A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  But Armstrong didn’t do that. He nailed Yohe with a technical. Barnes didn’t even know who had been called or for what. Armstrong then took a bad situation and made it worse. As Rodney Rice went to the foul line to shoot the two free throws, Armstrong noticed student trainer Dean Ravizzo, who was sitting on the far end of the bench, putting his hand on his neck. Armstrong not only had rabbit ears, he had rabbit eyes. Just as Rice released the ball, Armstrong blew the whistle and teed up Ravizzo.

  Armstrong had completely lost control. For one thing, he had messed up the simple act of administering a technical. He had blown the whistle just as Rice released the ball and the shot had hurtled off the back rim. “He should get that shot over,” Tarrant argued, correctly. To be consistent, Armstrong turned that down. He did everything entirely wrong during the sequence.

  A good referee does not call a technical foul on a student trainer who is sitting at the far end of the bench nowhere near the coaches. If he is so sensitive that he objects to the choke sign—Ravisso denied that he had done anything later—he should go to the head coach and say, “I object to the choke sign from that kid on the end of the bench and if anything like that happens again, I’ll tee you.” One can be certain that Barnes, or any coach in a like situation, would clamp down quickly.

  Armstrong did none of this. He simply ran amok. Did his past run-ins with Barnes affect his judgment? Who knows. Armstrong is a good official most of the time. But he had been counseled by others in the profession for two years to stop letting his ego interfere with his work. “Stop being such a tough guy all the time,” one supervisor had told him on several occasions.

  Tonight, Armstrong had been a tough guy. And he had cast a pall over a championship game. Rice made the next three free throws and on the ensuing possession, Scott Stapleton hit a jumper. Richmond led 39–26. In an amazing twist of irony, Armstrong then pulled up lame on the next trip downcourt with a torn calf muscle. He had to leave the game. The Patriots, just as hobbled emotionally, limped into the locker room down 48–35.

  Barnes’s assistants had the most work to do at halftime. They had to convince Barnes not to try to find Armstrong right then to demand an explanation. Outside, Kvancz, normally the cool one in the group, was raging at ACC Commissioner Tom Yeager and Refereeing Supervisor Dan Woolridge. “I’d like to see that son of a bitch pull that kind of crap on the North Carolina bench during a championship game,” Kvancz raged. “What does he think this is, the goddamn Little League, where he’s Mr. Big Shot and can do whatever the fuck he wants to?

  “You send the SOB to my place next year,” Kvancz concluded, “and I promise you I won’t pay him!”

  In the meantime, the game wasn’t over. Barnes’s job was to convince his players of this. “Get your heads up!” he said. “We’ve been down before and we’ve come back. Right now they’re sitting in there thinking they’ve got it fucking won. They’re in for a shock. Play our way and you’ll come back. If they get the ball inside, foul them. We can afford to foul. Put them on the line. They aren’t good foul shooters.

  “There’s one key here. You’ve got to believe you can come back. Twenty minutes is a long time.” He paused. “Keep your heads up and go back out there and play like champions.”

  They did. Sanders, held to five points in the first half, scored right away. Then he stole the inbounds pass and scored again. After that, it was Davis’s turn. He nailed three straight three-pointers and suddenly, in less than five minutes, it was 51–48.

  Davis, overexcited, committed his fourth foul, reaching in, and had to come out. Richmond built the lead back to 59–52 but the Patriots came back again. Miller hit a jumper, then a drive. Earl Moore, the forgotten man of the last month, hit a three-pointer. Then he hit another one. Amazingly, Mason led 61–60 with more than eight minutes to play.

  From that moment on, it was high-wire basketball, two good teams playing with an entire season at stake. No one could get the lead and the ball. Back and forth they went, the old building now full of life as each team’s fans cheered and prayed and hung on for dear life.

  A Davis three-pointer put the Patriots up 69–67, but Benjy Taylor, a little-used Richmond senior averaging 1.7 points per game, answered with a three of his own to make it 70–69. Davis hit two free throws to make it 71–70, Taylor answered again and it was 72–71 with 1:50 to go.

  Moore flashed open. His jumper went in and out. Richmond rebounded. There was 1:20 left. The Spiders would have to shoot. They ran the clock down, then tried to go inside to Peter Woolfolk. The pass was long. Moore picked the ball up in the corner, took a step and slipped on a wet spot. He fell, but on tape, it looked as if he kept his dribble. The officials saw only the fall and called traveling. Either way, a tough call.

  That gave the ball back to Richmond. The clock was now down to forty-five seconds. Richmond didn’t have to shoot. The Patriots, not wanting to foul, let the clock run to eight seconds before they fouled Taylor, who was 20-of-21 from the line on the season. Coolly, after two Barnes time-outs, he made both. It was 73–70. George Mason needed a three-pointer to tie. Davis, who had been heroic all night, cut to the left wing and with all sorts of hands in his face, fired. The ball clanged off the rim. It was over. Richmond was in the NCAA Tournament.

  For a moment, Davis just sat on the floor, staring in disbelief. Barnes went to congratulate Tarrant, still slightly in shock himself. It had been so close. As he walked off, staring at the scoreboard, Barnes couldn’t help himself. “Three points,” he thought, “and Armstrong gave them three points on the technicals.”

  Sadly, the technicals had intervened on an evening of otherwise wonderful basketball. The talk in the aftermath should have been about the Patriots’ courageous comeback and Taylor’s clutch play at the finish. Instead it was about Hank Armstrong. Even Yeager shook his head and said, “I would really like to know the rationale behind those calls.”

  Unfortunately, the tightness of the officials’ fraternity got in the way of what was best for the game. Woolridge, the supervisor, a recently retired official himself, refused to admit that Armstrong had made any mistake at all. Even the next day, after looking at tape, Woolridge still wouldn’t admit that Armstrong had messed up.

  This is a problem with officiating: When mistakes are made, no one wants to admit it. The fraternity closes ranks. Too many leagues have ex-officials like Woolridge as supervisors. It is very difficult to discipline a former peer, a friend, a pal. Woolridge is a good supervisor but someone else should have been involved in the area of discipline.

  Barnes didn’t know it but he had just coached his last game at George Mason. On that night, though, he was thinking of the future—one he thought would be at George Mason.

  “You proved tonight you’re winners,” he told his team. “You three seniors have set a standard here and the rest of us are going to live up to it in the future. You should be disappointed, but you should be proud too. I’m proud to have coached you this year. You’ve put up with a lot.

  “We’ll be back again,” he said finally. “The standard has been set.”

  Barnes turned around and walked out. His players’ tears were more than he could bear.

  March 9 … New York

  From thirty-eight floors up, Paul Evans stared down at the streets of Manhattan, a look of complete relaxation on his face. If ever a coach had reason to feel satisfied, it was Evans. His Pittsburgh team had gone through a season as turbulent as can be imagined and in the game that mattered most, had played its best basketball.

  “I would hope winning the regular season will put a lot of the Pitt problems of the past in the past,” he said. “The whole thing was set up for us to fail and we didn’t. That’s what makes me feel good.”

  The Panthers had gone to Syracuse for the last weekend of the regular season with the Big East title on the line. Both teams were 11–4 in league play. After losing on the road to Seton Hall, Pitt had struggled past Connecticut and Boston College. In the Connecticut game, the Huskie
s had come back from 18 points down in the second half to almost steal the game. Against BC, Evans had intentionally taken a technical foul early in the first half to try and get his team going but then had drawn another one—unintentionally—at the end of the half.

  “We weren’t playing well, but we were winning,” Evans said. “I kept wondering if we were going to just jerk along like this the rest of the season or get it going again. It worried me, though, because it reminded me a little bit of last year. Once we won our twentieth game last year we didn’t have a good practice the rest of the season.”

  Evans was even more worried when his team lost its last home game to Seton Hall. By now, there was no doubt that the Pirates were for real. They had destroyed Villanova after their initial win over Pitt and they were playing superb basketball. Pitt didn’t play poorly against Seton Hall. But a loss was a loss and now the Panthers had to go to Syracuse to play in the Carrier Dome in front of more than thirty thousand people for the Big East title.

  Strangely, Evans felt confident as he and the team flew to Syracuse on Friday, even though he had left backup forward Steve Maslek home. After Evans had told the team to take it easy and get some rest on Thursday, Maslek had been spotted heading for his girlfriend’s dorm at 2:30 A.M. Enough was enough.

  Still, Evans was—for him—sanguine. “Playing in the Dome never bothered me,” he said. “We’d gone in there when I was at Navy and beaten them by 20 in the NCAAs and we had won up there last year. The question was whether the kids wanted it or not.”

  On Friday afternoon, Evans called Charles Smith in to talk about his feelings. Evans genuinely liked Smith. He often got frustrated with Smith because Smith was low-key and easygoing, not the kind of blood-and-guts competitor that Evans craved. Even though he wished he could get Smith to hurt more after losses, Evans respected him and looked to him as the buffer between himself and the team.

  Evans told Smith he was worried about the team. He didn’t think the freshmen were as concerned about winning as they should be. He had no idea where Lane and Gore were coming from. He thought that once again they had become satisfied because they had won twenty games and wrapped up an NCAA bid. Smith agreed. He said he would talk to his teammates.

  Evans felt better. But that evening he got a phone call from his trainer. Lane had been scheduled for treatment that night and hadn’t shown. He had, instead, gone out with some of the Syracuse players. Evans wasn’t pleased. He was less pleased a couple of hours later when he went to make a midnight bed check. Curfew had been at ten. Jason Matthews was on the phone when Evans walked in and Bobby Martin was still dressed. Evans said nothing to the two freshmen. He also said nothing to Lane.

  Saturday went by quietly. Evans, who had been having trouble sleeping for most of the season, was up very early Sunday morning. He was angry with his team and he planned to let the players know about it. Before they went to the arena that day, Evans told his players what he thought of them.

  “You have the talent to win this game but I don’t think you will,” he said. “I don’t think you guys care enough. Jerome, if you really cared you wouldn’t be running around with the Syracuse guys on Friday. You’re so good you don’t need treatment, I suppose. Jason, Bobby, you’re both so cool I don’t know if you care at all.

  “You guys just piss me off. You don’t want to win. You’re satisfied to just be good. You don’t want to be great.”

  Evans’s words were carefully chosen. “I figured with the environment we were going into, we needed to be pissed off,” he said. “If they were pissed at me and went out and played because of it, that was just fine.”

  Whomever the Panthers were mad at, they played the way Evans wanted—especially Lane. He scored 29 points and had 15 rebounds. “He was on another level,” Evans said. “He was possessed.”

  Smith scored 18 points, Gore scored 15. The Panthers hung on in the face of the screaming crowd and won, 85–84. For the first time in school history, they had won the regular season title in the Big East. “If we had lost we would have gone into the [Big East] Tournament needing to win at least two games just to save face,” Evans said. “Now, we’ve won something that means something and we know we’ve probably got a number two seed in the [NCAA] Tournament wrapped up. That feels good.”

  Looking back at the turbulent year—the two players lost to academics, the run-ins with John Thompson and Rollie Massimino—Evans had few regrets. Except about Massimino. “I think we’ve both hurt ourselves with this thing,” he said softly. “I would guess now, it will never really be resolved. Last night, we were both at a high school game and I saw him in the hospitality room at halftime. I started to go over and say hello, maybe break the ice a little, but he had turned around. I don’t know if he saw me or not but I really don’t think it’s going to change any time soon.…”

  Massimino had seen Evans. That same afternoon, he sat on a bench in Central Park (the Big East Tournament would begin in two days in Madison Square Garden) dressed in a red sweater, smoking a cigar and talking alternately about the joys and frustrations of the season.

  Many of the frustrations centered on Evans. Their second meeting of the season had been even more embarrassing than the first. It had come three days after Villanova’s loss at Temple. Once again, Pitt had played superbly, killing Villanova on the boards while winning the game going away, 87–75.

  Once again, Massimino changed his mind about shaking hands, again feeling that you don’t walk away after a loss, especially at home.

  But the handshake had turned into a shouting match with graduate Assistant Coach Steve Pinone having to step in between the two men to keep it from getting worse.

  Massimino was genuinely shaken by the incident. Instead of hanging around his office as he normally does after a game, he left right away. “If I had stuck to my original plan to not shake hands, nothing would have happened,” Massimino said. “I’m not a hypocrite, that’s why I didn’t think I should shake hands. They don’t shake hands in the pros and it’s no big deal. But then with twenty seconds to go I told [Assistant Coach] Steve [Lappas] that I had to go over and congratulate him, that it would be wrong not to.

  “But that incident was it. The whole thing was an embarrassment—to both of us. There just isn’t going to be any communication between us. I don’t see any reason for it. People in this business know me. I’ll let them make the judgments on who is right and who is wrong. The whole thing never should have come to this but it did. Now, it’s over and done with. If we play Saturday in the semifinals, I won’t shake his hand after the game, win or lose.”

  Massimino’s voice was filled with anger as he spoke. Like any coach who had known success, Massimino has detractors. But he had never had an experience like this with another coach, and it had shaken him.

  In truth, though, the Evans affair was the only blotch on a regular season that had been as rewarding as any Massimino could remember. The Wildcats were going into the Big East Tournament with a 19–11 record. They had finished tied (with Georgetown) for third in league play with a 9–7 record, a far cry from the seventh place finish that many had predicted for them.

  Since their record included victories over Illinois, Syracuse, St. John’s, Georgetown, Seton Hall, and Virginia, they had an NCAA bid wrapped up, even if they were to lose their opening tournament game to St. John’s.

  “I don’t think we’ll lose, though,” Massimino said. “It will be a very tough game but the way our kids have practiced and prepared the last few days I really think we’ll beat them. This will be the eighth time in nine years we’ve been in the NCAAs. Last year was just a fluke. I knew that but we had to prove it to people. Now, we have. But there’s still more to do.”

  Massimino paused to relight his cigar and leaned back on the bench, watching a female jogger running by. “Great city, New York,” he said, giggling for a second like a teenage boy. His mind turned back to his team.

  “You know, I could be completely wrong, we might not win another g
ame this season. But I just have a feeling that this team is gonna do something special. We’re not as good as we were in ’85 and I’m not sure we’ve got quite the toughness that team had. But these kids have really been something all year.

  “When we went to Seton Hall and got absolutely hammered [84–58] we could have been in trouble. That was the one game of the year where we just didn’t have it. They were hot. We couldn’t stop Bryant and we got killed. I was worried. I thought maybe we were running out of gas, not so much physically as emotionally.

  “So the next day I gave ’em one of my talks. I told ’em about the house that we had built at Villanova. That if you play for Villanova, you don’t get blown out the way we did at Seton Hall. Every family goes through ups and downs and when you hit a down you pull together and use each other to replenish your strength.

  “I screamed and I yelled and I made it clear they hadn’t done a goddamn thing yet this season. Villanova teams don’t settle. They always look for more. When I was finished, I just turned around and walked out. I was drained.”

  But he wasn’t finished with his yelling for the day. “After the kids went home I gave my assistants the same speech. I killed them. I told them that it didn’t matter what I said to the kids, this was our fault, not theirs, that we had let up and been satisfied because we had played well early. I said, ‘If you catch me doing that, jump on me. I don’t want a bunch of yes-men working for me. If I screw up tell me.’ ”

  Two days later Villanova went to Syracuse. Coming off the Seton Hall debacle, there was every reason to believe the Wildcats might be primed for another blowout on the road. It never happened. “When we went up there, they had every reason to kill us. We had beaten them at our place, they were still fighting to win the conference. But our guys went out and played. When we do that, we can play with anybody.”

  Villanova had a chance to win on its final possession, but Plansky missed a jumper and Syracuse survived. The Wildcats were devastated by the loss. Plansky, normally the most quotable member of the team, sat in a corner of the locker room, his head down, giving monosyllabic answers. Kenny Wilson cried and wouldn’t talk to anyone.