A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  He wanted the ball. He dealt with the boos. He handled getting yelled at. Danny Manning had come a long way. But he still had a long way to go.

  8

  THE WEST COAST … AND BEYOND

  December 21 … Berkeley, California

  The memorable moments have been few and far between for the basketball program at the University of California during the past twenty-eight years. In 1959, the Golden Bears won the national championship. In 1960, they reached the championship game again before losing to Ohio State.

  Then Pete Newell retired. And Cal basketball seemed to retire right along with him. During the next twenty-five years, Cal had seven winning seasons. Newell had won his last eight games against UCLA. The year after he stepped down, Cal split with the Bruins. After that, it took twenty-five years—fifty-two games—before they won again.

  Newell, who was only forty-four when he got out of coaching, stayed on as athletic director for eight years before moving on to the NBA, first as a general manager, then as a superscout. But his legacy lived on at Cal, where they never quite figured out why he gave up doing something he did so well.

  “I had done coaching,” he said simply. “Plus, my doctor said I needed to give up cigarettes and coffee because they were messing up my lungs. I couldn’t coach without cigarettes and coffee.”

  Almost twenty-eight years later, looking back at what Cal basketball was before Newell and what it became after Newell, Cal decided to name its basketball floor for the man who did the most winning on it. On December 21, 1987, the floor of venerable old Harmon Gym became, officially, “Newell Court.”

  Exactly what people would call the 6,450-seat place where Cal plays its home games in the future was uncertain. Once, it had just been the men’s gym. Twenty-six years after it opened, in 1959, it was renamed Harmon Gym in honor of the man who had given the funds to build the original Cal gym in 1878. When Lou Campanelli became the coach in 1985, he insisted that college teams didn’t play in gyms and demanded it be called Harmon Arena. Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle began referring to it as Harmon Gym/Arena/Stop ’N Shop and Drive-Thru Bank.

  Whatever it was called, Harmon/Newell is a wonderful anachronism. There are no chair backs, just bleachers, and to get 6,450 in, everyone has to squeeze together real tight. Only here does the pep band have the best seats in the place, right at center court across from the scorer’s table.

  But this is no ordinary band. It is “the Straw Hat Band,” so named for the very obvious reason that its members all wear straw hats. Steve Kerr would get in trouble later in the season for commenting in a guest column in the Cal student newspaper that the band looked like a bunch of Shakey’s Pizza countermen.

  The Straw Hat Band makes its entrance by marching onto the court—usually right through the visitors’ warmup—and across the floor to its seats. It is joined there at game time by Oski the Bear, a truly homely and fantastic mascot. When the Straw Hat Band plays “Fight On Golden Bears,” and Oski leads the crowd in finishing the song by yelling, “GRRRRAAAH,” Harmon/Newell/Stop ’N Shop is about as much fun as it gets.

  The night of the dedication will be a special one. Newell, looking tan and fit at seventy-two, has just flown back from Japan. There, he received the Japanese Sacred Order of the Treasury, as thanks for the work he has done with basketball in Japan during the last twenty-eight years. After Newell had led the U.S. Olympic team to the 1960 gold medal in Rome in his last game as a coach, the Japanese approached him about working with their team to prepare for the Tokyo Olympics.

  As the host country, the Japanese were concerned about embarrassing themselves in basketball. Newell worked with the coaches and the team and in 1964, Japan finished fifth—the highest finish for the country in Olympic basketball—losing to the Soviet Union by 4 points. Since then, Newell has gone back every year. He has spent so much time in Japan that Tommy, the second of his four sons, calls him “Papa-san.”

  For Papa-san, this will be an emotional night. All four of his sons, Pete, Tom, Roger, and Greg, are here. The opponent for Cal is—who else?—UCLA. In 1986, during Campanelli’s first season, Cal broke the fifty-two-game losing streak. The record since Newell retired is now 2–56. But the Bruins are not exactly the Bruins of old.

  It is a rainy night four days before Christmas but the old place is packed nonetheless. Many of Newell’s former players have come for this and the joint is jumping when the teams are introduced. This will be a night for Cal people to remember—and for UCLA people to try to forget.

  Three minutes into the game, Matt Beeuwsaert, a transfer from Notre Dame, gives Cal the lead at 7–4 with a three-point play. Amazingly, UCLA will not get even again for the rest of the night.

  Cal quickly builds the lead to 15–5 and with the place rocking, UCLA falls apart. To a neutral observer, watching a UCLA team unravel so completely is a shocking sight. Even though John Wooden has been retired thirteen years, it is remarkable, and a bit unsettling, that UCLA has fallen so far. Even in a league as weak as the Pacific 10 they are not a very good team.

  A three-point shot by freshman Ryan Drew makes it 18–6, and it keeps getting worse for UCLA. When Beeuwsaert hits a nineteen-footer with 4:10 left, Cal is up 38–16. It is tough to believe that score can be correct. At halftime it is 45–26, putting the crowd in a perfect mood for the dedication ceremony.

  The ceremony is, as all ceremonies should be, a simple one. Athletic Director Dave Maggard introduces the luminaries from the Newell era and hands the microphone to one of Newell’s former captains, Earl Robinson.

  “We all have a lot of memories of this place,” Robinson says. “And most of them start with Coach Newell. We know tonight that his four sons are here in the stands and we also know that his number one assistant coach [Mrs. Newell, who passed away in 1985] is up above looking down on us tonight and smiling at what she sees.”

  Newell speaks briefly, fighting not to be overcome thinking about his wife and looking at his sons. When he is finished, he is handed a straw hat. Then he walks over and leads the band in “Sons of California.” Everyone is standing and singing and all four sons are pushing tears back from their eyes. They aren’t alone.

  When the game is over—Cal wins it 83–70—Newell goes down to the locker room to thank the players for winning the game on this night. “All I know about him,” says Ryan Drew, “is that he’s a legend here. He won.”

  Greg Newell, who lives five minutes away from Harmon/Newell/ Drive-Thru, throws a little postgame party to celebrate. “It’s funny to have a place named for you,” Pete Newell says after pausing to give Greg a hard time about the length of his hair. “When I coached, I almost burned the place down a couple times. I used to smoke during practice and every once in a while I’d drop the butts in the pipes they had on the side of the court for the volleyball nets. I never noticed until we’d smell something burning.”

  Papa-san laughs. “It was nice to see the old place rocking again,” he says. “It was just like the old days.”

  For one night at least, Pete Newell was part of Cal basketball again. And, just as he had done twenty-eight years ago, he left an admirable legacy behind. The court with his name on it has plenty of reason to be proud.

  December 22–31 … Honolulu

  Quick quiz: Name the state that, year in and year out, plays host to more top college basketball teams than any other.

  North Carolina? Indiana? Kentucky? California? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. The answer is Hawaii and it isn’t even close.

  If you want to lay claim to having a top-flight program, you have to find a way to get your team to Hawaii at least once every three years, if not more. In 1987, no fewer than 35 Division I teams played in Hawaii and the only reason the number wasn’t higher were the various NCAA restrictions on travel to Hawaii, many of them recently passed to cut down on the excursions.

  About the only top coach who doesn’t bring his team here on a regular basis is Bob Knight, who last brought Indiana in 1980, l
ost two games, never let his team see the beach, and flew out right after his last game vowing never to return.

  Steve Green, who played for Knight in the 1970s, didn’t think it was any loss for the players not to go back to Hawaii. “What difference does it make where you are,” he said with a laugh. “Whether you’re in Madison, Wisconsin, or Hawaii all you’re going to see is the airport, the hotel, and the gym.”

  That’s not true for most other coaches. To them, Hawaii presents many different opportunities.

  It can be a recruiting tool: “Come play for us and go to Hawaii.” It is a chance to pick up some extra games. Under NCAA rules, games played in Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico do not count against a team’s twenty-eight-game regular season limit. In recent years, some teams have played in Alaska and Hawaii in the same season, picking up an additional six games. It can be a break from the drudgery of staying on campus over Christmas break and going home cold night after cold night to empty dorms or apartment buildings. And, on some occasions, it can even be fun.

  “We tell our players they can only spend an hour on the beach,” said Louisville Coach Denny Crum, who seems to find a way to play here every year. “They follow our orders. They’re on one hour, off one hour.”

  For the coaches, deciding how much freedom to give the players is often difficult. They don’t want to be Scrooge and tell the players just to focus on basketball. On the other hand, they don’t want the players to forget the games because, more often than not, they are playing good teams here.

  “It’s a balancing act,” Virginia Coach Terry Holland said. “On the one hand, you want the trip to be something of a reward to the kids for working hard and you want them to have fun. Who knows if any of them will ever come back here again. But the reason you’re here is basketball. I just try to say to them, ‘Look, you could be practicing here or in Charlottesville, which would you prefer?’ ”

  Holland had the misfortune to coach in the most significant game ever played here. In 1982 he brought his team, ranked No. 1 in the country with senior All-American Ralph Sampson, to Honolulu on what was really a stopover en route home from Japan. The Cavaliers had already done their job for the month, beating Georgetown and Patrick Ewing, then beating Houston (without Sampson, who was ill with the flu) in Japan. Hawaii was a chance to relax for a few days. A game with tiny Chaminade University was scheduled as an excuse for the trip.

  Chaminade was—and is—a tiny Catholic school in Honolulu with 900 students and no gym. The game was played, as are all the important games here, in the Neal S. Blaisdell Arena. Because of Sampson’s presence, close to 3,000 of the 8,800 seats were filled that night, December 23, 1982.

  Chaminade won the game. Sampson was outscored by a 6–7 forward named Tony Randolph, a player he had faced in high school. Randolph, from Alexandria, Virginia, scored 19 points and Sampson only had 12. Chaminade was a smart, well-drilled NAIA team that would finish the season 33–5, but the notion that the Silverswords could beat Virginia was preposterous.

  After the game, when someone asked Holland if this was perhaps the biggest upset in the history of college basketball, he nodded his head. It had to be. From that day forth all upsets were measured against Chaminade over Virginia. Nothing yet has equaled it. In Hawaii, it is still referred to simply as “The Upset.”

  The victory made an instant island celebrity of Coach Merv Lopes, a taskmaster who, along with Athletic Director Mike Vasconceles, had built Chaminade’s program by mixing a few local players with a player here and a player there who couldn’t make it on the mainland.

  Until Chaminade’s victory, the only tournament in Hawaii that really mattered was the Rainbow Classic, which started in 1964 and annually brought seven teams in from the mainland to play the University of Hawaii. It was, along with New York’s Holiday Festival, the Christmas tournament. Back then, Hawaii had a very competitive team. In the early 1980s, just when Hawaii’s competitiveness was fading, Chaminade burst onto the scene. After The Upset, Chaminade suddenly found corporate sponsors for its own Christmas tournament. Then, NBC got into the act, deciding to televise a Christmas Day game from Hawaii. Since the Rainbow Classic always started after Christmas, NBC tied in with what was now the Western Airlines—Chaminade Christmas Classic.

  Amazingly, Lopes and Chaminade proved that The Upset was not a once-in-a-lifetime fluke. One year later, the Silverswords stunned a Louisville team that ended up in the Final Four that season. And then, a year later, they beat both Louisville and Southern Methodist in back-to-back games.

  In a way, the SMU victory was as remarkable as the Virginia victory. SMU came to Hawaii that year ranked No. 3 in the country. The team was undefeated and led by Olympian John Koncak. In the opening round of the tournament, while the Silverswords were doing their number on Louisville, SMU easily beat a very good, Wayman Tisdaleled Oklahoma team.

  Because of NBC’s involvement, the second-round Christmas Day games were prescheduled: Oklahoma would play Louisville on national TV and then Chaminade would play SMU. Having seen Chaminade beat Louisville, SMU should have known the game would not be a walkover.

  “Yeah, we should have known but we didn’t,” Dave Bliss, then coach of SMU, said. “We went over there to play Oklahoma. We just couldn’t believe Chaminade was that good. We still should have won anyway.”

  SMU actually appeared to have the game won when Koncak blocked a shot out of bounds with the Mustangs leading 70–69 and the clock at :00. But the officials ruled that the buzzer hadn’t sounded, meaning there was still a fraction of a second remaining.

  Occurrences such as this are not unusual in Hawaii. The local officials have become legendary over the years for their home jobs. In 1981 during the Rainbow Classic, then Bradley Coach Dick Versace became so enraged about the officiating that he walked onto the floor, tore the whistle from around the neck of a referee named Larry Yamashita, and hurled it into the stands.

  Valvano, whose team was playing in the next game, raced to court-side immediately. Pointing at Yamashita, he told tournament officials, “I want that guy working my game.” Before anyone could ask why, Valvano added, “As long as he doesn’t get his whistle back.”

  Bliss might have had similar thoughts on Christmas Day 1984. After a time-out and a wasted tirade by Bliss, who was convinced the game should be over, Chaminade was allowed to inbound under the basket.

  Keith Whitney caught the ball in the corner, spun it in his hands for a proper grip, aimed, and shot. There was no way the shot could have been launched before the buzzer. No matter. The ball hit the side of the rim, bounded into the air and—naturally—fell through the net. The officials emphatically signaled that the shot counted and Chaminade had pulled Upset IV, 71–70.

  “We got jobbed,” Bliss said, looking back. “But it was our fault for putting ourselves in position to get jobbed.” Ironically, Whitney had first heard of Chaminade the day after The Upset, just like millions of others.

  But SMU was the last miracle. Teams started coming to Hawaii looking for a tough game from Chaminade. And, even with their newfound notoriety, Lopes and Vasconceles couldn’t get a bigger budget or better facilities. In 1986, NBC, cutting back on December college basketball, stopped doing Christmas in Hawaii. That same year, Western merged with Delta. For one year, Delta maintained sponsorship, but then, in 1987, decided to drop out.

  Chaminade was still in business, however. In November, Hawaiian Airlines had sponsored the first annual Maui Classic and ESPN televised it. Teams were already lining up to play in 1988. Even without commercial sponsorship, the Chaminade Christmas Classic lived—though just barely.

  “We’re definitely struggling right now,” Vasconceles said on the opening day of the Chaminade Classic, as a crowd of no more than four hundred people drifted around the Blaisdell Arena. “Basketball is down in Hawaii right now. We aren’t winning and neither is UH. Plus, this close to Christmas [December 23] you need something special to get people to leave their families or come off the beach. Right
now, we haven’t got it.”

  Hard times had truly hit Chaminade. The Silverswords entered the tournament with an 0–7 record. Some of the losses were more than respectable for an NAIA/NCAA Division 2 team: Kansas, Stanford, and Nebraska in the Maui Classic, and San Jose State and Long Beach State on the mainland. But there were also losses to Western Washington and Whitworth.

  There were a number of reasons for these troubles: injuries, academic losses, recruiting not panning out. But Vasconceles believed that part of it had to do with Lopes, the fiery coach who had built the program. In 1985, several months after The Upset, Hawaii had fired Larry Little as coach. Lopes was interviewed for the job but eventually it went to Frank Arnold. In two seasons, Arnold won eleven games. He quit in 1987 to become an assistant coach at Arizona State. This time Lopes didn’t even get a phone call before Riley Wallace, a former UH assistant, got the job.

  “Merv will never admit it but not getting the Hawaii job devastated him,” Vasconceles said. “He never stopped working hard but it cost him in enthusiasm and intensity. It’s a little bit like scar tissue after a major operation. You’re never quite the same.

  “He felt slighted. I felt slighted too. We all did. Look at what he had done with almost nothing to work with. They have a million-dollar budget over there. We have a $50,000 budget. Merv was beating teams they couldn’t beat and we were drawing as well as they were. Even now, they aren’t drawing much better than us and we aren’t drawing anything.”

  Lopes is fifty-three but looks younger. He is a sharp dresser with a sharp, quick tongue. Hurt creeps into his voice when he talks about the Hawaii job. “I’m a here-and-now guy,” he said. “It’s past, it’s over. But you would have thought they would look at what I had done. It was certainly disappointing. Maybe I did something to upset them, I don’t know.”