A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  No doubt. Snyder and King were locked in an endless hug. In eight short days they had turned their season completely around. The Tar Heels were devastated. “It really hurts to lose this,” Smith admitted, “because we put so much into it.”

  Both teams had put heart and soul into it. Not because it would influence where they went in the NCAA Tournament—even though it would—but because of the championship that was at stake. The ACC Championship.

  Two hours after Duke and Carolina decided the ACC title, they learned, along with everyone else, where they would be going to start NCAA Tournament play.

  The four No. 1 seeds had been locked in for a couple of weeks: Temple, the top-ranked team in the country, was No. 1 in the East. Oklahoma was No. 1 in the Southeast. Purdue was No. 1 in the Midwest. And Arizona was No. 1 in the West. By their seeding, they were installed as the favorites to reach the Final Four in Kansas City.

  By upsetting Carolina, Duke had won the right to stay near home. Instead of being shipped west as the No. 2 seed in the West Regional, the Blue Devils were installed as the No. 2 seed in the East, meaning they would open play that Thursday in the Deandome. Instead of getting to play at home, Carolina had to trek to Salt Lake City as the No. 2 seed in the West. Kentucky was the No. 2 seed in the Southeast and Pittsburgh, in spite of losing to Villanova in the Big East semifinals, was No. 2 in the Midwest.

  Villanova, after losing the Big East final to Syracuse, was No. 6 in the Southeast—the highest one of Rollie Massimino’s teams had ever been seeded. Kansas was also a No. 6 seed after being bombed in the Big Eight semifinals by Kansas State. The Jayhawks would open in the Midwest against a Xavier team many people thought might upset them. N.C. State was also in the Midwest, with a tough first-round game against Murray State. “I hate playing teams where every guy is 6–6 and can jump,” Valvano said. “If we win, we’ll win by two.”

  Ohio State, in spite of upsetting Purdue in the last week of the season to finish 16–12, did not get a bid. Gary Williams and his team gathered in the locker room on Sunday afternoon to watch the pairings. When the last two teams had gone up on the board, Williams clicked the TV off.

  “We just didn’t play well enough, guys,” he said. “We’ll get an NIT bid. Seniors, look at it as a chance to go out on an up note. You younger guys, use the experience to learn and get better so we won’t go through this again next year.” Williams went home that evening depressed. “I expect to have a long career in coaching,” he said. “I’ll get to the NCAAs again. But the players only get four shots. I feel bad for them.”

  Don DeVoe’s Tennessee team didn’t get a bid either. But DeVoe hadn’t expected one after losing in the first round of the SEC Tournament to Florida to finish 16–12. Tennessee also received an NIT bid.

  One coach whose phone didn’t ring at all on that Sunday night was Rick Barnes. He had hoped that George Mason’s 20–10 record would earn it an NIT bid even though the Patriots were not the name type of team the NIT looks for to sell tickets. The call never came. Most of the teams in the NIT field had weaker records than George Mason—but records don’t really matter to the NIT.

  “First thing tomorrow morning,” Barnes said, “I get on the road recruiting. We’re going to get players so we don’t have to wait for a phone call anymore.”

  Of the 291 teams that started on October 15, 96 were going to postseason play—32 to the NIT and 64 to the NCAAs. The 32 would play for a consolation prize. The 64 would play 63 games. Only one of them would end the season with a victory.

  16

  WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR … OR AT LEAST UNTIL MAY

  Camp Lejeune, North Carolina … March 14

  For David Robinson and Kevin Houston, the NCAA Tournament was just a spectator sport. Houston filled out a pool sheet on Monday morning, picking Temple, Brigham Young, Kansas State, and Arizona to reach the Final Four. Robinson, who had played in the NCAA Tournament the past three years, didn’t bother with a pool. “All I know,” he said, “is I’m not playing.”

  Robinson and Houston were playing basketball, though. Both had traveled to this Marine base on the Atlantic coast for the annual Armed Forces Tournament. Each of the four branches had a team and the tournament would be a three-day double-elimination.

  Houston had been with the Army team since January. He and his wife Elizabeth had gone west to San Francisco so Houston could try out for the team in mid-January. The trip had not gotten off to an auspicious start. When the Houstons arrived in the apartment building provided for officers stationed at the Presidio, they found themselves back in college. The apartment had a small bedroom and a sitting room with a couch and a TV. The bathroom was down the hall.

  “It wasn’t a great way to start,” Houston said. “We opened the door, looked around and said, ‘Oh no.’ But after a while we got used to it.”

  Houston also got used to his new team. The Army All-Stars were, for the most part, experienced Army veterans. Houston was the youngest member of the team. He was also the most publicized and the only white member. This combination guaranteed that Houston would catch a lot of flak from his new teammates.

  “It worked out really well,” he said, laughing. “I mean, right from the start it was the same old story, guys not believing I was me because I looked so young and all. They all made me feel like part of the group right from the beginning by giving me a hard time.”

  This was a period of adjustment for Houston. He had not played on a daily basis since his senior season at Army ended the previous March. He had to get used to playing international rules because most of the tournaments the Army team played in were played under those rules. That meant adjusting to the international three-point line, which was nine inches farther out than the college three-point line. A subtle difference but, without question, a difference.

  And, being on a veteran, talented team, Houston was not the star anymore. He was a starter and a scorer but not every play was being run for him. He had to share the ball. “In a way, it’s fun going out knowing I don’t have to score 30 for us to win,” he said. “But it’s been an adjustment not having the ball as much as I used to. It doesn’t bother me. It’s just different.”

  Always, though, Houston’s mind focused on one thing, on or off the court: the Olympic Trials. He knew the invitations were going out in mid-April and he had heard that Bill Stein, one of John Thompson’s assistant coaches, had inquired about the team’s schedule so he could scout Houston at some point. Even just watching games on television, Houston’s mind was on his chances.

  “I would watch a guy make a move and I’d say to myself, ‘Can I do that?’ I’d see a guard and wonder if I could guard him. Or, if he could guard me. Some nights I would sit there and think they couldn’t choose seventy-five guys without me being one of them. Then, on other nights I would think there was no way I could make that top seventy-five.

  “Liz and I would talk about it and she would ask me what I thought and every day it seemed like I thought something different.”

  Houston was happy with the way he was playing. His scoring average was about half of the 32.9 points per game he had averaged at Army, but he wasn’t shooting nearly as often. Once a week, he called the Army basketball office to update them on his progress. Coach Les Wohtke was surprised when Houston would say softly, “I’m playing pretty well.”

  “Kevin never says he’s playing well,” Wohtke said, “unless he’s playing great.”

  In truth, Houston was having the time of his life. For the first time since he had enrolled at West Point he had some free time. He and Elizabeth played tourist all around the Bay Area and they decided to start a family. “I’d like to have about four kids,” Houston said, grinning. “All of them white shooters.”

  The senior white shooter in the family and his team were touring the West Coast and ripping teams up. Their record was 19–2, including four victories over the Navy team that would be playing at Camp Lejeune. “But that’s without Robinson,” Houston said. “The guys keep asking
me what Robinson’s like to play against. I tell them I don’t know that much. All I know is I’m 0–5 against him.”

  The difference in the lives of the two former military academy stars was perhaps best illustrated by the way they arrived at Lejeune for the tournament. Houston came with his teammates after a barnstorming stop at Fort Hood on the way east. They arrived two days before the tournament was to begin and found themselves quartered along with the Air Force and Navy teams in an old style barrack—one huge room filled with bunk beds—the kind you see in the movies. All it lacked was the gruff drill sergeant waking them up at reveille.

  Robinson spent the day before the tournament began in Kansas City, working for ABC—TV as the color analyst on the Big Eight championship game between Oklahoma and Kansas State. He flew into Lejeune on Monday afternoon and joined the Navy team without having practiced and without having picked up a basketball for most of the past two months. He had spent those months in Oxnard, California, at a civil engineering school.

  “All I want to do tonight,” he said before the opening game, “is be able to run up and down the court without dying.”

  Actually, Robinson was in very good physical shape. He just wasn’t in basketball shape. “I haven’t had the chance to work out with anyone, all I’ve done is a little work on my own,” he said. “The two months in California were just so hectic there was no time to play or even work out, except for some time working with weights.”

  Robinson’s hectic schedule was at least partly self-inflicted. Whenever he had free time, he ran off to do something basketball-related, continuing to live the double life of Navy ensign and millionaire ballplayer. One weekend he judged a slam dunk contest. On another, he went to the NCAA convention in Nashville. There, he bumped into John Thompson. “Keep yourself in shape,” Thompson said, tapping Robinson on the stomach.

  The Navy was certainly doing its best to keep Robinson in shape. One week, Robinson and his classmates were shipped to Camp Pendleton for a week of field maneuvers. “Toughest week of my life,” Robinson said. “I came back and said, ‘I hope I’m never in a war.’ ”

  Every morning, Robinson would wake up at 4:40 A.M. from a half-sleep caused by the too-small sleeping bag he’d been given. Bathing was no picnic either since Robinson hadn’t brought a towel. “I spent the week drying off with a T-shirt,” he said.

  That was the easy part. The hard part was going into the field for sixteen hours a day under simulated war conditions. “We were supposed to be an advance force,” Robinson said. “We were doing these laser drills where they have simulated snipers. If they hit you in a certain spot, you were killed. The only good thing was that you got to stop running for a while if you got killed. I got killed three times.”

  He wasn’t alone. In a group of seventy-three people on the final day, forty-six were killed by the five snipers. “I came back from that more tired than I had ever been in my life,” Robinson said. “But I couldn’t relax. I had commitments all the time.”

  Robinson was enjoying himself, though. He played on a softball team in Oxnard, ran into a fence making a catch in center field—“It was an awesome catch”—and was immediately ordered by the officer in charge to get out of center field before he hurt himself.

  But in the back of his mind, Robinson was concerned about his basketball. By the time he got to Lejeune, it had been a year since his last game at Navy and seven months since his last game with the Pan American team. He knew he wasn’t sharp and he wondered when he was going to get the chance to play. He knew the Navy brass wanted him on the Olympic team but now the trials, scheduled to begin May 18, were only a little more than two months away.

  “There’s such an irony in all this,” he said. “All these years I worked to get better at basketball. The last couple, it really became important to me and, sure enough, I’m the number one draft pick and I’m going to be paid all this money to play basketball. Only I’m not playing. Here I am, with all this other stuff: The contract, a shoe deal, all the attention, but I’m not playing.”

  Most of the time, Robinson was able to deal with his situation. He was resigned to the fact that he would be in the Navy until May 20, 1989, and that was fine with him. He wanted to play in the Olympics, a feeling distinctly different from a year ago.

  “Losing the Pan Ams certainly affected me,” he said. “I can still remember sitting on the bench [in foul trouble] watching that lead disappear during the final. I’ve talked to guys who played in the Olympics and they all say it was one of the great experiences of their lives, one they wouldn’t trade for anything. So I’m really looking forward to having the chance to play.”

  Occasionally Robinson felt pangs though. Watching his future team, the San Antonio Spurs, struggle was difficult, because he knew he could be helping them if he were in uniform. And some nights it hurt just being detached from the game he had grown to love.

  “When I was still stationed back at King’s Bay [Georgia] I was in a bowling league one night a week,” he said. “One night after we had finished we were all sitting around watching a game on television. I looked at the game and then I looked around me and saw myself sitting in this bowling alley and I said, ‘This sucks.’ ”

  But before he concerned himself with his future in the pros, Robinson wanted to concern himself with his more immediate future: the Olympic trials. Unlike Houston, he had no concern about receiving an invitation; in fact he didn’t have that much concern about making the team. “But I don’t want to just show up and make the team because I’m 7–1 and can run and jump,” he said. “I want to go to the trials in shape and really dominate.”

  That road would start in this tournament. Goettge Memorial Field House was a long way from Seoul. It was an old, dimly lit, 5,194-seat arena. Anyone who wanted to see the tournament simply had to walk in and take a seat. There was no charge for admission. About 1,500 people, many of them in Marine fatigues, showed up on the first night.

  In the opening game, Houston shot poorly (5-for-14) but finished with 18 points as his team beat Air Force, 107–106. “We never thought they would be as good as they were,” Houston said. “They caught us by surprise.”

  It was the Navy team that Houston and his teammates were interested in. The Navy had brought two of Robinson’s former Academy teammates, Kylor Whitaker and Vernon Butler, in to join the team along with Robinson. Navy routed the Marines; Robinson, looking very rusty, scored 13 points and had 7 rebounds. It wasn’t anything wondrous, but it was a start.

  “Just playing basketball in a real game feels great,” he said afterward. “Hearing myself introduced, the lights, seeing people in the stands—it feels like I’m alive again. I feel like I’ve been away from the game forever.”

  While Robinson played, Houston sat in the stands with his wife and watched. “Anything David gets, I’m happy for him,” Houston said. “He’s going to be a key to our Olympic team. Me, I just want a shot to try out. I know whatever happens, this is my last hurrah.

  “But as long as I get the chance to have that last hurrah, one way or the other I can walk away and smile. I just want to show them that I can play.”

  In a sense, that was the bond between Robinson and Houston. All the ensign and the lieutenant wanted was a chance to play.

  Walker Lambiotte could relate to the way Robinson and Houston felt. He had not played in a real college basketball game for a year. Now the 1987–88 season was over and he knew his next college game was more than eight months away.

  But when he had made his decision to transfer from N.C. State to Northwestern, Lambiotte had known what he was getting into. He’d hoped the year he had to sit out as a transfer would be a learning one and would give him a chance to get his confidence back after two tough years at State.

  For the most part, all had gone according to plan. “I feel much better about myself as a player now than I did last year,” Lambiotte said, two days after Northwestern’s season had ended with a second straight 7–21 record. “I really feel lik
e I’m going to help this team next year because my game is starting to get where I think it should be.”

  Clearly, Northwestern needed plenty of help. In Bill Foster’s second season, there had been some moments of hope: a win over DePaul and a miraculous victory over Indiana that had set off a net-cutting celebration worthy of a conference championship. Lambiotte had reveled in that victory even though he had only been a spectator.

  “We played an almost perfect game to win, which is what we have to do against Big Ten teams,” he said. “When it was over, everyone went crazy. We all knew that, great as it was, we had to have more wins like that. You can’t build a program on just one win, no matter how big it is.

  “What worried me coming here was the losing. I knew I’d get a good education and a chance to play against good players in the Big Ten. That’s all there for me. But I want to be part of a team that can compete. I think we’ve had a pretty good recruiting year this year and I hope we’re going to be better for it. We had some bad luck with injuries this year, but with guys coming back and the recruits and me, I think we have a chance next season. I just wish it would get here quick because I’m ready to go.”

  Unfortunately, Northwestern was losing its best player, center Shon Morris. Often, when he and Morris would work two-man plays in practice, Lambiotte would find himself fantasizing about playing in real games with Morris as a teammate and an inside threat. Early in the season, he would half-joke with Morris, telling him to get hurt so he could redshirt and come back for another year. If anyone deserved the chance to play for a good team, it was Morris.

  All season, the Wildcats had chances to add to the Indiana upset. They came close against Ohio State, close against Michigan State, close against Wisconsin. They played Illinois down to the wire in the last game of the season. But the big plays just weren’t there at the end. “It would seem like whenever we got in position to win we just didn’t know how,” Lambiotte said. “That’s when the sitting was hardest to take. I would sit there on the bench envisioning what I could do if I was in the game. Sometimes I could actually see the move I would make on a guy if he was guarding me in an endgame situation. But that was all I could do, fantasize.”