Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room

by Michael Perry

  In the spring of his senior year at Taylor, Starks signed a letter of intent to attend UC, a school that hadn’t even been on his so-called radar screen.

  “If my grandfather wouldn’t have gotten sick, I would’ve gone to UCLA,” Starks said.

  LEARNING CURVE

  Starks arrived at UC in 1987. He was a big-time scorer at Taylor, and the first day of practice with the Bearcats, he shot the ball almost every time he touched it. Yates stopped practice and tossed Starks the ball. “Here Keith, shoot it,” Yates said. He did. Yates gave it back. “Shoot it again.” Everyone was looking around, wondering what was going on.

  Finally, Yates said, “Have you gotten it out of your system yet? Because you’re not going to shoot the basketball. You’re just going to go out and play as hard as you can, play defense and rebound. We have plenty of shooters.”

  The first four games, Starks hardly played. It was a tough transition.

  WHAT A FIND

  Sometimes, this is how recruiting works.

  Yates and assistant coach Ken Turner were traveling through Montgomery, Alabama on the way to try to contact Leon Douglas, a star high school player from Meridian, Mississippi.

  Turner was friends with an Alabama high school coach, and he suggested stopping off to see him to inquire about any talented players in the area.

  Turns out there was a big kid, a raw talent, at Noxubee County High School in Macon, Mississippi. Yates and Turner dropped by to see him.

  The player’s uncle was the band director, and the coach had just plucked the kid out of the marching band. He had grown seven inches over the summer and entered his sophomore year six foot six. But he had never played organized basketball.

  “He runs the floor like a deer,” the coach said. The kid’s name was Cedric Glover.

  Glover played the drums and trumpet. He had cousins who had received music scholarships to college, and that was the path he was following.

  William Triplett was the school’s basketball coach, and he also happened to have Glover in his history class. Every day, he talked to Glover about trying out for the team. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” Glover would tell him. But he never did show up.

  One day, Triplett walked Glover to the gym after class and had him watch practice. Glover expressed interest and said he’d start the next day. He didn’t. A few days later, the coach again walked Glover to the gym—and this time he had practice gear waiting for him.

  “There was no getting out of it,” Glover said. “So I actually got dressed to be a part of a team I had no intention of being a part of. I didn’t have a clue about any of the rules. I didn’t understand basketball, but I could run a little faster and jump a little higher than other guys.”

  The UC coaches followed his progress and recruited Glover hard. But so did powerhouses like Houston, Louisville, and Georgetown. All those schools suggested he redshirt as a freshman. Yates told him he’d have the chance to play right away at UC; plus, Glover had relatives in Cincinnati. He signed with the Bearcats.

  Yates says Glover was “the worst basketball player in the United States” when he arrived at UC.

  “He was big and strong, but he didn’t know how to play,” Yates said. “He had bad hands. He would travel all the time. He was a very sensitive kid. Not a lot of confidence.”

  A knee injury forced Glover to sit out his junior season, which gave him time to mature and get stronger. Glover was first-team all-Metro Conference in 1988 and ’89.

  “He came a long way,” Yates said. “He worked very hard and became an excellent player for us.”

  “Sitting out really, really helped me develop my body physically, helped me get stronger, helped me learn more about basketball,” Glover said. “When I look back on it, coming into the university, I should have redshirted. All those other schools that were recruiting me were right. I needed to develop more.

  “Everything I earned and gained was due to hard work. I put in a lot of time in the weight room and did what I needed to do to get better. I put on my hardhat every day and I came to work and that was pretty much it for me.”

  THANKS TO BENCH, ROSE & CO.

  Who would have known that the star basketball player from Camden, New Jersey, was such a big Cincinnati Reds fan?

  Lou Banks’s father loved the “Big Red Machine” and talked about them all the time. He took his son to see the Reds when they were in Philadelphia to play the Phillies.

  So when the University of Cincinnati came calling in 1986, Banks felt it was the place to be. He chose UC over Louisville, Temple, and Rutgers and was the fifth-leading scorer in school history when he left.

  “When I came on my recruiting visit, I had a great time and already liked the Reds, so it seemed like it was a fit for me,” Banks said.

  WHERE IS EVERYBODY?

  The play was not designed specifically for him. But Vic Carstarphen, a six-foot-one freshman, found himself with the ball as the clock was running out. “I played high school ball with Lou Banks. He said, ‘Listen, if it comes to you, take the shot.’ That’s all I remember,” Carstarphen said.

  So Carstarphen drove the lane and hit a running 12-foot jumper from just inside the foul line with 10 seconds remaining. That gave UC a one-point lead against Morehead State on December 2, 1988. He would help force a turnover and lay in another basket at the buzzer.

  Four points in 10 seconds. The Bearcats won 67-64 at the Cincinnati Gardens.

  So how did he get treated afterward? Well, by the time he finished postgame interviews and got dressed, he discovered the team had left the building.

  “I really didn’t understand the whole leaving on the bus thing,” Carstarphen said. “We would have to catch vans back and forth (from campus). I guess everybody left. I remember thinking, ‘I hit the game-winning shot and now I’m stuck.’ I thought it was a joke actually. I thought it was a freshman joke.”

  News Record reporter Rodney McKissic ended up driving Carstarphen back to campus.

  “I remember Vic walking outside and looking around for the vans, but they were all gone,” McKissic said. “I said, ‘I think they left you, need a ride?’ It was so funny. The guy just won the game for the team and they left him at the arena.”

  Carstarphen transferred to Temple after the season. He would return to Cincinnati and play at Shoemaker Center as a senior in December 1992. But that didn’t turn out to be a pleasant experience. A.D. Jackson fell on Carstarphen while the two went after a loose ball, and Carstarphen broke his left leg in two places.

  “I came back in the NCAA Tournament at the end of that year,” Carstarphen said. “But I was not 100 percent.”

  LOU’S GOT A BOARD

  UC had just returned from a road trip to Tampa, where the Bearcats lost 82-65 to South Florida, whose six-foot-seven center Hakim Shahid finished with 14 points and 20 rebounds.

  The Bearcats were in the locker room before practice December 14, 1988. Miami University was next on the schedule. And Banks and Glover got into an argument.

  Glover, the six-foot-eight, 235-pound team captain and the biggest and strongest Bearcat, was telling the UC perimeter players that if they had played better defense, the Bearcats might have fared better against South Florida. USF guards Andre Crenshaw and Radenk Dobras combined for 39 points, 12 rebounds and nine assists.

  “What are you talking about?” responded Banks, 6-6, 195 pounds, who had totaled just two points in the game. He pointed out that Glover’s man was unstoppable on the boards. South Florida had outrebounded UC, 61-40.

  They began to fight. Glover grabbed Banks and dragged his head across the locker-room floor.

  “I was the captain of the team,” said Glover, who played the South Florida game with the flu and finished with 12 points and five rebounds in 25 minutes. “With every team, there’s going to be a guy that for some reason doesn’t want to follow the program. He just happened to be that guy. I was the policeman. I was the disciplinarian. I dragged him around. I made him a part of the locke
r-room decorations. He got a good whipping that day.”

  Banks was furious.

  “He took my face and dragged me on the carpet,” Banks said. “I didn’t appreciate that. I didn’t think because he was bigger he should’ve been trying to bully me.”

  Banks left the locker room and went outside. “I didn’t collect myself,” he said. The first thing he saw was a four-foot-long board with several nails sticking out of it at the Shoemaker Center construction site.

  Banks came into the Armory Fieldhouse waving the board in the air and yelling. The players were warming up before practice. Banks headed straight for Glover.

  “Lou’s got a board!” Yates reportedly yelled.

  “Buddy, bring it on,” Glover shouted at Banks.

  Assistant coach Ken Turner and Yates stopped Banks.

  “I was just really hot that day,” Banks said. “Yeah, I would’ve hit him if they wouldn’t have grabbed me, because he manhandled me in that locker room. I probably would’ve hit a couple of those other guys for not helping me.”

  Banks said he was mad at Glover for “about 10 days.” Fifteen years later, the two laugh about the incident.

  “I’m not embarrassed about it, because it happened,” Banks said. “When I look at now, I’m thinking, yeah, that’s crazy, but at that time I was very angry because of the way that he did me. It is funny now. It didn’t last very long. I never hold a grudge against a guy.”

  “It just kind of diffused,” Glover said. “It’s a big joke now. But at that time, we were in the heat of battle. It just exploded all at once. Once that episode happened, everybody kind of fell in line. And I kind of developed a reputation not only in the locker room, but throughout the football team ‬ and the entire athletic dorm.”

  SO LONG, FAREWELL ‬

  Glover’s senior night was anything but memorable.

  Sure, his parents were at the Cincinnati Gardens for his final home game—against South Carolina—and they were on the court before the game with their son, who received a nice ovation.

  But Glover was hurt and couldn’t play. He had sprained his left ankle at Virginia Tech on February 18 and had not played in three games. Still, Yates wanted him to make an appearance, so he started and played about two minutes. He had no shots, no rebounds, no nothing. He finished 49 points shy of joining the 1,000-point club.

  “I’m out there just barely limping around,” Glover said. “That’s how it ended. It was kind of a downer. But you know what? I developed so many relationships with people associated with the university, so many relationships with people you cherish off the court.”

  HOW IT ENDED

  The way the Tony Yates era came to an end somewhat surprised the coach and some of the players.

  “We kind of heard rumors, but we didn’t pay attention to them,” Andre Tate said. “We were kind of shocked when it happened.”

  UC finished 15-12 in 1988-89 and won four of its last five games, including a 77-71 upset of No. 14-ranked Louisville at Freedom Hall. When the season ended, Yates didn’t hear a word from first-year Athletic Director Rick Taylor. Yates had one year left on his contract.

  Around 2 p.m., the day of the team’s postseason banquet, Taylor called Yates to his office. Even then, Yates said, he didn’t know what was coming. Taylor told him he was making a change. “I was caught by surprise,” Yates said. “You have a winning season, you don’t expect anything like that to happen.

  “I told him, ‘This is a helluva time for you to do that. It’s not very fair to me, and it’s not very fair for the kids.’ We conducted the banquet as if nothing ever happened.”

  After the banquet, held in the student union, Yates told his players in an emotional meeting. Taylor told the media in his office. Yates did not speak to reporters that night.

  He never coached again.

  “I was very philosophical about it,” he said. “It’s just a fact of life that there are certain times you move on, no matter what you’re doing. It was time to move on. I had my life to live. The worst thing you can do in life is hang on and brood about those kinds of things.

  “I didn’t want to coach anymore. I had my fling. I did what I wanted to do. I wanted to coach at the University of Cincinnati. I’m very pleased, very blessed, and very happy about what we had done. There were a lot of very special moments with a lot of special people. There are a lot of great, great memories.”

  10

  BOB HUGGINS ERA (1989-2005)

  THERE’S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN

  The new coach called a 3 p.m. meeting with his players. It was held in Laurence Hall because the new basketball office in Shoemaker Center wasn’t ready.

  Bob Huggins waited while some guys sauntered in around 3:15. Others strolled in at 3:30.

  “Then he just went off,” Keith Starks said.

  The Bearcats were not just introduced to their new leader, they were treated to a display of, uh, colorful language and verbal assaults the likes of which they were unaccustomed to.

  “If this is how you think it’s going to be, pack up your stuff and go back to where you came from,” Huggins shouted. “I will win with walk-ons.”

  It was April 1989.

  “You can’t run a business that way,” Huggins recalled, almost 15 years later. “You can’t have people sitting around waiting for other people to show up. We start meetings on time. We start practices on time. We leave on time. It could’ve been the first day, it could’ve been the 10th day, the message wasn’t going to change: Be where you’re supposed to be.”

  A 37-year-old Bob Huggins (left) and Dick Vitale take part in the show during UC’s Midnight Madness festivities in October 1990. (Photo by David Baxter/University of Cincinnati)

  He wasn’t just talking about basketball; he was talking about life.

  Some guys took him seriously, some guys didn’t.

  Lou Banks and Elnardo Givens didn’t. Banks eventually came around; Givens, UC’s only point guard and the team MVP the previous season, didn’t. He was kicked off the team in September 1989 for missing classes.

  “That got everyone’s attention,” Starks said. He told teammates: “This guy’s for real. He’s not going to take any crap from anybody.”

  The players didn’t exactly go out of their way to see Huggins that summer. Quite simply, some were a little afraid.

  Huggins asked players what were the problems with the program. Of all things, they mentioned the old uniforms and mismatched warmups. “That was easy to fix,” Huggins said. He asked them to design new uniforms. He ordered new practice gear. He wanted a fresh start. UC had not been to the NCAA Tournament since 1977—12 long years.

  Starks, Banks, Levertis Robinson and Andre Tate were the only returning scholarship players. Michael Joiner and Tarrice Gibson, Huggins’s first high school recruits, were freshmen.

  “Our first day of practice was hell,” Starks said. “We had never practiced that hard, ever. Guys were throwing up, falling down.

  “This is what you have to do to win,” Huggins told them.

  “We had heard certain stories about Coach Huggins,” Robinson said. “We had heard he was tough, which is true, but the toughness was not as it was categorized. He was a very level-headed coach and he was passionate about the game. He pretty much let us be young men. The enthusiasm that he had is what really set the tone for me.”

  “He honestly believed we could win a national championship his first year there,” Starks said. “And he made us believe it.”

  HE SAID IT AND HE MEANT IT

  Huggins did believe UC could win a national championship. “If I didn’t, I don’t know who would,” he said.

  And he wasn’t afraid to let the world know what he expected. In the press conference when he was introduced as UC’s new coach, Huggins made it clear that his goals were annual Final Four appearances and an NCAA title.

  “We want to win right now,” he said the day his hiring was announced. “I don’t want to cheat people. If you say you’re on a f
ive-year plan, you’re basically asking for an excuse to lose.”

  He never regretted setting the bar so high.

  “That’s what you play for,” Huggins said. “I thought coming in here the Metro (Conference) was a great league. At that time it was. Louisville had won a national championship (in 1986). If you could get to the top of the league and compete with Louisville, you should be able to compete on a national level.

  “Some coaching friends said, ‘You shouldn’t say things like that, people will expect it. Guys get fired for saying things like that.’

  “I think the biggest thing we had to change was the work ethic. They didn’t really have a strength program, so to speak. They just didn’t put the time in for whatever reason. The guys who were here, I thought, were really good. I loved coaching them. There just weren’t many of them.”

  Didn’t matter.

  UC upset 20th-ranked Minnesota 66-64 in Huggins’s first game and went on to a 20-14 season, including a 1990 National Invitation Tournament bid. In Huggins’s third season, Cincinnati was back in the Final Four, just as he had predicted.

  LAST-SECOND LOU

  He had a broken bone in his left hand. He missed practice the day before the game because he went to see a doctor.

  Junior Lou Banks’s response was to go out and have a career night against Dayton on December 17, 1989. He scored 31 points, added seven rebounds and made the game-winning shot with two seconds remaining in a 90-88 victory.

  “I wasn’t so much in pain that night,” Banks said. “They had it taped up pretty good. I hit it a couple times, but it wasn’t throbbing pain.

  “That was one of the first times I had a great game in Shoemaker. All my other good games came on other courts.”