A Season Inside
Page 51
The Tar Heels, instead of getting two points out of the mistake, had a chance to get as many as five—the two free throws plus the ensuing possession. Instead, Fox only made one of the free throws and King Rice’s jumper was long at the buzzer, so the halftime lead for Carolina was only 28–26.
Lute Olson was not a happy man during intermission. He didn’t feel his team had been aggressive enough. To combat that problem, he decided to switch to a man-to-man defense to shake his team out of its lethargy. Tom Tolbert, in particular, had struggled. Olson asked him a simple question: “Do you want to go to Kansas City?” Tolbert didn’t have to answer.
Both teams picked up the pace as the second half began, sensing that the time for playing chess games was past. Sean Elliott and Craig McMillan quickly hit three-pointers for Arizona, while Scott Williams hit twice inside for Carolina. Kerr stole a pass and fed McMillan for a dunk. Arizona led 34–32.
The game stayed tight. Tolbert put Arizona on top with a circus shot, an over-the-head flip that went into the basket just as Reid crashed into him. Reid answered that seconds later and Carolina led 44–43. But then Kerr hit a three-pointer and Tolbert produced another spectacular move, driving under the basket and reversing the ball up and in as he was fouled. The free throw made it 49–44.
Kerr fouled Scott Williams—“Oh my God, no! That was no foul!” he screamed in frustration—but Williams missed the first free throw. Then Reid stepped into the lane as Williams was shooting the second. On the bench, Smith looked a little shell-shocked. His team was unraveling and he knew it. Tolbert hit inside again. Reid dunked to make it 51–46 with 9:20 left but that was the last field goal for the Tar Heels until a Fox fifteen-footer with 1:45 left.
By that time, Arizona had put the game out of reach. Tolbert and Elliott had taken command, leading the Wildcats on a 13–4 run, giving them a 64–50 lead. Just as it had done against Duke, Carolina had fallen apart on offense during the last ten minutes. Nothing would fall for any of the Tar Heels. As the lead mounted, Kerr began to realize that he was, at last, going to the Final Four. When the buzzer sounded and Arizona had won, 70–52, Kerr felt as if a giant weight had come off his shoulders.
“I can’t even remember how many times I fantasized going to the Final Four,” he said. “It was just an unreal feeling, looking up at the scoreboard and knowing we had it. I couldn’t believe Carolina fell apart the way it did. You just don’t expect that from them. We expected the game to go right to the end but they just didn’t seem to have anything left. It was really kind of shocking.”
There were more shocks left for Kerr. As he was being guided toward the CBS camera for the postgame interview, the on-site producer, Roy Hamilton, who had played at UCLA when Kerr was a ballboy there, whispered to him, “When you go on the air, Steve, do us a favor and say, ‘We’re going to Kansas City!’ ”
CBS, it seems, not only pays for the NCAA Tournament and determines when the games will be played, it now also feels it must script the postgame interviews. Kerr shrugged. “What is this,” he wanted to know, “a Disneyland commercial?”
But Hamilton had been a friend since boyhood. Kerr delivered the line. When the interview was over, CBS’s Brent Musberger asked Kerr how his mother would hear about the game. “I guess I’ll give her a call,” Kerr said.
“If you’d like,” Musberger said, “you’re welcome to use the phone in our truck to call.”
Kerr thought this was a generous offer and would save him quite a few dollars on a phone call to Egypt. “That would be great,” he told Musberger.
“We’d love to put a camera on you while you make the call,” Musberger said.
Kerr was stunned. And embarrassed. “Calling my mother is kind of a private thing,” he said politely. “I guess I’ll just do it later.”
It was later that Kerr learned CBS had been told by the NCAA that Kerr could make the call from the truck as long as he later reimbursed the network for the call. So Kerr would not even have saved any money by accepting the CBS offer. As always, the NCAA was right on the case in a matter that should have meant absolutely nothing.
By the time Kerr was finished with all the interviews, he was exhausted. It had been a grueling game, one surprisingly full of trash talk back and forth. Kerr had not expected this from North Carolina. In fact, afterwards, Bucknall had claimed that if he had been playing on two good legs, Elliott would not have scored 24 points. When he heard this comment, Elliott laughed.
“At least,” he said, thinking back to December, “Billy King took it like a man.”
Now, Billy King was in the Final Four. So was Elliott—and Kerr. Two hundred and eighty-seven teams were done. Four were left and, as the people at CBS would tell you again and again, they were all going to Kansas City.
19
FINALLY, THE FINAL FOUR
March 30-April 5 … Kansas City
Once upon a time, fifty years ago, when the NCAA Tournament was played for the very first time, a total of eight teams participated and four of them came to Kansas City to decide the championship. Oregon State won that first tournament and it has never again been so quiet in Kansas City.
Now, the Final Four ranks with the World Series and the Super Bowl among the great annual events in American sports. It is covered by several thousand members of the media, it dominates whatever town it is played in for an entire week, and it is a major television event around the country.
When the NCAA awarded the 1988 Final Four to Kansas City, it did so with tradition and nostalgia in mind. Kansas City had hosted nine of the first twenty-five Final Fours; since this was to be the fiftieth anniversary of the tournament, it would be a nice touch to return there.
All well and good. It would be wonderful if all Final Fours could be played in basketball gyms like Kemper Arena. Basketball is an intimate sport and when it is played in domes, it loses intimacy, especially for those fans sitting miles and miles from courtside. But the future of the Final Four is, without question, in domes. In 1990, the Final Four will be played in Denver’s twenty thousand-seat McNichols Arena. It is unlikely to be played in a real basketball arena any time after that.
So, in more ways than one, this Final Four was a tribute to the past—very shortly this kind of Final Four will be a thing of the past. With only 16,200 seats for sale in the arena, scalpers were asking—and getting—close to $2,000 a ticket.
The Final Four is much more than three basketball games. It is a week-long convention of the entire sport. The National Association of Basketball Coaches actually holds its annual convention during the week. The rest of the college basketball world has its own less-formal convention at the same time. Nobody skips the Final Four. A lot of people come for the week with absolutely no chance of getting in to see the games. They come to see the people.
Until 1973, the national championship game was played on Saturday afternoon. In fact, until 1969, the Final Four was, basically, a twenty-four-hour affair. Two games were played Friday night and one game was played Saturday night. By Sunday morning, everyone had gone home.
In 1969, when NBC–TV first took over the television contract, the semifinals were moved up to Thursday night and the final was played Saturday afternoon. Back then, NBC only televised one semifinal nationally. Four years later, the format was changed again. The semifinals were moved to Saturday afternoon and the final was pushed back to Monday night so it could be televised in prime time. In that first prime-time final, Bill Walton hit 21 of 22 shots for UCLA as most of America watched open-mouthed. From there, the tournament simply got bigger and bigger and bigger.
Its growth is difficult to measure, but consider this: In 1986, when Syracuse hosted the first and second rounds of the East Regional, it had more requests for press credentials than the NCAA received for the Final Four in Atlanta in 1977.
Now, the Final Four is a week-long social occasion, beginning for many people on Wednesday and not ending until the following Tuesday. There are more parties than anyone can keep track of,
even more rumors than there are parties, an extraordinary number of hotel-lobby arguments and, just by the way, these three basketball games. It is, in short, a celebration of a greatly flawed but truly great sport by the people who have flawed it and made it great.
To begin at the beginning in 1988 …
DAY ONE : WEDNESDAY
The city is just beginning to fill up when the first bombshell of the week hits. Word comes out of Los Angeles that, to almost no one’s surprise, Walt Hazzard has been fired at UCLA. The Bruins have just finished a 16–14 season marked by shoddy play, embarrassing losses at home, and constant battles between Hazzard and almost everyone around the program.
Everyone knows Larry Brown wants the job. But he is tied up right now with the small matter of preparing Kansas to play Duke in the first semifinal on Saturday. On Wednesday evening, the story breaks: Jim Valvano is going to be the UCLA coach.
The main perpetrator of this story is Dick Vitale of ESPN. On Wednesday evening Vitale goes on the air with a story that says Valvano has been offered the job and is likely to take it before the weekend is over. In the lobby of the coaches’ hotel, the word spreads like wildfire. In the coaching world, this is what is known as a domino job. If Valvano moves to UCLA, it starts a series of dominoes: N.C. State will hire a head coach from somewhere to replace Valvano. Rumors are starting already: Gary Williams of Ohio State? Jeff Mullins of UNC–Charlotte? Lefty Driesell? (Did someone say Lefty Driesell????) Yes, someone said Lefty Driesell.
Moments after “breaking” the story, Vitale appears in the lobby, clearly delighted with himself. “It’s done, baby, it’s over, I just broke the story, we went with a bulletin,” Vitale says. “Jimmy V. is goin’ to UCLA. He’s gone. It’s a done deal.” Vitale is taking bets he is so sure. “Dinner, baby, you name the place,” he says. “Anyplace.”
It is tough getting angry at Vitale even when he is as full of himself as he is right now. He is a genuinely nice person who loves basketball and can’t quite believe what a celebrity he has become in recent years as a TV analyst. He says he won’t reveal his sources on this story but he’s locked in and he’s got it right. Standing right behind Vitale is Sonny Vaccaro, the maven of Nike shoes who is tight with all the coaches who are paid by Nike to wear their equipment. Vitale is a Nike man. So is Jim Valvano. Vaccaro is also betting Valvano is going to UCLA. Any guesses as to who Vitale’s source might be?
“This is unreal,” Virginia Assistant Coach Dave Odom says. “If Valvano goes, who knows how many jobs could open up?”
By now, the lobby is crowded. Most of the coaches arrive on Wednesday because their annual golf tournament is on Thursday morning. Usually, Wednesday is warmup night. Everyone arrives, has dinner, and takes things easy. No wild nights—yet. But the Valvano rumor has energized everyone. The lobby is alive.
In one corner, Bill Foster and Dick Stewart are sitting, fending off questioners. Foster, the Northwestern coach, coached Valvano at Rutgers. They remain close friends. “If he takes the job I’m going with him and sit on the bench and keep track of the time-outs,” Foster says. “I’m old enough to do that job. They can just call me Father Time.”
Stewart, who also played for Foster, is Valvano’s top assistant. “I don’t know anything,” he says over and over again. “I wish I did. Jimmy’s coming in tomorrow and I’ll talk to him then.”
Jim Boeheim joins the conversation. A year ago, Boeheim was still working during this week. Now, he will coach the annual coaches’ all-star game on Thursday night. His opponent in that game will be Jerry Tarkanian of Nevada–Las Vegas. Boeheim is not very happy with Tarkanian at the moment. Recently, Boeheim’s star recruit, Billy Owens, has qualified to play as a freshman by improving his SAT score from 590 to 730. Tarkanian thinks Owens’s improvement is miraculous—too miraculous—and he has said so, implying that someone took the test for Owens.
“I don’t see anyone questioning Alonzo Mourning,” Boeheim says. “His score went up a lot more than Billy’s.” But Alonzo Mourning is a Georgetown recruit. Basketball people will privately question John Thompson—but never publicly. Thompson is the Olympic coach. He is tied closely to Dean Smith and Dave Gavitt. He is too powerful to take on publicly. So it is Boeheim who gets ripped. “All I know is Billy studied like hell in that SAT course before he took the test again,” Boeheim says.
Foster and Stewart nod politely. More coaches drift over. “What about Lefty?” asks Joe Harrington of Long Beach State, a former Driesell assistant. “Is he going to James Madison or not?”
“Nothing’s final,” Driesell keeps insisting. “It’s up to the lawyers. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ beyond that.”
The coaches agreed that Lefty would go to James Madison. But what if Valvano went to UCLA, would State want to hire Lefty? And who would James Madison hire then? On and on it went.…
Across town, in the lobby of the press hotel, the Valvano rumor was spreading rapidly. “I don’t believe it,” said Billy Packer of CBS. “He may be talking to them, but I guarantee you nothing is final yet. It’s just too fast.”
By now, Vitale, having worked his way through the coaches’ lobby, was in the press lobby. It was late, though, almost 2 A.M., and Vitale had talked about the story so much even he seemed to be getting tired. Finally, he looked up from a rare silence and said, “So what do you think, will Jimmy take the job?”
That seemed a perfect time to end the opening evening. Four hours after insisting that Valvano was UCLA’s new coach, Vitale was asking if he would take the job. It could only happen at the Final Four.
DAY TWO : THURSDAY
This is the day when the four teams get to town. The team that will travel the shortest distance, Kansas, will be the last to arrive. The Jayhawks will bus the forty miles from Lawrence after a late afternoon practice in time to see the coaches’ all-star game. They also must wait until their bus driver arrives. The ever-superstitious Brown has flown his bus driver from Pontiac in for the weekend. This is a first: the bus driver flying in while the team busses in.
No one is happier to get to Kansas City than Steve Kerr. The three days since the victory in Seattle have been exhausting. After the team flew back to Tucson on Sunday—a trip highlighted by Bobbi Olson dancing in the aisle of the team—bus—they were taken straight to McKale Center. There, more than thirteen thousand people awaited their arrival.
“When we walked in, the place just went crazy,” Kerr said. “I think I knew, at least for a minute, what it feels like to be a rock star. It was just unbelievable.”
Each member of the team had spoken, Kerr going last of course. He had to wait for the “Steeeeeve Kerrrrrrr” chants to die. When he finally got quiet, he played the rock star bit to the hilt. “Hi,” he said, “my name is Steve Kerr.”
The party at McKale was followed by a party at Kerr’s, a wild and wet one. Kerr’s last memory of the evening was joining about thirty other fully-clad people in the complex’s swimming pool.
He had finally reached his mother—without a CBS camera present—that evening. She already knew of the outcome, having listened on Armed Forces Radio, and was making plans to fly to Kansas City. In fact, the arrangements were already made. Ann Kerr was still a member of the board of American University in Beirut. One of her fellow board members was the president of Royal Jordanian Airlines. As a courtesy, whenever he could, he flew his friend Ann Kerr for free on his airline. Ann and John Kerr would fly first class from Amman, Jordan, on Royal Jordanian Airlines. They would be in Kansas City on Saturday morning.
The next three days after the Sunday victory party were a blur to Kerr. He was forced to have his roommate screen all his phone calls because the phone never stopped ringing. There were dozens of interviews to do with a whole new crew of reporters wanting to hear the whole Steve Kerr story all over again. The mail was piling up so fast Kerr couldn’t keep track of it.
“I just want to get to Kansas City and play,” he said. “Practice is about the only escape I have right now.”
Arizona arrived in Kansas City late Thursday. Kerr had only been in his hotel room for a few minutes when one of Arizona’s assistant athletic directors asked to see him. The NCAA had called. Apparently, the ever-vigilant ones had spotted an item in the paper noting that Ann and John Kerr would be flown to the U.S. courtesy of Royal Jordanian Airlines.
According to the NCAA, if the Kerrs were getting their free airline tickets because Steve Kerr was a basketball player, this might be a violation of the extra benefits rule. Of course, the free tickets had absolutely nothing to do with Kerr playing basketball.
This was remarkable. The NCAA couldn’t even begin to police the real cheating in college basketball. In 1985, the Lexington Herald Leader had produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of stories in which twenty-six former Kentucky players admitted—on the record—that they had received payoffs while at Kentucky. Almost thirty months later, the NCAA had reported the findings of its Kentucky investigation: nothing. Kentucky, it said, had not done a good job undertaking its own investigation of the matter. This comment was a little bit like Richard Nixon saying that Ronald Reagan’s administration had been rife with corruption.
The NCAA almost never caught the big-time cheaters. Its member schools had little interest in catching the big-time cheaters. Why mess with a goose that is laying a golden egg? The NCAA investigative staff was woefully undermanned, and any suggestion that maybe a tiny percentage of the $55.1 million CBS was annually paying the NCAA for the rights to the basketball tournament should go to enforcement was laughed off. What would happen if the enforcement staff was increased from 25 to 250 by an influx of, say, $5 million to its annual budget? What would happen is that cheaters might get caught. Few people really wanted that.