A Season Inside (12 page)

Mitchell and Stephens agreed with Lewis. But they didn’t say anything either. That night, back in their apartment, Mitchell and Lewis found themselves talking about Bob Knight. Both had been recruited by Knight, though not terribly hard. Lewis had dropped Indiana from consideration when Knight had cursed in front of his mother. Mitchell kept remembering then-Assistant Coach Jim Crews saying, “It takes a special person to play at Indiana.”

“I decided right then,” Mitchell said, “that I just wasn’t that special.”

Mitchell and Lewis had become friends during a recruiting visit to UCLA. Lewis was one of those players everyone wanted. Mitchell attracted less attention because many people thought he would play football in college, rather than basketball.

The two stayed in touch after the UCLA visit and when Mitchell decided to go to Purdue, he called Lewis to tell him. Lewis had been hounded so badly by recruiters that he was hiding out at his father’s house to stay away from the constant phone calls at his mother’s. When Mitchell called to tell him he was going to Purdue, Lewis said, “You know, I think I’ll go there too.”

They had been roommates and best friends from day one. Stephens, who had come to Purdue from Evanston, Illinois, joined their circle as a freshman but didn’t get as much attention as “TNT” (Todd’n Troy) until he became a key player his junior year. Now, the three often seemed inseparable, although Stephens tended to go off with his own set of nonbasketball friends more often than TNT did.

None of them had ever regretted choosing Purdue, except perhaps during the snowstorms that buffeted West Lafayette during the winter, when they thought about the warm-weather schools that had recruited them. But now, they thought Keady could use a shot of Bob Knight’s toughness. “If this had happened with Knight,” Lewis said, “he would have called the two guys in and said, ‘You fucked up one time too
many, you’re gone.’ But Coach just isn’t that way. He wants everything to be right this season, exactly right.”

There was more. Although Keady is known as “the bulldog,” as much for appearance as approach, he is, underneath the tough veneer, a softie. Throwing a player off his team was a very difficult thing for him to do, regardless of whether the player was a star or a scrub.

These problems were exactly what Keady had hoped to avoid during the preseason. During his first seven years at Purdue, he had carefully built one of the strongest programs in the country. But because of the repeated March failures, the Boilermakers still weren’t getting the recognition they felt they deserved.

No one was more aware of this than Keady. A week before practice began, he had been asked to appear on Roy Firestone’s ESPN talk show. Great, Keady thought, some national exposure. He had flown to Los Angeles and then squirmed for twenty minutes while Ted Green, subbing for Firestone, asked him a series of questions about Bob Knight, Digger Phelps, and his former boss, Eddie Sutton.

Keady knew that he could win twenty games for the next one hundred years in a row and no one was going to notice Purdue until it got to the Final Four. This team should be a Final Four team. It had a superb point guard in Stephens, a deadly shooter in Lewis, an outstanding inside-outside player in Mitchell, a solid center in Melvin McCants, and good, young depth.

“This team should have a better chance in March than any we’ve had,” Keady said. “We’re bigger and stronger and we’ve got the experience. The way we’re playing right now [November 10] we don’t belong in the Top Twenty. But if we had Arnold and Stack in there, I wouldn’t be uncomfortable being ranked Number One.”

And Keady fully expected to have Arnold and Stack back in January, when they would become academically eligible. In the meantime, though, there were nagging worries: Lewis had broken his foot in September and Mitchell had undergone arthroscopic knee surgery on October 28. Both were now back practicing but weren’t yet 100 percent.

And the memories of ’87 nagged, the blowout loss at Michigan that gave Indiana a share of the Big Ten title, followed by the Hoosiers’ success and the Boilermakers’ failure in postseason.

“I think Indiana doing as well as it did blew our
not
doing well out of proportion for all of us, starting with me,” Keady said. “I think the
Florida game was my fault. We played as if we were afraid to fail. That’s not any good. This year, I just want us to go out and play every game.”

The games would begin on November 20. Already, it had been a tough season at Purdue. And March was still a long way off.

The college basketball season formally began on Friday night, November 20, when the third annual preseason National Invitation Tournament opened up with seven first-round games—the eighth would be played Saturday—at various sites around the country.

Once, college basketball began everywhere on December 1, never earlier. But in recent years, with the proliferation of holiday tournaments, the first games have been staged earlier and earlier. Now, in addition to the sixteen-team NIT, there is the annual tip-off game held at the birthplace of basketball, Springfield, Massachusetts. There is the Great Alaska Shootout on Thanksgiving weekend, not to mention the Maui Classic and dozens of other classics and nonclassics held, quite literally, around the world. Clemson and Oregon State began their seasons in Taiwan. Truly, a neutral court.

No one was more ready for the start of the season than Rick Barnes. He had intentionally made life difficult for his team almost from his first day at George Mason. He honestly believed that discipline—a
lot
of discipline—was the only thing that would allow the Patriots to improve on the 17–14 record they had compiled the previous year.

What’s more, the team was filled with academic question marks and Barnes wanted to avoid that kind of trouble. He had devised something
he called the “Pride Sheet.” Each Friday, the players had to come into Barnes’s office and sign the sheet.

The sheet read as follows:

Heavy stuff. If anyone could not sign the sheet on a given Friday, the whole team got up at 6
A.M.
to run. If a player signed the sheet when he should not have, he was automatically suspended one game. Punishments became more serious for second and third offenses.

“If these guys don’t have the discipline to go to class, they aren’t going to have the discipline to be any good,” Barnes said. “I know this isn’t going to be easy and we may lose some guys. But the ones who stay will be better off.”

Even with the Pride Sheet, it was not an easy fall. There were a lot of early mornings for the players and coaches. If Barnes didn’t like practice in the afternoon, he brought the players back at night. If he didn’t like it at night, they came in early the next morning.

Everyone was pointing for November 20, the date of the NIT opener against Seton Hall. But three days before the opener, disaster struck No one had worked harder during the offseason than senior point guard Amp Davis. Barnes had told him that he wouldn’t play if he didn’t lose weight and Davis had lost thirty pounds. At 5–10, he had gone from 195 down to 165.

Davis, Barnes felt, would be a key to how the team played. Then, three days before the season began, Davis came to see him. He had been accused of cheating on a test—for a second time. The first time, Davis had admitted he was guilty. This time he insisted he was innocent.

It didn’t matter. Guilty once, Davis was considered guilty until proven innocent this time. He wouldn’t make the trip. Barnes made Davis tell his teammates what had happened. When Davis began to cry during his confession, star forward Kenny Sanders grabbed him and hugged him. If nothing else, Barnes thought, the tough preseason had produced a close team.

But he was going to New Jersey without his point guard to play a Seton Hall team that would be very tough to beat under any circumstances. Additionally, Barnes had suspended freshman reserve forward Harold Westbrook for one game for missing a class.

Playing in the NIT, even in the role of sparring partner for Seton Hall, was a big thing for George Mason. The school had only been playing in Division 1 for nine years; this was a major opportunity to get people to notice a school few even knew existed.

Barnes was tense on game day, a frigid, gray day. The game would be played at Rutgers because the NIT insisted that all its games be played in gyms with at least 8,000 seats. So instead of playing before a sellout crowd of 3,000 at Seton Hall, the teams played before 1,200 people in the 9,000-seat Rutgers Athletic Center.

At 11
A.M.
, the Patriots went to the gym for their pregame shoot-around. The players were so tight they couldn’t make a shot. Barnes was worried. Back in the hotel, he called his old boss, Gary Williams, looking for advice and encouragement.

“You’ve waited so long for this you think it’s the only game you’re ever going to coach,” Williams told him. “It’s a very long season. Win or lose, you’ve got a hell of a lot left to do.”

And what about Davis, how should he deal with that? “You let the kid dictate your actions by his,” Williams said. “See how he responds to all this.”

Barnes felt better after talking to Williams. He had learned a lot from him, including how to curse. “I swear, I never used any of those words until I worked for Gary,” he said. “Now, I use them all the time.”

Everyone seemed looser at the pregame meal. Later in the season,
Barnes would start skipping pregame meals because he felt his presence made the players nervous. Today, though, he was there, watching them eat pretty much whatever they wanted. This was one decision Barnes had made when he became a head coach. Most coaches spend a lot of time worrying about what to feed their players at pregame meal. Not Barnes.

“The best these guys play is in summer league,” he said. “And all they eat then is McDonald’s. So why worry about it?”

The team arrived at the gym two hours before tip-off so Barnes could take them through videotape of Seton Hall one more time. As the players warmed up, Barnes talked calmly with Seton Hall Coach P. J. Carlesimo.

In truth, Carlesimo had a lot more to be concerned about than Barnes. He was entering his fifth year at Seton Hall, the last year of his contract. The administration had essentially given Carlesimo a “make the NCAAs or walk” edict. And yet, Carlesimo seemed unbothered by the extra pressure. He had grown a beard during the offseason and had taken a “so what” approach to his ultimatum.

“If the ship sinks,” he said, “I think there’ll be a lot of people around to throw me a life raft.”

All true. Carlesimo was one of the best-liked people in the sport. In the Big East, a league full of jealousies and antagonism, everyone liked P. J. Carlesimo. But he wanted to keep this job. If he was going to survive, Seton Hall could not afford to lose to anyone like George Mason.

Barnes knew his team was supposed to lose. He knew no one was going to judge him on one game, or for that matter, one season. But logic wasn’t at work here. He was a wreck. “How much time?” he kept asking his coaches while the players were on the floor warming up. “God,” he finally said, standing up, “it seems like we’ve waited
forever
to play this game.”

The locker rooms at Rutgers are tiny, so narrow that if two players are trying to dress at the same time on opposite sides of the room, they can’t do it. The players crowded together—because they had no choice—as Barnes gave them final instructions.

“Remember what we’ve said all week,” he began softly. “Make them prove to us they can hit the outside shot. Take the ball to them every chance you get. Head-hunt out there, put your bodies on them. And
rebound. We have to have all five guys on the boards to have a chance against this team.”

He paused. They had heard all of that before. “Only you guys know how hard you’ve worked to get here tonight. The NIT has put us here for one reason—so Seton Hall can advance. That’s fine. This is our opportunity to prove a lot of things.

“One more thing. I’ve waited ten years for this night. Sometimes, when I was out recruiting, I wondered if this was what I really wanted. But working with you guys these last six months, I know it is. You’ve done a great job preparing for this …”

Barnes stopped. He was getting choked up. You aren’t supposed to break down
before
your first game. “Okay,” he said, gathering himself. “Get out and work for forty minutes and you’ll come back in here a happy team.”

Out they went. Barnes shook hands with his assistants and walked onto the floor. It was not exactly the scene he had envisioned for his first game. The gym was practically empty and, if not for the Seton Hall pep band, would have been virtually silent. But Barnes was exactly where he wanted to be.

Or so he thought. It took Seton Hall seven seconds to score. It took Mason’s Steve Smith fifteen seconds to toss an air ball. In seventy-seven seconds, Seton Hall jumped to a 7–0 lead. The Patriots looked frightened. Before his team had scored a point for him, Barnes had to call the first time-out of his coaching career.