A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  One thing that encouraged Lambiotte was the way his coach, Bill Foster, was dealing with the losses. When he was younger, Foster had trouble handling defeat, any defeat. When he coached at Duke, Foster would often get in his car after a loss and drive around all night listening to country music, trying to escape from the questions gnawing at his brain. Starting over at Northwestern, Foster understood he couldn’t drive himself so. He didn’t take the losing all that well, that just wasn’t in his nature. But Lambiotte was impressed by the way Foster kept coming back, loss after loss, insisting that there was no reason why the Wildcats couldn’t win the next one if they would just play as well as they were capable. Like Lambiotte, Foster honestly believed that better things were ahead if he could just make himself stay patient and wait for better players to arrive while the younger ones currently on the team matured. And, there was Lambiotte.

  “He definitely will make a big difference in the nature of our team next year,” Foster said. “I can’t tell you how many times this season, if we had just had that shooter who could knock down the big shot from outside, we might have won ball games. That alone would have made a big difference. Also, he’s the kind of player who makes the guys around him better players. We need some of that, too.”

  Lambiotte had never been part of a losing team in his life, and that was tough to take. But he kept his mind focused on the future in basketball and enjoyed the present away from the floor. Once he got used to the weather, he found himself enjoying Northwestern. “At first, when The Hawk [the wind that blows in off of Lake Michigan] blew through here I said, ‘No way can I take this,’ “he said, laughing. “I mean it was so cold it was unbelievable. I walked around campus with one of those ski masks that covers your whole face.

  “Everyone told me I was the only person on the entire campus wearing one. So for a while I stopped. But I was freezing. So, I said, ‘The hell with it, I don’t care what anyone thinks,’ and I started wearing it again. After a while, though, I started to get used to the cold. The only time I wore the mask was when the temperature went below zero.”

  A true midwesterner. Lambiotte’s grades were solid although he did struggle with a computer science course. One night he locked himself into the computer room at 10 P.M. to figure out a program and didn’t come out until 6 the next morning.

  “If there’s an advantage to not playing basketball, that kind of thing is it,” he said. “If I was in the middle of the season, I would never think of staying up all night that way. But because I’m not playing, if I lost a night of sleep it was no big deal. If I’d been playing I might have flunked that course. It was hard as hell.”

  There were other advantages. Lambiotte got to go home for a real Christmas vacation for the first time in years. “My mom really spoiled me while I was home,” he said with a laugh. And, when he suffered through a spate of minor injuries, he didn’t have to worry about missed playing time, although he wasn’t thrilled to miss practice. “Coach Foster told me he hopes I’m getting all the injuries out of my system this year,” he said. “I hope so too because even now they aren’t any fun.”

  More than anything, though, Lambiotte just tried to be patient. In a sense, even though he was sitting and sitting, he was at a point where he could finally see the proverbial light at the end of a long tunnel. For two years at N.C. State he had wondered when his time would come, had wondered if it would come. Finally, he had made a very tough decision, one that many ballplayers make without giving enough thought to the consequences. He had decided he would sit for twenty months—from March of 1987 until November of 1988—so that he could start all over again.

  Transferring is not an easy thing to do for anyone. All too often, players make snap decisions and they make them when they are frustrated, not knowing the consequences. Lambiotte’s decision had been viewed that way by some. But he had never doubted his decision, never questioned it—except perhaps the first time The Hawk cut through him—and now he could begin the countdown to playing again.

  “It’s been a long twelve months,” Lambiotte said. “I feel like I’ve grown a lot and learned a lot, though. I never realized how much I liked to play basketball until I couldn’t play it. I think I’ll enjoy the next two years even more because of what I’ve gone through this year.”

  David Robinson could certainly relate to that feeling.

  17

  SIXTY-FOUR AND COUNTING

  March 17 … Chapel Hill, North Carolina

  The best nineteen days of the year began today.

  Of all the championships that take place in this country, only the NCAA Basketball Tournament creates such extraordinary electricity in so many different places. Before it is over, thirteen different cities have hosted it, millions of fans have watched it and, unlike any other major team sports event, sudden death is in effect every time the ball goes up. Someone advances, someone goes home.

  Pro football fans may argue that the same is true in their sport. But when was the last time a Super Bowl had any suspense in the second half? For that matter, when was the last time a football playoff game started and ended in the same afternoon?

  Only one sport produces the upsets, the unlikely heroes that this one does. Only one team wins, but everyone takes home memories. This is an event so good that even the NCAA itself has trouble screwing it up.

  The tournament really begins on the last Sunday of the regular season when the field is announced. Three days before the field is officially chosen, the nine members of the NCAA basketball committee gather at a hotel in Kansas City to begin putting the draw together. By the time they arrive there, they probably know who fifty-five to sixty of the teams in the field will be. The tough part of their job is choosing the last few teams, then deciding how to seed them and where to send them. No matter what the committee does, somebody is screaming bloody murder on Sunday night.

  What’s more, until 1975, the only ACC team that could go to the NCAA Tournament was the ACC Tournament champion. That meant a team could have a superb regular season, dominate everyone for three months, and then go home empty-handed because of one bad night. In 1970, South Carolina went 14–0 in ACC play. But N.C. State beat the Gamecocks in the tournament and went to the NCAAs instead of them.

  In 1974, when N.C. State and Maryland had perhaps the two best teams in the country, they met in the ACC final. Only the winner would advance to the NCAAs. For forty minutes, the two teams put on a display of basketball that no one in the building has ever forgotten. It was 86–86 at the end of regulation and neither team had committed a turnover. Not one. State and David Thompson finally won the game, 103–100 in overtime.

  After he had finished talking to the media, Lefty Driesell walked out to the State bus, boarded it and told the State players, “Y’all just played an unbelievable game. I’m as proud of you as I am of my own team. Now you make sure you go on and win the national championship.”

  They did. Maryland went home and watched on television as State went on to upset UCLA in the semifinals and win the national title. The next year the NCAA expanded its field from twenty-five to thirty-two teams, meaning a conference could send two teams to the tournament. In 1980, when the field was expanded to forty-eight teams, all limits were dropped. A conference could send all its teams if all were good enough to be invited.

  Five years ago—in a rare moment of TV ingenuity—CBS decided to put together a show to announce the pairings. At 5:30 P.M. eastern time on Selection Sunday, anyone who cares about college basketball finds a TV set, sits down with a draw sheet, and listens as the field is announced. Most coaches nowadays have their teams together to hear where they are going—or in some cases if they are going.

  “To me, it’s the nicest day of the year in college basketball,” Rollie Massimino said. “This is what you work all year for and if you’re going, it’s nice for your whole team to be able to share it.”

  Massimino did it up right on Selection Sunday this year. His team had played the Big East final that aftern
oon in Madison Square Garden, losing to Syracuse. No matter. Massimino rented a suite in the Penta Hotel, across the street from the Garden, for his team, ordered a case of champagne and some food, and he and his players gathered around the television to learn that they were going to the Southeast Regional. They’d be playing Arkansas in Cincinnati in the opening round.

  “Can you believe it?” Massimino wanted to know. “If we get out of Cincinnati, we’re going back to Birmingham.” It was in Birmingham in 1985 that Villanova won the regional en route to the national title. Coaches believe in omens.

  There were groans and cheers all over the country as the names went up on the board. Arizona got exactly what it expected—a No. 1 seed in the West, a trip to Los Angeles, and a first-round game against Cornell. The second-round opponent would, in all likelihood, be Seton Hall. “That’s a tough second-round game,” Steve Kerr said. “We’re probably in for a tight week.”

  What about Cornell? Kerr laughed. “We’ll be playing five Steve [read slow] Kerrs. We ought to be able to handle them.”

  Of course for Cornell, even as a lamb to the slaughter, just being part of the tournament is a thrill. The same could be said for all the No. 16 seeds. They weren’t going to be there long, but they would be there.

  The only real surprise on Selection Sunday this year was the committee’s decision not to let teams play at home. For years, the committee had done just the opposite and for years it had heard cries that letting teams play on their home court was unfair. Of course those doing the crying were right. This year, the committee decided to ship teams away, unless they earned the right to stay at home by being a first or second seed.

  If North Carolina had beaten Duke in the ACC final, it would have stayed home in the Deandome. Instead, Duke got to play in the Dome as the No. 2 seed in the East. To say that Carolina was less than thrilled with this setup was putting it mildly. Their fans, who had bought up the twenty-one thousand tickets early, assuming they would see the Tar Heels, began taking out ads in the local papers and on local radio stations to try to unload their tickets. The common refrain was this:

  “But it’s still great basketball.”

  “Only the Tar Heels play great basketball.”

  The Tar Heels themselves were in Salt Lake City. In their absence, no one would be using their locker room. Or, for that matter, the hallway on which the locker room was located. It was locked and shut long before any of the eight teams assigned to Chapel Hill arrived.

  The opening game of the four played on Thursday was as intriguing as any first-round matchup in the country. It matched Missouri and Rhode Island. In the minds of many, one team—Missouri—had started the season as a dark horse Final Four contender. The other, Rhode Island, had never won an NCAA Tournament game and, even with a 26–6 record, no one took the Rams very seriously. After all, this was a team that had lost to Duquesne twice.

  The doubters included Missouri. If ever a team should have been wary of a no-name first-round opponent, it was the Tigers. A year earlier, playing Xavier in the first round, Missouri had neglected to show up and had been upset. Now, playing at high noon in the half-empty Deandome, Missouri was in trouble again. The key man for the Tigers was the ever-enigmatic Derrick Chievous. The day before, as practice was ending, Chievous stood under the basket knocking in lay-ups and baby jumpers. “I just want to spend one more minute on the court where Jordan played,” he said to a teammate.

  It was a lovely sentiment—but Michael Jordan had played his home games in Carmichael Auditorium, half a mile up the road from the Deandome.

  Chievous had already had a strange season, one filled with benchings and bad games and some good ones in between. As with his team, no one ever knew which Chievous would show up.

  Today, it was Super Derrick. From the start, he was involved, driving the lane, stopping for pull-up jumpers. If the rest of the Tigers had been as ready as he was, they would have won the game. But everyone else looked like they were waiting for Jordan to arrive.

  Rhode Island was a team built around its two senior guards, Carlton Owens and Tom Garrick. In the East, Owens and Garrick were highly respected and highly thought of. But west of Kingston, Rhode Island, few people had heard of them. Quickly, they set out to change that.

  Garrick’s story was the kind that makes the NCAA Tournament special. He had been unrecruited coming out of high school; given a scholarship by then Rhode Island Coach Brendan Malone because he was a local kid and Malone had an extra scholarship to give. What set Garrick apart, though, from the average late bloomer was his father.

  Tom Garrick, Sr., had never seen his son play basketball. In 1944, as part of the U.S. force pushing into Germany, he had stepped on a mine and come home blinded for life. He had met his future wife in an Army hospital and they had produced a family of eight children. When Tom Jr.—the youngest—played, one of his siblings sat with their father and did play-by-play so the father could get a feel for what the son was doing.

  “My father is my hero,” Tom Garrick said simply. “He’s my inspiration. Everything I do, I do for him.”

  On this day, there was plenty for Garrick’s brother John to describe for their father. After a cold (1 for 8) first half, Tom Garrick came to life in the second, hitting 9-for-15 from the field. His 29 points and Owens’s 25 were the keys for Rhode Island as they pulled off the first upset of the tournament—which was all of two hours old—beating Missouri, 87–80.

  Chievous finished with 35 points. One certainly couldn’t criticize his performance. But when the Tigers still had a chance to win, with Rhode Island clinging to a 74–73 lead and more than two minutes left, no one had been able to come up with a rebound. Twice the Rams missed shots, and twice they got the rebound. On their third chance, Owens was fouled. He made both free throws and Missouri never got that close again.

  When the buzzer went off, Chievous walked away from his last college game without pausing to shake any hands, without even looking up at the scoreboard. He just walked off, head down, leaving his teammates, his opponents, and four years behind him. In the locker room, he refused to talk to reporters.

  “I don’t have to do interviews anymore,” he said, putting on a Detroit Tigers cap. “I’m just a student now.”

  It was a sad ending to a strange, often brilliant, career.

  Game two that afternoon almost produced an upset that would have made Rhode Island–Missouri a footnote. Syracuse, the 1987 runner-up and the No. 3 seed in the East, played thirty-four minutes against North Carolina A&T, the No. 14 seed, to a 50–50 tie.

  North Carolina A&T is a black school that plays in—and dominates—a black league, the Mid-East Athletic Conference (MEAC). No MEAC team has ever won an NCAA Tournament game and so, in spite of a 26–2 record, A&T was rated somewhere between 53rd and 56th in the field, producing its 14th seed. This was Catch–22. If you are always a low seed, you are always going to play a very, very difficult first-round game. If you always play a difficult first-round game you are going to keep losing and keep drawing such games in perpetuity.

  “That’s not the NCAA’s problem, it’s ours,” said Don Corbett, the A&T coach. “It’s up to us to find a way to win one of these games and change things. It isn’t up to the NCAA to do it for us.”

  Another first-day upset: a coach with grace under pressure. But Corbett’s team lost again because Syracuse finally figured enough was enough and put together a 15–0 run. Even so, Jim Boeheim wasn’t very happy. “Whoever those guys refereeing were, they don’t belong here,” he said. “They had no idea what they were doing out there.”

  If this sounds like whining, well, Boeheim is famous for whining. But as it turned out, all three officials in this game were sent home the next day, none of them advancing to the second round. Boeheim, in the opinion of the officiating supervisors, had a point.

  That evening, David Rivers made his exit from college basketball. He was far more gracious in defeat than Chievous, but his last game was memorable only because Rivers
was outplayed completely by a guard named Kato Armstrong.

  Armstrong, Southern Methodist’s point guard, lit Notre Dame up for 29 points—Rivers finished with 12 on 5-of-15 shooting—and had his way with Rivers at every key point during SMU’s 85–73 victory. “It’s not a very happy way to go out,” Rivers said softly when it was over.

  Rivers had been hoping to get through this game to get another shot at Duke and Billy King in the second round. “David really wants Duke again,” Digger Phelps had said the day before. “He doesn’t think that game was the real David Rivers.”

  The real David Rivers was a gifted player who, for four years, was asked to do far too much by Phelps because his supporting cast was never quite up to Rivers’s level. This was especially true the last two seasons (after Rivers miraculously came back from an automobile accident that had nearly killed him). Phelps had talked so often about Rivers’s courage, his ability, his toughness, his desire, that he had almost become a parody of himself.

  But when Rivers’s last game was over, Phelps was eloquent. “You know if you coach long enough,” he said, “you find out that guys like [Adrian] Dantley, [Kelly] Tripucka, and [John] Paxson are one in a million. David Rivers is once in a lifetime.”

  Watching Rivers go down, Billy King felt a twinge of sadness too. He admired Rivers, but at the same time liked the challenge of stopping him. Now, if Duke were to beat Boston University in the first round, King would have to stop Kato Armstrong in the second round.

  The Blue Devils were top-heavy favorites to win their opener. It was another middle-of-the-night game, but this time they were in control by halftime. The final was 85–69, the finish marked by sluggish play from the subs.