A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  There are very few high school gyms in Indiana that are merely gyms. Jeffersonville is no exception. The William S. Johnson Arena seats 5,300 people—about a thousand less than BNL’s gym seats—and almost five thousand less than the gym Steve Alford played in when he went to high school in New Castle.

  The place is packed, partly because this is a big game, partly because a sizable contingent of fans has made the drive down from Bedford. And partly because Damon is in town.

  Damon hardly looks the part of an icon. He is listed at 6–3, but standing next to him it is impossible to believe he is much more than 6–1. Maybe 6–2—standing very straight. He wears a brace on his left knee, has freckles and light brown hair, and doesn’t look a day older than sixteen years, three months, and eight days—which is exactly what he is. In a pinch, he could easily pass for Beaver Cleaver. He even has a teammate who looks like Lumpy Rutherford.

  Damon is not a bombs-away shooter like so many high school phenoms are. Damon’s forte is the head fake and pull-up jumper, a move that has become something of a lost art in college basketball, especially since the invention of the wretched three-point rule. Most of his shots come from twelve to seventeen feet, and he rarely takes a bad shot. Knight, in a romantic moment, once said that Damon was ready for college basketball. But if he is to be a great college player, he will have to improve his range during the next two years.

  On this level, though, his athletic ability and court sense make him dominant. Damon is one of those special players who is gifted with a feel for the game. It is not something that can be coached. The great players—Magic, Bird, Erving, Jordan—all have it. They have much, much more than just that, of course, so Damon’s gift doesn’t guarantee greatness. But still, it is a rare gift, and it is a pleasure to watch in a player so young.

  He also has a remarkable maturity. For a youngster to have received so much adulation and attention yet kept a level head is almost miraculous. Friends credit his parents, who have refused to be swept up in all this and have continued to treat Damon like a teenager.

  “I just like to play basketball and have fun playing basketball,” Damon says. “If we lose a game and both teams have played well, I don’t mind losing.”

  This is not an attitude that will serve Damon very well should he end up playing college basketball in Bloomington. But for now, he can still be a sixteen-year-old kid enjoying his gift for the game. And this is the kind of game Damon enjoys. From the start, it is apparent that Jeffersonville is going to make life difficult for BNL. The score is tied at 20–20 after one quarter. At halftime, the Jeffs lead 43–37.

  The arena/gym is rocking. Damon has 16 points on 6-of-12 shooting. For a mere mortal, a very good half. But for Damon …

  Jeffersonville takes command in the third quarter, building the lead to 50–39 on a basket created by a (gasp!) Damon turnover. The lead is still 10 in the final seconds of the third quarter when Jeffersonville starts a three-on-one break. This is where Damon becomes “Damon.” He steals the ball with four seconds left, turns and heaves it upcourt to a teammate. As the buzzer sounds, the youngster flings a twenty-seven-foot shot at the basket. Swish—for three. Instead of leading 68–56 after three, Jeffersonville leads by only 66–59.

  The fourth quarter belongs to Damon. He scores 14 of his 38 points, makes a backdoor cut with forty-five seconds left that puts BNL up 78–77, and sinks two free throws with seventeen seconds to go that makes it 80–77. The final is 81–77. In the second half, Damon is nine-for-eleven from the field. That’s pretty good even for an icon.

  “That was just a good time,” Damon says when it is over, surrounded by reporters. “The Jeffersonville kids are really good guys, I enjoyed playing against them. I like an atmosphere like this even when the crowd is against you. It makes you feel like you’re really into the game.”

  Someone asks if all the attention bothers him. He smiles the smile of someone who has heard all the questions before. And even at his age, he has. “No, it doesn’t bother me. When I was in eighth grade, Steve Alford took my parents and me to dinner and told us what to expect. He told me to just play basketball and let the rest take care of itself. He knows what he’s talking about.”

  The dinner with Alford was arranged by one Robert M. Knight. Damon is certainly aware of Knight’s interest in him. “A lot of people want me to go to Indiana,” he says. “But they’re not going to be mad at me or get upset if I go someplace else. They’ll still back me.”

  Damon may be a little naïve on that one. If he chooses a school other than Indiana he may acquire a new first name: Benedict. But that is a ways off. For now, Damon is just Damon, a hero in his hometown. Now that isn’t such a bad thing to be, is it? Especially in Indiana.

  January 30 … Bloomington, Indiana

  The oldest cliche in sports is the one that says, “When these two teams get together you can throw the record book away.”

  Most of the time, the record book tells you a lot. But when Purdue and Indiana meet in basketball it is definitely fair to say this: Regardless of record, a victory can salve a lot of wounds, a defeat can make a string of victories seem meaningless.

  Purdue is a basketball team with a mission: Win the national championship. Indiana achieved that last year, and when the Boilermakers walked onto the floor of Assembly Hall they could see the national championship banner hanging there—along with four others. Purdue has many, many banners in Mackey Arena, but not one of them says “National Champions” on it.

  What makes it worse are the strange air currents in Assembly Hall. On some days, the place actually has a breeze blowing through it. When that happens, the banners billow back and forth. This is one of those days. The banners just keep swaying in the wind, a reminder to the Boilermakers that they are in Bloomington, and that they have never achieved the status of Bob Knight’s team.

  For the three Purdue seniors, Troy Lewis, Todd Mitchell, and Everette Stephens, playing here has never been anything less than strange. As freshmen, they were innocent bystanders in the infamous chair-throwing game, an easy Purdue victory that was completely overshadowed by Knight’s chair toss and subsequent ejection.

  As sophomores, they had the Hoosiers beaten, leading by five points in possession of the ball, less than three minutes to go. But they managed to score just one point in the last four minutes of regulation and overtime and somehow lost the game, 71–70. Then, a year ago, they played perhaps their worst game of the regular season—until the finale at Michigan—and Indiana won easily.

  The game today then, is a chance for the seniors to finish 2–2 in Bloomington. It is also an opportunity to inflict a loss on the Hoosiers they know will be painful.

  The Boilermakers are a team riding very high. Having survived the crises of the early season and the controversies surrounding Dave Stack and Jeff Arnold, they are rolling. They have not lost since the November 24 NIT loss to Iowa State—two months and sixteen games ago. They are 17–1 overall and 6–0 in the Big Ten, giving them firm control of the race.

  Indiana’s situation could hardly be more different. Throughout the Hoosiers’ season, everyone has been holding their breath, wondering what will happen next. Six days ago, a decisive loss at home to Michigan dropped their Big Ten record to 1–4, their overall mark to 9–6.

  During that game, Knight had shoved his own player, Steve Eyl, as Eyl was coming out of the game, and a rare sound had been heard in Assembly Hall—boos for the IU coach. The next day Knight decided to radically change his lineup for his next game, against Ohio State. He decided to elevate two freshmen, Jay Edwards (who had briefly been off the team—academic ineligibility) and Lyndon Jones. Benched were Rick Calloway and Keith Smart.

  This was the most radical lineup move Knight had made since the disastrous 1985 season when he had benched four starters, including Alford, for a game at Illinois. Calloway, a junior, had been a starter since his second game as a freshman. Smart, a senior, was merely the hero of the ’87 national title game, having hit t
he winning shot with five seconds left.

  Clearly, Knight was desperate. Such a move can go one of two ways. It can cause panic on a team and make a bad situation worse. Or it can be a tonic, the new players giving everyone else a boost. This time, the latter proved true. Jones and Edwards played excellent basketball at Ohio State and the Hoosiers beat the Buckeyes 75–71.

  But it easily could have gone the other way. That morning, during the game-day shootaround, Knight had thrown Calloway out for not working hard as part of the second team. Calloway never moved off the bench that night. Smart played two minutes. If Ohio State had managed to win the game, who knows what would have happened next?

  But Indiana won and that same lineup was intact for Purdue. With Assembly Hall as loud as it ever gets, the Hoosiers roared out of the blocks like a sprinter who has timed the start. It was 4–4 after two minutes. Indiana scored the next 10 points. Purdue scored to cut the margin to 14–6. Indiana scored 7 more. Finally, Purdue awakened, scoring 6 straight points to trim the margin to 21–12 nine minutes into the game.

  Jones hit a jump shot and then Edwards made a play that seemed to stun Purdue. He reached in on Mitchell, stripped him of the ball, raced the length of the court and hit a spectacular spinning lay-up to make it 25–12. A moment later, center Melvin McCants was called for a charge and Coach Gene Keady hurled his sports coat into the stands—the second time in three years his jacket had failed to make it to halftime in Bloomington.

  After a Todd Jadlow jumper, the next, Dean Garrett scored six straight points and, by the time Keady had called his second time-out, the score was an amazing 33–12. Indiana, which less than a week ago had looked ready to go completely down the tubes, was humiliating the No. 2 team in the nation.

  “We’ll make a run,” Lewis thought to himself. “We know they can’t keep this up and we know we aren’t that bad.” But, glancing at the scoreboard, Lewis also thought, “We sure have dug ourselves a hole here.”

  It was Lewis’s running mate, Stephens, who finally stopped the bleeding, hitting two straight three-pointers to nudge the margin down to 33–18. But, with seven minutes still to go in the half, Knight was so confident he even let Smart get into the game briefly, and Smart responded by immediately hitting a baseline jumper. It was 40–22 and it was Indiana’s day—or so it seemed.

  Except Purdue didn’t die. A three-point play by Mitchell cut the lead to 43–32. IU built the margin back to 50–34 before Mitchell hit a three-pointer with eighteen seconds to go, 50–37. But Joe Hillman ended a near-perfect first half with a jumper just before the buzzer and it was 52–37 at intermission.

  “During that first half,” Knight would say later, “I thought we played the best basketball I’ve seen anywhere this year.”

  It wasn’t a boast, just a fact. But, as Knight expected, Purdue came back. “They’ve played everywhere, seen everything,” he said. “Those seniors weren’t going to just roll over because we had a good half.”

  Lewis, zero-for-four in the first half, finally found the basket three minutes into the second period, hitting a three-pointer, chipping the lead down to 56–48. The lead went back up to 12, then down to 8 and back to 12 at 67–55. But Lewis hit a short pop and Stephens stripped Edwards for a lay-up to make it 67–59. After a Lyndon Jones turnover, Stephens hit a three-pointer. Suddenly, it was 67–62. Garrett missed inside and Lewis bombed from three. Amazingly, it was 67–65. Knight called time, hoping to regroup.

  Purdue had now made this a game that would be remembered regardless of outcome. Would this be the day Indiana built a 21-point lead and hung on to upset the No. 2 team in the country? Or would it be the day the Hoosiers blew that big lead and allowed this Purdue team to truly establish greatness?

  When Lewis tied it at 69–69 with a baseline drive, greatness seemed very possible. A minute later, after Indiana had missed three shots inside, McCants posted up and put Purdue in front, 71–69. In a span of less than twenty-three minutes, the Boilermakers had come all the way back, outscoring IU 59–26 to take the lead.

  But Bob Knight teams don’t usually fold their tents and go home. Edwards, who would finish with 22 points, calmly swished a three-pointer. It was 72–71. Purdue went back ahead 74–72 on a McCants free throw and a Mitchell lay-up. So Edwards simply nailed another three to make it 75–74 with 3:45 left. Then, with the score 76–76, Stephens hit what appeared to be a huge shot, a three-pointer. With 1:51 left, Purdue was up 79–76. Garrett came back, cutting it to 79–78, then Purdue, trying to spread the floor, turned the ball over with less than a minute to go.

  The Hoosiers didn’t call time. They came down the court with everyone standing—the crowd, the benches, the coaches—looking for the lead. The ball went inside to Garrett. He missed. Jones rebounded. He missed. The ball was alive on the board and then there was Todd Mitchell, grabbing it in his huge hands and covering up, holding the ball like a mother protecting her child from the rain. Quickly, Indiana fouled. Mitchell, who had been superb during the second-half rally, scoring 15 of his 24 points, was going to the line with fifteen seconds left. If he made both ends of the one-and-one, Indiana would have to hit a three-pointer to tie.

  “It’s exactly the kind of situation you dream about being in,” he said. “You’ve come all the way back, on the road against your arch-rival, and now you have a chance to just about clinch it. I knew I was going to make the shots. I just knew it.”

  Indiana called time to let Mitchell think about it. He thought about it, knowing he was going to make the shots, squared himself to the basket, spun the ball off his right hand and then watched in horror as the ball hit the back rim.

  Garrett grabbed the rebound and quickly flipped the ball to Hillman. Indiana rushed down. Again, as usual with a Bob Knight team, no time-out. Hillman swung the ball to Jones. The freshman had no intention of shooting. Garrett was planted in the low post to the right of the basket, a spot he had been in so long all afternoon he should have been paying an occupancy tax. Jones threw him the ball. Garrett turned and softly shot the ball over McCants. Swish—his 31st point. Four seconds left. Purdue screamed for time-out. There was still time.

  “No need to panic,” Lewis said. “We had time to get a good shot.” Instead, they got no shot. Tony Jones inbounded to McCants, who quickly threw the ball back to him. Jones was to take the pass and race upcourt and either shoot or, if there was time, find one of the seniors for a shot. Instead, Jones’s brain got ahead of his body and he started running before he remembered to dribble. Traveling. It was over. Lyndon Jones’s lay-up at the buzzer was just a twist of the knife that made the final score 82–79.

  If a January basketball game can have major implications, this was it. Purdue had showed guts coming back but hadn’t been able to finish Indiana off. “It’s a shame when you have seniors,” Keady said, “and they can’t get it done at the end.”

  He was angry and frustrated and it showed. Once again, Indiana had stolen the show. Purdue, with a sixteen-game winning streak, was ranked No. 2 in the nation. The headlines all week had been about Indiana’s lineup changes. Now, the headlines would be about how they had worked and how Knight had proven himself a genius once again. Keady wanted to scream.

  “All I know is we work our ass off to get recognition in this state and we don’t get it,” he said. “Obviously, you’ve got to win in March to get recognized. Winning the Big Ten doesn’t mean anything. Nothing means anything.”

  Someone asked Keady if he was surprised by Knight’s new lineup. “Are you shitting me?” he roared. “Nothing surprises me over here!”

  It was Mitchell who took the loss hardest. He sat on the bleachers waiting for the bus to leave to go back to West Lafayette, his head down, looking up only when Dean Garrett and Rick Calloway came over to offer condolences. “Hey Todd, you played really well,” Calloway said.

  Mitchell nodded, and in a voice that was barely a whisper said, “Good players play well. Great players win games.”

  12

  REFS


  February 1 … Philadelphia

  Joe Forte felt good. In fact, he felt better than good. He was an hour outside Philadelphia, the weather was beautiful, and he was about to spend the evening doing what he loved to do best: referee a basketball game.

  “This is my favorite time of year,” he said. “Once you hit February, it’s all downhill. You can see the finish line so you don’t feel tired. And the games are better because everyone is sharp. I walk on the floor every night and look around and say, ‘This is exactly where I belong.’ There is nothing I would rather do than referee a basketball game. To me, it’s like I’m still playing the game. Only now, my shots are my calls and my goal is to hit at least ninety-five percent of them.”

  On any list of the top officials in college basketball, Joe Forte’s name will appear, usually right at or very near the top. At the age of forty-two, he is one of the most respected men in his profession, a fact reflected by five Final Four appearances in the last eight years and two appearances in the national championship game.

  To Forte, like most of the men who officiate college basketball games, refereeing is a profession. True, most college officials have another job, but during the winter that job usually takes a backseat to refereeing. A top college basketball official will work about eighty games during a season, usually averaging a minimum of four games a week.

  Forte has gone a step further than other officials. He has just quit his job as a salesman for a food products company to devote full time to the marketing of the new whistle he and fellow official Ron Foxcroft invented. The whistle is called, cleverly enough, “The Fox40.” Forte’s name is pronounced “Fort-A,” but Fox40 is close enough.

  The whistle is the product of four years of work. It came about after Forte and Foxcroft, working a tournament together in South America, realized that in certain situations, their whistles couldn’t be heard over the din of the crowd. “What if we could invent a whistle with a higher pitch that could be heard anywhere?” they said to each other one day, and the concept was born.