One on One

by John Feinstein

  So now, a little more than three years later, I found myself in a seafood restaurant near the Holy Cross campus with Ralph Willard. Right from the start, I knew his Pitino background wasn’t going to be a problem. We bonded right away—as New Yorkers, as basketball junkies, as cynics. When I brought up Pitino, just to get the issue on the table, Ralph waved his hand.

  “Someday I’ll get the two of you in a room and you’ll be friends,” he said. “Your problem is you’re too much alike. You’re both ball busters.”

  True to his word, Ralph sat me down with Rick a few years later at the same basketball camp where I had first come up with the idea for The Last Amateurs, and we talked at length. Since then we’ve gotten along fine—Rick’s even played in the charity golf tournament I put on in Bruce Edwards’s name. We’re not best friends by any stretch, but we’re cordial and Rick returns my phone calls. We have no plans to do a book together at any point in the future.

  THERE WERE SO MANY good stories at Holy Cross I wasn’t sure which one to work on first. Two seniors had been cut from the team because Willard only wanted guys who really wanted to play. One other had made the team, realized he didn’t really want to play, and quit. Another quit, came back, and then quit again at midseason.

  And then there was Chris Spitler.

  There was no doubt Spitler wanted to play. The question was could he play? Willard kept thinking he should cut him, but couldn’t bring himself to do it because it was tough to cut a guy who worked harder than anyone in practice.

  I have told and retold Spitler’s story more times than I can remember. He was completely unrecruited as a high school senior in Buffalo, where he averaged seven points a game. He went to Holy Cross on an academic scholarship and played JV ball as a freshman. He asked then coach Bill Raynor if he could try out as a sophomore, and Raynor told him he could—but that he had no chance to make the team.

  He made the team—about 99 percent on attitude, the rest on grade point average (yes, even at Holy Cross they like high-GPA kids for the end of the bench). It was on an endless bus trip home from a loss at Colgate that Spitler famously (at least in my life’s sphere) picked up the basketball magazine that ranked the thirty-one Division I conferences and noticed the Patriot League was ranked number thirty-one. It was then that he made his calculation that being the worst player on the worst team in the worst conference made him the worst Division I player in the entire country.

  Quite a distinction.

  By season’s end, Raynor was starting him. He played thirty-nine minutes at Bucknell and scored 11 points and had 5 assists. He fouled out diving for a loose ball. Raynor made him try out again as a junior. He made the team again as the twelfth man on a twelve-man team and was again a starter by season’s end. Willard arrived, told his coaches that Spitler had to be cut, and, of course, ended up starting him before the season was over.

  Frank Mastrandrea, who was then the SID at Holy Cross and now has some associate AD title I can’t figure out, called this “the three phases of Spitler”: you can’t possibly be on the team, you’re on the team but you’ll never play, you’re the starting point guard.

  My favorite Willard-Spitler exchange took place at Yale, when Spitler came into the game late in the first half and promptly launched a badly missed jumper with ten seconds left—when Holy Cross was playing for the last shot. Walking off the court, Willard said, “Spitler, I thought the one good thing about you was that you were a smart player!”

  “Oh no, not me, Coach,” Spitler said. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  The first time I met Spitler I knew I had the right guy. After I finished my first interview with him, I went and found Mastrandrea, who remains to this day a close friend.

  “You realize don’t you that this kid is this book?” I said.

  “I know,” Frank said. “I didn’t want to introduce you to him right away because I wasn’t sure he was going to be on the team.”

  One thing about Spitler, he always found a way to make the team.

  SINCE ELEVEN YEARS HAVE passed, I can now reveal that for all the complaining I’ve done throughout my adult life about game times being changed for TV, I was responsible for a game time being changed while I was researching The Last Amateurs.

  The toughest thing about that season was figuring out where to be each night. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to miss the games, it was that I didn’t want to miss the locker room moments, the time with the players and coaches—just the general “scene” of the league. I still remember one Saturday when I went to see Holy Cross play at Lafayette in Kirby Arena in the afternoon, then jumped in my car to drive the fifteen miles over to Stabler Arena to see Colgate play Lehigh.

  Neither game was remarkable in any way (except for Lehigh coach Sal Mentesana saying to a referee who failed to call an obvious foul late in the game with Colgate up twenty-five, “Look, no one wants to get this over with more than me, but we both have to do our jobs. That was a foul”). But I remember as I raced into Stabler to join Lehigh in the locker room for their pregame talk thinking how much I was going to miss all of this the following season. I had only been to a handful of so-called big-time games all year and hadn’t missed it for one second.

  Each week I would sit down on Sunday night and plan my schedule for the next week. It would be based on who was playing whom, logistics (a day like the one where I could see two games back-to-back was an obvious choice), and whomever I hadn’t seen in a while. I was driving everywhere, knew the hotels cold by midseason, and didn’t even really need my credentials since everyone working in all seven buildings knew me by then.

  Looking ahead to the last weekend of the season, I saw a problem. Army and Navy were closing out their regular season at Army at noon on Saturday. That was a game I needed to see because it was Army-Navy, because it was the last home game for the Army seniors, and because Navy needed to win to keep pace with Lafayette in the race to finish first. The highest-seeded team hosted the championship game and, given that each had beaten the other at home, that figured to be critical. Lafayette would be at Bucknell on Sunday to close out the season, so there was no problem getting there.

  The problem was Chris Spitler.

  Had it been early in the season, Lehigh at Holy Cross, scheduled for Saturday at two o’clock, would hardly look like a game I needed to attend. And at this point, both teams were in the bottom half of the league. But Spitler had become a central figure in the book and it was his last home game. Not only that but he was the only Holy Cross senior left and there was certainly something symbolic in that.

  There was no way I could be at West Point for a noon game and then at Holy Cross—about two-and-a-half hours away—for a two o’clock game.

  I called Mastrandrea. “I know this is crazy,” I said, “but do you think there’s any way you could play your game that day at seven instead of two?”

  Frank thought for a minute. “Logistically, I don’t see why not,” he said. “There’s no TV involved. We could easily get word to our season ticket holders [of whom there were at most three hundred at that point] and our students. As long as Ralph and Sal don’t object, I don’t see why not.”

  Neither Ralph nor Sal objected. In fact, they were glad to help me out. It would mean Lehigh would get home much later, but it was a Saturday, so the players could sleep in on Sunday. No one bothered to check with the league office because there would have been such paralysis in making a decision we might still be waiting for an answer right now.

  So the game was changed to a seven o’clock tip. The only complaint I heard was from one of the women’s assistant coaches at Lehigh. In those days the men and women played doubleheaders in the Patriot League, and the women’s tipoff was moved from 12:00 to 4:30. When the women’s coaches asked why—a reasonable question—they were told it was to accommodate me.

  I guess they didn’t like that and one of them decided to tell me so. “You should be ashamed of what you did,” she said to me in the hallway of th
e Hart Center when I walked in at about five o’clock. The women’s game was at halftime and Holy Cross, which back then had the best team in the league, was winning easily. Apparently that was because of the time change.

  I wasn’t ashamed and it was well worth the effort. Spitler made a couple of key free throws and Holy Cross won the game. Even the Lehigh people seemed to have a sense of appreciation for Spitler. Mentesana brought his team out from the locker room to applaud Spitler during the Senior Night (or Spitler Night) ceremony. “In a lot of ways he’s what our league is supposed to be about,” he said later. “I was glad to do it.”

  Lafayette won the conference tournament after getting home-court advantage for the final based on a slightly higher RPI (computer ranking) than Navy. Every other tiebreaker had failed after the teams finished 11–1, so that was all that was left. It was a shame to decide something so crucial based on something so inexact. But that was the way it was done.

  The Leopards were sent to Buffalo by the NCAA to play Temple: a two seed versus a fifteen seed. This was one of those “coincidental” matchups that often pop up in the bracket. Lafayette coach Fran O’Hanlon was a dyed-in-the-wool Philly guy who had worked for Temple coach John Chaney earlier in his career. They were still good friends. So, somehow, of all the two–fifteen matchups available, Lafayette drew Temple.

  I had no illusions about what was going to happen in the game. Lafayette was a good Patriot League team and it played a very good matchup zone defense. But O’Hanlon had learned the defense from Chaney, who played it with bigger, quicker athletes. A lot of people saw Temple as a potential Final Four team. I knew miracles happened, but I certainly wasn’t counting on it.

  One thing I wanted to be sure of was that I didn’t get shut out of the Lafayette locker room after having had complete access all season. This was a potential headache because of the rule the NCAA had put in place after A Season Inside. Dave Cawood, then the NCAA’s PR guy, had gone out of his way to enforce it in 1997 when I was working on A March to Madness.

  I was able to write around not being in the locker rooms fairly well that year since, as with other books, the coaches and their assistants willingly told me what had been said. But I know I missed something not being in there, and it was all because of Cawood.

  Now, in 2000, Jim Marchiony, someone I knew and liked, had Cawood’s job. Even though Jim and I were friends, I knew in NCAA-world he would be almost obligated to try to keep me out of the Lafayette locker room. Of course, what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him—or me.

  So I applied for a media credential as if planning to cover the subregional in Buffalo like everyone else. Then I got Lafayette to put me on their team list at the last possible moment. I was fortunate that the committee representative in Buffalo was a close friend, Jack Kvancz, the athletic director at George Washington. I told Jack my plan so that if anyone asked him what my name was doing on the Lafayette team list, he could just say, “That’s just so he can get into their practices without any problem.”

  Everything went well until halftime of the Temple-Lafayette game. I’d had no problems before the game or at halftime. In fact, when Fran O’Hanlon and I had walked out to the court together to watch the overtime of the Seton Hall–Oregon game, which opened the afternoon program, Fran had been stopped by a security guard because he’d left his jacket with his lapel pin in the locker room. I had to vouch for him.

  When I came back out of the locker room with the team at halftime—Temple was winning the game in a romp—Kvancz was waiting for me.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said. “Marchiony’s here and he’s onto you.”

  At that point it was obvious that all I needed was to be in the Lafayette locker room after the game. The Leopards would not be playing again on Sunday.

  “Hold him off,” I said.

  Jack nodded. “I’m going to tell him you aren’t going in after the game,” he said. “You go in, then afterward he can yell at both of us.”

  That’s exactly what happened. I went in and witnessed O’Hanlon’s very emotional final talk to his team. When the locker room opened to the media, I walked into the hallway and found Marchiony waiting.

  “I knew you were in there,” he said. “I knew Jack was covering for you.”

  “Jack’s my friend,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Jim said. “It was wrong.”

  “No, Jim,” I said. “It was absolutely right.”

  EVEN AFTER LAFAYETTE GOT pummeled that day, I knew I had a very good book. Whether anyone would read a book about kids playing basketball in a league that had never won an NCAA Tournament game since its formation, I didn’t know. Woodward’s words about the magazine piece were still rattling around in my head somewhere.

  The early reviews were very good. I did book signings at the schools, which almost brought back memories of that first day in Indiana with Season on the Brink. I went to a Princeton-Lafayette game to do a pregame book signing and never saw a minute of the game because people were still lined up through the entire game—which included overtime.

  Patriot League people would buy the book. But would anyone else?

  On a night in early December I was in Boston promoting the book. My last stop was at Harvard, where I had been asked to speak to a student forum. I told the story that night about the argument between my father and me about where I should go to college. Dad was teaching a graduate-level course at Yale at the time, and having gone to CCNY because he had grades but his family had no money, it had always been his dream to see his kids go to Ivy League schools. My sister came the closest, going to Wesleyan.

  After my visit to Duke in January of my senior year, there was no doubt in my mind I wanted to go there. The campus was beautiful. It was 65 degrees and there were girls walking around in halter tops and shorts. The swimming pool was brand-new with giant windows that made you feel as if you were swimming outdoors. Even though the basketball team was lousy, the atmosphere in Cameron Indoor Stadium was amazing, and I happened to visit on a weekend when the team upset number two–ranked Maryland, 73–69. At Yale it had been snowing, everyone was bundled up, the basketball team was awful, and the pool in Payne Whitney gym felt like it was a hundred years old, even if Don Schollander had worked out in that pool en route to his four Olympic gold medals in 1964.

  To me it was a no-brainer. Dad, of course, disagreed. I finally said to him, “Dad, I need to go to college where I want to go, not where you want me to go.”

  “Well,” he said, “you didn’t even apply where I really wanted you to go.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “I applied to Yale.”

  “I didn’t want you to go to Yale. I wanted you to go to Harvard.”

  “You never said a word about Harvard!”

  “I know. I knew you couldn’t get in there.”

  The audience loved that story. Afterward, several students came up to thank me.

  “Oh, it was my pleasure, I enjoyed it,” I said.

  “We’re not talking about the speech,” one of them said. “We’re talking about not going to Yale.”

  That was funny. The people who sponsored the speech had a really nice dinner for me and then I headed down the road toward Hartford, where I was stopping to do several interviews for the book the next morning before going on to New York. It was snowing, but not hard, and I pulled off the road at the Mass Turnpike rest stop just before I-84 to get some gas and go to the bathroom. I also wanted to check my messages at home. I had a separate phone line that only rang in the basement, where my office was, so I knew I could check messages without waking my family.

  The last message was from Esther. It was, as always, direct.

  “Number fourteen,” she said. “Congratulations.”

  I knew exactly what the message meant, but I stared at the phone for a second and then pressed replay just to be sure. The three words were the same the second time as the first.

  I can remember where I was and how
I heard the news every time I’ve had a bestseller. Needless to say, the two times I’ve had books get to number one are especially vivid.

  The first was in a Holiday Inn in Evanston, Illinois. I had wrapped up some book-promo stuff for Season on the Brink in Chicago and had driven up to Evanston to do a column on Bill Foster, who had been the coach at Duke when I was an undergraduate and was then coaching at Northwestern. I had gone for a walk during the afternoon, because it was an unseasonably nice day, and had wandered into a bookstore, where I was unable to find a single copy of A Season on the Brink.

  Even with Macmillan going back for new printings constantly, this had been a problem for two months: the stores just couldn’t keep enough copies on the shelves. It was a nice problem to have, but still frustrating.

  I called Esther from the hotel to tell her we needed to bang on Macmillan some more about distribution. The book had gotten to number two on the New York Times bestseller list the week before behind Bill Cosby’s book Fatherhood, which had been number one for a year. When I had called my dad to tell him the book had jumped from number eleven on the list to number two, he had said, “Why isn’t it number one?”

  “Dad, it’s behind Bill Cosby. This is as good as it’s going to get.”

  While I was talking to Esther, she suddenly interrupted and said, “Hang on, Jeff Neuman is on the other line. He says he has news.”

  I held my breath. I wasn’t going to let myself believe that the news could be that I had gone past Cosby.

  Esther was back on a moment later, almost breathless.

  “This is just unbelievable,” she said. “This just doesn’t happen.”

  “What?” I screamed.

  “You’re number one.”