A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  Lute Olson had taken the Arizona job that spring, knowing he had a major rebuilding job ahead of him. He was scouring the California summer leagues in search of underclassmen with potential when he spotted Kerr. He was surprised—and intrigued—when he learned that Kerr was a high school graduate without a college.

  “We had a scholarship left, we weren’t very good to say the least, and this kid could shoot,” Olson remembered. “I thought he was worth looking at again.”

  Olson sent Assistant Coach Kenny Burmeister to look at Kerr. Burmeister wasn’t sold. Olson went back again, this time taking his wife Bobbi with him. Bobbi Olson had seen a lot of basketball. When she saw Kerr she turned to her husband and said, “Lute, are you kidding?”

  Olson was hesitant. In the meantime, Fullerton was pressing Kerr for a decision. He wanted to go to Arizona—sight unseen—but suspected Olson was delaying in the hope that someone better might come along.

  “I spent three days trying to get the Arizona coaches on the phone to find out whether they wanted me or not,” Kerr said. “They were all out on the road. Finally, I just gave up, figured they were ducking me and called Fullerton and told them I would come. They were really nice and back then they had a better team than Arizona did. But to tell you the truth I wasn’t that thrilled about going to college just off the freeway next to Disneyland.”

  Two days after Kerr had committed to Fullerton, Olson finally called back. Kerr told him he was going to Fullerton. Olson wished him luck and said he was sorry Arizona had lost him. Kerr was baffled. Arizona had never offered him a scholarship.

  “Somewhere, our communication broke down,” Olson said. “I had the impression we had simply lost Steve to Fullerton. I didn’t realize he wanted to play for us.”

  Malcolm Kerr did. He noticed his son moping around the house, clearly unhappy about the way things had turned out. So, he sat him down and said, “Where do you want to go to college?”

  “Arizona.”

  “Fine, then. Let’s call Coach Olson and tell him that.”

  Olson remembers the phone call vividly. “Malcolm asked me if we wanted Steve at Arizona. I told him we did. Then he said to me, ‘This is a very important question. Steve is torn up about having made a commitment to Fullerton. He doesn’t want to renege. But he really wants to go to Arizona.’

  “I told Malcolm that it might sound self-serving but if a kid wanted to go to another school after committing to mine, I wouldn’t want him to come because no one wants someone in their program who is going to be unhappy.”

  Malcolm Kerr talked with his son again. He pointed out that nothing had been signed and that four years was a long time. The decision was made. Steve would enroll at Arizona.

  That done, he went off on vacation with his family to Beirut. Malcolm Kerr was taking up residence there as the president of AU-Beirut. On the day Steve was supposed to leave Beirut to fly home and start school, his mother took him to the airport.

  “While we were in the terminal, they started shelling the airport,” Steve said. “They were trying to get planes as they sat on the runway. The driver who had taken us to the airport told us to get away from all the windows. Then, he decided to get us out of there and back to the embassy.”

  Two days later the same driver took Kerr on a terrifying ride through Syria to Amman, Jordan. They were stopped a number of times but the driver, who knew the route and the games, talked them through. Kerr flew home from there. Several months later he learned that his driver had been killed by a sniper shortly after that ride.

  Kerr fit in quickly at school and with the basketball team. He was the third guard, the shooting specialist off the bench on a lousy team. But he was happy.

  Then, on January 18, 1984, Kerr was awakened shortly after midnight by a telephone call in his dorm room. His brother’s nightmare had become reality: Malcolm Kerr had been shot and killed by two assassins outside his office in Beirut.

  The first member of the Arizona coaching staff to hear the news was Assistant Coach Scott Thompson. He raced over to Kerr’s dorm and found Kerr sitting motionless on his bed, paralyzed by what he had been told. When Thompson sat down, the first thing Kerr said to him was, “I’ve got to talk to my mother.”

  It took several hours, but Kerr finally got his mother on the phone. She and his brother Andrew were both okay. The next two days are a blur in Kerr’s memory. What he does remember is that the only escape from his grief came when he was on the basketball court. Arizona State was coming to Tucson to play two days after the murder. Olson asked Kerr if he wanted to play. Kerr said absolutely.

  “It was the only thing to do,” he said. “My dad would have been very disappointed in me if I hadn’t played. What’s more, there was nothing I could do at that point. I knew my family was safe. I was going to the memorial service the next day. It just wouldn’t have made sense not to play.”

  A moment of silence for Malcolm Kerr was planned before the tip-off. Initially, Olson intended to keep the team off the floor until it was over. But Kerr came to him and said he felt he needed to be there. Olson then decided the whole team should be there with him.

  It is difficult to imagine the emotion of that evening. Even with Arizona’s arch-rival in the building, few people in the McKale Center that night were really focused on basketball. The violence of the shooting that had taken place thousands of miles away was tangible as everyone stood in silence. Kerr broke down. So did many in the crowd.

  Eight minutes into the game, Olson sent Kerr in as part of his normal rotation. The first time he touched the ball—eighteen seconds after coming in—Kerr was open. Instinct took over. He shot from twenty feet. Swish. It is unlikely that a shot to win a national championship was as electrifying as that one.

  “I’m not sure I can describe the feeling in the building that night,” Olson said. “All I know is, I cried and I certainly wasn’t alone.”

  The legend of Steve Kerr was born that night. He scored 12 points—shooting five-of-seven from the field—and the inspired Wildcats destroyed a superior Arizona State team 71–49 for their first Pacific 10 victory under Olson. From that night forward, Kerr became Tucson’s adopted son. Whenever he scored a field goal and the PA announcer screeched, “Steeeeeve Kerrrrrrrrr!” Thirteen thousand people screeched it right back. Everyone in town wanted to invite Kerr to dinner. Every school wanted him to speak to its students.

  Almost always, Kerr accepted. At times, being such a hero was embarrassing to him. He had never thought of himself as special, and that attitude is exactly what made him special. Also, he kept his self-deprecating sense of humor even amid the constant adulation.

  He became a starter as a sophomore, then, as a junior moved to point guard. There he became a star, the leader of a very young team, picked in preseason to finish eighth, that shocked people by winning the Pac-10 title. When people asked Kerr about his emergence as the team’s leader, he laughed.

  “You want to know why I’m the leader,” he said. “It’s simple. Last summer we went to France. I speak French. The other guys don’t. Every time they wanted to hit on a girl, they needed me to interpret. That’s when I became the leader.”

  Olson, who was continually amazed by Kerr’s improvement as a player, didn’t buy that line. “He’s the best leader I’ve ever seen,” he said. “If he told this team that green was orange, they would all believe him.”

  During the summer after Kerr’s junior year, Olson coached the U.S. team in the World Championships in Spain. Kerr made the team and was a key player. Then, during the semifinal game against Brazil, he drove the lane looking to create a play against Oscar, the Brazilian shooting specialist who would torture the U.S. a year later in the Pan American Games final.

  “I remember going by Oscar easily because he couldn’t guard anyone,” Kerr said. “I saw Charles Smith open and I jumped in the air to pass him the ball. But someone stepped in front of him so I sort of twisted in the air to get a shot off. When I came down my whole body was off-bala
nce. I felt my knee just blow out when I landed. The pain was unbelievable.”

  David Robinson, the center on that team, was sitting on the bench when Kerr fell. He can still see the play in his mind’s eye: “When Steve came down it was one of the most horrifying sounds I’ve ever heard. You knew it was bad right away.”

  It was torn ligaments, bad enough that team doctor Tim Taft felt he should immediately tell Kerr that this was often a career-ending injury. When that diagnosis reached Tucson, hysteria broke out. The word was that Kerr was through as a player. Kerr never believed that for a minute, although when someone asked him what he would do if he couldn’t play again he grinned and said, “I’ll just have them fire Coach Olson and take his job.”

  There was no need. Kerr went through reconstructive surgery, worked all through the ’87 season on rehabilitation, and began playing again in the spring. Slowly, his confidence was coming back. But as the Wildcats flew into Anchorage the day before Thanksgiving, Kerr had misgivings. In the cold weather, the knee felt stiff. He wondered if he could compete with Grant and Douglas.

  The answer to that question was an emphatic yes. In the semifinals, he completely outplayed Grant. Kerr was so excited that when Grant started talking to him during the game, he talked back to him. And when he buried a key three-pointer late in the game, Kerr pointed right at Grant as if to say, “Take that.”

  Two days later, after enduring an earthquake in the morning—“A nice way to start the day,” Kerr said—the Wildcats upset Syracuse. Suddenly, people were taking notice of them. Dick Vitale was screaming on ESPN that Sean Elliott was an All-America. Kerr, people noticed, wasn’t just a good story, he was a good player.

  “I finally feel as if people have completely accepted me as a person, not just as a victim,” he said. “This is a great feeling to be on a team with this kind of potential. I hope we can keep it going all year.”

  They were certainly started in the right direction.

  7

  “IT’S STILL EARLY BUT …”

  December 3 … Knoxville, Tennessee

  One of the last teams in the country to open the season was the University of Tennessee. There was something correct about this delay, because the arena that the Volunteers were scheduled to open their season in was already two years late.

  When the Thompson–Boling Arena had first been conceived in the early 1980s, Tennessee was battling Kentucky for supremacy in the Southeast Conference. Building an arena that would have more seats than Kentucky’s 23,000-seat Rupp Arena seemed a logical step.

  But almost since the day that B. Ray Thompson anonymously put up the first $5 million of the $37 million it would take to build the arena, Tennessee basketball had seemed jinxed. Not only had the construction of the building been a disaster—one death, two construction firms, and two pending lawsuits—but the basketball program had slipped steadily.

  The story that may best sum up what had happened to Tennessee basketball was Doug Roth. In high school, Roth was coveted by everyone. He was 6–11, a good athlete, a good student, and his statistics were superb. He could shoot with both hands and, best of all as far as Don DeVoe was concerned, he was from Knoxville.

  “When I first saw Doug Roth play as a junior in high school, I thought he was a breakthrough player for our program,” DeVoe said, looking back. “We were averaging about twenty wins a year at the time. I thought he was the kind of player who could take us to twenty-three or twenty-four wins a year.”

  DeVoe worked diligently to make sure Roth stayed home when it came time to choose a college, and when Roth announced in 1985 that he was going to Tennessee, DeVoe was elated. Roth had been named to virtually every high school All-America team there was. DeVoe, often accused of not being a good recruiter, had pulled off a major recruiting coup.

  But that summer, DeVoe went to see Roth play in the annual Olympic Festival. Suddenly, playing against players who were much bigger and quicker than the ones he had played against in high school, Roth looked human. Very human. DeVoe also noticed that Roth had trouble at times doing simple things like catching the ball. There was a reason: Roth was legally blind in his right eye.

  During Roth’s first two seasons at Tennessee, the Volunteers won a total of twenty-six games, a far cry from the average of twenty-three or twenty-four a season DeVoe had anticipated. There were many other reasons for the team’s troubles, but Roth, who averaged 3 points a game as a freshman and 9.7 as a sophomore, became a symbol of all those problems.

  No one was more frustrated by those problems than DeVoe. This was a coach who had only had one losing season during his first fourteen at three different schools. Suddenly, at the age of forty-five he had rolled back-to-back losing seasons: 12–16 and 14–15.

  “A lot of things went wrong those two years,” he said. “Our best player, Fred Jenkins, missed eighteen of our thirty-six conference games with injuries. Roth didn’t pan out the way we thought he would. We had other injuries. But the bottom line, to be honest, was that I hadn’t recruited well enough. If we had more depth, we could have overcome the injuries.

  “Instead, we only won one conference road game [out of eighteen] in two years. We lost games that Mary Poppins would have won. Last year we were up 12 on Kentucky with 1:10 left and found a way to lose. We just have to find a way to be more consistent this year and, more than anything, to play better defense.”

  Defense has always been the cornerstone of DeVoe’s coaching approach, not surprising considering his background. He was born and raised on his parents’ 179-acre farm in Clinton County, Ohio, and to a large extent still looks and sounds like the farmer’s son that he is: He is tall and clean-cut-looking with a quick, eager laugh and a sincerity and intensity that carries over into his coaching.

  DeVoe went to Ohio State on a partial scholarship during Fred Taylor’s glory years there. He fully intended to get his degree in animal sciences, go back to the farm and breed livestock. But after one semester under Taylor and a coaching class taught by Woody Hayes, DeVoe wanted to coach.

  He graduated in 1964 with a degree in education and began looking for a coaching job. A year later, one of his former teammates, Bob Knight, was named the head coach at Army. He hired DeVoe as his assistant. Five intense years later, DeVoe left Knight to go back to Ohio State as a graduate assistant.

  “Those were tough years working for Bob,” he said. “But I learned a lot from him. I figured I was destined for small college coaching somewhere and I would need a graduate degree. So, I decided to go back to Ohio State and work for Fred [Taylor] again while I got my master’s.”

  DeVoe not only got his master’s, he got an offer to be the head coach at Virginia Tech—and took it. One year later, the Hokies wrote one of the more remarkable stories in the history of the NIT when they won four games by a total of five points and won the tournament on a desperation buzzer-beater by Bobby Stephens, stunning Notre Dame 94–93 in overtime.

  DeVoe can remember most of the details of that tournament, including riding the subway with his team to the Garden for each game. “It’s funny how hard it becomes to top something like that,” he said. “That was an amazing experience for me as a coach. I’ve had success since then, but nothing that felt quite as exhilarating as that.”

  DeVoe continued to win at Virginia Tech and when Taylor, under pressure, resigned at Ohio State midway through the ’76 season, DeVoe’s name was immediately linked with the job. He was on his way to a 21–7 record at Virginia Tech and, being an Ohio State alumnus, most people thought DeVoe would be hired.

  DeVoe was on the last year of his contract at Tech. He didn’t want to sign a new contract. Ohio State was a possibility, although he told the school he would not talk to them until his season was over. The season ended, shockingly, with a first-round loss to Western Michigan in the NCAA Tournament, a game DeVoe still shakes his head about. The next day DeVoe interviewed at Ohio State. But he came away sensing he was not going to get the job.

  “It was just a gut f
eeling,” he said. “The next day I was driving from Blacksburg to Philadelphia and I heard on the radio that Eldon Miller had gotten the job. It didn’t shock me. But then when I got home, I found out that Virginia Tech had hired a new coach, thinking I was going to Ohio State. All of a sudden, I didn’t have any job at all. It was pretty depressing.”

  DeVoe landed at Wyoming for two years before Tennessee came after him. Ironically, he got the Tennessee job in large part because of the recommendation of then UCLA Athletic Director J. D. Morgan. When Morgan was looking for a coach to replace Gene Bartow in 1977, he had called DeVoe. Eventually, Morgan hired longtime UCLA assistant Gary Cunningham, but when Tennessee Athletic Director Bob Woodruff called the next year looking for names, Morgan mentioned DeVoe.

  During his first season at Tennessee, DeVoe won twenty-one games and beat Kentucky three times. His first five Tennessee teams reached the NCAA Tournament. The next two settled for the NIT but won twenty games each. It was the last two teams that had been failures.

  Tennessee is not a school that deals well with failure. And DeVoe is not the kind of coach who can lose and remain popular. He has always been private, but became even more so when he went through a divorce in 1983. He has since remarried and has two young children with his second wife, Ana. But he is not comfortable out on the town or palling around with the alumni. To be popular, he must win. For two years, he had not won.

  Now, with the new arena finally opening, DeVoe is feeling heat. Losing teams mean empty seats, especially in a huge arena. Tennessee, with Jenkins and leading scorer Tony White gone, is going to have to show improvement for DeVoe to keep his job. He knows that. His players know that.

  DeVoe has a good enough reputation in the coaching profession that be knows he will find work somewhere if he loses his job. But he has no desire to leave Knoxville. His wife is from there, he honestly believes that the new arena will be a major recruiting tool, and he is comfortable there after ten years.