A Season Inside

The sun was just beginning to appear on the eastern horizon when we walked out the front door of the hotel. It was a few minutes before 7
A.M.
on the third day of the NCAA basketball tournament. As I opened the trunk, Hoops looked at me through the slits that passed at the moment for his eyes and asked, “Where are we going?”

I had to think for a moment. “Notre Dame,” I finally said, pleased with myself.

Hoops nodded. “Who are we seeing play?”

That one was too much. I was stumped. I reached into my coat pocket for my schedule. As I did, I almost dropped my coffee, which would have been a major catastrophe, and started to lose my footing on the ice. But I hung on to both, with as much grace as possible—which wasn’t much—and pulled the schedule out. “Purdue—Memphis State, and DePaul—Kansas State,” I announced.

Hoops said nothing. I started the car. We pulled out of the hotel and onto the interstate, heading fifty miles north for the Dayton Airport. “Hey, you know what,” Hoops said. “This is going to be fun. I’m really psyched.”

I sipped the coffee. Like Hoops, I was beginning to wake up too “Another day, another plane, another tip-off. What else is there in life?”

Hoops—who in real life is Dick Weiss of the
Philadelphia Daily
News
—had been with me since Thursday. We had seen four NCAA Tournament games that day in Chapel Hill, leaving the Deandome at 1
A.M.
Up at 5:30, we had flown to Cincinnati, arrived in the middle of a snowstorm, and seen four more games. Now, the second round was beginning and we were off to South Bend for a mere doubleheader. If all went well, we would drive two hours from South Bend to Chicago that night and fly to Lincoln, Nebraska, Sunday for one more double-header.

Four days, four cities, four planes, four hotels, and twelve games. What the hell, it was March. “We can rest,” Hoops said, “on April fifth.”

He was right of course. March is for basketball. April is for resting. And the rest of the summer is waiting for basketball to start again. Purdue and Kansas State won that day. We had fun. Of course.

Ed Tapscott, the very articulate basketball coach at American University, once said this about his sport: “Basketball is a culture. If you don’t grow up with it or come to understand it completely, you can never really appreciate it. But if you do, no one can ever say anything that will change the way you feel about it.”

Everyone who loves a sport makes arguments for why it is the best. I love baseball, always have and always will. But I
live
basketball, specifically college basketball. I can still remember the chills I felt during the first college basketball game I saw in the old Madison Square Garden—the 1965 NIT final—when the St. John’s student section filled the old arena up with chants of, “Let’s go, Red-Men,” and I can still feel the chills I felt on April 4, 1988, when the Kansas band played its fight song while Danny Manning and his teammates jumped all over each other in the middle of Kemper Arena. Twenty-three years have gone by and the feeling never changes.

What I set out to do in this book is to explain the culture. The date October 15 is part of the culture, and so are the war stories of recruiting and the great rivalries and the old gyms and snowy nights in the Midwest and even balmy afternoons in Hawaii when two teams play a great game in front of five hundred people. The culture is full of characters, both good guys and bad guys. Each year there are different stories, new heroes and new villains. Some things never change, others always do.

While I wanted to see as much as I could, I knew I could not see everything. There are many superb stories to be told in Division 2 and Division 3 and on the NAIA and junior college levels. Hersey Hawkins of Bradley had one of the great seasons in 1987–88 that any college guard has had in recent years. I didn’t get to see him play except on television and I feel I missed out. I missed the earthquake in Alaska because I got sick—thank goodness it only happened once all season—and I wish I had been there to see Richmond upset Indiana. I couldn’t see everything. But I tried.

In all, I saw 104 college basketball games, assorted high school games, a couple of games in an armed forces tournament, and several dozen practices. I selected a group of players and coaches to be the main tellers of this story, to try as best I could to tell the story of one season in this game, and this culture, through their eyes. The book is not exclusively their story, but a large portion of it is.

I have many memories of this season. Some of them are those that millions saw on their TV screens: Danny Manning’s extraordinary NCAA performance, Billy King’s defense on Mark Macon, the sadness of the Purdue seniors in their final game, and the joy of the Tennessee players the night they upset Kentucky and probably saved their coach’s job.

But two of the stories I have told in the book stick with me as I begin my annual countdown to October 15: One is the memory of the Villanova players, less than four hours before they would play Big Bad Kentucky in the NCAA Tournament, staging their game-day sing-along, rolling in the aisles with one another laughing, all of them caught up in the sheer joy of just being there. As I sat with them, I couldn’t help remembering my experience in 1986 in Indiana, where Bob Knight didn’t allow anyone to talk during the pregame meal, thinking, “My God, these are a bunch of kids who are going to play a
game
.” That was all it was. Not life or death, just a game. And the Villanova kids went out and pounded the oh-so-serious Wildcats, shocking the hell out of all those Kentucky fans who think the game is a religion.

My other vivid memory of this past season is walking into a tiny bar in Clemson, South Carolina, in January, trailing Lefty Driesell and hearing the place literally erupt as he walked through the door. If there has ever been a cult hero, it is Charles G. Driesell. That’s what this book is about. A culture and some of the people who make it what it is. College basketball is a game played inside. This is the story of one
season inside college basketball. Not all of it, but everything that can be done if you can get from Chapel Hill to Cincinnati to South Bend to Lincoln in four days.

It was fun. Right, Hoops?

—
JOHN FEINSTEIN, SHELTER ISLAND, N.Y.
     MAY
1988

For a split second, he didn’t move. The ball was cradled in his hands the way a doctor might hold a newborn; the grip firm, yet soft and clearly full of love, with just a touch of wonder. Danny Manning loved this moment, perhaps more than any other in his entire life. He had fantasized it thousands of times and now, when it was real, he wasn’t quite sure whether to believe it.

But his eyes and ears told him it was true. He looked at the Kemper Arena scoreboard and there it was: Kansas–83, Oklahoma–79. And the clock said :00. The questions had all been answered. The basketball was his to keep and so was this feeling. If it had been tangible, Manning would have gripped the feeling so tightly he might have choked it. Instead, he had the ball.

When a full second passed and he still hadn’t jolted awake in bed to realize it was just another dream, when he heard the cheers of joy still ringing in his ears and understood that it was 10:09
P.M.
on a warm April night in Kansas City and he, Daniel Edward Manning, had become a part of history, he reacted. His face exploded into a look of utter ecstasy and he began searching for people to hug.

He didn’t have far to go. Chris Piper was running toward him, arms in the air, his head back, screeching something that was unintelligible
to Manning. It didn’t matter. Piper had been there all four years at Kansas with Manning. They had suffered together, living through all the near-misses and the key injuries, wondering often if there was such a thing as a happy ending and holding each other as if the other were a life raft when it seemed so often that their epitaph would be, “If Only …”

Now, there would be no epitaph, just a legacy—and a happy ending. And so, as was only right, Manning and Piper fell into each other’s arms, living a moment so filled with happiness that, later, it hardly seemed real. Then their teammates were climbing on them, clutching and grabbing at them, each player a part of this because no one—not even their coaches—among the thousands in the arena or the millions watching on television could understand how this felt. For that brief moment, before fans and officials and TV types and newspaper people interrupted, it was just the Jayhawks, piling on one another, sharing a feeling that was theirs and theirs alone.

They had won a national championship. They had beaten 290 other teams and they had beaten the odds. They had beaten their own self-doubts and they had beaten a season that seemed to have beaten them on a couple dozen occasions. The coaches had put in the hours too and felt the pain, but for coaches it was different. Ten years from now they would still be coaching. College basketball players have a brief lifespan. They are freshmen one minute; alumni, it seems, only seconds later.

Within minutes of Manning’s grabbing that last rebound, the rest of the world would intrude on them. Manning and Coach Larry Brown would be hustled in front of the television cameras. The others would find microphones and cameras and pencils surrounding them. They would all look into the stands for family and for friends to begin to share the joy with them. But those first few seconds belonged to them and to no one else. No one.

One of the most intelligent things the people at CBS do in those initial moments following the last game of the basketball season is shut up. Eventually, millions of words will be written and spoken about this game, this team, this night. Briefly, though, the pictures speak the most eloquent words of all.

No one needed to describe what Danny Manning had just done. No
one needed to say anything about the feelings of Stacey King, the wonderful Oklahoma forward who sat on the scorer’s table sobbing. And, as the Jayhawks unpiled, there was little doubt about what Manning would do next. He headed straight for his mother. When he was a little boy and his father was away playing ball or coaching ball or driving a truck to keep food on the family table, Danny Manning’s best friend was his mother. She had shared his tears and felt his sorrow and, when his father couldn’t be there, his loneliness. More than anyone, she had convinced him to stay in college a fourth year, to pass up the mind-boggling NBA money for twelve more months. Now, she shared his joy and a feeling that millions and millions of dollars could never buy.