A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  “I wish this was next year,” he said the afternoon of the Purdue game. “Then, I would feel completely different. I would feel like I had eight or nine guys and I could really go out and attack. That’s the way I like to play. Now, I feel like I’m on the defensive in every game. If this team finishes the season over .500 it just might be my best coaching job.”

  Williams decides to stay with his press but in order to show Purdue something different, he puts in a triangle-and-two halfcourt defense, guarding Lewis and Mitchell man-to-man. The defense confuses Purdue so much that at one point in the first half Stephens calls out a zone offense just as Mitchell is calling out a man-to-man offense. Angry, the two of them yell at each other. “That’s the first time in four years that we’ve ever done that,” Stephens says later.

  Williams keeps his team in the game. It isn’t easy, though. Early in the first half he gets nailed for a technical by referee Jim Bain while arguing a call that Bain has clearly botched. This is a Bain tradition. When he blows a call and a coach argues, he often reinforces his error by calling a technical. No one in basketball is quite sure how Bain keeps getting top assignments, but he does. He will work a regional final in the NCAA Tournament in March.

  Through everything, Ohio State stays in the game all night. Down 11, the Buckeyes fight back to within 3 at 77–74. But Tony White misses a short jumper with 2:23 left and a minute later, down 78–74, Curtis Wilson makes only one of two free throws. That makes it 78–75. Lewis hits a baseline jumper with just five seconds on the shot clock and, after Wilson walks, Melvin McCants hits two foul shots to wrap it up. The final is 84–77.

  “If we were any good we would have won the game,” Williams said. “The effort was there. And they were ripe to be picked.”

  Indeed. With the students still on break, Mackey Arena did not have its usual electricity. A high school band just wasn’t the same as the Purdue band. And the Boiler Babes had been nowhere in sight. The crowd, usually the most vocal in the Big Ten, had been quiet almost the entire night. Purdue was lucky to escape with a victory.

  Keady knew this and told his team so. Angrily, he accused Mitchell—who had been just three-of-nine from the floor—of taking bad shots from the outside because his father had been telling him to shoot more.

  “That is bullshit,” Mitchell said later that evening. “And anyway, what goes on between my dad and me is none of his business.”

  They hadn’t played well, but they had won. They were 2–0 in the Big Ten. Iowa was coming in for an important game Saturday and Arnold was due to rejoin the team on Monday. He had made it through the first semester. Stack had not. He was off the team. Arnold had shown up for the game that night in a tuxedo, complete with red bow tie and cummerbund, living up to his flaky California image.

  Later that evening Arnold called Mitchell to make sure he wasn’t too upset about what Keady had said about his father. “Jeff’s a flake, but he’s really a pretty good guy,” Mitchell said. “Getting him back should really help us.”

  Arnold never made it back though. Two days before he was supposed to return, Keady announced that he had not met all the requisites attached to his reinstatement and had been permanently dropped from the team. He was vague and evasive when pressed on why Arnold was gone.

  According to some of Arnold’s teammates, he was dropped because a drug test had showed traces of marijuana in his system. Later in the year, Arnold insisted that was not the case, that he had been dropped because he had started going back into bars and liquor stores again during the semester break. He did admit that he had tested positive for marijuana as a freshman but denied that was his problem this time.

  The three seniors felt sorry for Arnold. None of them thought he was a bad person in any way. But at least now there were no questions lingering. Keady had complained to them since the summer about the troubles that had been caused because of Arnold and Stack. Now, Arnold and Stack were gone. Two days after the Ohio State game, in spite of a missed Mitchell dunk down the stretch, the Boilermakers beat Iowa, 80–79. They were 3–0 in the Big Ten, 13–1 overall, and back in the top five in the polls.

  It had been a rough ride but so far the three seniors were hanging on for dear life. They had survived December. They had survived Arnold and Stack. Now, the schedule eased up for a couple of weeks. It was a respite that was much needed and well deserved.

  January 9 … Lawrence, Kansas

  This should be a day for celebration here. On a cold, sunny afternoon, Kansas and Missouri are renewing one of college basketball’s oldest rivalries, each beginning Big Eight Conference play.

  Missouri is the defending conference champion, having beaten Kansas at the buzzer in last year’s Big Eight Tournament. In Derrick Chievous, the Tigers have one of the game’s best—and most enigmatic—players, one of the few people in the country whose name is even mentioned in the same sentence with Danny Manning.

  Then there are the coaches. To say that Norm Stewart and Larry Brown don’t like each other is a little bit like saying Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier didn’t get along. Each thinks the other remarkably arrogant. Neither one tries to hide his feelings either.

  This is the time of year when college basketball starts to become fun. The warm-up games are over and traditional, longtime rivals begin home-and-home conference play. The players know each other well, the fans know the players and coaches and even the officials. There are memories galore—and new ones being made.

  No place is better suited for this kind of game than Allen Field House. This is one of college basketball’s ancient gems, a true field house with bleachers on all sides, the smell of popcorn and the aroma of pomp in the air, banners dating back to 1923 when Kansas claimed what was then a mythical national championship, and an atmosphere made for college basketball. If you can’t have fun watching a game in this old place, then you can’t have fun.

  “If you like this sport then it doesn’t get any better than this,” Kansas assistant Alvin Gentry said while the crowd lustily booed Missouri as the Tigers came out to warm up. “You walk on the floor for a game like this, you get chills up and down your spine.”

  Sadly, Gentry’s boss, Larry Brown, felt almost none of this. An hour before tip-off he sat in the end zone half-watching the last minutes of the women’s game, a morose look on his face.

  “I’m so depressed right now I don’t know which way to turn,” he said. “This was going to be such a great year and now all this has happened. I’m not dealing with it very well and neither is Danny [Manning]. We’re both very frustrated.”

  “All this” had started ten days earlier in New York during the final of the ECAC Holiday Festival in Madison Square Garden. The opponent was St. John’s, a team the Jayhawks had beaten just two weeks earlier in Lawrence. Midway through the first half, during a scramble underneath, Archie Marshall’s knee had collided with someone. There were so many players involved that even on tape it was tough to tell where the major contact had occurred.

  That didn’t matter. What did matter was that Marshall had come out of the crowd screaming in pain, then collapsed in a heap on the floor right at Manning’s feet. For a split second, Manning thought he was dreaming; he knew that his friend, who had worked so hard to come back from his 1986 knee injury, could not possibly be hurt again.

  “I just knew, I mean I knew that it wasn’t that serious,” Manning said. “It couldn’t be. But when I looked down he was all curled up in the fetal position screaming.”

  As Manning stood frozen in his tracks, Brown and trainer Mark Cairnes raced to Marshall’s side. While they worked on him, the assistants were telling the players, “Don’t worry, it’s just a sprain. It’s not the bad knee, it’s the other one. He’ll be all right.”

  But as Brown leaned over Marshall, he heard him say through clenched teeth, “My God, Coach, I think this one is worse than last time.”

  When Brown looked at Cairnes he just shook his head. Even just a quick check told him the injury was bad—ligament dam
age again. “All the kids I’ve ever coached, I’ve never coached a better kid than Archie,” Brown said. “That’s easy to say when he’s hurt but it’s true. When they said it was ligaments again, I couldn’t take it. I just broke up completely.”

  When Brown came back to the bench, he was weeping uncontrollably. The players knew right then that this was no sprain. “It was a nightmare,” Manning said. “Archie had worked so hard to come back. The whole time he had never gotten down or depressed. He was just so upbeat all the time. He had learned to play differently because he didn’t have the same explosiveness in his legs.

  “And then just like that he was gone again. I felt sick. I didn’t want to be out there playing anymore. I don’t think any of the other guys did either.”

  The Jayhawks went through the motions the rest of the night. St. John’s won easily. The next day, back in Lawrence, they got the official word on Marshall: ligament damage. More surgery. His college career was certainly over. There was a good chance he would never play again. It was not a Happy New Year.

  Five days later, in their first game without Marshall, the Jayhawks struggled past a mediocre Washington team, having to come from 19 points down in the first half to win. Before that game, Manning wrote Marshall’s number—23—on his wristbands. He also shaved a tiny 23 on the side of his head. “I just wanted Archie out there with me in some way. In spirit, if not in body.”

  Marshall was still in the hospital recovering from the surgery when Missouri came to town. Manning went to see him daily, sometimes twice a day. Brown went too, but found each visit difficult. “Every time I see him lying there,” he said, “I lose it again.”

  The day before the Missouri game, Brown got more bad news. Marvin Branch, the junior-college center whose role had become even more important with Marshall gone, was academically ineligible. It would not be official until the following Wednesday, but unless a grade was changed, Missouri would be his final game.

  Marshall’s injury had saddened Brown. This infuriated him. He was angry with Branch for getting into this trouble. He was angry with his academic support people who had not, in his view, kept a close enough watch on Branch’s progress. And, he was angry with Kansas. Branch had gotten a C- on the final in the course he had to pass to stay eligible. And yet, he had flunked the course because his papers during the semester had been F’s.

  Brown felt a C- on the final should at least get you a passing grade in the course because it showed you knew something about what had gone on during the semester. He was not about to directly involve himself in the situation, though. A couple of years earlier he had gone with a player to talk to a professor about a grade and he had been publicly accused of trying to intimidate the professor into changing the grade.

  This time, Branch was in the hands of the academic counselors, which didn’t thrill Brown. He felt that if Branch was capable of passing the final, he should have been capable of writing passing papers during the semester. The academic counselors were paid to keep on the kids to do their work. In Brown’s mind, they hadn’t done their job.

  Branch would play against Missouri. But unless something drastic happened, it would be his last game. That would leave Kansas without two starters and leave Manning to face double- and triple-teaming up front. “We’re right back to where we were last year,” Brown said. “Only this feels worse.”

  There was one other note of good cheer: Chris Piper, the team’s other senior, had been struggling all season with a groin injury. He wouldn’t start against Missouri and how much he would be able to play the rest of the season was also questionable.

  Missouri had different problems. When the starting lineups were introduced, Derrick Chievous was not among the starters. This was not the first time Stewart had benched him. Apparently, Chievous had been late for the team bus that morning; his car had hit a patch of ice and spun out. He was unhurt, but also not playing when the ball went up.

  Amidst all these troubles, the two teams played a sterling basketball game. Manning was Manning, scoring 28 points, getting 7 rebounds, and blocking 4 shots. But the key for Kansas was Milt Newton, a fourth-year junior from Washington, D.C., who had patiently waited for his chance to play and had seen it come when Marshall went down. Newton scored 21 points, hitting 8 of 10 from the field, giving Kansas the boost it had to have.

  Missouri was a talented team searching for a rudder. Chievous, who only played twenty minutes, wasn’t about to supply it. Sophomore point guard Lee Coward, a talented player who seemed to save his best games for Kansas, wasn’t consistent enough. Stewart didn’t help. Chievous threw a bad pass, he came out. When it is apparent that the best player and the coach aren’t getting along, the whole team is affected.

  No one ever had command of this game. The biggest lead came ten minutes in when Kansas went up 19–10. No one led by more than six in the second half and that margin, 70–64, didn’t last long because Chievous promptly buried a three-pointer.

  Manning made the big plays at the end, scoring 8 of the Jayhawks’ last 12 points, most of those coming while Missouri was trying desperately to rally. His two free throws with thirty-three seconds left made it 74–69, but Coward nailed a three-pointer to cut it to 74–72. Then, with Missouri screaming for time-out, Manning threw a long pass to Pritchard for a lay-up. That made it 76–72. Greg Church scored quickly to make it 76–74, and this time Missouri did get time-out. Eight seconds to go.

  As soon as the ball came inbounds, the Tigers fouled Jayhawk Scooter Barry. The son of Rick Barry, Scooter isn’t as tall (6–2 to 6–7) or nearly as talented as his father. And, unlike his father, he shoots his free throws overhand, not underhand. But, like his father, he can shoot them well. Calmly, he stepped to the line and made both ends of the one-and-one with six seconds to go, icing the game.

  “I’ve been doing that in my backyard since I was a little kid,” he said. “We all do it, pretend we’re shooting free throws to win a big game. That’s the first time I’ve ever really done it though, even in high school.”

  Manning didn’t linger long in the locker room after the game. “Got to go,” he said to a TV crew looking for one last comment. “I want to get to the hospital and see Archie.”

  As always, Brown and the coaches headed for the Mexican restaurant of which Brown is part owner. This is a postgame tradition in Lawrence and it had now produced fifty-four straight victories, dating back to Brown’s first season. Manning had never lost a game in Allen Field House. “We come here,” said assistant coach R. C. Buford, “after every game, win or lose.” Buford had been on the staff four years. “Of course, I’ve never been here for a loss. I guess we come here after a loss.”

  The victory had cheered Brown up, especially since it was over Stewart. But looking ahead, he was concerned. “Oklahoma may be the best team in the country,” he said, not innacurately. “Missouri is very talented, you saw that today. And Kansas State is darn good. So is Iowa State. I’ve never won up there and we have to play them next. I’m telling you, Coach, it’s gonna be real, real hard.”

  Brown wasn’t speaking to a coach. He calls approximately 60 percent of the people in the world “Coach.” After a couple of drinks, it goes up to 90 percent. His two favorite words—besides coach—are “um” and “special.” He begins almost every sentence with the word “um,” and describes almost every person or event in his life as special. His coaches joke about this often. How was practice today, guys? Special. How tough will Iowa State be? Very tough, they’re a special team. Johnny Orr is a special coach. Jeff Grayer is a special player.

  That is Brown, though. A good friend of his once said, “Larry believes everything he says when he’s saying it. It’s just that five minutes later, he may believe something completely different.”

  Because of that, the coaches had absolutely no idea where Brown would be coaching next year. It might be Kansas. It might be UCLA. It might be Texas. It might be in the NBA with Charlotte. Or Houston. Or San Antonio. Brown didn’t know either. He l
iked it in Kansas but worried about whether he could recruit players good enough to legitimately compete for a national title. And, at least on some days, Brown was certain the worst mistake he had ever made had been leaving UCLA in 1981, which he did because he wasn’t making enough money.

  In an ideal world, Brown would stay at Kansas. Strangely, for someone who has been accused so often of disloyalty, Brown is a man who craves loyalty. He knew the people here were loyal to him and that feeling of belonging was important. But as he looked ahead and saw Ames, Iowa, looming, Brown knew that all the loyalty in the world wasn’t going to produce any more points or rebounds. And right now, Kansas needed some of both.

  Danny Manning was stretched out on his couch, a just-finished pizza lying on the table in front of him. In the background, the Norm Stewart show was on. “I like to watch Band-Aid’s Court,” Manning said with a smile, referring to the segment of the show done by Chievous. Chievous’s nickname is Band-Aid because he always wears one.

  For Manning, this is the last day for a long time he can take it easy. Tomorrow, he will miss the first day of class for his final semester of college because Kansas will be flying to Ames to play Iowa State. He has decidedly mixed emotions about the impending end of his college career.

  “I never pictured this year turning out this way,” he said. “First, Archie, now Marvin. Pipe is hurting too. People just don’t know what kind of competitor Pipe is.

  “I knew when I decided to come back that I would still see zones and double-teaming and all. But it wasn’t going to be like last year. Now, it will be. It isn’t like I’m not used to pressure. I am. Coach Brown has put pressure on me since the day I got here. I know I’m the best player, so if we lose I think it’s my responsibility. But sometimes, I just like to get away, come back here and be by myself. It seems like everyone is always looking at me to see how I react to things. You know, ‘What does Danny think of this? Is he upset about that?’ ”