a week he considers very important to his team. The first game is against Creighton. “The way we’re playing right now,” he says, “we could lose to anyone.”

  Spoken like a true coach.

  Although the Rainbow Classic has lost some luster because of the springing up in recent years of one tournament after another in Hawaii—UH will host three other tournaments itself this season—it is still the basketball event in Hawaii.

  The tournament begins each year with a dinner at the luxurious Kahala Hilton Hotel, which is on the far side of Diamond Head away from the sprawl of hotels on Waikiki.

  Because Hawaii basketball has fallen on hard times (the Rainbows are 1–7 entering the tournament), the hope for the host team going into the tournament is that it can win a game. The last time Hawaii won a tournament game was in 1984, and that was against Cornell. This year, the first-round opponent is Mississippi State, hand-picked because of a 7–21 record a year ago. But Mississippi State has a young, aggressive team and is 7–0, although Coach Richard Williams is quick to point out that the Bulldogs haven’t played anybody.

  It still sounds like a tough game for Hawaii. “All we’re hoping,” says Jim Leahey, the master of ceremonies at the dinner, “is that Hawaii gets to play at night after the first round this year.”

  The tournament’s consolation games are played in the afternoon.

  Each coach is allotted three minutes to talk about his team. Valvano talks for ten. He introduces the crowd to a Mr. Fujita, who is the director of the three-team tournament held in Japan every December. “Please stand up, Mr. Fujita,” Valvano says, waving his arms at him to stand. Fujita stands. “Mr. Fujita is here looking for teams for next year’s tournament. He speaks no English. Right now, he thinks I am Dean Smith and we’re in. I have instructed all my players to only answer to the name J.R.”

  Denny Crum from Louisville and Dave Bliss from SMU, both victims of Chaminade three years ago, say the same thing. “It’s great to be here, especially since we don’t have to play Chaminade.”

  The Hawaii people, who won’t even schedule Chaminade, don’t laugh. Everyone else does. When you are 1–7, nothing seems that funny.

  When the dinner is over, Valvano and his entourage head for a bar, where a group called The Love Notes is playing sixties music. They sit at a table right at the foot of the stage, a group of twelve that includes Pam Valvano, the assistant coaches and Valvano’s “host” for the tournament, Jeff Portnoy.

  There are few things in life that Valvano enjoys more than oldies. He knows the words to every song and is singing along with the band—loudly. Pam, who is a good deal more decorous than her husband, thinks he should stop singing so noisily.

  “Come on Pam,” Valvano says, “this is our past. You should sing too.”

  Pam isn’t going to sing. But Jim is, late into the night. When the band plays “At the Hop,” Valvano jumps to his feet. “I used to have them play that song when my team came on the floor at Johns Hopkins,” he yells.

  The band takes a break. The band members, five of them from New York, come over and Portnoy introduces them to Valvano. Valvano is nostalgic. “When I was dating Pam in college I used to spend all my money calling her on weekends,” he says. “The rest, anything I had left, I was saving for a ring. I never really asked her to marry me. When we were seniors, I just gave her the money, six hundred dollars, and her uncle got us a ring. He worked in the diamond district. Can that really be twenty-one years ago?”

  It can. The band starts again and Valvano is singing again. The music goes on until 1 A.M., but Valvano is still going when the bar is closing. “I’m really a good dancer, you know,” he says—Pam is rolling her eyes again.

  He turns to Portnoy. “Do you know how to do the stroll? Here, let me show you.” He grabs Portnoy by the arm and, while tourists walk by giving them funny looks, he stands in the doorway leading out of the bar demonstrating the dance.

  “I think I’ve got it,” Portnoy says.

  “Nah, no way,” Valvano says.

  He grabs Pam by the arm. “Come on, honey, let’s go to bed. These guys will keep us out all night if we don’t.”

  Pam just nods. She has heard all of this before. She thinks her husband is quite silly—but also quite adorable. And she knows by morning he will have forgotten the dancing lessons and be worrying once again about Shackleford.

  The Rainbow Classic opened on a Sunday night with a surprisingly large crowd of 2,703 in Blaisdell Arena.

  Blaisdell is a story in itself. It rises out of downtown Honolulu like the humpback of a white whale, very out of place among the tourist stops, especially since it is barely a mile from Waikiki. It was built in 1964, one year after Red Rocha became the coach at Hawaii. Then it was a showplace with its 8,800 seats. Rocha built a powerful program at Hawaii, peaking in 1971 and 1972 when his team won twenty-three and twenty-four games. They called that team “The Fabulous Five,” and Blaisdell was almost always packed when the Rainbows played.

  The arena has aged now, decaying, it seems, along with Hawaii basketball. But it still has its charms. To enter, one must cross a stream that runs around the building like a moat. On one side, one can see the mountains that cut through the middle of Oahu. On another side, one can see Diamond Head.

  But what really makes Blaisdell unique is the kind of basketball played inside. All year, top college basketball teams play in packed arenas, usually on frigid evenings. In Blaisdell, they play in front of small, often tiny crowds while most people on the island bask on the beach.

  As the host team Hawaii had chosen to play a team, Mississippi State, it figured to beat. There was a problem though. Although Richard Williams was starting four freshmen, the Bulldogs were not without talent. What’s more, Williams, who was in his second year coaching at the school, had managed to convince his young team that it could win. For a half, Hawaii played excellent basketball, leading 30–21 at the intermission. But Mississippi State shook its jitters in the second half, held Hawaii to 22 percent shooting, and pulled away to win the game, 68–55.

  For Hawaii, this was just the kind of loss that kept attendance and interest dwindling. Once, the Rainbows had a TV contract. It was gone. The only reason they still had a radio contract was that they tied their football deal to basketball. Riley Wallace, who had been hired because he “understood” Hawaii basketball, had a lot of work to do.

  “Television is killing us,” he said. “Kids want to go where they’re going to be on TV. In the old days we could recruit on the East Coast, convince kids to come here and get out of the cold weather. Now, they all want to play in the Big East. They all want to visit, but very few of them want to come.”

  Image had hurt Hawaii too. During Larry Little’s tenure—he had been the last coach with a winning record when he won seventeen games in 1983—it had come out that very few Hawaii basketball players were getting anywhere close to a degree. “It was exaggerated,” Little said. “Out of the kids who completed four years, we had close to 60 percent graduation.”

  Note the words “completed four years.” Most players at UH weren’t lasting four years. They would come in, play a year or two, enjoy the sun, and move on. “We run into a lot in recruiting,” Wallace said. “It isn’t just the long trip or lack of attention. We actually lose kids because people tell them about demons and volcanoes exploding. It’s rough.”

  Certainly it couldn’t be much rougher for Riley Wallace than it was for Richard Williams, whose job was to convince
players that they wanted to spend four years in Starkville, Mississippi. Williams was different from a lot of previous coaches at the school, though. He had played at Mississippi State and he didn’t see the job as just a stopping-off point on his way somewhere else.

  “I’ve got the job I want,” he said. “Now all I have to do is convince people they want to play for us.” He laughed. “I know it isn’t easy. [Alabama Coach] Wimp Sanderson told me that the most exciting thing that goes on in Starkville is when they unload the Kroger trucks at midnight. It’s all right though, we’ll find a way.”

  Beating Hawaii is no small victory for Mississippi State. It gives Williams’s team eight victories—one more than the year before. Still, his team is picked tenth in the Southeast Conference. “Once we leave here, there isn’t a game on the schedule I can look at and say we can definitely win it,” Williams said. “Ever since we got here, everyone’s been telling me to enjoy myself, spend time on the beach and all. I can’t do it. Yesterday, I walked down to the beach, looked at the water and said, ‘The hell with this.’ I went back to the room and looked at some more tape.”

  The work has paid off with one victory. The trip, for Williams and Mississippi State, is already a success.

  While the tournament was opening, Valvano and his team, given the first night off, were at Sea Life Park for the evening. Valvano was fighting the flu and still worrying about Shackleford. During the show, one of the acts was a Hawaiian woman who picked people out of the audience to teach them the hula. Naturally, confronted with the 6–10 Shackleford and 6–8 Avie Lester, she couldn’t resist grabbing them and pulling them onto the stage.

  Within five minutes, she had Lester doing a respectable hula. Shackleford struggled, drawing hoots from his teammates. “See that,” Valvano said. “He just doesn’t concentrate. I ought to go tell that woman that now she knows what I put up with every day.”

  Twenty-four hours later, when State played Creighton, Shackleford wasn’t in the starting lineup. He had been five minutes late for a team meeting. Lester, who had been offering people hula lessons all day, started in his place. Shackleford came in and played 28 minutes, scoring 14 points and getting 12 rebounds. Valvano was pleased—slightly. The Wolfpack won easily, 86–55. It would play Louisville the next night. That was the game Valvano wanted to win.

  The Cardinals, coming off the disastrous 18–14 season and their awful opener against Notre Dame, were starting to come on. Pervis Ellison was playing hard again and LaBradford Smith was truly a gifted freshman. Louisville has such a fanatic following that in addition to several hundred fans with them in Hawaii, all their games were being televised back home, even though the time difference meant they started at close to midnight. The two Louisville TV men did the telecasts in red-and-white aloha shirts. Jim Leahey, doing the local telecast of the final in Hawaii, worked in a jacket and tie.

  Valvano was confident Shackleford would come to play against Louisville. But now he had a different problem. Against Creighton, he had started Quentin Jackson at point guard. Jackson, a senior, had been a key player during State’s late rush to the ACC Tournament title the year before. In the five pre-Hawaii games, Valvano had started freshman Chris Corchiani, who was quicker and a better penetrator than Jackson.

  After the losses to Kansas and Cal-Santa Barbara, Valvano decided that Jackson needed some playing time. Corchiani only played nine minutes against Creighton; Jackson played twenty-eight. Corchiani had never been benched in his life and he did not take it well. Late that evening, Valvano found him sitting alone in the hotel lobby, sulking. The coach desperately wanted to go to bed because he felt terrible. But clearly, this had to be dealt with.

  “I told him the story about Sidney Lowe when he was a senior,” Valvano said later. “We were playing West Virginia and running our delay where Sidney passes, catches, passes, catches. He came by me and said, ‘Coach, I need a blow.’ I said, ‘Sidney, your next blow will come when your eligibility is used up.’

  “That’s the way it will be someday with Chris. I told him that Vinny [Del Negro] and Quentin both thought he was nuts because he thought he should play every minute, every game. They both waited almost three years to play. Someday when he’s a senior some hotshot freshman is going to come in and Chris will look at him and say, ‘Did I act like that asshole when I was a freshman?’ And I’ll tell him, yes, he did. And we’ll both laugh about it.

  “But right now, the problem is very real to him. I understand that. It’s like the difference between my nineteen-year-old daughter and my seven-year-old. My nineteen-year-old sees college as a four-year experience, something you get better at as you go along. My seven-year-old wants a new bike today. Not tomorrow or Tuesday, today. That’s the way freshmen are. You have to be patient with them until they learn to be patient with you.”

  State and Louisville will play at 6 P.M. At noon, Hawaii and Texas A&M played in the first consolation game. Hawaii had the game won, leading 67–64 with the ball and twenty seconds left. The Aggies fouled Reggie Cross. He missed the one-and-one. Hawaii extended its defense to deny any three-point shots. Finally, with two seconds left, Darryl McDonald stepped back to twenty-four feet and fired. Naturally, it swished.

  Texas A&M won in overtime and Riley Wallace and 994 fans went home muttering, no doubt, about demons and volcanoes.

  Thanks to the Louisville and N.C. State entourages, the crowd that evening was 3,275. Jackson started at point guard again but Corchiani played 22 minutes—7 more than Jackson. And, when the game was on the line, Shackleford and Chucky Brown dominated. Shackleford had 18 points and 8 rebounds. Just as important, he held Ellison to 13 points and his presence in the low post opened things up for Brown, who scored 25 points. State pulled away late to win, 80–75.

  When Shackleford played well, State had three excellent players: Shackleford, Brown, and Del Negro. The latter two were as consistent as Shackleford was not. Even on a bad shooting night from the field—three of seven—Del Negro had 15 points, 6 assists, 6 rebounds, and zero turnovers.

  “When Shack plays like tonight, we’re a very good club,” Valvano said. “He knows it, we know it, everyone knows it. Tonight, against Pervis, he came to play. We’ll see about tomorrow. If the past is any guide, he’ll suck.”

  State’s opponent in the final would be Arizona State. The Sun Devils beat Mississippi State, 70–69, when Williams’s one veteran starter, Greg Lockhart, took the ball all the way to the basket with his team down three and time running out. The lay-up did the Bulldogs no good. Williams just stood with his arms folded, pointed to his head and said, “What were you thinking?”

  A few minutes later, still a bit shocked, Williams was able to joke. “I told the kids that if they thought we were going to go undefeated, they were wrong. We’ve still got a lot of lessons to learn. I’m sure Louisville will teach us another one tomorrow.”

  Louisville did just that with an 86–65 victory. But Williams and his young team will win six games in the Southeast Conference and finish 14–15. There is a future in Starkville even if you skip watching those Kroger trucks unload.

  The final was closer than Valvano would have liked. Shackleford was just as lackadaisical in the first half as he had been fired up the evening before. State led 37–36 at the half but Valvano was furious. He stormed into the tiny locker room and tore into Shackleford, questioning his desire, his intelligence, his manhood. He roared out the door, thought of a couple more things he wanted to say and turned to go back in, throwing the door open just as team doctor Jim Manley was about to open it on the other side.

  Manley, considerably older and thinner than Valvano, went flying. “Jeez, I thought I killed him,” Valvano said later. Manley survived. So did Shackleford, who responded to Valvano’s tirade by taking over the game when it was on the line. He scored 9 points during an 11–3 burst that put the Wolfpack up 61–53 with 7:50 to go. From there, State cruised to an 83–71 victory. The Most Valuable Player? Charles Shackleford.

  Valvano
was delighted. He had gotten everything he wanted out of Hawaii: progress from Shackleford, good play from both Corchiani and Jackson, a victory over a very good team, and some consistency. The winner’s trophy was a bonus.

  As the arena emptied—which didn’t take long-the PA announcer was telling the crowd the names of the visiting teams for the 25th Rainbow Classic in December 1988. Yale was on the list. No doubt the Eli would be Hawaii’s first opponent. That afternoon, Creighton had beaten the Rainbows for seventh place, Hawaii’s ninth straight Rainbow Classic loss.

  If Yale isn’t the answer maybe Hawaii could try a new strategy in 1989. Invite Chaminade.

  January 2, 1988 … Los Angeles

  They sold out Pauley Pavilion today. Sadly, that was news. What was once the proudest college basketball program in America has become an embarrassment. UCLA isn’t very good and everyone in Los Angeles knows it.

  The sellout today was created by the presence of North Carolina. The fans came to see Dean Smith and J. R. Reid the way they once came to see John Wooden and Lew Alcindor. Or Sidney Wicks. Or Bill Walton. Or Richard Washington. Wooden has been retired thirteen years now and during games he sits in the second row, directly across from the UCLA bench, looking just as impassive as he did when he coached.

  In his place sits Walt Hazzard, the fifth coach to try to fill Wooden’s unfillable shoes. Hazzard played for Wooden. He was the captain of his first national championship team in 1964. He has tried to inject Wooden’s magic back into the program since taking over four years ago, walking across the floor to shake the great man’s hand before tip-off, even going back there sometimes at halftime.

  Hazzard has had some success. His first team, after a horrendous start, came back to win the NIT. His third team won the Pacific 10, got back into the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1981, and won twenty-five games. But the best player on that 1987 team, Reggie Miller, a recruit of Hazzard’s predecessor Larry Farmer, has gone on to the pros. UCLA still has some talent but it is not a team that plays very hard or very smart. The debacle two weeks earlier at California was a perfect example.