A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  “Two years ago, the committee wanted to abandon the Garden completely, play the whole tournament at campus sites. We would make more money that way. But this is where the NIT was born and where it will always be. Seton Hall should draw more here. Maybe, tomorrow night.”

  P. J. Carlesimo was as aware of the NIT’s tradition as his father. Growing up in Pennsylvania, he had driven to New York with his high school team each year as a teenager to see the semifinals and finals of the NIT. “We would always eat at Tad’s Steak House after the games,” he said. “Ninety-nine cents for a steak. It was heaven. Of course in those days the NIT was all we cared about. The NCAA was just the tournament that UCLA won every year.”

  But even with those memories, Carlesimo’s thoughts that Friday evening were not about tradition or, for that matter, his father. “After it’s over,” he said. “Then, I’ll have time to think about those things.”

  After the victory over New Mexico, Carlesimo sat in the stands watching Florida beat Iowa State in the second game. Then, as planned, he went to have a late dinner with his coaches and with Loyola–Marymount Coach Paul Westhead, who was in town to play in the annual Joe Lapchick tournament at St. John’s on Saturday and Sunday.

  Westhead and Carlesimo were not your average college coaches out for a late-night dinner. Carlesimo had majored in the classics at Fordham. Westhead was an English teacher who specialized in Shakespeare. He had coached at LaSalle before coaching the Los Angeles Lakers to the NBA title in 1980, only to be fired the next year during a dispute with Magic Johnson. Now, he was back in college coaching at Loyola, a school located a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport. Westhead had a bunch of Pacific 10 transfers and high hopes in his second season.

  Dinner was at Vagabondo. Dinner in New York with Carlesimo is always at Vagabondo. An ex-girlfriend once said of him (Carlesimo is thirty-eight and single): “He’s the only man in the world who thinks there’s only one restaurant in New York City.”

  She was wrong of course. There were two: Vagabondo and Tad’s.

  “How do you feel about Florida?” Westhead asked Carlesimo.

  “They’re a bitch,” Carlesimo said. “We’ve got three tapes to look at tonight but I don’t know why. I know [center Dwayne] Schintzius is great, I know [guard Vernon] Maxwell is great and I know [forward Livingston] Chatman is as good as any freshman I’ve seen. We’ll look at the tapes and see if we can figure something out.”

  Westhead said, “I don’t need to figure anything out. We just run, run, and then run. If we get to play St. John’s Sunday, I’m sure Looey [Carnesecca] will have Mickey Crowley waiting for me. Maybe he’ll bring Steve Honzo out of retirement while he’s at it.”

  Crowley and Honzo are longtime eastern referees who most visiting coaches would swear have worked at least twenty-five St. John’s games a year for the last twenty-five years. Westhead is wrong, though. Crowley is nowhere in sight Sunday. But Saturday he works St. John’s–Harvard.

  The NIT final was everything a final should be. The crowd was better—9,729—and the game superb. For twenty minutes, Florida was exactly what Carlesimo had said it would be: a bitch. Chatman, the 6–7 freshman with the biggest rear end seen in college basketball since Mark Aguirre played at DePaul, was dominant inside. Seton Hall, trailing 43–23 a minute into the second half, looked completely over-whelmed.

  Suddenly, with shocking quickness, the Pirates rallied. John Morton, the up-and-down point guard, made two steals. Mark Bryant began to control the boards. A 13–0 run closed the gap to 43–36 and forced Coach Norman Sloan to call time. Maxwell hit a tough baseline jumper to stop the skein but The Hall kept coming. A three-point shot by James Major cut the margin to 51–49, and there was still 10:38 left. The Garden was rocking. Suddenly the empty seats were invisible.

  Seton Hall couldn’t quite pull this one off, however. A three-point play by Bryant tied the game at 64–64, but the Pirates never got the lead. Morton tied it one last time at 68 with twelve seconds to go, but Martin Salley was called for a silly foul twenty-five feet from the basket on Maxwell with six seconds left.

  Calmly, the senior guard made both free throws. Morton, rushing, shot too soon, a thirty-footer with four seconds still left. The ball rolled off the rim as the buzzer sounded and Seton Hall had come up just short, 70–68.

  Carlesimo’s immediate reaction was to grab Morton, put his arm around him, and say, “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

  A few minutes later, when Carlesimo went out to receive the runner-up trophy, the man presenting it was his father. Their hug was long, lingering, and emotional. “I wanted to win because of what it would have meant for the program,” Carlesimo said later. “But I wanted to win for my dad, too. I’m prejudiced, but I think he saved the NIT.”

  In 1987, it was the son—and his team—more than the father that saved the NIT.

  The atmosphere the next afternoon at the Joe Lapchick Tournament final was decidedly different from the one in downtown Manhattan the night before.

  St. John’s has staged this tournament to open the season for thirteen years now. It is named for the legendary St. John’s coach who retired in 1965. His replacement back then was a diminutive assistant coach named Lou Carnesecca. He has coached the Redmen ever since, except for a three-year break when he tried his hand at the pros, coaching the New York Nets in the old ABA.

  To everyone in Queens, Carnesecca is just Looey. In his favorite Italian restaurants, he is Looey. On the street corners and in the schoolyards, he is Looey. And in Alumni Hall, he is Looey.

  The Lapchick is a Thanksgiving weekend tradition. Looey usually invites three turkeys to Alumni Hall and the Redmen carve them up while 6,006 pack the old building to get an early look at what Looey has this season.

  Always, it seems Looey has something. He has never coached a losing team in twenty years at St. John’s and never failed to make postseason play. And, he has never lost a game in the Lapchick Tournament.

  “Why shouldn’t we win?” he will say defensively. “If you come to my house for dinner, don’t you want me to enjoy the evening?”

  This is typical Carnesecca logic. He is, in his own words, a master at ignoratio elenghi—Latin for “circumventing the issue.” Looey can circumvent the issue in several languages. It is part of his charm.

  This year, though, Looey may have miscalculated. Loyola–Marymount, Westhead’s team, fit the profile of a good Lapchick team when it was scheduled: last in its conference and going nowhere. Harvard and Tennessee Tech, the other two teams, certainly cooperated, losing easily on Saturday. But Loyola is another case. With transfers like Corey Gaines and Hank Gathers and a solid player in Mike Yoest, the Lions are good. Very good, in fact.

  What’s more, they like to take about ninety to a hundred shots a game. Carnesecca is much more comfortable when there are about a hundred shots in the game total. This final will not be your typical Lapchick blowout.

  The fans wander in shortly before tip-off on a rainy Sunday afternoon. This is a family crowd. They go to church, get in their cars and drive to Alumni Hall, one of the few places in New York City where parking is both easy and free.

  Looey has a brand-new backcourt this season, a pair of jets imported from San Jacinto Junior College—Greg (Boo) Harvey and Michael Porter. Harvey and Porter would probably fit in better with Loyola’s run-and-gun style. That is apparent early in the game when Looey jumps off the bench as Harvey races past him and screams, “Boo, slow down!”

  This is a fascinating game from start to finish. Loyola keeps sprinting while St. John’s filibusters. The fans are confused: The game is close, something is wrong, and yet they sense that their team is playing pretty well.

  Carnesecca doesn’t want the Lapchick streak to end during his reign. When his Italian center, Marco Baldi, makes two horrendous plays in a row, Looey curses him out—in Italian. Still, the Redmen lead 44–40 at halftime.

  The game seesaws the whole second half. The difference is Shelton Jones
, this year’s designated senior star for St. John’s. He finishes with 25 points and 16 rebounds, showing the kind of spark he never had his first three years.

  But Gathers, who wears white tassles on his sneakers to emulate his hero, Muhammad Ali, keeps the Lions close. When Jeff Fryer hits a jumper with thirty-eight seconds left, an 11-point St. John’s lead is down to 85–84.

  The Redmen spread out, trying to kill the clock. Loyola lets it run to fifteen seconds before fouling Porter. Calmly, Porter makes the first free throw. But he misses the second. Gathers rebounds and tosses an outlet pass toward Gaines. Remarkably, Porter flashes between them, steals the pass and lays the ball in with six seconds left to make it 88–84. Ball game.

  But no. As the ball comes through the net, St. John’s Matt Brust grabs it. Technical foul. All game long, the Redmen have been touching the ball coming through the basket to try to slow the Loyola fast break. Westhead’s complaints have been heard and this is the fourth technical called for delay of game.

  Looey is so exorcised he leaps in the air and one of his hearing aids pops out. “I’ve seen a thousand games,” he will say later, “and I’ve never seen the rule interpreted like that in my life.” Where is Steve Honzo when you need him?

  Yoest makes only one of the technicals, making it 88–85. A three-pointer can still tie, but Fryer comes up way short and time runs out. The Lapchick record is intact: 26–0 and thirteen first-place trophies. Everyone goes home happy.

  “That’s a heck of a club,” Looey says. “They’re an NCAA team.” He’s right. Loyola will win twenty-three straight games and finish 26–4, but Looey doesn’t know that in November. He once called U.S. International a heck of a club after beating them and added, “They’re going to beat a lot of people.” U.S. International was 1–17 at the time.

  But Looey is happy … sort of. “We made enough mistakes to put Goodyear out of business,” he says. What???? And: “Running was their idea, not ours.” And: “I don’t understand the technical fouls. We’re just poor Ascensions. Someone else will have to explain what happened.”

  Someone asks if playing a tough game this early in the season might help the Redmen in the long run. Looey laughs. “You ever hear a coach say to his team, ‘Let’s go out and have a tough one tonight?’ Who needs it? It’s like when you hear a kid say, ‘I wasn’t up for the game.’ What does that mean? Does a kid sit there and say, ‘I’m going to stink tonight?’

  “It’s a funny game. We won. It’s nice. If we lost, would the school close tomorrow? It isn’t that important. Nobody remembers who won this tournament five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago.”

  Wrong, Looey. Everyone remembers who won five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago. It was St. John’s, St. John’s, and St. John’s.

  Looey smiles. “Oh yeah,” he says, “I forgot.”

  By the time Thanksgiving weekend is over, almost every college basketball team in America has opened its season. Some like to start with walkovers—Georgetown begins every year in Hawaii playing a team called Hawaii-Loa—while others seek out the tough holiday tournaments to get extra games against top competition.

  One team that coveted an early challenge was Arizona. The Wildcats had wiped out the Soviet Union in their preseason exhibition game and were wound up for the Great Alaska Shootout, knowing that Syracuse and Michigan, both ranked in most top fives, were waiting for them there.

  For Steve Kerr, this would be a weekend when he would find out a lot about himself and his knee’s progress, since he would be facing Michigan’s Gary Grant and Syracuse’s Sherman Douglas, two of the top point guards in the country.

  Even if he never scored another basket, Kerr’s story was already extraordinary. It is a story that reads like a movie script, except that if you sent it to Hollywood you’d be laughed right off the lot. “It has to be believable to sell,” they would tell you. “This one will never fly.”

  It wouldn’t fly as fiction. Too corny. Think about it: Bright, articulate kid comes out of California recruited by no one and lands, thanks in large measure to his father, in a rebuilding program at Arizona. Four months after he enrolls, his father is assassinated by terrorists in Lebanon. Two nights later, the kid comes off the bench and leads his team to a dramatic victory. He becomes a star and a hero. Then, he tears up his knee playing for the U.S. and is told his career might be over. He comes back and becomes the leader of a top ten team.

  Never happen, right? But that’s the catch: The story’s true. The only person who doesn’t see anything terribly remarkable in it is Steve Kerr. “To me, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal,” he said. “I guess that’s because I lived it. For a long time, people looked at me as a victim. I think now, they see me as a person. I prefer it that way. I really don’t think of myself as being all that different than other guys.”

  But Kerr is different. Every time life has knocked him down he has gotten up. It isn’t that nothing bothers him, it’s just that nothing is going to defeat him.

  He was born in Beirut, the third child of Malcolm and Ann Kerr. Malcolm Kerr had also been born in Beirut and it was there that he met his wife. He had just graduated from Princeton and was doing postgraduate work. She was on her junior year abroad from Occidental College. They were married in 1957 and eventually had four children: Susan, John, Steven, and Andrew.

  The Kerrs lived all over the world while their children were growing up: Beirut, Cairo, Oxford, the south of France, Tunisia, and Los Angeles. Steve was always the family jock. “My first memories are of wanting to play ball,” he said. “I learned to read by reading the sports pages of the newspaper. Whenever we were in L.A. my dad would take me to Dodger games and UCLA basketball games all the time. He loved it almost as much as I did.”

  Malcolm Kerr was on the UCLA faculty for twenty years, even when teaching abroad. For a couple of years, Steve Kerr was a UCLA ballboy. His first close-up heroes were college basketball players. He played all sports when he was young, although his quick temper as a baseball pitcher unnerved his parents.

  “He just didn’t handle losing very well at all,” Ann Kerr said. “It was especially bad when he was pitching. Malcolm and I were actually sort of relieved when he started playing basketball all the time. You can’t afford to lose your temper every time something goes wrong in that sport. We were much more comfortable with that.”

  By ninth grade, basketball was Kerr’s sport. The family was living in Cairo and Kerr played for the American school team. They mostly played adult club teams, often on outdoor courts that had rocks in them. The games were rather crude, but Kerr was happy.

  “People don’t understand what Cairo is really like,” he said. “They think of Egypt and they think of pyramids and camels. Actually, for an American teenager, Cairo is a great place. There are Americans all over and there aren’t very many rules you have to follow. I had a great time over there.”

  He returned to Los Angeles for his sophomore year at Pacific Palisades High School, largely to play on a more competitive level. By his junior season, his parents had come back to the U.S. and Kerr was starting to attract notice from college scouts because of his range as a shooter.

  With Malcolm Kerr back in the Middle East, Ann Kerr stayed behind in Los Angeles during Steve’s senior season to help him deal with the recruiting process. There wasn’t very much to deal with. The scouting services had labeled him too slow. No one called. Finally, Gonzaga asked him to fly up for a visit.

  “I flew up there and what they did was try me out,” Kerr remembered. “I had to play against John Stockton [now a star with the Utah Jazz] for two hours. I didn’t do very well. When it was over, the coach, Jay Hillock, said to me, ‘It wouldn’t be a problem if you were a step slow, but you’re two steps slow.’ ”

  Kerr was crushed. When he graduated from high school that spring he still had no idea where he would be going to college.

  In the meantime, Malcolm Kerr’s lifelong dream had come true: He had been offered the job as pres
ident of the American University in Beirut. Being an expert on the Middle East, this was what he had always wanted. But he also knew there was danger associated with the job. Beirut was very different from what it had been in the 1950s, when it was known as “The Paris of the Middle East.”

  Now it was caught in the middle of an ugly war. The man Malcolm Kerr would succeed, David Dodge, had been kidnapped in 1982 and held hostage for a year. Malcolm Kerr called a family meeting to talk about the job.

  “We all knew the risks involved,” Ann Kerr said. “But this was the job Malcolm had always dreamed about. There was never really any doubt about going.”

  Steve was seventeen at the time. He remembers that family meeting. “I didn’t say much,” he said. “I never really considered what was happening. Obviously, I was kind of naïve but it’s the kind of thing where you think, ‘This can’t happen to me.’ This was just my dad’s job. I never thought about it any differently.”

  His older brother John did think about it differently. Hauntingly, Steve can still remember John saying to his father, “I just don’t want Mom to end up a widow.”

  Steve looks back now and knows that hindsight is useless. “When I think about it,” he said softly, “I don’t feel any bitterness. Just sadness. My dad is the reason I’m at Arizona, he’s the reason I’m the basketball player that I am. Sometimes, when I think of the success I’ve had I think about how much he would have enjoyed it all. I just wish he was here for all of this.”

  It was Malcolm Kerr who brought Arizona and Steve Kerr together. During the summer of 1983, after graduating from high school, Steve played summer league basketball in Los Angeles. His father was home for the summer and they spent a good deal of time together. Often, when Steve played, Malcolm watched. Malcolm Kerr once said that his greatest joy, next to being president of AU-Beirut, was watching Steve play basketball.

  Kerr’s play in the summer league attracted attention. Colorado was interested but didn’t have a scholarship to offer. Kerr was welcome to come there and walk on if he liked. Cal State Fullerton was not only interested but was willing to offer Kerr a scholarship. A first. And then there was Arizona.