A Season Inside (25 page)

Valvano was confident Shackleford would come to play against Louisville. But now he had a different problem. Against Creighton, he had started Quentin Jackson at point guard. Jackson, a senior, had been a key player during State’s late rush to the ACC Tournament title the year before. In the five pre-Hawaii games, Valvano had started freshman Chris Corchiani, who was quicker and a better penetrator than Jackson.

After the losses to Kansas and Cal-Santa Barbara, Valvano decided that Jackson needed some playing time. Corchiani only played nine minutes against Creighton; Jackson played twenty-eight. Corchiani had never been benched in his life and he did not take it well. Late that evening, Valvano found him sitting alone in the hotel lobby, sulking. The coach desperately wanted to go to bed because he felt terrible. But clearly, this had to be dealt with.

“I told him the story about Sidney Lowe when he was a senior,” Valvano said later. “We were playing West Virginia and running our delay where Sidney passes, catches, passes, catches. He came by me and said, ‘Coach, I need a blow.’ I said, ‘Sidney, your next blow will come when your eligibility is used up.’

“That’s the way it will be someday with Chris. I told him that Vinny [Del Negro] and Quentin both thought he was nuts because he thought he should play every minute, every game. They both waited almost three years to play. Someday when he’s a senior some hotshot freshman is going to come in and Chris will look at him and say, ‘Did I act like that asshole when I was a freshman?’ And I’ll tell him, yes, he did. And we’ll both laugh about it.

“But right now, the problem is very real to him. I understand that. It’s like the difference between my nineteen-year-old daughter and my seven-year-old. My nineteen-year-old sees college as a four-year experience, something you get better at as you go along. My seven-year-old wants a new bike
today
. Not tomorrow or Tuesday, today. That’s the way freshmen are. You have to be patient with them until they learn to be patient with you.”

State and Louisville will play at 6
P.M.
At noon, Hawaii and Texas A&M played in the first consolation game. Hawaii had the game won, leading 67–64 with the ball and twenty seconds left. The Aggies fouled
Reggie Cross. He missed the one-and-one. Hawaii extended its defense to deny any three-point shots. Finally, with two seconds left, Darryl McDonald stepped back to twenty-four feet and fired. Naturally, it swished.

Texas A&M won in overtime and Riley Wallace and 994 fans went home muttering, no doubt, about demons and volcanoes.

Thanks to the Louisville and N.C. State entourages, the crowd that evening was 3,275. Jackson started at point guard again but Corchiani played 22 minutes—7 more than Jackson. And, when the game was on the line, Shackleford and Chucky Brown dominated. Shackleford had 18 points and 8 rebounds. Just as important, he held Ellison to 13 points and his presence in the low post opened things up for Brown, who scored 25 points. State pulled away late to win, 80–75.

When Shackleford played well, State had three excellent players: Shackleford, Brown, and Del Negro. The latter two were as consistent as Shackleford was not. Even on a bad shooting night from the field—three of seven—Del Negro had 15 points, 6 assists, 6 rebounds, and zero turnovers.

“When Shack plays like tonight, we’re a very good club,” Valvano said. “He knows it, we know it, everyone knows it. Tonight, against Pervis, he came to play. We’ll see about tomorrow. If the past is any guide, he’ll suck.”

State’s opponent in the final would be Arizona State. The Sun Devils beat Mississippi State, 70–69, when Williams’s one veteran starter, Greg Lockhart, took the ball all the way to the basket with his team down three and time running out. The lay-up did the Bulldogs no good. Williams just stood with his arms folded, pointed to his head and said, “What were you thinking?”

A few minutes later, still a bit shocked, Williams was able to joke. “I told the kids that if they thought we were going to go undefeated, they were wrong. We’ve still got a lot of lessons to learn. I’m sure Louisville will teach us another one tomorrow.”

Louisville did just that with an 86–65 victory. But Williams and his young team will win six games in the Southeast Conference and finish 14–15. There is a future in Starkville even if you skip watching those Kroger trucks unload.

The final was closer than Valvano would have liked. Shackleford was just as lackadaisical in the first half as he had been fired up the evening before. State led 37–36 at the half but Valvano was furious. He stormed
into the tiny locker room and tore into Shackleford, questioning his desire, his intelligence, his manhood. He roared out the door, thought of a couple more things he wanted to say and turned to go back in, throwing the door open just as team doctor Jim Manley was about to open it on the other side.

Manley, considerably older and thinner than Valvano, went flying. “Jeez, I thought I killed him,” Valvano said later. Manley survived. So did Shackleford, who responded to Valvano’s tirade by taking over the game when it was on the line. He scored 9 points during an 11–3 burst that put the Wolfpack up 61–53 with 7:50 to go. From there, State cruised to an 83–71 victory. The Most Valuable Player? Charles Shackleford.

Valvano was delighted. He had gotten everything he wanted out of Hawaii: progress from Shackleford, good play from both Corchiani and Jackson, a victory over a very good team, and some consistency. The winner’s trophy was a bonus.

As the arena emptied—which didn’t take long-the PA announcer was telling the crowd the names of the visiting teams for the 25th Rainbow Classic in December 1988. Yale was on the list. No doubt the Eli would be Hawaii’s first opponent. That afternoon, Creighton had beaten the Rainbows for seventh place, Hawaii’s ninth straight Rainbow Classic loss.

If Yale isn’t the answer maybe Hawaii could try a new strategy in 1989. Invite Chaminade.

They sold out Pauley Pavilion today. Sadly, that was news. What was once the proudest college basketball program in America has become an embarrassment. UCLA isn’t very good and everyone in Los Angeles knows it.

The sellout today was created by the presence of North Carolina. The fans came to see Dean Smith and J. R. Reid the way they once came to see John Wooden and Lew Alcindor. Or Sidney Wicks. Or Bill Walton. Or Richard Washington. Wooden has been retired thirteen years now and during games he sits in the second row, directly across from the UCLA bench, looking just as impassive as he did when he coached.

In his place sits Walt Hazzard, the fifth coach to try to fill Wooden’s unfillable shoes. Hazzard played for Wooden. He was the captain of his first national championship team in 1964. He has tried to inject Wooden’s magic back into the program since taking over four years ago, walking across the floor to shake the great man’s hand before tip-off, even going back there sometimes at halftime.

Hazzard has had some success. His first team, after a horrendous start, came back to win the NIT. His third team won the Pacific 10, got back into the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1981, and won twenty-five games. But the best player on that 1987 team, Reggie Miller, a recruit of Hazzard’s predecessor Larry Farmer, has gone on to the pros. UCLA still has some talent but it is not a team that plays very hard or very smart. The debacle two weeks earlier at California was a perfect example.

To add to Hazzard’s troubles, seven-foot sophomore Greg Foster, a prize recruit two years ago, has disappeared, angry at being benched. He will announce later in the week that he is transferring to Texas–El Paso.

The Bruins are talented enough to compete with North Carolina, especially since the Tar Heels have been all over the map in two weeks, bouncing from home to Champaign, Illinois, to London (yes, England) to Reno, Nevada, to here. They won’t take UCLA that seriously and that will keep the game close.

Walking into Pauley on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, one can still sense the history in the place. There are championship banners hanging from the rafters all the way around the building. Hazzard likes to boast that UCLA doesn’t even bother to hang banners for Pacific 10 championships, though they did hang one for the 1985 NIT championship.

But there is something missing: the 1964 banner, the first one. “We sent it out to the laundry,” Sports Information Director Mark Dellins jokes. Actually, neither Dellins nor anyone else knows where the banner is. It has been stolen, just like UCLA’s greatness.

In truth, although it is less than twenty-five years old, Pauley is an antiquated facility. Once one walks inside, the hallways are about as wide as a basepath, the bathrooms are too small, and the locker rooms are tiny. Yet the place reeks of so much tradition it doesn’t really matter.

Tradition, however, isn’t going to beat Carolina. The Tar Heels lead early, but as will become a pattern with them, they cannot put the
weaker team away. Center Scott Williams is trying too hard, which is understandable. Williams grew up as a UCLA fan, dreaming of playing in Pauley Pavilion. When it came time to choose a college though, the disarray at UCLA frightened him and he opted for the sure winner, three thousand miles away in Chapel Hill.

In October, just after practice began, Williams’s father had gone to see his mother, apparently hoping to renew their marriage. When she refused, Scott Williams’s father shot her. Then he turned the gun on himself. In a moment, both were dead. Dean Smith had flown to Los Angeles with Williams for the funeral and the two of them had decided it would be better for Scott to keep playing in order to keep his mind off the tragedy. This is Williams’s first trip home since the funeral. He has friends and relatives at the game and he is trying to do too much.

Carolina leads from the start, but UCLA hangs close, cutting a nine-point lead to 41–37 at halftime. When Hazzard comes over to Wooden during the intermission, the photographers scramble to take the picture, demanding that passersby clear out of their way. Dellins shrugs: “We’ve got to hang on to the few traditions we have left.”

UCLA hangs on to the game until the end. It is tied at 69–69 after Williams misses a layup and fouls the Bruins’ Jerome (Pooh) Richardson going for the ball. Williams has fouled out after shooting three-for-eleven in twenty-three minutes. With 3:27 left, the score is tied and the crowd is into the game.

But Carolina is too good to lose to this team. Ranzino Smith hits a three-pointer, UCLA’s Charles Rochelin tosses a brick at the other end, and Jeff Lebo feeds Smith for a lay-up to make it 74–69. Kelvin Butler scores for UCLA, but Reid overpowers everyone going to the basket and is fouled as he hits a falling-down, off-balance shot. The free throw makes it 77–71 with 1:53 left and it is over. The final is 80–73.

UCLA is 4–7 and has lost five games at home. Wooden didn’t lose five games at home in ten years. Hazzard has now done it in seven weeks. Things are so bad that staying
close
to Carolina is considered a victory.

Dean Smith, searching for a way to be polite, says of the victory: “I thought we beat what was a very good team
today
.” Even El Deano isn’t going to try to claim that this UCLA team is very good.

In a narrow hallway, Richardson, whose recruitment out of Philadelphia three years ago was supposed to signal a rebirth at UCLA, is shaking his head in disgust. “I knew it would never be like it used to
be when I came here because no one will ever do that again. But I never thought it would be this bad.”

Hazzard is resolute. He has blamed his troubles on the press, on tough admissions standards, on the past, even on Dick Vitale. “We’re just going through a bad place right now,” he insists. “I’m just waiting for things to click around here.”

He is not alone.

Paul Evans was uptight. Twenty minutes before his Pittsburgh team was to begin Big East Conference play against defending league champion Georgetown, he sat on his bench watching warmups, chewing intently on a piece of gum.

For a coach with a 9–0 record and a team that was ranked second in the nation, Evans had been through a very tough first semester.

First came the loss of point guard Michael Goodson to academic ineligibility. Then, on a recruiting trip to Los Angeles, Evans and Assistant Coach John Calipari had been caught in the middle of an earthquake. They were asleep in their hotel room when everything began to shake. Panicked, Calipari had raced to the door, thrown it open, and stood there in his underwear, because he had heard you were safer standing in a doorway during a quake. Evans was just as frightened, but the sight of Calipari standing in the doorway sent him into hysterics.

“I was never so glad to leave a place,” he said later. “We got out on a red-eye and both went to sleep. Then, about an hour out of Los Angeles I heard this noise, like a thud. It was loud. I woke up and thought, ‘That was an engine.’ Then I saw the stewardesses all scrambling into the cockpit. I turned to John and I said, ‘We just blew an
engine.’ He gets up, walks straight to the back of the plane and sits down next to a nun. We’re over the mountains, it’s the middle of the night and we’ve lost an engine. I didn’t think the nun was going to help that much.

“Then the pilot comes on and in that calm pilot voice says we’re going to land in Vegas just as a precautionary measure, no big deal or anything. Yeah, sure, no big deal. Fortunately, we did land and we got the hell off and finally got on a TWA flight that got us to New York. We didn’t have any sleep but after the earthquake and the engine, I didn’t much care.”

Then there was the saga of Keith Tower. Although he was not the most highly publicized player Evans was recruiting that fall, he might have been the one he wanted most. Tower was 6–11 and had improved tremendously over the summer. He lived in Corapolis, just outside of Pittsburgh. And he had a 3.7 grade point average. In a program that had developed a reputation for suspect students in recent years, Evans desperately wanted some classroom stars.

Because he was 6–11, a pretty good player and a good student, Tower was being recruited by most of the big-name schools. Evans thought his main competitor was Notre Dame. As it turned out, he was correct.