It was an extraordinary moment in my life. I called my mom first and then my dad. Mom was Mom: proud, happy, wanting to know when I was coming home from my trip. Dad was, well, not Dad. “You’re kidding?” he said. “You went past Cosby? I thought you said that couldn’t happen? Linda, Judy [his two assistants], come in here right now. John’s number one on the bestseller list! He beat Cosby!”
Other than when I called to tell him he was a grandfather, I don’t think I ever heard my father so happy.
Not everyone in the world was that impressed that I had gone by Cosby. When Bob DeStefano, my longtime boss at Gardiner’s Bay on Shelter Island, called the publisher of the Island’s weekly newspaper, The Reporter, to tell her she should write something about the success of the book, she balked.
“I really don’t like to do stories on Island authors,” she said. “We have so many that if I do something on one of them, the others get upset.” (A lot of writers do have places on Shelter Island, including, back then, people like Leon Uris, Robert Hughes, and Harold Schonberg, the Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic of the New York Times.)
“But John grew up here summers,” Bob said. “He wrote the book out here. He went past Bill Cosby to get to number one on the bestseller list!”
There was a pause, and then the publisher said, “Okay, start at the beginning. Tell me who this Cosby fellow is.”
By the time I got through making phone calls after hearing the news that day in Evanston, the only place I had time to eat my celebration dinner was McDonald’s. That was just fine with me.
The second time I got to number one, I was in California the week after Father’s Day. A Good Walk Spoiled had hit the list the week before at number eleven, and with Father’s Day sales I thought it might crack the top five—but I wasn’t counting on it. I had just finished an interview at a radio station in Pasadena. I had a little time before my next interview and found a pay phone in the lobby of the building where the radio station was to call home and see how things were going.
My wife, Mary—we have since divorced—answered the phone sounding very emotional about something. “Is Danny all right?” I asked, immediately concerned something might be wrong with my son, who was eighteen months old.
“Danny’s fine,” she said. “Have you talked to Esther?”
“No. Why?”
“Because I think she wanted you to know that a book you dedicated to your mother and your son [my mom had died on Mother’s Day two years earlier, a few months before Danny was born] is number one on the New York Times bestseller list.”
There was a chair right next to the phone. I remember feeling my knees semi-buckle and falling into the chair in disbelief. Thinking about my mom at that moment and how much she loved golf, I started to cry.
After I did my last interview in Los Angeles that evening, I had to drive to San Diego. I pulled off of I-5 to eat and celebrate at—you guessed it—a McDonald’s.
Five years later, hearing Esther’s message saying that The Last Amateurs was number fourteen on the Times’s list, I let out a whoop in the mostly empty rest stop. A couple of people glanced at me but kept going. The book no one wanted me to write was a bestseller. The book Bob Woodward thought should be a magazine story. When I hung up the phone I threw my arms into the air and shook a fist à la Tiger Woods.
It was almost midnight. I had eaten dinner but I had to celebrate.
Fortunately, the rest stop had a McDonald’s.
21
Back to the Future
JUST UNDER TEN YEARS after my celebration at the Mass Pike rest stop, I walked up Eighth Avenue from Madison Square Garden—where I had parked my car—to meet Christopher G. Spitler, attorney at law (yes, that Chris Spitler), at the John’s Pizzeria near Times Square, a few yards down from the entrance to Sardi’s.
Both places brought back boyhood memories. Because of my dad’s theater connections, my Bar Mitzvah party had been held at Sardi’s. The John’s where I was meeting Spitler didn’t exist in those days, but the original John’s of Bleecker Street—on Bleecker Street—did exist. Frequently, we would get in the car on Sunday night and drive down there for dinner. It was usually that or Chinese food.
I loved John’s pizza then; I love it now. One of the great pleasures of doing Sports Reporters was walking down the street on Saturday night from the hotel where we stayed, picking up a John’s pizza, and taking it back to my room.
On this particular day—November 18, 2010—I was very much looking forward to meeting Spitler, though not looking forward so much to the task that faced me after Spitler and I had finished eating pizza: trying to talk to Bob Knight.
When I first began researching this book, I knew I was going to try to go back and talk to many of the major characters from my first ten nonfiction books. Ten seemed like a good number to me for two reasons: it represented exactly half the nonfiction books I had written and it made sense to me to perhaps wait a little longer before I thought about going back to talk to people I had worked with in recent years.
I knew the book would begin with Knight, and believed it should end with Knight. I didn’t expect for one second that Knight was going to sit down and talk to me at length, but I had to make the attempt.
Knight was working for ESPN that night, doing color on the Maryland-Pittsburgh game at Madison Square Garden. I was planning to arrive early to make sure I got a clean shot at speaking to him—one way or the other.
Before that though, I met Spitler at John’s.
He walked in looking very much like the lawyer he had become. It was relatively warm out, so his suit jacket was draped over his shoulder. He had come from Grand Central Station, since his office was in Connecticut—even though he and his wife, Jodi, live on the West Side of Manhattan. He had left the law firm he had worked at for more than six years to work as legal counsel for an investment firm that was connected to the Royal Bank of Scotland.
“I like the people there,” he said. “It’s always been important to me to work someplace where I like the people. I remember when I graduated from law school I had two interviews the same day. One was at lunch, and the guys from the firm used a fork and a knife to cut the bread that was put on the table. I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t for me.’ Then I went to dinner with the guys from this other firm and we had wings, chicken fingers, and ribs. I figured they were the right guys for me.”
That was a firm called Cahill Gordon & Reindel. He had met Jodi in law school, and they had dated for a long time before deciding to get married. His three brothers—who all played college basketball as walk-ons just like Chris—were his best men.
He was thirty-two now, very much the successful young lawyer. He and Jodi had bought a house in upstate New York, and they rode the train from Manhattan almost every Friday, picked up their car at the train station, and went to their favorite Italian restaurant for dinner. And yet he still described things as “awesome” and “excellent”—the Italian restaurant was both awesome and excellent—and sounded, to me, like the kid I’d met in November of 1999 whose work-study job was at the security desk in the Hart Center at night.
“I guard the building better than I guard other players,” he had joked back then.
We had stayed in sporadic touch since the book. I had talked to him when I had done an epilogue for the paperback version, and he had told me a funny story about getting an e-mail from someone who had read the book inviting him to play pickup basketball with his team. “We suck,” the e-mail had read. “But from what I’ve read, you suck too.”
Spitler had agreed to join the team. “First time in a while I didn’t have to go through tryouts,” he’d told me. The twist to the story was where the team played: P.S. 87 on 78th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. Henry Winkler—“Fonzie”—was a graduate. So was Don Adams, the original Maxwell Smart. So was I, fifth-grade class of 1966.
I asked Spitler if he still played basketball.
“Absolutely,” he said. “In fact,
when I leave you I’m headed downtown for a game. It’s a local men’s league. We play all over the city in different gyms one or two nights a week. It’s a blast. You pay a hundred bucks to play ten games, plus playoffs. My team was 5–5, but we made the playoffs. Back in college, especially my senior year, I shuddered whenever I shot the ball because I was never the first option. Now I shoot all the time. I’m still not all that good, but God do I have fun.
“At Holy Cross when we lost, everyone took it so hard, which I understood because we all put a lot of time into it. Now it’s totally different. We had one game this year where a guy came down court with the game tied and drilled a three right in my face at the buzzer. Honestly, by the time the ball hit the floor I was over it. I didn’t want him to make the shot, but when it was over it was ‘No big deal, I had fun tonight.’ That’s what I’m out there for.”
What was interesting about Spitler was that he loved to play basketball but didn’t often watch it. He had a vague idea of how Holy Cross was doing each winter, and he knew that Willard had left for Louisville two summers earlier to go work for his friend Rick Pitino. Spitler asked me why Willard had left.
“He convinced himself he was unhappy at Holy Cross,” I said. “Which was too bad because people loved him there. Plus, Pitino was in trouble and really needed a friend at Louisville.”
Not surprisingly, Spitler knew nothing about Rick Pitino’s off-court troubles.
Spitler and Willard had never developed a warm, fuzzy relationship. For one thing, Ralph wasn’t a warm, fuzzy guy most of the time. For another, even though he respected Spitler’s work ethic and his willingness to do anything for the team, it absolutely killed him that he was coaching a team that actually needed Spitler.
“Poor Ralph,” Spitler said. “Imagine, he went from coaching Pitt to coaching Spit. That had to be tough.”
Willard had never named a team captain during Spitler’s senior season. Spitler was the only senior and Willard just couldn’t bring himself to name him the captain. Several years later, Frank Mastrandrea had tried to convince Willard to retroactively name him captain—at least in the media guide. Willard thought about it and then came back and told Mastrandrea, “You know, I really love the kid. But I just can’t do it.”
Spitler didn’t mind. “I’ll tell you one thing about Willard,” he said. “He is one hell of a basketball coach. He wasn’t easy to play for, but he was a great coach. All you have to do is look at what he did there to know that.”
For all their differences, Willard understood Spitler. He kept him on the team because he knew having him around was a good thing. But he understood that Spitler was never going to be someone who lived and breathed basketball and that when he played his last college game he would walk away without turning back.
“We opened that year at Providence,” Spitler remembered. “I got a call that week from Goldman Sachs saying they wanted me to come to New York on Saturday morning for an interview. Now it wasn’t as if I was the leading scorer or anything, but a lot of coaches would not have been thrilled with a guy coming to them saying, ‘I have to go to New York the morning of our opener. I’ll try to meet you at the game.’
“I actually was going to tell Ralph that I’d try to postpone the meeting. He shook his head and said, ‘Spit, this is your future. It’s more important. Go.’ So I went. Then I drove back to Providence and actually got there early. I couldn’t find anyone who would let me into the arena so I had to wait outside until the team showed up.”
I told Spitler that whenever I spoke I told his story as an example of someone without a lot of talent who stuck with it and made himself into a decent player. “Decent player is generous,” he said, laughing. “You were very generous to me in the book.”
The book still came up in his life on occasion: people would recognize his name and ask him if he was the guy who had identified himself as the worst Division I player in the country.
“Actually, my boss bought the book,” Spitler said. “He went on eBay and bought it in hardcover for a penny.”
A penny?
“Yup. I told him I hoped when he finished it he felt as if he’d gotten his money’s worth.”
I hope so too.
SPITLER WASN’T THE ONLY person I’d written about in The Last Amateurs and stayed in touch with. Chris Spatola, who had been Army’s leading scorer when I did the book, had been dating Jamie Krzyzewski, youngest daughter of Mike Krzyzewski. Shortly after Jamie graduated from Duke, they got married. Not long after that, Chris deployed to Iraq for a year.
When he came back, he went to work for his father-in-law (not a bad person to know if you want to coach) and now has one national championship ring and a son—who was born four months before Duke won the 2010 national championship. There’s a photo in Chris’s office at Duke of him with his wife and son that was taken while the nets were being cut down in Indianapolis. The same photo is in his father-in-law’s office one floor up.
Two years after the book came out, I was approached by a friend of mine named Billy Stone, who at the time was an independent TV producer. Billy had put together a package of Ivy League basketball games that were televised on Friday nights on DirecTV. The package had been successful, at least in part because so few college games are played on Fridays. Billy wondered if I would be interested in doing color on a similar package of Patriot League games.
I will not waste a lot of time here on my various run-ins with TV people—most from ESPN, but not all. Billy told me DirecTV would only do the package if I would do the color. I was flattered and said yes. The games have wandered all over the TV landscape for the last nine years, from DirecTV to CBS College to ESPNU and back to CBS College. I’ve enjoyed being part of the package because it has allowed me to stay in touch on a regular basis with people in the league—coaches, athletic directors, and to a lesser extent, players. Obviously I don’t know the players now the way I did when I was practically living with them eleven winters ago.
My style is, to put it mildly, a little bit different than most color commentators. I don’t have pet sayings and I try not to raise my voice unless I’m genuinely excited. I prefer to tell stories about the people involved in the games rather than telestrate ball reversals. That can be difficult at times because there is always a very important promo to read about an upcoming hockey game or women’s basketball game or a crucial sponsor drop-in that has to be taken care of before we talk about, well, the game.
In all though, I have enjoyed it. The Patriot League has come a long way since 2000. All the schools are still giving scholarships, although they still keep a close eye on the AIs (Academic Indexes) of the players each of them is recruiting. When Emmett Davis was fired by Colgate last spring, it meant that only Fran O’Hanlon was left from the coaches I had worked with on the book.
I still see many of those who have moved on. Pat Harris has a son who has followed in his footsteps to play at Army. Pat Flannery still works in development at Bucknell, and I try to get together with him whenever I’m up there for a game.
Ralph Willard is with Pitino, and it has not been a smooth ride. Not long after Ralph moved to Louisville, the story broke about Pitino’s one-night stand with a woman in a Louisville restaurant. That was followed by the woman being charged (and later convicted) with trying to blackmail Pitino while claiming he had gotten her pregnant. Pitino ended up having to testify at the trial. None of it was pretty.
Louisville played in the first round of the 2010 NCAA Tournament in Jacksonville, which happened to be the first- and second-round site where I was working that year. On the practice day I went to find Ralph, and we spent some time chatting, leaning against a wall in the hall outside the Louisville locker room. Pitino came down the hall and stopped to say hello.
“Did he tell you that I promised him we’d have a good time?” Rick said, smiling. “Have we had nothing but a good time since you got here, Ralph?”
“Nothing but grins and wins,” Ralph answered, deadpan as always.
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Louisville didn’t grin or win the next night, losing to California. A year later, after a surprisingly good regular season, the Cardinals were upset in the first round of the tournament by thirteenth-seeded Morehead State, becoming the highest seed to lose in the first round.
Meanwhile, back at Holy Cross, Sean Doherty, hired to replace Willard, went 9–22 after the Crusaders were picked in preseason to win the league. Athletic director Dick Regan decided he’d made a mistake and fired Doherty after one season—shocking the coaching world. Coaches don’t get fired at Kentucky after one season much less at Holy Cross. The case can be made that if Dean Smith or Mike Krzyzewski had been judged on their first year—or, for that matter, their first three years—they never would have become Dean Smith or Mike Krzyzewski.
Milan Brown was hired to replace Doherty and, after an awful start, managed to go 7–7 in league play last winter. Still, it was another twenty-loss season in Worcester. Not a lot of grins or wins there or in Louisville.
The most remarkable story in the Patriot League since the book’s publication was the one written by Bucknell in 2005 and 2006. After years of solid teams and near misses, Pat Flannery finally won a league title, upsetting Holy Cross at Holy Cross in the championship game, and made it to the NCAA Tournament in 2005. The Crusaders had come a long way from the “Spitler Era.” They had won three straight titles from 2001 to 2003 and had come painfully close to winning first-round NCAA Tournament games against Kentucky, Kansas, and Marquette. The last two had gone on to the Final Four.
Still, the Patriot League had an NCAA tournament record of 0–13 when Bucknell, a number fourteen seed, went to play third-seeded Kansas in a first-round game in Oklahoma City. Bucknell won the game. After leading most of the night, the Bison got nervous and the Jayhawks roared back to take the lead, 62–61, with 24 seconds left. Just when it looked as if the game was going to be another close-but-no-cigar for the Patriot League, Bucknell center Chris McNaughton made a shot in the lane with 10.5 seconds to go and Kansas’s Wayne Simien back-rimmed an open fifteen-footer at the buzzer.
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