A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  All four teams had gone through a lot to get to Kansas City. They were the last four among 291 who started. In the end, though, only one team can feel what Kansas felt. Everyone else becomes a spectator.

  But in October, when the leaves are turning and the weather is just starting to get brisk, everyone is Danny Manning or Keith Smart. Some know they can’t be The One, not really, but they dream about it anyway. Others know they have a chance and they think about it more often. Others believe it to be their destiny. Often, they become obsessed by it.

  Unlike any other sport, they all begin at the same time. The same day every year. No other sport is as precise. They all begin together, each of them pointing for the same night. Only two make it there. And, among approximately 3,500 college basketball players, no more than fifteen get to feel the oh-so-pure joy of being The Champion.

  Kansas won in 1988, but it was not the only winner. Winning and losing is certainly very much a part of college basketball, as with any other sport. But to those who point each year to October 15 the way little children point to Christmas, the season is a companion, a way of life, a certainty you can cling to. To those who love the sport, the feeling each spring as the national champions celebrate is a mixed one: There is joy for the winners, sadness for the losers, and an empty feeling because the season is over.

  But there is also a bright side: While the hopes of last October are six months removed, the fantasies of next October are only six months away.

  2

  IN THE BEGINNING …

  October 14, 1987 … Lawrence, Kansas

  Larry Brown had one of those looks on his face that Danny Manning didn’t like to see. Manning was about to escape Allen Field House, having gone through the regimen of Kansas’s annual Media Day, to spend a few hours relaxing before coming back late that evening to start the basketball season. Practice began at exactly 12:01 A.M. on October 15. This was a three-year-old tradition at Kansas, something Manning looked forward to because it was like a giant coming-out party. But now, the man for whom the occasion was named—“Late Night with Larry Brown”—was calling his name, and it wasn’t to tell a joke.

  “When are you guys going to come over tonight?” Brown asked the best player he had ever coached.

  “Don’t know, maybe about ten-thirty or so.”

  Brown stiffened. “Look, Danny, you decide what time and you tell the other guys. You make sure they’re here, okay? You’re in charge.”

  Manning nodded. Practice didn’t formally begin for another nine hours and already Brown was starting again. He wondered again if he hadn’t made a mistake passing up the NBA for his last year of college. But, looking around the floor, Manning saw the reasons he had stayed. In one corner, Archie Marshall was answering reporters’ questions. Eighteen months earlier, in a Final Four game against Duke, Marshall had crashed to the floor of Reunion Arena in Dallas, his knee torn up. He had sat out the entire 1987 season, rehabilitating the knee so he could come back and play with Manning one last season.

  During the springtime, when Manning was in the throes of deciding whether to return to Kansas or take the pro money, Archie Marshall had said mournfully to Manning’s mother, “Mrs. Manning, Danny’s going to turn pro and I’ll never get to play with him again.”

  “Archie, don’t you worry,” Darnelle Manning had said. “I’ll take care of that.”

  She had done just that. Never once had she told her son he had to stay in school or wailed about him getting his degree. But Danny knew how she felt and he wanted to play with Archie. And, he wanted another year with his dad, who was standing quietly a few feet away while Brown was telling Danny one more time that he was in charge.

  Ed Manning is one of those huge men who has never felt the need to be terribly verbal. He played pro basketball for nine years, a power forward at 6–7 ½, a player who made up for a lack of natural talent with desire and hard work. His son, so much more gifted, had yet to acquire his father’s toughness. That frustrated Ed Manning at least as much as it frustrated Brown. And, on occasions when Brown and Ed Manning would yell at her son during games, Darnelle Manning would sit in the stands and think, “Why are they always yelling at that child?”

  She knew the answer, just as her son knew the answer. Both coaches saw one thing in Danny Manning: greatness. Both felt an obligation to bring out that greatness. It had not been easy for any of them. Now, standing on the brink of their last season together, Brown, Ed Manning, and Danny Manning all knew this was the last time around. October 15, 1987, was an ending as well as a beginning. Once midnight struck that evening, every hour of every day would put Danny Manning closer to the end of a college career that had begun with soaring hopes three years earlier. Many of those hopes had been realized, but there were still doubts, still questions about whether Manning would ever play up to his extraordinary potential.

  One thing Manning knew for certain: His coach and his father would be on him nonstop from 12:01 A.M. until whenever.…

  While Kansas was gathering for its annual party, 290 other basketball teams were doing the same thing, many of them practicing at 12:01 A.M., too. In the last ten years, as the money available to the sixty-four teams that make it to the NCAA Tournament has run amok—each Final Four team received $1.1 million in 1988—more and more schools have joined Division 1 of the NCAA hoping for a piece of that huge cake.

  Because it only takes twelve players to field a team and only one or two stars to have a good team, Division 1 schools come in all shapes and sizes. The Big East, considered by many the most powerful basketball conference in America, has six schools so small that they do not field Division 1 football teams. (It takes at least forty players to man a football squad, often fifty or sixty. One star, or two or three, for that matter, cannot bring glory—or a million dollars—to a football school.) Georgetown, the 1984 national basketball champion, plays football in Division 3. So does Villanova, the 1985 national basketball champion. There are Division 1 schools with gyms that can barely hold two thousand people, Division 1 schools that most people don’t even know are in Division 1. How about Radford, Akron, and Winthrop, to name a few? Or, for that matter, Baptist, Monmouth, and Florida Southern. No Orange Bowl teams in that group.

  That is why, on October 15, everyone has hope. If Cleveland State can beat Indiana in the NCAA Tournament, if Arkansas–Little Rock can beat Notre Dame, if North Carolina–Charlotte can be one shot away from reaching the national title game, then anyone with twelve uniforms, two backboards, and a few basketballs can think themselves next March’s David.

  At Kansas, there was no talk about David. Only about this being Manning’s last shot. “Danny’s the best player in the country,” Brown said that afternoon. “And I feel good about the way we coach.” He paused and said something coaches aren’t supposed to say. “Deep down, I’d be disappointed if we didn’t win it all. That’s the only way I’d really be satisfied: if we won the national championship.”

  Brown was not the only coach and Kansas not the only school with those kinds of thoughts on that Wednesday afternoon. At Arizona, Lute Olson looked at the team that took the floor for the first day of practice and thought back four years, to his first practice in Tucson, and couldn’t help but smile. “I remembered walking off the floor after that practice and looking at my assistants and saying, ‘What have we done? What have we gotten ourselves into?’ ”

  Olson had left a Top Twenty program at Iowa to take over a 4–24 Arizona team; he opted for the sun over security. The only player who had been at that first practice in 1983 who was on the floor now was Steve Kerr. Olson offered Kerr his last available scholarship that first year, largely out of desperation. He had seen Kerr playing in the Los Angeles summer league. Kerr was too slow and couldn’t jump, but he could shoot. If Olson had still been at Iowa, he wouldn’t have given Kerr a second glance. But, starting from square one, he was willing to take a chance. Even though when his wife Bobbi saw Kerr play, her reaction was, “Lute, you’ve got to be kiddi
ng.”

  Lute wasn’t kidding, he was desperate. And so Steve Kerr landed at Arizona. No one, not Kerr, not Olson, could imagine the extraordinary story Kerr would write there. Midway through his freshman year, Kerr’s father was assassinated in Beirut, shot twice in the head as he stepped off an elevator on his way to work. Two nights later, because he thought that was what his father would have wanted, Kerr played against Arizona State.

  He broke down during a pregame moment of silence, but when he came into the game he hit his first shot—and ended up scoring 12 points during an easy Wildcat victory. From that day forward, Kerr was Tucson’s adopted son. He became a starter as a sophomore, an all-Pacific 10 player as a junior, and made the World Championship team coached by Olson during the summer of 1986. Late in the Americans’ semifinal game against Brazil, Kerr went up to pass, came down wrong, and landed writhing in pain, his knee torn up.

  The initial diagnosis was simple: torn ligaments, a probable career-ending injury. Kerr cried that night, but he never gave up. He went through reconstructive surgery, spent the winter rehabilitating the knee and the summer getting back into playing shape. Now, as practice began, the knee felt fine and Kerr was eager, though nervous since it had been fifteen months since he had played in a real game.

  In West Lafayette, Indiana, the trepidation on opening day had nothing to do with injuries, although Troy Lewis, Purdue’s leading scorer in 1987, had broken his foot in early September. Lewis would be fine long before the season began.

  But Lewis knew, as did fellow seniors Todd Mitchell and Everette Stephens, that this was going to be a difficult season. During their first three years at Purdue, the Boilermakers had won sixty-seven games. They had played in three NCAA Tournaments. They had been Big Ten cochampions in 1987 along with Indiana, the Bob Knight-coached team that had gone on to win the national championship.

  Each March, however, Purdue had come up shy: a first-round loss to Auburn in 1985, a first-round loss to Louisiana State in 1986, a second-round loss to Florida in 1987. In ’85, they had been freshmen, a young team just learning. Okay. In ’86, they had been sent to play at LSU, an unfair draw since they were seeded higher than the Tigers. They lost in overtime. Okay. But in ’87 they played Florida in Syracuse, a perfectly reasonable place against a beatable team. They lost by 20.

  No excuses were left. And Coach Gene Keady had made it clear all summer that he was miserable about the way the ’87 season had ended—a 36-point loss to Michigan in the regular-season finale, ending their chance to win the Big Ten outright, didn’t help Keady’s mood—and that the three seniors had better show from day one that they were going to be the leaders of this team. Keady wanted to make damn sure they weren’t going to accept any more March failures. He wasn’t.

  “We know,” Todd Mitchell said, “that nothing we do before March really matters. We’ve done everything else. We’re going to be judged on one thing this season, the NCAA Tournament. That’s fine with us. That’s the way it should be.”

  But already, even before the first practice began, there were tensions. There were two other seniors on the team, Jeff Arnold and Dave Stack, who were academically ineligible to play. When Keady had called the senior trio that August to ask them how they felt about the situation, their answer had been unanimous and blunt: Get rid of them. Arnold and Stack, in their minds, had been in trouble almost from day one at Purdue. They really didn’t deserve another chance.

  Keady thought the team needed Arnold, who was 6–10 and could rebound coming off the bench. “One more chance,” he told the seniors.

  Okay, they thought, one more chance. Arnold and Stack were at practice that first day. It was the beginning of their last chance.

  The tension that existed as practice began at Villanova was very different from Purdue. Rollie Massimino, the little coach who had become a megastar almost overnight in his championship season of 1985, had been through the worst season of his coaching life in 1987.

  His team wasn’t very good. The final record had been 15–16. But that was only a small part of the problem. In December, Massimino had learned that Gary McLain, the starting point guard on that miraculous 1985 team, was in the process of selling a story to Sports Illustrated in which he confessed, at length, to having used and sold cocaine while at Villanova. Even worse, McLain claimed in the story that Massimino had been aware of the problem but had never done anything beyond warning him to stop. The implication was that Massimino didn’t want to deal with McLain’s addiction just so long as McLain continued to play well.

  Given a choice between being accused of that kind of exploitation or of having both his hands cut off, Massimino would have willingly given up his hands. Always, he had prided himself on the family atmosphere he had created at Villanova, not just because his players graduated but because even after they left, they were still part of Villanova and Villanova basketball. This was a coach who got his players up at 5:30 in the morning during preseason to work out, and then gave them milk and cookies after the workout.

  Now, for a price, Gary McLain was going to tell the world Rollie Massimino didn’t care, that he was just another coach who cared only about winning. It would be March before the story appeared. But Massimino knew in December. He told no one. “We noticed something was wrong with him,” said Mark Plansky, a junior on that team. “He wasn’t himself. The emotion just wasn’t there. But we had no idea what it was.”

  Massimino is known as the Danny DeVito of coaches. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of dollars he spends on clothes, he always ends up looking like an unmade bed at the end of a game. “He starts the game looking great,” his son R. C. once said, “but by halftime he’s sort of unraveled.”

  Not in 1987. Massimino might as well have been Tom Landry on the bench. “I was,” he remembered, “a mannequin.”

  When the story broke, his players and friends understood why he had been so distracted all season. Just before publication, Massimino talked to McLain. “He told me, ‘Coach, I’m doing this to help kids. Nothing will happen to you or the program because you are too big.’ ”

  That was a little hard for Massimino to swallow since McLain had only told his story in return for a lot of money—about $20,000. But he had to live with it and deal with it.

  “The whole thing was scary,” Massimino said. “Honest to God, I swear on my five children, if I had known, I would have tried to help him. I always tell our guys that if they have a problem and they come to me, I’ll help them. But if I catch them, they’re history.

  “I always thought I knew my people and my kids. This time I didn’t. I take responsibility for that but it hurt me to think anyone could believe I would know what was going on and not do anything about it.”

  A press conference was called to respond to the McLain story. For an hour beforehand, Massimino sat in his office with university lawyers poring through a carefully worded statement, rehearsing what to say and what not to say. Finally, it all kicked in.

  “I got up, ran out of the office and said I couldn’t do this,” he remembered. “I went into [Assistant Coach] Steve Lappas’s office and I sat down and I cried. It all just got to me at once. Then I walked back in and I said, ‘Forget the speech, I’m just gonna go out there like I always have and say what I think. I’ve been Rollie for thirty-two years in this business and that’s who I still am.’ ”

  So he went out and talked about how much it hurt. And, when he was finished, he said he only wished Gary McLain well. Later, that summer, he helped get him a tryout with a team in Holland. A lot of Massimino’s friends were furious with him for helping McLain. “He’s still one of my kids,” Massimino said in reply.

  But now it was October. The 15–16 team was back, minus leading scorer Harold Jensen. Recruiting had been a disaster: One player reneged on a verbal commitment and had gone to Pittsburgh and one decided at the last minute to play baseball.

  A few people picked Villanova as high as fifth in the Big East. A few more picked the Wildcats as lo
w as ninth. The consensus: sixth or seventh. “The thought of being mediocre scares me,” Massimino admitted. “But I’ve always said the real guy comes out under adversity. Maybe I needed a shock like last year. Maybe it had all gotten a little too easy.

  “I’ve told this team our job this season is simple: Find a way. I told them they better find a way. Because if we finish seventh in the league, they’ll find me in the Schuylkill River.”

  One person who would not have minded seeing Villanova finish seventh—or lower—in the Big East was Paul Evans. Across the state from Philadelphia, Evans was assembling a very talented team at Pittsburgh. In his first season at Pitt, 1987, after moving there from Navy, Evans had put together a 24–9 record, tying for first place in the Big East.

  This was no small accomplishment for what was largely the same team that had been 15–14 the previous year. Evans had come in vowing that the talented, undisciplined team would become a disciplined one or heads would roll. On the very first day he ran a practice at Pittsburgh, Evans threw Jerome Lane out of practice. The two fought most of that year, but when it was over Lane had become the first player under 6–7 to lead the nation in rebounding since Elgin Baylor, thirty years earlier.

  But as he was earning respect for his coaching abilities, Evans was doing very little to win friends or influence people around the Big East. Evans is, to put it mildly, outspoken. What he thinks he says and if people don’t like it, tough. When Bobby Martin, a talented 6–10 high school center, changed his mind about his verbal commitment to Villanova and signed with Pitt, Massimino was angry and unhappy. When he made that unhappiness public, Evans lashed back at him, accusing him of doing a lousy recruiting job.