A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  Barnes had come to the end of his first season as a head coach feeling sadder but wiser. He had started out confident and now felt even more confident. He had thought he could coach, now knew he could. The won-lost record and the improvement of the team from October to March was evidence of that.

  But it hadn’t been easy. Being a hard-ass with players he liked wasn’t fun. He had screamed, threatened, cajoled, and used so much profanity it made him shudder to think about it. He had benched and suspended and worried and wondered. Tonight was typical. Long ago, he had promised Amp Davis, his point guard, that he could sing the national anthem before his last home game. Davis was an accomplished gospel singer.

  But Davis had just been convicted by a student judicial board of the cheating offense he had been accused of in November. Since the semester was half over, and since he was not going to graduate on time in May, the board had suspended him from school for summer school and the fall semester. This meant that Davis’s basketball eligibility was unaffected but his chances of graduating were damaged severely.

  Barnes and Athletic Director Jack Kvancz were stumped. Should they go ahead and play someone who had been convicted of cheating? If they benched him, were they guilty of double jeopardy? The judicial board could have ruled Davis ineligible to play but hadn’t. Was it their place to add to the penalty? Davis still insisted he was innocent. If he was suspended, he wouldn’t suffer alone: The Patriots were not likely to do much damage without their starting point guard.

  All of this, along with the pragmatism that afflicts most people in making such decisions, led to Davis staying in the lineup. But what about the national anthem? “If we’re letting him play,” Kvancz said, “we should let him sing the national anthem. How can we say he should be penalized that way if we aren’t penalizing him by taking him off the floor during the game? If he plays, he sings. If he doesn’t play, he doesn’t sing.”

  And so Amp Davis sang—quite well. He and fellow seniors Brian Miller and Darrin Satterthwaite received their farewell flowers and plaques. Then it was time to play. Only Barnes’s Patriots forgot about that one little detail. They spent the first twelve minutes admiring the Midshipmen, who ripped to a 29–12 lead, thanks largely to the three-point shooting of freshman Joe Gottschalk, who had been out for almost a month with a leg injury. The layoff didn’t seem to bother Gottschalk, who came off the bench and hit three straight three-pointers in ninety seconds to help build the Navy lead. At halftime, the lead was nine points, 39–30.

  Barnes didn’t scream and yell during the break. Instead, he issued a challenge. “Okay now, we’re in March and we’re in trouble. So now we’ll find out after all these months what you guys are made of. You went out and played scared for a half. Why, I don’t know. You know these guys can’t guard you if you play the way you’re supposed to. But you’ve fucked around for a half like a bunch of fags and now we’ve got to come back. Well, let’s see if you can do it. I know you can. But do you?”

  If they didn’t, they figured it out. Navy briefly built the lead to 42–30, then George Mason just took over the game. Sanders scored inside. Miller hit a three-pointer. Satterthwaite hit a drive. Robert Dykes and Sanders scored inside and Davis hit a three-pointer. That made it 50–46.

  It was 50–48 when Hank Armstrong, Barnes’s old friend, called a cheap foul on Navy. Coach Pete Herrmann, watching the game go down the drain, screamed at Armstrong and drew a technical. Armstrong then did what referees worry about doing when they are pumped up after a technical—he walked to the wrong foul line.

  At that moment, Armstrong’s error meant very little. Davis made the two free throws to tie the game and Mason gradually pulled away for a satisfying 85–72 victory. Barnes was able to take the seniors out one at a time and let them hear the cheers of a home crowd one last time. But Armstrong’s little faux pas would turn out to be a harbinger of trouble still to come.

  For this night, though, it didn’t matter. March had come in with a victory and Barnes was happy with the way his team had reacted to his halftime words. “We played, guys, we really played the way we can that second half,” he told them. “Now we’re going to Hampton. It’s all right there for you. Three more games and we’re there.”

  March 2 … Knoxville, Tennessee

  The sunshine that had blanketed the University of Tennessee campus seemed just about right to Don DeVoe. The sounds of spring were in the air and if spring is about new beginnings and rebirth then that was just fine with DeVoe.

  In two short weeks his outlook had changed 180 degrees. He had gone from a coach struggling not to completely lose his team—and, in the process, his job—to a coach whose team seemed to be coming together at exactly the right time.

  “I knew all along that this team wouldn’t be as good offensively as last year’s,” he said, luxuriating in a banana pudding dessert at his favorite lunch spot.

  “But I also knew we had the potential to be better defensively. Before the Kentucky game, when we got blown out those three straight games, we had lost it defensively. If we didn’t get it back, we were finished. But we got it back in the Kentucky game and that seemed to convince the guys they could do it every night. So, we’ve gone out and done it.”

  One day, DeVoe might look back at Tennessee’s dramatic 72–70 victory over Kentucky and say, “That saved my job.” But in the aftermath of the win, happy as he had been, DeVoe had said firmly, “For this to mean anything we’ve got to go on the road and do something.”

  The road in the Southeast Conference had been a nightmare for Tennessee for three seasons. The Volunteers had a three-year SEC road record of 2–22 as they started on a trip to Auburn and Florida. Their big chance, they felt, was at Auburn. They had beaten the Tigers easily at home in January. Three days later, Florida had come into Knoxville and beaten them by 20. The odds of going to Gainesville and winning were not too good. So Auburn was it.

  To add to the road woes, DeVoe learned shortly before tip-off at Auburn that John Ward, Tennessee’s longtime radio play-by-play man—The Voice of the Vols—had been taken to the hospital. He’d been bleeding internally. It turned out Ward was having a bout of diverticulitis. That night there was fear that tests might show cancer.

  With Tennessee fans listening to the Auburn radio feed, the Volunteers almost won the game. They led by as many as seven points in the second half. But down the stretch, the jump shots that had been dropping against the Auburn zone didn’t drop and the Tigers ended up with a 73–68 victory. DeVoe was surprised by his players’ postgame reaction.

  “They were actually up,” he said. “They knew just how we had lost but also that we could have won. It was the first time in a while that we had played a good team on the road and walked away saying, ‘What if?’ We hadn’t been close enough to do that before.”

  The team bussed back to Knoxville right after the game. DeVoe couldn’t sleep throughout the five-and-a-half-hour ride. He was too keyed up, worrying about Ward, a friend, and wondering if his team could ever find a way to win on the road. Tennessee was now 13–10 on the season, 6–8 in the SEC. Athletic Director Doug Dickey had said to DeVoe, “Show me improvement, Don.” There were four regular season games left—two at home. If Tennessee split those games, it would be 15–12 going into the SEC Tournament. That was better than the 14–15 of a year ago. That was improvement. But would it be enough? DeVoe didn’t know the answer.

  He sat awake on the bouncing bus, his mind churning, racing from thoughts of Ward, to the late turnovers at Auburn, to how to beat Florida. He got home at 5:30 A.M. and slept two hours before his children woke him.

  The following day DeVoe and his coaches began to prepare for Florida. Avoiding turnovers, they knew, would be the key. Florida could embarrass you if you didn’t take care of the basketball and Tennessee had been weak in this area often—especially on the road—during the season. “We came up with two different plans,” DeVoe said. “Plan A didn’t work.”

  Plan A called for the guards to get th
e ball up the floor themselves, clearing the big men out of the way and perhaps looking for Doug Roth as an outlet cutting down the sideline. It didn’t even come close to working. Florida’s quick guards, Ronnie Montgomery and Vernon Maxwell, wreaked havoc on the Tennessee backcourt, forcing quick turnovers while the Gators built a 15-point lead. Tennessee looked dead. But a late flurry in the last minute of the half cut the margin to 9.

  “That was critical,” DeVoe said. “We came into the locker rooms and the guys were saying, ‘Hey, we can win this game.’ We decided to go to Plan B in the second half against their pressure. It worked. We didn’t have one turnover in the second half.”

  Plan B brought all five Tennessee players into the backcourt—if necessary—to help against the press, while the quicker, more dangerous Dyron Nix replaced Roth as the sideline outlet. Greg Bell got hot, scoring 13 straight points during one stretch. Instead of being a Florida walkover, the game was tight and, as always, the pressure was on the home team. They were supposed to win.

  The Auburn experience also came into play here. Before Auburn, Tennessee hadn’t been involved in a close game on the road. Now it had been, and it was better able to cope with the pressure down the stretch. With time running out and the score tied at 63, Tennessee ran a clear-out play for Bell, the hero of the Kentucky game. He drove the lane and hit a short jumper with two seconds left. Florida called time. It got the ball downcourt to freshman Livingston Chatman but his desperation shot from the corner hit nothing. Tennessee had the victory, 65–63.

  “When Chatman’s shot was in the air I think my heart actually stopped,” DeVoe said. “After everything that had happened, after getting a bunch of bad calls the second half and then the ball ends up in his hands, you wonder. But the ball doesn’t go in and we’ve got the win.”

  If DeVoe had ever had a bigger win he couldn’t remember it. It was the 300th victory of his coaching career and at least as important, the fourteenth of the season. The team flew home by charter. When DeVoe finally walked into his house—it was after two o’clock in the morning—he found his wife waiting for him. Normally, she would have gone to bed, but this was too important.

  It was their third wedding anniversary.

  Don DeVoe met Ana Garcia on a setup. In 1983, shortly after he and his first wife had separated and decided to go ahead with divorce proceedings, his next-door neighbors, Bill and Myra Brown, invited him over to the house for a barbecue. They also invited Ana Garcia to the house that day, hoping the two of them would hit it off. They did. Less than two years later, they were married. There are some who say that DeVoe’s second marriage has mellowed him. DeVoe doesn’t buy that old cliché but he doesn’t downplay the importance of his new family.

  “After my separation, I think I went into a shell for a while,” he said. “I really don’t think it affected my coaching but I do know I didn’t want to see people that much and I didn’t travel the way I had before. I just wanted to sort of be by myself and feel sorry for myself.

  “If I had gone through this past season feeling the way I did that year, I’m not sure I could have handled it. I don’t really know what I would have done, if I would have stuck it out. I’d like to think I would have because I’m a competitor, but who knows? Having my family and knowing that no matter what happened they were going to be there for me helped me an awful lot.”

  Now, he had the chance to share some good times with his family. The following night he took Ana to a high school game—after they had celebrated the night before with cookies and milk. For the first time in three years, he felt the kind of warmth from the fans that he had enjoyed in the past.

  “It was like the old days,” he said. “People coming up, congratulating us on the Florida game, talking about the rest of the season and the future. It was a nice feeling.”

  This was exactly eight days after DeVoe had been half-joking about trading his car in for a van. Two days later, Tennessee beat Mississippi State in a tough game, 64–62. The letdown was to be expected and the Bulldogs were a much-improved team. They would prove that the following week by beating LSU a second time in a row. DeVoe was delighted to escape with the victory.

  That win brought March, the sunshine, and Alabama to Knoxville. This would be Tennessee’s last home game. DeVoe thought it crucial that Tennessee win and win resoundingly. Seven straight losses to Alabama stung. This was Wimp Sanderson’s worst team in years. It came to town with a 14–14 record, 0–7 on the SEC road. There was no way Tennessee could afford to lose this game.

  A victory would make the Volunteers 16–10 going to Georgia for the final game of the regular season. It would put them on the NCAA Tournament bubble, giving them at least an outside shot at a bid. And it might very well earn DeVoe a new contract.

  “If we can just get past this [the new contract] we really can get it turned back around here,” he said. “I’m convinced of it. With those five good juniors in the state next year. If we swept them—wow!” His face lit up at the thought. “But we can’t do anything without a new contract.”

  DeVoe was as upbeat now as he had been down two weeks earlier. Friends had sustained him all winter. Bob Knight had called and given him a pep talk. Texas Coach Bob Weltlich had written him a note right after his 300th victory. C. M. Newton had talked at length about how people who run programs the way DeVoe did should be given the benefit of the doubt even when the program was a little bit down. And Fred Taylor, DeVoe’s old coach at Ohio State, had sent him a note when things were at their low ebb just before the Kentucky game. In the note, Taylor had written:

  “Just remember this. Even though you walk in the valley of the shadow of death, you have the comfort of knowing you’re the meanest SOB in the valley.”

  It all made DeVoe feel better. “Nothing’s guaranteed in coaching,” he said. “I lost my job once after going 22–6. You’re always on the bubble if you’re a coach. There are always going to be people who think someone else can do a better job.”

  He laughed. “Right now, though, it’s still my job.”

  After Alabama, DeVoe was even more confident it would continue to be his job. Tennessee rolled from the start, leading 36–22 at halftime and then embarrassing the Tide in the second half, eventually building a 77–49 lead. DeVoe cleared his bench with five minutes left, getting everyone, walk-ons included, into the game. The only bright spot for Alabama came when Bryant Lancaster, who had come into the game 3-of-19 from the free throw line, made two in a row.

  Wimp Sanderson spent most of the second half with his head buried in his hands. “No point looking,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t gonna get any better.”

  It all looked wonderful to DeVoe. The final was 81–58 and it was even easier than it sounded. Win number sixteen might be the one DeVoe needed.

  “I haven’t slept well at all these last couple of weeks,” he said. “The other night I dreamt that I brought back [suspended] Elvin Brown for the SEC Tournament and we beat LSU in overtime. I woke up at five in the morning with a smile on my face. The problem was it was five in the morning and I couldn’t go back to sleep.”

  He was smiling as he told the story. Elvin Brown wasn’t coming back. But DeVoe sensed that he was. That night, when the Tennessee fans sang, “Nah, nah, nah, nah, Hey, hey, goodbye,” it was directed at Alabama, not DeVoe.

  From where DeVoe had been two weeks earlier, that was major progress.

  March 5 … Tucson, Arizona

  Steve Kerr munched on the chocolate chip cookie, kicked his feet up and let his body relax. At least for a minute. He had a couple of hours to rest before he had to venture from his apartment once again, duck into a nearby phone booth and emerge as that great superhero, Steeeeeeve Kerrrrrrrr, defender of truth, justice, and the basketball whenever Arizona had it.

  The apartment, especially at its messiest, was Kerr’s refuge. Although he would have been well advised to put in a revolving door to save people trouble, everyone who wandered in and out came in search of nothing more than a beer o
r sunglasses or suntan lotion. No autographs. No words of wisdom. And, at least for now, if the phone rang, his girlfriend, Margot Brennan, was there to answer it. Kerr was safe … for a moment.

  “Margot, you want a cookie?” he yelled.

  “No, I don’t like that kind.”

  “Why, don’t you like nuts or something?”

  “I like you.”

  Ba-boom. Kerr wasn’t the only wit in this group.

  It had been a long month for Kerr. Tonight, Arizona would play its final regular season game against Washington. Although the Pacific 10 tournament would be played in the McKale Center, meaning that Kerr and fellow seniors Craig McMillan, Tom Tolbert, and Joe Turner would play here again, this was, technically speaking, their last home game. A major pregame ceremony was planned.

  Kerr was looking forward to it but was also glad that a little of the emotion involved would be deflected by his knowledge that this wasn’t really his last game. “If this really was the last one, I might get choked up about it all,” he said. “This way, it will be nice, but not that big a deal.”

  Kerr didn’t need any more big deals or any more attention right now. He wanted to get some rest, focus his mind on the NCAA Tournament, and put the month of February behind him. It had not been an easy one.

  There had been the now-standard crush of demands on his time. Interviews, speeches at local schools and to charity groups, appearances. The team ended January with a 20–1 record, then had gone a little flat. The spark that had carried them through their tough December schedule had gone out; faced with the desultory competition of the Pac–10, they weren’t the same team.