A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  “They’re going to go inside on every possession now,” Knight said. “Don’t lunge inside! Just hold your position and we’ll be fine.”

  A moment later, Harris lunged at a pass. Thomas, coming over to help, was a step late. It was his fifth foul. The lead was 53–48. Knight stared at the floor as Thomas went by him to the bench. The last seven minutes were like root canal. Every possession was critical. Alford hit to build the margin to seven. Harris, so pumped up he wasn’t thinking, lunged again, and Norman made a three-point play. Alford hit another jumper. He never seemed to miss when Indiana had to score.

  Norman missed at the other end. Harris scored. The lead was 59–51. Bruce Douglas missed outside and Harris rebounded. Less than six minutes, a chance to lead by ten. But Harris was called for an illegal screen. Another Illinois three-point play and it was 59–54. Knight decided to spread out and work the clock just as he had done at Ohio State.

  Robinson hit, Wysinger answered. They traded turnovers and misses. Finally, Wysinger hit again with 1:50 left and it was 61–58. Knight called time ten seconds later. “We’ve got to suck it up for 100 seconds, boys, that’s all. It’s right there. Just play smart now. This is our ballgame.”

  They were hanging on now. Calloway walked with 1:13 left. The Indiana defense forced Illinois to take twenty-three seconds to get off a shot. Wysinger missed, but Glynn Blackwell rebounded and his shot made it 61–60. There were still fifty seconds to play.

  Illinois was pressing. Robinson caught a quick pass from Alford right on the midcourt line. He had one foot in the frontcourt, the other in the backcourt. Referee Eric Harmon rushed in. Robinson, he said, had gone over-and-back, meaning he had gone into the backcourt after entering the frontcourt. Illinois ball.

  But no. Referee Verl Sell raced over to Harmon. The rule on over-and-back had been changed one year earlier. It now said that until a player had both feet in the frontcourt, he could not be guilty of over-and-back. Robinson had never had both feet in the frontcourt. “Are you sure?” Harmon asked Sell. Sell was sure. Harmon changed his call. With forty-three seconds left, the ball went back to Indiana.

  The Illinois crowd, not understanding the change, went berserk. It was throwing things on the court. Henson was screaming. Knight called Sell over. “Verl, I promise I will never again give you a hard time in a game,” he said. “That was one of the guttiest calls I’ve ever seen. It was the right call, but a gutty one.”

  The game was not over. Indiana would still have to shoot the ball if Illinois chose not to foul. The inbounds went to Calloway. He walked with the basketball. The crowd screamed. But the officials missed the call. They never saw it. The clock went down. Illinois didn’t foul. Finally, with four seconds to go, Alford had to shoot. Douglas deflected the shot and Winters grabbed it and called time. Two seconds were left.

  Illinois had to go ninety-four feet, from under its own basket to Indiana’s, to win the game. Knight asked the coaches if they should put the 6-9 Jadlow in to distract the inbounds passer. They thought so. Knight wasn’t sure. “Let’s try it,” he said finally.

  Illinois wanted to pass the ball to midcourt, call time immediately, and then have another chance to inbound the ball from there. Douglas threw the ball to Norman, who was so intent on giving the time-out signal that he dropped the ball. Since he didn’t have possession, he should not have been able to call time. But Tom Rucker, the third referee, Knight’s old friend, awarded the time-out. What’s more, somehow, the clock had never moved. There were still two seconds left.

  Technically, this was possible. There could actually be 1.1 seconds left and the clock would show two. More likely, though, the Illinois clock operator had been conveniently slow. While the other coaches huddled—it was now Illinois’s ball at midcourt—Waltman walked over to the timer.

  “When did you start the clock?” he demanded to know.

  “As soon as Norman touched the ball.”

  Waltman is, under most circumstances, the most low-key member of the coaching staff. “You lying sonofabitch,” he said looking right at the timer. “You never even started the clock.”

  With that he stalked back to the huddle and spent most of the ensuing two time-outs—Indiana called one after Illinois had come out on the court—glaring at the timer.

  With the ball at midcourt, Knight wanted to use Jadlow as an extra defender, leaving the inbounder unguarded. “No fouls,” he said. “Get a hand up. Be smart. Boys, we’ve got to have two seconds of real smarts and real balls. Right now!”

  Everyone in the arena was standing, including both benches. Douglas inbounded again. Illinois wanted to run a screen play near the top of the key, but Jadlow, the extra man, cut that angle off. Finally, Wysinger, who had been the hot shooter in the rally, came open on the baseline. Under the basket, Todd Meier saw the ball go to Wysinger.

  Knowing there was no time for Wysinger to do anything but shoot, Meier left his man and ran at Wysinger, arms high in the air. From where he was standing, Knight thought Meier was going to collide with Wysinger. His heart stopped. Winston Morgan, standing near the top of the key, turned and saw Wysinger with the ball and turned his back: “I couldn’t look.” Alford, taken out of the game in favor of Jadlow, just held his breath.

  Meier had made a brilliant play. He had run at Wysinger on an angle so that as he flew through the air, arms flailing, he was going past Wysinger, not into him. Wysinger, only 6–1, had to change his shot to get the ball over Meier. It came up way short. Flying past Wysinger, Meier never saw the shot. He just listened for the crowd. He heard no roar. He knew. The shot had missed. Time had finally expired. Indiana had won, 61–60.

  This time they celebrated on the court. They hugged each other and grabbed and clutched and almost fell over from exhaustion. In a very real sense, this was the victory that brought Indiana all the way back from last year’s depths of depression. The team that had dominated them twice in 1985 had now been beaten twice in 1986.

  Knight had almost no voice left. But he was ecstatic. “I’m as proud of you right now as any team we’ve ever had,” he told them. “Enjoy this one, boys. You earned it.”

  They enjoyed. Ricky Calloway was running around the locker room grabbing people and saying, “Do you know how long I’ve waited to play on a winner? A real winner?” And Stew Robinson spoke the words no one had spoken before: “Now we can win the Big Ten,” he said. “We got to think about that now.”

  The long cold November nights seemed awfully far away now.

  They flew home that night in sole possession of first place in the Big Ten. For the second time, Michigan State had upset Michigan. This time, they beat the Wolverines in Ann Arbor after Michigan guard Antoine Joubert had guaranteed a victory. Skiles responded with thirty-three points in leading the Spartans’ victory and had sneered at Joubert during the game, yelling at him at one point, “Come on and shoot it, fat boy. Show me what you got.”

  That was the line of the year in the Big Ten, and Skiles was certainly the player of the year.

  Thanks to Skiles, Indiana at 10–3 was alone in first place. Michigan was 9–4 and a host of teams were 8–5. The Hoosiers were also 18–5 overall, and Knight’s nineteen-victory goal was starting to look conservative. When they arrived home that night—actually it was about 1 A.M.—Knight went to call Pete Newell. The coaches headed for the cave. “I have a feeling this is going to be a long night,” Waltman said. “I suspect the mentor is thinking about more than an NCAA bid right now.”

  Waltman was partly right. Knight was starting to think big thoughts, but he was so giddy from the victory that they only looked at the tape once. This was a night to go home for at least a few hours and savor what they had accomplished.

  The congratulatory calls came in throughout the next day. Jimmy Crews called early and turned the tables on his old coach. “I saw you shake hands with Henson,” he said.

  “I was just trying to confuse him,” Knight answered, grinning. Others called. It was like the old days. Indian
a was in first place in February and no one outside the team could believe it. If Knight had died that day he would have gone to heaven with a huge smile on his face.

  There was, however, the rather large matter of playing Purdue in two days. Indiana traditionally had more trouble winning at Purdue than at any other arena in the Big Ten. Knight’s record in Mackey Arena was 4–9; most of the losses had been in games where one play could have changed the outcome, and Knight could still recite most of them by rote. With Indiana in first place and Purdue attempting to nail down an NCAA bid, Gene Keady would make the game a crusade. Knight knew all this. He also thought that if his team could play the way it had at Illinois it would win.

  Quinn Buckner was at practice Friday. He was now resigned to the fact that no NBA team was going to pick him up, and he and Knight were talking about what direction he should go in next. If Buckner had wanted a job in coaching, Knight would have almost undoubtedly found a way to give him a job at Indiana. But Buckner didn’t want to coach. He wanted to try something else. In the meantime, though, Buckner would be at the rest of the team’s games and sit on the bench next to Knight.

  They bused to Purdue after a tight practice on Saturday. Knight knew this team had given him everything he could possibly ask for. He also knew that if they could find a way to win at Purdue, they would be in control of the Big Ten race. Knight has won seven Big Ten titles, but the last one was in 1983. He was dying to win this one in a year when no one—himself included—thought Indiana had a prayer at the start of the season.

  The two-hour bus trip was a rare one for the Hoosiers. The team flies to every road game it plays, except Purdue. Louisville is just as close to Bloomington as West Lafayette, yet the team flies there. Busing to Purdue is as much tradition as anything else.

  They went straight to Mackey Arena for a shoot-around; there would be no chance to shoot the next day since the game was in the afternoon. Walking onto the floor, Knight ran into Keady. Without so much as a hello, Keady told Knight to tell Alford and Robinson that he resented their coming up to shake hands with him after Indiana’s overtime win in Bloomington the previous month. “They didn’t shake hands with me last year when we kicked your ass,” Keady said. “You can tell them I didn’t appreciate that.”

  “Gene,” Knight said softly, “they’re just kids.”

  Keady stalked off. Knight had always had at least a civil relationship with Keady; the little episode was a clue as to how uptight Purdue was about this game.

  Knight told the players what had happened. “Understand, they’ll be looking at this as a season-maker. They’ll play us harder than they play anybody. That’s the way these people are. Now, you know I’m not very big on the people up here, including their coach, but you’ve never heard me say anything special about a Purdue game. But this game is a hell of an opportunity and it’s one you people have created for yourselves.”

  Walking to the bus, Knight said softly, “I think it will be awfully hard for us to win this game.”

  That evening, Knight and the coaches walked down the road from their hotel to a Chinese restaurant. It was a bitterly cold night, but Knight seemed not to notice. Sam Carmichael was along again, having brought good luck with him to Illinois. “People like Sam are the reason I could never leave Indiana,” Knight said as everyone struggled down the highway, cars roaring past. “I have friends I could never leave no matter what the job. Even if there was something I really wanted to do, I just couldn’t leave people like Sam and Hammel and all the people around town who have been my friends over the years.”

  Knight and the coaches looked at tape until after 2 A.M. and then walked across the street to Bob Evans. Knight had apple pie à la mode and hot chocolate. He had not mentioned his weight for a month.

  “I have to say that this team has really been fun to coach,” Knight said, leaning back in his chair. “I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed watching a group of players get better any more than this one. And next year we should be even better. A lot better.”

  He smiled contentedly. It was 3 A.M. on February 23. Exactly one year had passed since he had thrown the chair.

  Thirteen hours later, Purdue made its season. The Boilermakers were about as close to perfect as anyone can get. Early in the first half, they hit twelve straight shots. Long shots, short shots. Drives, jumpers, you name it. Indiana had no chance. A 10–7 Purdue lead after four minutes became a 41–19 lead after sixteen minutes. It was more devastating than Iowa. Basket after basket, with Keady up waving his arms to the crowd to keep it wild.

  And it was wild. Mackey Arena is a strange place. It is not an old building, but it looks old. It is very dark, and all the seats are just benches. The crowd is easily the loudest in the Big Ten and just as certainly the most vulgar. It was on Knight from the moment he walked out from the tunnel and never stopped. The only way to stop a Purdue crowd is to win. That wasn’t going to happen today.

  Knight tried mightily to get his team into the game. He tried soothing. He tried screaming. He tried name-calling. Later, watching the tape, he would decide that the officials had set the tone early by not calling fouls that Purdue was committing inside. But the simple fact was that Purdue was having an extraordinary day. It shot 74 percent in the first half and led 46–29.

  All of Knight’s halftime pleadings were not going to save this one. They gave it a shot, whittling the gap to as little as 68–60 with seven minutes left. But Melvin McCants, Purdue’s rapidly improving freshman center, powered over Thomas on the next possession to make it 70–60. Calloway missed a shot and Morgan went up and tangled with Todd Mitchell, Purdue’s 6–8 moose of a forward, for the rebound. Morgan went down. The foul was on Morgan. Showing no class, Mitchell dropped the ball on Morgan’s stomach. Morgan went after him. McCants stepped in. The proverbial cooler heads prevailed. Mitchell made the foul shots for a twelve-point lead. Indiana missed three layups on its next possession—Calloway, Alford, and Thomas—and Purdue scored again. It was 74–60. The brief run was over. The final was 85–68.

  For the first time all season, Alford had been stopped. Purdue’s guards had hounded and pounded him all day, and it had worked. Alford, shooting an extraordinary 56 percent coming into the game, was held to three for twelve shooting and a total of eight points. It was the only time all season he failed to score in double figures.

  That it had taken twenty-three games for someone to shut Alford down was a tribute to Knight’s offense and the way it freed Alford up for his shots, and to Alford, who often scored his points late because he wore defenders down with his relentless movement. Usually, if a good team decides it is going to stop a guard, it can do so. Most teams approached Indiana with the belief that if you stopped Alford you stopped Indiana. And yet, until Purdue, no one had been able to execute that strategy.

  It usually took less to get Alford in the Knight doghouse than any other player. Knight had a knack for looking at a tape and not seeing any of Alford’s shot making. In his third game at Indiana, Alford scored twenty-seven points. Knight never said a word afterward. The next day in practice, Knight put his arm around Alford and said, “Don’t think I didn’t notice the points. But I don’t talk about what’s good—I talk about what’s bad. I know you can shoot.” Alford had improved considerably in all areas since then. But his strength as a basketball player lay in his shooting. He knew that and Knight knew that. Yet Knight constantly harped on Alford’s weakness as a passer, his inability to find open men. Alford—never forgetting that first talk—was used to this. But he had been trained from high school forward to think shot first. Usually by the time he looked first for his shot and then to pass, the open man was no longer open.

  Ideally, on a day like this one, Alford might have changed his game. Knight kept telling him throughout to look to be a feeder when the shot wasn’t there. But Alford wasn’t a feeder. He finished the game with one assist. Yet there was no explosion from Knight. After the other players had walked to the bus, Knight took Alford aside and w
alked him out of the building, his arm around his shoulder.

  Quietly, he reminded Alford about how well he had played all year. “We wouldn’t be where we are, Steve, without you. You’ve just done a great job. You had a bad day. Everyone does. Learn from it. Learn that there are some days you look to pass. You can be dangerous that way because of the way defenses gang up on you.” He batted Alford on the back of the head as they walked out of the door. The only thing missing were the Lifesavers.

  Knight’s reaction to the defeat, given the margin and the opponent, was remarkable. He told the team it had played poorly and why. He told them he was disappointed in the way they had reacted to Purdue’s aggressiveness. Little did he know that Purdue had finally discovered the Achilles heel that would ultimately do this team in. But that would be later. For now, as the bus lurched home in the middle of an ugly snowstorm, Knight told them to forget Purdue and remember where they had put themselves before Purdue.

  “You still have a lot to be proud of, boys,” he said. “You are still tied for first place and nobody but us thought we’d be where we are. Don’t get deflated because of one game. This is the week we have to get ourselves into the NCAA. We have two home games [Minnesota and Iowa]. Let’s win those two games, get ourselves into the NCAAs and the week after that we can worry about winning the Big Ten. That’s our approach: the tournament this week, the league next week. Be thinking about that.

  “Remember one other thing,” Knight said before sitting down. “We’re in first place in the Big Ten and there are eight sonsofbitches including those assholes [Purdue] that aren’t.”

  Knight sat down with the coaches. “There’s just no point in beating on these kids. They’ve come such a long way. There’s no sense getting all over them for one bad day.”

  The coaches were of the opinion, as they sat in silence for the rest of the trip, that their boss would have been incapable of such logic a year earlier. His players thought the same thing.