A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  “The good news is, I can get the job,” he told friends jokingly. “The bad news is, I’m going to take it.”

  The first-year record was 8–20, the same as his predecessor Rich Falk. Foster had to get some players, that was clear. Suddenly, in the spring of 1987, Walker Lambiotte was available. Lambiotte had been one of those can’t-miss high school seniors in 1985. He starred at the summer camps, made every All-America team, and was recruited by every big-time program around.

  He was from Virginia and the Cavaliers recruited him, but his older brother Kenny had gone there, transferring away after only two years, even switching sports—basketball to football—at the University of Richmond. Maryland wanted him. So did Duke. And so did N.C. State.

  Valvano went after Walker Lambiotte hard. He was the kind of player his program really needed—Lambiotte could play and he was a good student. Valvano had been criticized for having a high transfer rate and a low graduation rate. Lambiotte was appealing because he was someone with a 3.4 gpa who, it just so happened, could run and jump. “Walker was a V job all the way,” Tom Abatemarco, then Valvano’s top assistant, remembered. “The father loved him right away and Jim knew it. We just stayed out of the way and let Jim do it all.”

  Jim did it. Walker Lambiotte chose State, a decision that hurt Mike Krzyzewski and thrilled Valvano. Lambiotte started often and played a lot his first year. He still started as a sophomore but his minutes dwindled and then dwindled further. He began to worry what his junior year would be like. He asked Valvano. “You’ve had two years of learning here,” Valvano responded. “You should play a lot.”

  But Lambiotte wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure if the way State played suited his own style. Lambiotte is a shooter, a lefty with a deadly touch. He is also a very good athlete. But he is not a ballhandler. He does not create his own shots. Most of State’s players do create their own shots, inside or outside. A guard who fit exactly that description, Rodney Monroe, had been signed. Lambiotte went home for spring break and talked it over with his parents. He had trepidations about transferring: the stigmas attached, sitting out a year from basketball—which all transfer student-athletes must do—and starting all over again. But transferring had worked out well for brother Kenny.

  “In the end, I just thought to myself, ‘Am I getting better the way I want to?’ ” he said. “The answer was no. I talked it over with my dad and he agreed. He was the one who called Coach Valvano and told him. I didn’t want to do it. It would have been hard for me because it was never anything personal. I still like the guy.”

  And Valvano liked Walter Lambiotte. But as practice began, the shooter was preparing to play—or in the case of this sit-out season, not play—for Bill Foster.

  Nowhere in the country do they enjoy October 15 more than in Lawrence. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is the absolutely horrific record of the Kansas football team. In 1987, the record was 1–10 and the victory was 13–12 over Southern Illinois. By October, everyone is more than ready for hoops to begin.

  It goes beyond that, though. This is one of the great traditional basketball programs in the country. Phog Allen Field House, named for the legendary Kansas coach, is one of the great old arenas in the country, a place that reeks with memories and rocks every time the doors open.

  In 1985, Mark Friedinger, then a Kansas assistant, suggested to Larry Brown the notion of opening the season with a 12:01 A.M. practice. The idea was hardly original. Kentucky has done it for years and many others also do it now. But Friedinger and Brown came up with a twist of their own. They decided to call the event, “Late Night with Larry Brown.” On a college campus filled with David Letterman watchers, this was bound to get some attention.

  The first “Late Night” was that October and more than eight thousand people showed up. The Jayhawks were coming off a 26–8 season and with Manning just a sophomore, expectations were high. It was also a novelty. People wondered how the second year would go. It went even better. This time twelve thousand people showed up. The Kansas Athletic Department was so excited that it wanted to charge admission for the third year. Brown wouldn’t allow it. But there were “Late Night” T-shirts ($10) and pizza for sale.

  Allen Field House was packed. All 15,800 seats were filled, most of them by 10 P.M., an hour before the prepractice festivities were to begin. While the players were gathering, Brown sat in his office with a friend watching game seven of the Cardinals—Giants playoff series. Already, the annual rumors that he would leave Kansas at the end of the season had started—especially with Manning graduating.

  Brown had thought about leaving the previous spring to coach the New York Knicks. At the same time, Manning had thought about leaving to turn pro. Both were still in Lawrence, however, for reasons of their own. Maybe that was why the T-shirts said “Still Late Night, still Larry Brown.”

  The party began at 11 P.M. with a look-alike contest. The guy doing Larry Brown walked with a noticeable limp, a tribute to the hip surgery Brown had undergone the previous spring. “I thought I got rid of that thing,” Brown said, watching. “Pee Wee Herman” beat out “Letterman” to win the contest and got booed. All seemed right with the world.

  Then came a search for the missing Jayhawk, the KU mascot for seventy-seven years. A contest was held to replace the Jayhawk. Just as the girl in the white hot pants and black high heels was about to be declared the winner, the Jayhawk showed up. Can’t win ’em all.

  Finally, just before midnight, the players showed up dressed in sunglasses and raincoats. The seniors were the last to arrive. Only one of them—Manning—wasn’t in sunglasses. To thunderous cheers, he led his teammates in a truly atrocious version of “My Girl.” That Manning was willing to lead the song was a tribute to how far he had come since he had been an almost painfully shy freshman.

  That his voice was lousy didn’t matter. Brown shrugged. “I’d rather be his agent as a basketball player than as a singer,” he said, laughing.

  Finally, with all the lights turned out, the clock struck midnight, the Jayhawks took off their raincoats and practice, in the form of a scrimmage, began. Kevin Pritchard scored the first basket of the season, Manning gave him the first high-five, and everyone partied well into the night.

  As the Jayhawks left the floor an hour later, the band played—what else?—“Kansas City.” One hundred and seventy-three days later, they would be in that city. But no one in the building could even begin to imagine the journey that would take them there.

  3

  RECRUITING

  More than any other sport, college basketball starts in stages. The games begin in November; practice in October. And recruiting begins full-blast in September.

  In one sense this is a misnomer because for college basketball coaches recruiting is a never-ending process. Even while you are wrapping up the recruitment of high school seniors, you are already going after juniors, looking at sophomores, and wondering about freshmen. There may even be an occasional eighth grader who is worth checking out.

  The recruiting game is a chameleon, constantly changing because the NCAA comes up with new rules on an almost annual basis. Once, not all that long ago, recruiting was simple. When the season was over, coaches went to some high school state tournaments, took in several all-star games, and made their pitches to that year’s graduating seniors.

  There was no such thing as a letter of intent. That is why a player like Tom McMillen could change his mind on the day he was supposed to register for classes at North Carolina in 1970 and instead register at Maryland.

  Now, because recruiting has become so intense and extreme, there are restrictions. There are rules. There are binding letters of intent. Once, a basketball player could not sign such a letter before April. But because so many players were being hounded even after they had made verbal commitments, there is now an eight-day signing period in November which allows players who have made a decision to sign with a college before their senior season begins.

&n
bsp; The raison d’être of this rule makes absolute sense: If a player makes his decision and signs early, he may then play his senior season free of recruiting burdens. It cuts down on circus productions like the one that surrounded Ralph Sampson in 1979.

  Sampson was so confused that when he walked to the microphone at a packed press conference in May to announce his decision, he still didn’t know where he was going. He opened his mouth and said, “I have chosen, Ken … Virginia.” The three live TV crews in the room from Kentucky almost had cardiac arrests on the spot. It was that close—and that confused.

  Now, in 1987, Alonzo Mourning, this year’s Ralph Sampson, would make his choice—Georgetown—in November. It was still a circus—with a shoe company representative playing a role—but it was a shorter circus.

  The downside of the rule is that it has pushed recruiting up so that much of it is being done during a player’s junior year and the ensuing summer. The letters and phone calls that followed a player as a senior in the past are now just as intensely there as soon as his junior year begins.

  This is not to imply that the life-and-death pursuit of players or cheating in recruiting is a new thing. It isn’t. Gene Corrigan, who has been athletic director at Virginia and Notre Dame and is now the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference, probably explained it best: “Recruiting hasn’t changed very much at all in the last thirty years. It’s just that now everyone notices the cheating. It has always been there.”

  Because everyone notices now and because recruiting became a twelve-month-a-year affair during the 1970s, the NCAA changes the rules more often than Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney change spouses. Once, there were no restrictions on how often you could visit a recruit, on how often you could see him play, on how many visits he could make, on how much time coaches could spend on the road.

  Now, everything is regulated. Each school may pay for a maximum of eighteen official visits for athletes to its campus. Each athlete may officially visit only five schools. There are lengthy “dead” periods when coaches are not allowed off campus to recruit or to see games. And, the period when colleges may officially visit homes has been cut back to twenty-one days. In 1987 that meant home visits began on September 17 and ended on October 7.

  Naturally, coaches hate anything that limits their recruiting time. But the rules make sense. They have brought a tiny semblance of sanity to an insane pursuit.

  Once, when there were no limits on coaches, Dave Pritchett, then an assistant coach at Maryland, rented seven cars in seven cities in two days. Pritchett was so intense about recruiting that when he left town on a recruiting trip he would always park in a tow-away zone. Why? “Because I could never remember where I had parked my car but I always knew where it would be towed to.”

  Makes perfect sense. There is one problem—and it is a very real one—with the limits. They hurt the smaller schools. Now, the player who was willing to visit a small school in the past might pass it up; able to make only five visits, he doesn’t want to “waste” one. With the shorter visitation period, a player may limit the list of schools invited into his home and lop off the smaller school that just wants a chance to make a pitch.

  “The rich get richer is what it is,” said Rick Barnes, who saw the rules work in his favor while at Alabama and Ohio State but was now being hurt by them at George Mason. “If a kid has only five visits and he has a chance to go to a school and see a football game on that last visit, what’s he going to do? It’s frustrating.”

  But that is the nature of recruiting. It is always going to be frustrating and agonizing, no matter what the rules. When coaches leave the profession, they all say, to a man, that their greatest relief is not having to recruit anymore.

  “It is demeaning,” Valvano said. “I have to go in and sell myself and my university. Why should I have to do that to a seventeen-year-old kid? Why should I answer his questions, many of which are totally ridiculous? When I think about coaching in the pros, the thing I think about most is that I would never have to recruit again.”

  Sometimes, coaches snap and say what they’re really thinking. American University Coach Ed Tapscott, winding down the nonstop three weeks of home visits, found himself in the house of an excellent athlete who was, to be polite, a shaky student.

  “In the middle of our talk, the kid said to me, ‘Hey Coach, how many seats are there in your new arena and how many times will you be on television next year?’ I just snapped. It was too many visits and too many questions like that. I said to him, ‘Look, you can’t even read and write and you’re asking me how many times you’re going to be on television? You’ve got some nerve.’

  “I thought there was an outside chance that maybe the family would like it, you know, the tough, honest approach. But my reaction was just instinctive and they didn’t go for the tough, honest approach.”

  Honesty is often not the best policy in recruiting. Jim Boeheim, the Syracuse coach, went into the home of Jerrod Mustaf, the highly sought 6–10 DeMatha High School senior, knowing that Mustaf thought of himself as a small forward. Boeheim hadn’t seen Mustaf play much but his assistants had.

  “When he asked me where I thought he would play, I said, ‘Inside.’ He said, ‘Have you seen me play?’ I said, ‘No, not really, not yet, but I’d be very surprised if you aren’t better off playing inside.’ I could tell by looking at him that we were done.”

  Mustaf, who is a Maryland freshman, confirms the story and Boeheim’s notion. “When he said that, I knew for sure I wouldn’t be going to Syracuse.”

  What makes coaches truly crazy are the often wacky reasons that players use to choose a school. Rarely does a player choose a school simply because he believes it will be the best place for him athletically and academically. Sometimes the weather on a particular visit decides. Sometimes a pretty date on that visit decides. Sometimes nice uniforms decide. Sometimes, it is even sillier than that.

  Tapscott, who needs all the breaks he can get coaching at a small school like American, lost a player last spring because of Kermit Washington, the best player in AU history.

  “We were recruiting a kid from Florida named Deron Hayes,” he explained. “The kid was about six-five, not a great player but a good one, the kind who could help us. He had a great visit to campus. He even told me when he was here that he’d like to settle in the Washington, D.C., area after college. Then, a few days later he calls me up and says he’s going to Penn State.”

  Tapscott said his question to Hayes was direct: “Why the hell are you going there?” From there, the conversation went like this:

  Hayes: “Well, coach, they have a lot of tradition.”

  Tapscott: “That’s in football, not basketball.”

  Hayes: “Well, coach, I think a degree from Penn State would mean more than a degree from American.”

  Tapscott: “Come on, Deron, that’s not it, you know our board scores are higher on the average than theirs are.”

  Hayes: “Well, coach, a lot of my friends from home are going to school up there.”

  Tapscott: “Deron, you told me you were ready to leave high school behind and move on to college. That’s not it either. Now come on, why Penn State?”

  Hayes (softly): “Coach, I can wear number twenty-four there.”

  Tapscott knew he had hit the real reason. Kermit Washington had worn No. 24 and American had retired it after his graduation. Hayes wore No. 24 in high school. He could not have worn it at American.

  “If I had been smart, I would have told him I could arrange for him to wear it and then after he signed, explain that I couldn’t work it out,” Tapscott said. “But I’m not that smart.”

  Or that dishonest. In recruiting, that is a weakness.

  One of the more unusual recruiting stories in the country was that of Jerrod Mustaf. In many ways, Mustaf was every college coach’s dream. He was 6–10, a gifted, graceful athlete who could run, shoot, and pass. He could play inside when he had to although, as he made clear to Jim Boeheim, he p
referred to be outside. He came from one of the great high school programs in America, DeMatha High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, where he played for the legendary coach Morgan Wootten. He was a good student, a bright youngster who would do well academically anywhere he decided to go.

  What made Mustaf different was the involvement of his father in the recruiting process. Parental involvement—to the point of being interfering and domineering—was certainly nothing new in recruiting. It is something coaches deal with all the time. Often, in their recruiting folders coaches write notes that say things like: “The father is the key here.” Or, “Johnny will go to college where his mother wants him to go.” Thus the phrase, “recruit the parents.”

  That was the case with Jerrod Mustaf. Although Sharr Mustaf insisted, as all parents do, that the decision on where to attend college was Jerrod’s and Jerrod’s alone, that was clearly not so. In fact, Sharr Mustaf readily admitted that he had gone to his son before his senior season and said, “Son, please let me use you.”

  At least, unlike many parents, Sharr Mustaf wanted to use his son for a good cause. Born and raised in North Carolina, a former Greyhound sales officer who had retired on disability, Sharr Mustaf was a handsome man of forty-six who felt deeply about the exploitation of blacks in athletics. That was where Jerrod came in. His son’s ability gave Sharr a chance to do something. That was why he had convinced his son to leave his mother in Whiteville, North Carolina, and move in with him and his second wife in order to play at DeMatha.

  “I can remember when Jerrod was a freshman, Sharr saying to me, ‘Coach, this boy has a chance to do something for his race,’ ” Morgan Wootten said. “It was something that I think was in his mind when he brought Jerrod to DeMatha.”

  As a DeMatha freshman, Jerrod Mustaf had played with Danny Ferry, then a senior. He was comfortable with Ferry and liked him but was pleased as a sophomore when Ferry had gone on to Duke and he became the focal point of the DeMatha offense. Ferry’s last team had lost the city championship game, the big game every year for DeMatha, and the Stags lost again in Mustaf’s sophomore and junior years. “I don’t want to leave here without having won a city championship,” he said at the outset of his senior year. “That’s the most important thing to me this season.”