A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  He didn’t have to.

  8.

  Poster Boy

  The joyride lasted forty-eight hours. The team practiced only briefly on Wednesday, and Knight had flown to Elkhart to watch Sean Kemp, a 6-10 sophomore, practice. In a sense, this gave everyone a day off. When Knight is absent, everyone relaxes a little. More often than not, Knight is tense, and he creates tension around him. When he takes a day off, he knows he is giving everyone—including himself—a chance to take a deep breath.

  Thursday he was back and his mood was cheerful. In the locker room before practice, Knight joked with several players who had taken to wearing gray shorts underneath their red practice shorts. “Why do you guys do that?” Knight asked innocently.

  There was silence. Finally, Robinson, often the spokesman in situations where no one else wants to say anything, answered. “They’re more comfortable than the red shorts.”

  “Comfortable where?” Knight said pointedly, knowing the answer. Everyone was giggling by now. “It helps, you know,” Robinson stammered, “jock itch.”

  “Oh,” Knight said as if learning something brand-new. “Pretty smart doing that then, huh?” He turned towards Kreigh Smith. “Smith, do you wear them because of jock itch or because you saw the other guys doing it?”

  He didn’t wait for Smith’s answer. They left the locker room in a light, happy mood. It didn’t last. Waiting on the floor was Chuck Crabb, the athletic department’s promotions director. In Crabb’s hand was a calendar. It had been put together by a sorority to raise money for a camp the sorority sponsored during the summertime for handicapped girls. The calendar was a takeoff on the now-familiar calendars put out around the country that feature attractive women. This one featured attractive men. Mr. February was Steve Alford.

  Crabb was pale as he and Knight talked in one corner of the gym while the players were warming up. Alford was even more pale when Knight, his voice cutting the air like a knife, yelled, “Steve!” The other players tried not to look as Alford trotted over to Crabb and Knight.

  By posing for the calendar, Alford had broken an NCAA rule. It had never occurred to him when the women from the sorority approached him about posing; he received no money, and the women putting the calendar together would make no money. Alford posed in a sport coat, a shirt open at the top, and slacks. It was hardly a risqué pose. The picture had been taken in the fall in Assembly Hall, the session lasting all of about ten minutes.

  None of that would matter to the NCAA. The NCAA has proved itself time and again to be a body incapable of policing collegiate athletics. Players are given cars, money, horses, condos, women, you name it, and the NCAA almost never proves anything. Many of the powers in college football and college basketball cheat. Most exploit their athletes and have embarrassing graduation—or non-graduation—rates.

  Because it is unable— or unwilling—to successfully prosecute the big-time cheaters, the NCAA often goes after the so-called little guys. Schools like American University and Akron University find themselves being treated like felons by the NCAA. That fall, the NCAA had penalized American because one of its assistant coaches had participated in a pickup game in September. According to the NCAA, the coach’s presence in the pickup game constituted an illegal off-season practice.

  If there has ever been a college basketball program that follows NCAA rules to the letter, it is Indiana. Knight has often made his alumni unhappy because he allows them so little contact with the players but the less alumni contact, Knight figures, the less tempted the alumni will be to try to break any rules. Knight is so rules-conscious that he would not allow Winston Morgan to eat training meals with the team. Only scholarship players were allowed to eat at the training table, and Morgan wasn’t on scholarship. No one outside the team even knew that Morgan wasn’t on scholarship, and it would have been easy for Knight to bend this rule, but he wouldn’t even consider it.

  But now, Alford had broken a rule. Scholarship athletes at NCAA schools aren’t allowed to pose for any picture or film made by anyone outside the athletic department. This rule didn’t prevent athletic departments from selling posters of its athletes, but it did prevent businessmen from using college athletes to sell their products. Alford could not pose for a local department store or a shoe store or whatever; he understood that, but he hadn’t understood that the ban extended to something like this.

  Crabb had seen a mention of the calendar in the student newspaper that morning and, panicked, immediately got a copy of it. As soon as he saw Mr. February, he knew he had a problem. As Knight, Alford, and Crabb talked, the women who had put the calendar together were sitting upstairs in Crabb’s office.

  For the better part of the next two hours, Knight, Crabb, and Alford were in and out of practice. Knight’s mood had quickly changed to black. Alford was in for a couple plays, then out. He and Knight were gone for thirty minutes, then back. Serious negotiations were going on. Sales of the calendar had been suspended as soon as Crabb told the sorority there was a problem. But the question was what to do next. They had been on sale. There was also the question of blame: Alford said he had told the sorority to make certain there was no problem with his posing. The women claimed Alford had made no such request. They argued this back and forth for a while before Knight, privately, told Alford it really didn’t matter.

  “Their eligibility wasn’t at stake, Steve.” he said. “Yours was. You should have checked it out yourself.”

  Knight was right. Alford had made a mistake. There was really only one thing to do: call the NCAA and tell the people there what had happened. Given the nature of the “crime,” and given Indiana’s track record over the years, there was a good chance—or so it would seem—that the NCAA would let Alford off with a letter of reprimand. They had done this before when minor infractions had been inadvertently committed, writing a letter to the athlete and the school that said, basically, “Don’t do this again.” This had happened, most notably, two years earlier when an Ohio State quarterback named Mike Tomczak had posed in a magazine ad for a local clothing store. He had received no money for doing the ad and the NCAA had let him off with a letter of reprimand.

  Knight called the NCAA Enforcement Office himself as soon as practice was over and explained what had happened. He got the answer he had been hoping for: “They say,” he reported back to the waiting coaches, “that we should be all right.”

  This was after practice. This was after Alford had explained what happened to his teammates, who sat and listened in silence. This was after Knight had told Alford in front of the team that he had been selfish.

  But now it seemed the crisis had passed. Under NCAA rules, a player involved in something like this calendar, provided he receives no money, can be suspended for up to three games. With the game at Kentucky two days away, losing Alford for even one game was unthinkable. Knight was angry with Alford because he had been careless. But he was also relieved after his conversation with the NCAA.

  It was after seven o’clock before Knight felt comfortable that the Alford situation had been resolved. Pat Knight had a game at 7:30. Knight jumped in his car and drove to Bloomington North High School. He walked into the gym just as the ball was being thrown up to start the game. The other team won the tip and, just as Knight was taking his seat, he looked up to see North setting up in a zone defense.

  “Can you believe after the day I’ve just had that I walk in here and have to watch my son playing zone?” He smiled. The crisis had been averted. He could live with watching Patrick play zone defense—at least for one night.

  But the crisis had not been averted. Shortly after lunch the next day, the NCAA called back. The infractions committee’s initial ruling was that Alford would be suspended for one game. All the mitigating circumstances, not to mention the fact that Indiana had turned itself in, apparently didn’t matter. Nor did the precedent set in the case of Tomczak. “The rule wasn’t as widely publicized back then,” was the explanation. “Now, everyone knows it.”
<
br />   Only Alford hadn’t known it. Knight was, in a word, enraged: enraged at the NCAA, enraged at Alford, enraged at the sorority, enraged at life. He also had a decision to make. The suspension could be appealed. If it was, Alford could play at Kentucky and continue playing until the committee met formally to hear his appeal on December 23. But if the committee decided then that a three-game suspension was merited, which was possible, Alford would have to sit out the next three games. The third of those games would be the Big Ten opener against defending league champion Michigan. Given a choice between losing Alford for Michigan or Kentucky, Knight would choose Kentucky.

  In all likelihood, if Alford had appealed, he would have ended up with a one-game suspension and would have missed only a game against Idaho. But the mere possibility, even if slight, of losing him for the Michigan game made appealing look unappealing. There may have been one other factor, although Knight never mentioned it: If the NCAA was going to put its foot in its mouth by making Alford an example this way, what better way to emphasize its selective enforcement than having Alford sit out the Kentucky game?

  The irony was delicious. Kentucky was one of the most penalized schools in NCAA history. It was one of two schools that had had an entire schedule canceled. In late October, The Lexington Herald-Leader, in a Pulitzer Prize—winning series of stories, revealed in detail a protracted pattern of payoffs received by Kentucky players during the thirteen-year coaching tenure of Joe B. Hall. Already, the NCAA was dragging its feet in following up on the newspaper’s revelations, whining that it couldn’t get the twenty-six ex-players who had been quoted on the record to repeat what they had said. What a scenario: Kentucky, bastion of cheating, facing Indiana, bastion of honesty, and who had the NCAA suspended? Indiana’s best player.

  To Knight this irony was more infuriating than delicious. “For Alford not to play when all their kids are playing kills me,” he said. “There are kids on that team right now who have gotten more crap from alumni than any players in the country. I suppose [star forward] Kenny Walker’s never gotten anything. Anyone who believes that is either stupid or blind.”

  Knight was also influenced in making his decision by his anger at Alford. To him, especially now, Alford had gotten himself in trouble by acting as if he was above the law. Later, Knight would soften on the issue, coming to understand that Alford was a good kid who had been careless. Nothing more, nothing less. But on that frigid Friday, Knight was angry enough to want Alford punished. Sitting out the Kentucky game would certainly be a major punishment.

  The bottom line, though, was getting the whole dreary incident over with. If Indiana appealed, the question would hang over the team for the next seventeen days and Knight didn’t need that. And if by some chance the suspension was extended, it would become a complete disaster. This way, one game would be sacrificed and then it would be over.

  Knight was not conceding the game by any means. Even after he made the decision to keep Alford out of the Kentucky game, he still honestly thought his team could win if the players held together and played smart. Practice that day was as intense as any day since October 15. Alford did not practice. He sat alone in the locker room.

  There was no way practice was going to be without incident. The only question was who would cause the explosion. It turned out to be Kreigh Smith. His crime was not fighting through a screen properly. Knight, sitting at the far end of the court with Hammel, came out of his chair screaming. The chair went flying. It sailed through the air and landed—miraculously—on its feet, a good thirty feet from where Knight had been sitting. Knight wasn’t even looking when the chair landed, but everyone else was. Looks of fear were replaced by looks of amazement when the chair landed on its feet. Knight had to walk so far to get to Smith that he was almost out of steam by the time he arrived. He yelled, and Smith listened. But everyone was still staring at the chair.

  This happened every once in a while. Once, Knight had kicked a ball high into the air in disgust and the ball had come down right into a garbage can. Another time he had punted a ball and it had bounced off the head of one of his hunting buddies sitting up in the stands. At all times, everyone kept a straight face when these things happened. Only later did they laugh about them.

  When Knight was finished yelling at Smith, he returned to his chair, which had been put back in its place by a manager. After practice, he was succinct: “We are not going down to Kentucky to lose. We are not going down just to go down. If we play with our heads and our hearts, there is absolutely no reason why we can’t win this game. We can give them a lot of trouble with some of the things we do with or without Alford. Let’s get dressed and get down there.”

  Knight left the players to dress for the trip and returned to his locker room. Indiana had put out a release earlier in the afternoon announcing Alford’s suspension. Wayne Embry, a close friend of Knight’s who was a vice-president of the Indiana Pacers, called to find out what had happened. So did Quinn Buckner, who was playing for the Pacers. The team had the day off Saturday. Would Knight like Buckner to come to the game? “Quinn, that would be great,” Knight said. “You can fly down from here tomorrow afternoon with Ralph [Floyd].”

  Knight told Buckner and Embry what had happened, expressing disgust with Alford, the sorority, and the NCAA. “I’m not even going to take the little sonofabitch on the trip,” he told both men. “Screw him.”

  But Knight never told Alford he wasn’t making the trip. Alford knew he wasn’t playing, but didn’t know whether Knight wanted him to accompany the team to Lexington. Not wanting to venture anywhere near the coaches’ locker room, Alford went to the graduate assistants for advice. Dakich, who knew Knight best, told Alford he had to get on the bus.

  “If he wants you there and you aren’t, it’s irreparable and you’re in bigger trouble than you are now,” Dakich said. “If he doesn’t want you there and you are there, then he just leaves you on the bus. You have to go unless someone tells you different.”

  No one told Alford different. Knight thought he had told Alford, but he had only told Buckner and Embry. The bus rolled silently through the darkness to the airport. Always, the Indiana bus is quiet. Knight sits in the front seat, occasionally calling an assistant coach or Hammel up next to him to talk. There was no talk at all on this trip.

  Alford always sits in the very back of the bus and, naturally, is the last one to get off. The players always get off before the coaches, Garl, Hammel, and anyone else along on a trip. This gives them a chance to grab luggage and equipment and move it from bus to plane and, later, plane to bus. As Alford went past him, Knight sat up straight in his seat as if someone had stuck a rod in his back. Alford never put a foot on the tarmac.

  “Alford!” Alford stopped. “What the f— do you think you’re doing? Get back in here. Didn’t you hear me tell you that you weren’t making the trip?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well then you must be f—— deaf. Can’t you do anything right?” And so on.

  By the time Knight boarded the plane, everyone else was in their seats. Alford was left sitting forlornly on the bus. Knight was dressed in a red sport coat, slacks, and a shirt and tie. Everyone who travels with Indiana wears a jacket and tie. Even though he had abandoned this look for games and almost never wore a tie to speaking engagements, Knight still dressed to travel.

  The ride was brief, but when the plane arrived in Lexington, the bus was not waiting. While Garl went off in search of it, everyone just sat and looked at one another blankly. The bus had gone to the wrong end of the airport. By the time Garl found it and got it to the plane, everyone was shivering since the engines and the heat had been shut off.

  The bus was loaded quickly. But as the bus pulled away, manager Jim Kelly had a stricken look on his face. “The VCR got left home,” he whispered to Felling. “We [the four senior managers] must have forgotten to pack it.”

  Just then Knight came back to tell Felling he wanted the VCR set up as soon as the bus reached the hotel so the
players could look at tapes of Kentucky after they had eaten dinner. “Coach,” Felling said in the same tone one might use when confessing to a murder, “the VCR didn’t get packed. It’s not here.”

  “It’s my fault, Coach,” Kelly broke in, a brave man willing to die with his boots on.

  Knight stared for a moment. “What?” he said. “It’s not here?” Felling and Kelly shook their heads. Knight didn’t say another word. He walked back to the front of the bus, sat down and stared out the window. By the time the bus reached the hotel, a plan had been hatched: the managers would be sent out to rent a VCR and Murry Bartow would be called in Bloomington and told to drive Indiana’s VCR and the remaining tapes—some had made it on the plane, some had not—down to Lexington.

  Solution or not, it was clear that Murphy’s Law had taken charge of this trip. It was also clear that Knight was not going to be any fun to live with during the next twenty-four hours. That evening, Harold Martin joined the coaches for dinner. An hour later, when Knight was going through a tape with the team on the rented VCR, Martin coughed. “If you can’t be quiet, you can just leave,” Knight snapped. Martin left.

  Knight wanted to walk through Kentucky’s offense after the tape session. But the only room large enough for a walk-through was being used. Probably by someone named Murphy. Knight gave the team a brief talk and left. Felling lingered, hoping to loosen things up a little. Knight charged back into the room. “If I wanted you to talk to them, I’d tell you to talk to them,” he yelled after pulling Felling into the hallway.

  An hour later, Felling’s phone rang. It was Knight. “I’m sorry I snapped,” he said. “Come on down. Let’s talk about this game a little.” It was one o’clock in the morning.

  Alford almost played in the game.

  When the team went to practice at Rupp Arena in the morning, Cawood Ledford was waiting for Knight. Ledford has been Kentucky’s radio play-by-play man for about 100 years. He is a legend throughout the state, a man linked as closely to Kentucky basketball as anyone short of Adolph Rupp.