A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  “Great game,” Forte says when it is over. “Both teams really played well. Del Negro is a hell of a player.”

  Nolan Fine, who insists that Forte is by far the best official in the country, believes that Forte’s appreciation for the game is one of the things that sets him apart from other officials. “He played the game and loves it so much that he’s studied it to the point where he just feels the game better than the rest of us,” Fine says. “Joe never looks like he’s working out there. It all looks easy because he loves it.”

  This game Forte loved. “A game like that, I stand on the floor before it starts, looking around, hearing the band, and I get needles in my legs,” he says. “I feel so lucky to do something I love and get paid for it.”

  On Thursday, Forte will be in Washington for a game in an almost empty arena between two struggling teams, St. Joseph’s and George Washington. “But to them, Forte says, “it’s a big game. So to me, it’s a big game.”

  February 4 … Washington, D.C.

  The crew working St. Joseph’s–George Washington is a remarkable one, considering that this is a game between two not very good teams in the Atlantic 10. Forte is the referee. Luis Grillo is the U-1. Tim Higgins is the U-2. In April, all three of them will work the Final Four.

  Higgins is one of the more popular officials around. His colleagues call him Barney Rubble because he looks and sounds exactly like the Flintstones’ cartoon neighbor. Before the game, Barney is talking about arenas he would like to work. “I’ve never had a game in Rupp Arena,” he says. “I’d like to work there.”

  “I’ve never been in Pauley Pavilion,” Forte says. He turns to Grillo. “Of course, I love working at Mount St. Mary’s.”

  Grillo is assistant athletic director at Mount St. Mary’s, a Division 2 school.

  Forte’s pregame is simple. “Let’s remember that both these teams need a win,” he says. “They’re probably both going to be tight and maybe a little frustrated.”

  It is GW that is frustrated. The Colonials have been playing horribly since New Year’s and are buried near the bottom of the Atlantic 10. Tonight will be another miserable game for them. They stay close for a half, leaving with the score tied at 27–27. But from a 36-all tie, St. Joseph’s goes on a 20–4 romp that puts the game away. The Hawks go on to win, 67–55.

  It is not an easy night for Forte. He gets poked in the eye on a first-half play and needs Grillo and Higgins to up-periscope and freight-train in to make a call he can’t see. Late in the first half, one of the St. Joseph’s players sidles over to him and says, “You know that guy ain’t got no game.”

  “Who?” Forte asks, thinking the player is talking about one of the GW players.

  “Him,” the kid says, pointing at Grillo. “That ref ain’t got no game.” Forte resists the urge to tee the kid up and instead tells Grillo the story at halftime.

  Late in the game, with St. Joseph’s on the foul line, Forte makes the GW cheerleaders stop pounding their megaphones against the wall, which in the quiet, empty gym reverberates all over. “Why did you do that?” Higgins says afterward.

  “They shouldn’t be doing that,” Forte says.

  “But they were doing it all game,” Higgins answers.

  “They were?” Forte says. “I didn’t notice until then.”

  He is tired. Friday, he will fly home to Atlanta for a day off. On Saturday, he will be in Columbia, South Carolina, with his partner Donaghy to work Clemson-South Carolina.

  “Intrastate rivalry,” he says. “Big game.”

  Every time Joe Forte walks on the floor, he tells himself he is working a big game. That is one of the reasons why he is so good at what he does. He’s a ref. And proud of it.

  13

  BUCKLING DOWN

  February 6–7 … Durham, North Carolina

  The days are passing too fast for Billy King.

  “I was sitting with some friends the other day and one of them said, ‘Do you realize it’s just eighty-eight days to graduation?’ I hadn’t even thought about anything like that. The time is just slipping away so quickly. College is almost all over for me.”

  Many college basketball players see their last game as the end of their college experience. Billy King isn’t one of them. His last game will, in all likelihood, be an ending for him because he is not likely to play pro basketball. But it will also be the start of many beginnings for him. At twenty-one King knows what many basketball players never know: There is life after hoops.

  “I’ve taken the approach this season that this is it, my finale, and I want to make it memorable,” he said, eating Chinese food one afternoon. “If I get a shot to play pro ball, that’s great, wonderful. But the odds are I’m going to be working nine-to-five next year. This is my last time around. The last time I’ll hear the cheers and be the center of this kind of attention. I want to savor it all.”

  King is in a perfect place to have that kind of season. He and his roommate, Kevin Strickland, are the only seniors on a young but talented Duke team. Two years ago, when King and Strickland were sophomores, Duke won thirty-seven games, the ACC Tournament, and the East Regional, and came within two baskets of beating Louisville for the national championship.

  Five seniors, four of them starters, two of them All-Americans (Johnny Dawkins and Mark Alarie) graduated off that team. In 1987, picked for sixth in the ACC, the Blue Devils won twenty-four games and reached the NCAA round of sixteen. Now, four starters are back from that team. Still, in most preseason polls, Duke went almost unnoticed. They were in almost no top tens; some national polls didn’t even rank them in the top twenty-five.

  By the end of December, the Blue Devils were 6–1, their only loss at top-ranked Arizona, and they were in everyone’s top ten. But it was a month of turmoil and, although none of it directly involved him, King felt partly responsible.

  Duke began the season with four very easy victories over Appalachian State, East Carolina, Northwestern, and Davidson. But on December 13th, sophomore center Ala Abdelnaby ran his car off the road into a tree. He was charged with reckless driving (although he later pleaded guilty to “unsafe movement”) and was fined twenty-five dollars and court costs.

  King was hardly surprised by Abdelnaby’s mishap. The first time he had ever driven with him, Abdelnaby had wheeled out of a parking lot so fast that King almost got out of the car. Abdelnaby was bright, funny, and popular with his teammates. But he was also immature. It showed up in his play—and his driving.

  By this time, exams had started and two members of the team were struggling. One was Joe Cook, a freshman. The other was Phil Henderson. That was the more serious problem. Henderson had flunked out the previous year as a freshman, so if he flunked out again he was gone. Four days after Abdelnaby’s accident, Coach Mike Krzyzewski called a team meeting.

  “He was as angry as I’ve seen him in four years,” King said. “He couldn’t believe how undisciplined we had all been. Three guys out of twelve in trouble is a lot. Here we were with a chance to have a great team and we might screw the whole thing up before we’d played one big game. He told Kevin and me that part of being a friend is to crack down on guys when they need to be cracked down on. He was really, really pissed.”

  Things calmed down. Henderson and Cook got their minds on their books and came through finals okay. The players went home for four days at Christmas to regroup for the tournament in Arizona, which would be their first real challenge of the season.

  The tournament in Tucson was good … and bad. On the first night, Duke blitzed Florida, a team that had won the preseason NIT a month earlier. King, in his role of defensive stopper, guarded All-American Vernon Maxwell and shut him down. For King, this was something of a revenge game. In high school, during an AAU summer tournament, Maxwell had made two free throws to win a game after King had thrown a bad pass. After the game, Maxwell was gracious. “Makes us even,” he said to King, who had been thinking the same thing but wouldn’t say it.

  The next night
, though, Sean Elliott got even for Maxwell—and more. He torched King for 31 points and Arizona beat the Blue Devils 91–85 in one of the better games of the year. “The best I’ve ever guarded,” King said. “He’s 6–8 and has those long arms. Most guys I can get up and give them trouble when they take their shot. But he just shot over me all night. He was great.”

  King has had a reputation as a defensive specialist since high school. Krzyzewski can still remember a summer camp game in which King was assigned to Michael Brown, a hotshot shooter from Dunbar High School in Baltimore. “He just shut him down totally,” Krzyzewski said. “I turned to my assistants and said, ‘I have to have him.’ ”

  King, whose father died when he was four, was raised by his mother, grandmother, and sister. They did good work. King is articulate, funny, and bright. He is the kind of person everyone likes—except for the people he is guarding.

  “I’ve always loved defense,” he said. “Even when I was little, I was never a great shooter. I can remember when I was ten years old, I couldn’t make free throws. I still can’t. But I could always play defense and it was always fun for me. I liked to think I could do things on defense other guys couldn’t.”

  Krzyzewski saw this in King. He had thought when King first came to Duke that he would improve his offense as the years went by. But by his senior year he knew that wasn’t going to happen. “Billy is unique,” he said, “in that he focuses so much of his concentration on defense. Even when we’re on offense, I think his mind is on defense. Most kids are the other way around.”

  Krzyzewski would have liked for King to produce more on offense. He had pushed him for three years to work on his shooting. At times he had threatened to bench him if he didn’t improve on offense. But he never did, because even when he wasn’t scoring, King’s defense and his leadership on the floor were imperative for Duke to be successful.

  After the Arizona loss, Krzyzewski lectured his team about being soft in tough games. This was something he worried about with this team. There was no one on this Duke team, he felt, like Danny Meagher or David Henderson, two of his past players who would break an arm to win a game. He told his players they had lost to Arizona because they had thought winning would be nice—instead of thinking winning was an absolute necessity.

  The next four games were relatively easy victories: William and Mary, Miami, Virginia in the ACC opener, and St. Louis. But Krzyzewski wasn’t happy. Their play was sloppy. After St. Louis, he told his players, “If you improved a lot you’d be deplorable. You’re ripe to be picked.”

  Players almost never believe coaches when they hear things like this, especially when they are 10–1 and ranked fifth in the country. But Krzyzewski knew what he was talking about. Two days later, Maryland came to Duke and stunned the Blue Devils, who immediately got down 12–2 at the beginning of the game and were then outscored 8–0 in the last three minutes to lose, 72–69. Now, King and his teammates understood what Krzyzewski had been talking about.

  “What really made us mad was that Maryland didn’t even play very well and we still let them win,” King said. “We gave them too much respect. We knew they were talented but we forgot that so are we. We played tentative. The next few days in practice were like preseason again. We had a lot of cockiness knocked out of us. We didn’t like the way losing felt and the only way to make up for it was to win at Carolina.”

  Duke wins at North Carolina about as often as the Chicago Cubs contend for the pennant. The Blue Devils won there in 1966. They repeated the feat nineteen years later in 1985. Twice in twenty-two years. But they had to win now. No big deal, right?

  To change things a little, Krzyzewski took his team to shoot in the Dean E. Smith Center the day before the game. To everyone in the world, the 21,444-seat palace was the Deandome. At Carolina they always call it “Smith Center.” It is a reflex action. Say “Deandome” in front of someone from Carolina and they say, “Smith Center,” as if you had pressed a button and gotten a tape. “Smith Center, this is a recording.”

  The Deandome is a tough place for a visiting team to play for one reason: the opposition. Carolina is always good, more often than not excellent, occasionally great, and once every ten years virtually unbeatable. But Krzyzewski is not intimidated by Dean Smith, a fact that was evident the very first time they met.

  Carolina won the game 78–76. This was in the last year of the old Big Four Tournament. Krzyzewski, then thirty-three, was brand new to the ACC. When Smith, thinking he was victorious, ran over to shake his hand, there was one second still on the clock. Krzyzewski shook him off, saying, “The damn game’s not over yet, Dean!”

  Smith won that one and eight of the first nine in which the two men met. But slowly, as he built his program, Krzyzewski began to catch up. They had split their last six meetings going into this game in the Deandome, uh … “Smith Center, this is a recording.”

  Duke blew to an early eleven-point lead, which was hardly unusual. Over the years, Carolina had made a habit of falling behind early at home, often way behind, then rallying and finding a miraculous way to win.

  In the ACC this phenomenon is known as The Carolina Piss Factor. A Piss Factor game is one where you are winning, you are about to win, you have the game won, and then something strange happens, you lose and you are pissed.

  Duke has been the victim of as many Piss Factor games as anyone. In 1974, the Blue Devils led Carolina by eight points with seventeen seconds left—and lost in overtime. Walter Davis scored the tying basket on a forty-foot shot that banked off the top of the backboard and went in at the buzzer. Piss Factor. In 1984, trying to deny Carolina a perfect ACC regular season, Duke had a two-point lead with nine seconds left and Danny Meagher on the foul line. Meagher missed, Matt Doherty raced downcourt, appeared to travel, shot off-balance, and the ball went in at the buzzer. Carolina won in double overtime. Piss Factor.

  In 1986, in the inaugural game in the Deandome—Smith Center, this is a recording—Krzyzewski was hit with two first-half technical fouls that were so bad that Fred Barakat, the league’s supervisor of officials, criticized the calls on television at halftime. Carolina won by three. Piss Factor.

  This one had all the makings of another Piss Factor game. Slowly but surely, Carolina whittled the lead away in the second half. But there was another factor at work in this game—the King Factor. King was guarding Jeff Lebo, Carolina’s point guard and best outside threat.

  In high school, King and Lebo had roomed together at summer camp and they had remained good friends. Lebo was an anointed player, a coach’s son who seemed born to play basketball. He had been recruited by everybody, yet there had been little doubt that he would play at Carolina. He had been an All-ACC player as a sophomore and was this year’s Designated Talker in the Carolina locker room. If you wanted to hear some pablum, you headed for Lebo.

  In a Piss Factor game, Lebo would be the guy who hit the off-balance three-pointer at the buzzer. But King wasn’t going to let Lebo do much of anything in this game. Everywhere Lebo went, King went. When the game was over, Lebo had taken fourteen shots—and hit two.

  In the final two minutes, neither team could make a big play. Carolina got the last shot—twice—and couldn’t hit either time. When Lebo’s last shot of the game hit the rim and bounced to Danny Ferry, Duke had a 70–69 victory. It wasn’t pretty but it didn’t matter—it was only the second game Carolina had lost during three seasons in the Deandome—Smith Center, etc.…

  King felt this was a breakthrough victory for his team, not just because they had competed with a top team—they had beaten that team. Two years earlier when the ’86 team had won this kind of game, the key players on the ’88 team—King, Strickland, Ferry, and Quin Snyder—had been complementary players. And the fifth starter, Robert Brickey, had been a high school senior.

  “I think until that Carolina game, we were still trying to find an identity as a team, King said. “Kevin and I still hadn’t really made this our team as captains. We knew we were good, bu
t how good? Coach K kept telling us we had to learn how to fight our way through tough situations. In Chapel Hill, we did that.”

  The King–Krzyzewski relationship was an interesting one. Although Krzyzewski remembered King’s impressive performance against Michael Brown, King remembered a summer camp game in which he guarded Reggie Williams, the future Georgetown star, as the one where he established his reputation as The Defender. Other than that, they disagreed on almost nothing.

  Krzyzewski was a defensive coach and King the ultimate defensive player. “Of all the kids I’ve had at Duke, Billy probably knows what I’m thinking during a game and takes pride in it more than any of them,” Krzyzewski said. “Kids believe in what you’re saying in varying degrees. Billy, I think, more than anyone, has always believed in me. If I say something is so, he believes it and, as he’s gotten older, he’s become the guy who gets the other kids to believe it.”

  Even though the Carolina victory was gratifying, Krzyzewski still wasn’t convinced this team had the kind of get-down-in-the-mud guts that the ’86 team had. When he watched the tape of the Carolina game, he saw a lot of things he liked, but he also saw some plays at the end when his team had looked scared. The difference in this game and others against the Tar Heels was that Carolina had looked just as scared.

  The next two games were virtual walkovers for Duke: a victory over an outmanned Wake Forest team and a not-too-pretty win at Stetson. That set up the biggest week of the season: four home games in seven days, against Clemson, Georgia Tech, N.C. State, and Notre Dame, the last one a national TV game (clearly the type of game a coach plays only because the athletic director tells him to).

  Well rested, the Blue Devils started the week by hammering Clemson, 101–63. “That’s the best team I’ve seen in the four years I’ve been in the ACC,” Clemson Coach Cliff Ellis said. “They don’t allow you to do anything.”