A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  The difference between the two schools, besides the fifty miles that separates the two campuses, is in coaching. Tom Schneider is in his third year at Penn and is one of five different coaches to win the Ivy League at the school during the last twenty years. He is forty and ambitious. Like his predecessors, he probably won’t be at Penn for life.

  One man has coached Princeton since 1967. He is Pete Carril. He has won eight Ivy League championships, several of them with mirrors. Carril is fifty-six and, in all likelihood, will end his career at Princeton. When he retires, he will do so as one of the most revered figures in his profession. The consensus on Carril among his peers is that he could probably take five charter members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and find a way to contend in the Ivy League.

  Certainly, the Ivy League isn’t what it was in the 1960s or even in the 1970s, when Princeton had Bill Bradley and the Hummer brothers and Chris Thomforde, and Penn had Craig Littlepage, Dave Wohl, Steve Bilsky, Bob Morse, Phil Hankinson, and Tony Price. In 1965, Princeton reached the Final Four. In 1979, Penn equaled the feat. No Ivy League team is likely to get that far any time soon. But that doesn’t mean the intensity in the league is any less or the games less fun.

  In another life one suspects that Carril was Yoda, the diminutive Star Wars Jedi who taught Luke Skywalker about The Force and how to use it. In his blue sweater, Carril waddles around, scrunching up his face in anger when his Jedi screw up.

  No game in the Palestra can really get underway until the traditional throwing of streamers after the first basket by the Philadelphia team is complete. Hassan Duncombe (pronounced Dunk-em), a huge Penn freshman from Brooklyn, scores the first basket, and the blue-and-red streamers come from everywhere.

  But this is, after all, the Ivy League, and no self-respecting Ivy League school is going to come to a game as big as this one without an answer for a bunch of streamers. So, when Princeton freshman Kit Mueller ties the game, the Princeton fans pelt the court with blue-and-orange marshmallows. Take that, Big Five.

  That out of the way, Yoda puts his team into the weave he loves to use to confound the opposition. Stop running for one second against a Princeton team and you will be back-doored into oblivion. Even if you know the Tigers are looking for just that, you’re still going to get burned.

  Yoda loves these games. He is into every play. When he spots an illegal screen that the referees miss, he turns to press row and screams, “That’s an illegal screen—write that down!” Everyone writes it down for fear of ending up on the dark side of The Force. Princeton leads 34–26 at halftime. Penn, with superior athletes, rallies in the second half to within 36–34.

  But the Quakers never get even. They get to within 58–55 with twenty-one seconds to go but John Thompson, Jr., the son of the Georgetown coach, calmly makes two free throws to ice the game. Princeton wins 60–57.

  It is career victory No. 364 for Yoda. No big deal. He puffs on a dead cigar, squints through his glasses to look at the statistics, and sounds very much like the wise old Jedi that he is. Someone notes that Penn did a good job defending against the weave in the second half.

  “Defending us well is no surprise,” Yoda says. “We have a lead, we blow the lead. This senior class has been doing that since they walked into school. The school paper says I should play more guys. Maybe they’re right. I have about half a brain so I’m a little slow.”

  He goes on. “Coaching isn’t very hard, you know. My players tell me how to coach. The way they play tells me what I tell them to do. If a guy can drive, I tell him to drive. If a guy can shoot, I tell him to shoot. If a guy can pass, I tell him to pass.”

  Of course. Yoda shrugs. “You do what you can and then at the end of the game, everybody’s grandmother makes three-pointers against you and none of it matters.”

  Someone wants to know what Dave Orlandini, a senior and a leader of the team, has given Carril this season.

  “Headaches,” Yoda answers.

  “It’s not a hard game to figure, you know,” he says, still lecturing. “Take Tim Neff. He was fifth in a class of five hundred. He always does his schoolwork. You can’t separate the player from the man. If a guy is a clown on the court, he’ll be a clown in life.”

  Yoda waddles out. His team is 12–5 now and 4–1 in the Ivy League but he isn’t impressed. The clock and the three-point shot have taken some of his control of the game away. He knows this team is vulnerable. When the season is over, Cornell will be the Ivy League champion. But on the last night of the season, Yoda will give young Mike Dement, the Cornell coach, a lesson he will remember; Princeton will beat the Big Red by 29. That will be career victory No. 369 for Yoda. He will shrug, light another dead cigar, and be back next year.

  In the meantime, on a cold night in February, he and his team have added one more memory to a building already full of them.

  The next morning, Rollie Massimino was up before six o’clock. He was on one of his exercise kicks and before he went to the office, he would stop at Pat Croce’s gym to work out. “I’m gonna lose at least 15 pounds and get down to 210,” Massimino vowed. His friends found this amusing. They figured the workout regimen might last a month. They were closer: It would be three weeks and the six pounds lost would be eaten back on in March.

  But it didn’t matter. Massimino was happy again. He was back to being Rollie the Magician, the Little Coach Who Could. Villanova was also back—16–6 and on its way to the NCAA Tournament. As for the dire predictions of a finish near the bottom of the Big East, the Wildcats were 7–3 in conference play; Rollie didn’t have to carry out his threat to jump in the Schuylkill River if his team finished in the league’s second division.

  All fall, Massimino had suspected that he had a pretty good team. But it wasn’t until the first weekend of the season, playing in the Maui Classic in Hawaii, that he knew for certain 1987 would soon become just an unhappy memory. “Before then I thought we were okay, but I didn’t know,” he said. “I was still a little afraid. We needed to get a win over a good team early to get our confidence back.”

  That crucial win came in the second game of the season. After beating Nebraska easily in the opener—Massimino’s thirty-second straight victory in an opener on the high school and college level—the Wildcats played Illinois. Every season, Lou Henson has one of the more talented teams in America. And every season, one way or the other, the Illini don’t live up to their potential. One night they are devastating, the next night they are devastated. In 1987, two weeks after beating the Indiana team that would win the national title, Illinois was knocked out of the NCAA Tournament in the first round by Austin Peay. Name the city where Austin Peay is located and you win two tickets to Illinois’ next game against the Governors.

  In Kenny Battle and Nick Anderson, Illinois had one of the best forward combinations in the country. But Villanova upset the Illini 78–76. The next night, in the Maui final, the Wildcats led Iowa at halftime before getting blown out in the last five minutes. That was okay, though, at least as far as Massimino was concerned. They had found out they could play with good teams again. “The whole week over there was critical for us,” Massimino said. “We practiced outdoors, had pool parties and spent time together. We started getting the old Villanova feeling back again.”

  There are many who look cynically at Massimino and his claims that his team is a family. Big-time hoops is big-time hoops, right? Wrong. This is a program where the kids eat milk and cookies together after early morning preseason workouts and call the coach “Shorty” for the very simple reason that he’s short. Winning is important but so is having fun. And yet, there is no doubt about who is in charge, first, last, and always.

  The Hawaii tournament set up a solid December, marred only by a pair of one-point losses, one to St. Joseph’s and one to Auburn. There was an early league game thrown in, a victory at home over Connecticut, but that didn’t prove much.

  Then came January and a trip to St. John’s. Alumni Hall is as tough a place to win
as there is in the Big East. Yet Villanova went into the game completely confident of victory. “Sometimes, you look at the kids before a game and you know they’re going to win the game,” said Assistant Coach John Olive. “That was the way we felt before St. John’s.”

  The feeling was right. Villanova led the whole night and won, 69–62. Eyebrows went up around the East Coast. A victory over Boston College followed, and then came the stunner, an 80–78 upset of Syracuse. The Orangemen had not played up to their No. 1 preseason ranking, but they were still as talented as anyone in the country. When Villanova beat them to go 4–0 in the Big East, a lot of the ‘neers started to come back.

  Massimino didn’t want to make a big deal of anything yet, although he was starting to get excited himself. Publicly, all he would say is, “We’re more mature this year. A little more aggressive. Tom Greis has grown up into a player, Plansky is more confident, Doug West has become a star, and Kenny Wilson is confident running the team.”

  All of this was true. But it didn’t take Massimino to tell people this. Anyone watching the Wildcats play could see that Greis had truly become a force inside and that West, when he was on, could play with anybody. What people couldn’t see, and what Massimino didn’t talk about, was what was going on inside the team. Villanova was having fun again.

  Winning games was certainly part of this. Putting the Gary McLain ordeal behind them was part of it, too. But there were also factors people couldn’t really fathom unless they were there. Like Pat Enright.

  If there has ever been a Walter Mitty story in college basketball it is Pat Enright. As a freshman at a Division 2 school, Merrimack College in Massachusetts, he was cut from the team. A year later he transferred to Villanova. He dreamed of following in the footsteps of his brother Mike, who had played for Massimino as a walk-on, graduating in 1984. “I worked out all summer before my sophomore year,” Enright said. “I really got better. When tryouts came, I was ready.”

  And he got cut again.

  He went back to work. All summer, once again, he worked. When a friend asked him why he was working so hard at a sport where he clearly didn’t have the ability to be a star, Enright shrugged and said, “I just like to play.”

  He went out for the Villanova team one more time in the fall. One more time he was cut. But during semester break that winter, reserve guard Veltra Dawson decided to transfer. Massimino had an extra spot on the roster. He called Enright, who was home on Christmas vacation, and asked if he was still interested in walking on. Enright was back in Philadelphia the next day.

  He got to play fifteen minutes in mop-up roles that season and forty-five more minutes in 1987. He worked hard and was popular with his teammates. When the Wildcats played their last home game against Syracuse, Massimino started him—as a farewell gift. The season ended, Enright got his degree in communications and began thinking how he wanted to go about pursuing a career in radio and television.

  But, at the same time, Massimino came out of his recruiting season empty-handed. He was player-shy, especially at guard. Enright had only played two seasons in four years of college, so he had another year to play if he wanted. Once again, Enright didn’t hesitate. He came back, took out a second major in English, and began to get some playing time.

  More than just a backup guard, Enright was important because he made the team laugh. He is a gifted mimic who did, among others, a brilliant Massimino. His rendition of Assistant Coach John Olive doing a scouting report usually brought the house down, and his back-of-the-bus Frank Broyles—“Keith, aah have never seen an ath-a-lete laak Bo Jackson in maa laaaf”—was always in demand.

  “That little strap,” Massimino liked to say. “I don’t think I’m ever gonna get rid of him.”

  Massimino didn’t want to get rid of Enright or anyone on this team, not with all the pleasure they were giving him. The undefeated Big East joy ride had ended in Pittsburgh on January 16 in a game that left Massimino more than unhappy and not just because the Panthers won easily. Once again, he and Paul Evans were jousting, each claiming the other had ditched the postgame handshake. The publicity surrounding the nonhandshake was unpleasant for Massimino, who admitted that he had planned before the game not to shake hands with Evans but changed his mind because the Wildcats lost and he didn’t want to look like a sore loser.

  This time, Massimino was angry with Evans for comments that had appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News just before the game. Evans had been quoted as saying that Massimino had “fallen in love with himself” after winning the national championship and had “alienated a lot of friends.” Evans said later he thought he had been off the record when he made the comments. On or off the record, Massimino was incensed. Knowing this, Evans might have assumed Massimino wouldn’t shake his hand and walked off the floor too soon. Either way, it made for more childish sniping back and forth. “He wouldn’t shake my hand …” “Wrong, he wouldn’t shake mine.” And so on.

  Safely out of Pittsburgh and with Evans behind him—at least for four weeks—Massimino and the Wildcats came up with victories at Connecticut and at home against Seton Hall before hitting their first real slump of the season, a home loss to St. John’s and a shocking loss at Providence in which an 18 point second-half lead evaporated.

  Now the team faced its first true crisis of the season. Georgetown was coming to town and that was never an easy game. A loss would drop the Big East record to 6–4, and with the heart of the schedule still coming could be disastrous. But in the very strange “humidity” game that Joe Forte refereed to in The Spectrum, Villanova built a big lead thanks to horrid shooting by the Hoyas and hung on to win 64–58. “We lose that one and the kids start to wonder all over again,” Massimino said later. Providence was exactly the kind of game we had never lost before last year. It brought back bad memories. We wanted to get rid of that in a hurry.”

  The key to the game was Greis who refused to back down to Georgetown’s swarming big men and came up with 21 points and an amazing nine blocked shots. That was more blocks than he had produced his entire freshman year and continued his extraordinary one-year improvement program. “He’s still such a strap,” Massimino said. “I have to kill him more than anybody to keep him going. He’s still got sixty floors to go before he gets anywhere near his potential.”

  Massimino wasn’t complaining. Without Greis, work ethic or no, it would be very difficult for this team to Find a Way against the good teams. After Georgetown, Villanova played well enough to win and got past Boston College in the Boston Garden. That gave the team a 16–6 record—one more victory than it had produced in all of 1986–87.

  That victory put the Wildcats back in the Top Twenty—at No. 20—and set up a showdown with Temple, which had just ascended to No. 1 in the polls. Remarkably, in all the illustrious years of the Big Five, this was the first time one of their teams had been ranked No. 1 in the regular season. The game would be at Temple, at McGonigle Hall. Its 4,500 seats would be packed to the rafters. The Philadelphia papers placed the game—in importance—only slightly ahead of developments in the Middle East.

  “I love it,” Massimino said, staring at a huge front-page headline ballyhooing the game. “This is the way it oughta be.”

  He had finished his workout and was back in the office with his assistants, looking at tape. Massimino looks at tape the way archaeologists study hieroglyphics. You can never look too often and there is always something you will miss if you don’t look that one extra time.

  Massimino had no doubts about how good Temple was. He respected John Chaney as much as any coach in the business and he knew the Owls wouldn’t turn the ball over, partly because point guard Howard Evans was one of the most underrated players in the country, but partly because Chaney’s teams never turn the ball over. They fear his wrath too much to do so.

  Which was all fine with Massimino. He now believed that this team could compete with anyone. Beyond that, he knew that most people hadn’t figured that out yet. It was exactly the position
he loves to be in: a good team that isn’t taken seriously. The underdog.

  “This team isn’t as good as the ’85 team was,” he said as a Temple–LaSalle tape droned on in the background. “But I have the same kind of feeling with these guys that I had in ’85. They’re a bunch of nuts but they know how to win. They find a way.”

  That the Wildcats are nuts is apparent during their pregame meal. Before the meal, Father Bernard Lazor, the team’s chaplain for the last fifteen years, performs a mass. Then, everyone eats. And then the talent show starts.

  Remember, this is about four hours before tip-off. Some coaches do not allow their players to talk during pregame meal because they are supposed to be focusing all their thoughts on the upcoming game. Massimino thinks that’s silly. So do his players. There is only one rule at pregame meal: All rules are null and void. Anyone can be a target.

  Today’s show begins with a sing-along. Senior Manager Neil McShea (doing the high notes) and freshman redshirt Paul Vrind—a 7–2 center from the Netherlands—(doing the low notes) lead the team in a raucous and fairly decent version of “Under the Boardwalk.”

  Then it is Enright’s turn. First, he does Olive, hunching his shoulders, dropping his voice, and hollowing his cheeks. It’s very good. Then, urged on by his teammates, Enright does Massimino. “Remember, you must rebound the basketball.” He is just starting to go into the part about having fun when a familiar voice in the back interrupts.

  “You little jag, you better sit down.”

  Enright sits. Even Massimino can’t keep a straight face.

  “I think,” Olive says as Massimino heads home for his pregame nap, “we’re ready to play.”

  As it turns out, both teams are ready to play. The only shame in this game is that it isn’t played in the Palestra, because in the storied history of Philadelphia basketball this game will rank right near the top. In his pregame talk, Massimino speaks about what this kind of game means.