A Season Inside (40 page)

This
jinx: Monroe hit a three-pointer. Corchiani made a pair of free throws. Monroe hit another three, Corchiani two more foul shots. That made a 10–2 run, courtesy of the freshman guards, and it was 61–55. The Duke students were less jovial now. Quin Snyder, clearly nervous, threw a silly pass and Del Negro got loose for his first field goal of the game. Howard made a three-point play and Shackleford powered inside.
Wham-Bam
the run was 17–2, and State led 62–61 with 6:01 left.

From there, it was anyone’s game—except that one team was
hoping
to win, the other believed it
would
win. Krzyzewski put King on Corchiani down the stretch and King cooled the little guard off. But Del Negro now had room and he took advantage of it, hitting a ten-footer that put State up 73–72 with 1:50 left, and a gorgeous, jump-catch-and-shoot backdoor lay-up that made it 75–72. Duke had one last chance, trailing 75–74 with seven seconds left when Del Negro missed a free throw.

Ferry rebounded and thought he saw Phil Henderson open for a lay-up. But as he reached back to try to throw the long pass, Ferry, who almost never makes fundamental mistakes, lost control of the ball. His pass went right to Chucky Brown. Seconds later it was over, 77–74 State.

For Valvano, this was the biggest win of the season. His team had gone into a hostile gym, hung in for thirty minutes against a good team playing well, and made the big plays in the clutch. Everyone had helped: Monroe had 17 points, Shackleford had 16, Corchiani 15. Del
Negro, held in check most of the day, only had 12 but he got them when they counted most.

“We could be a pretty good club before this is over,” Valvano decided. “But now, we’ve got to play like this consistently.” Every coach can find a “but” line in a victory. This time, though, Valvano was hard pressed.

The feeling on the other side could not have been more different. The Blue Devils weren’t just unhappy, they were angry. King, normally the last one out of the locker room because he will answer every single question, was out in a flash. “I’m just so pissed off I don’t know what I could say to anybody,” he said. “There’s no way you can be a good team and blow a 14-point lead at home.”

That was exactly the way Krzyzewski felt. Again, he had the sense that, when it counted most, his team had played scared. He was most upset with Snyder, who had been outplayed by a freshman—Corchiani—and hadn’t seemed to know what to do in the final minutes. “Quin is playing to protect his spot, instead of being aggressive,” Krzyzewski said. “To one degree or another they’re all protecting. That’s just no good.”

He glanced at a picture of the 1986 team that hung on his office wall. “I’ll tell you one thing. This team isn’t anywhere near where that team was,” he said. “It isn’t so much talent, although that team did have more talent. What this team doesn’t have is a motherfucker.”

In the coaching vernacular a motherfucker was a guy the other team just didn’t want to mess with. Del Negro was that kind of player; so, to some extent, was Corchiani. Meagher and David Henderson had played that role in the past for Duke. Now, there was a void, and Notre Dame was coming to town looking to knock off a top team. The Irish were rested, the Blue Devils tired and frustrated.

It was a game Duke easily could lose because in the long run, it didn’t matter. The team was going to be in the NCAA Tournament regardless. It would have been easy to rationalize a loss and go on from there. But King wouldn’t let it happen.

In pregame the next day, he was on his teammates in a very un-Kinglike manner. Snyder, who was being benched by Krzyzewski, caught the brunt of King’s anger. “You can’t play scared, Quin,” he told him. “Go out and be angry. Prove to Coach K that he’s wrong.”

King had a major assignment for the day himself: He was to guard David Rivers, the All-American point guard. Rivers’s importance
to Notre Dame was best summed up by the Duke students who, as the Irish were introduced, chanted, “One-man team, one-man team.”

That wasn’t true in this game. Sophomore guard Joe Frederick, averaging 6 points a game, was 9-for-13 and had 23 points. At halftime, the Irish led 35–32. King had held Rivers in check for twenty minutes, but could he do it for forty? And would fatigue set in after two games in twenty-four hours and four games in seven days?

With 12:20 left, Notre Dame still led 48–44. King was giving Rivers absolutely no room to breathe. When Forte called him for a foul early in the second half, King, who calls all the officials by their first names, yelled, “Come on, Joe, don’t protect him because he’s a star.”

“I’m not, Billy, you fouled him.”

King smiled. “I know.”

Rivers saw no humor in the situation. “After he told the ref not to protect me, they never called anything on him the rest of the day,” he complained later. Rivers had no right to complain; the fact that he did was a mark of how frustrated he was by King. Rivers is not a whiner. After this game against Billy King, he whined.

It was Snyder, playing aggressively, who made the basket that got Duke going. He hit a three-pointer that cut the lead to 48–47. A moment later, King drove the baseline and put the Blue Devils up for good, 49–48. Then, to put an exclamation point on the day, he hit a ten-foot jump shot, something he had done in most leap years during his career.

It was over after that. Duke cruised home, 70–61. This was King’s day. Rivers finished with 9 points on 3-of-27 shooting and turned the ball over 4 times. “When he started slapping at my hand on inbounds plays, I knew I had him,” King said.

King, the nonscorer, also hit 5 of 7 shots and had 11 points. It was the first and only time in his senior season that King would score in double figures. For Rivers it was the first and only time in his senior season that he would
not
score in double figures.

With thirty seconds left, Krzyzewski took King out to what was undoubtedly the loudest standing ovation ever given in Cameron for a player who had scored 11 points. King, being King, understood how special this day was for him.

“A year from now David Rivers is going to be playing in the NBA as a first-round draft pick,” he said. “He’ll be making six figures and
then some. I’ll be working at a desk somewhere, fighting rush hour traffic every day.”

King smiled. “But I’ll always have the tape of this game. And when I’m old, I’ll pull it out and show it to my kids and say, ‘You see, the old man could play a little defense in his day.’ ”

If you care about college basketball as a sport, about its history and its traditions, then you must make a pilgrimage at least once a season to the Palestra.

The Palestra is to college basketball what Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are to baseball. It is a place where you
feel
the game from the moment you step inside. The popcorn smells like college basketball, the noises are those of the game: the crowd, the bands, the players, the coaches. All of it. Even though the old (born in 1927) place was given a $1 million sprucing up in 1986, complete with new paint and new seats, it still feels old. Most of the seats are still bleacher-style. The locker rooms are tiny and the seats are close enough to the floor that the crowd is always part of the game.

Things have changed, as they inevitably must, over the years at the Palestra. Once, all the schools in Philadelphia’s Big Five—Villanova, Temple, LaSalle, St. Joseph’s, and Pennsylvania—called the Palestra home. All of the traditional city games were played there, usually as the second half of a doubleheader. The first game would bring a major national power to town, then would come the Big Five game. The gym was smack in the middle of the Penn campus but it belonged, really, to the city and to The Game.

The Palestra still considers itself at least a part-time home for all five schools. It is the only arena in America that has national championship banners hanging for two schools: LaSalle (1954) and Villanova (1985).

But when big dollars came into college basketball, the Big Five schools were lined up like everyone else to grab some. Villanova joined the fledgling Big East while Temple and St. Joseph’s joined the Atlantic 10. LaSalle became part of the Metro Atlantic. The conferences were where the TV money was—especially in Villanova’s case—and were the schools’ route into the NCAA Tournament. The City Series
games became less and less important until, in 1986, it looked as if they might end completely.

Temple and Villanova no longer wanted to play home games in the Palestra. Villanova had built a new arena and Temple wanted to build one. What’s more, when you played in the Palestra, you split the money, taking away the financial home court advantage.

More and more in recent years, local rivalries in college basketball have gone the way of the dinosaur. The teams in power don’t want to play the weaker teams because they somehow fear that a loss might knock them off their pedestal. And, they know that a big local win could revive a rival that is down, making them a threat again. The attitude is: Forget the fans, who love local rivalries, and forget the fact that there is plenty to go around for everyone these days.

Georgetown Coach John Thompson is a perfect example of this kind of thinking. Every year Thompson sprinkles his schedule with teams like St. Leo’s and Morgan State, teams so bad that no one should be asked to pay money to watch them play. In the meantime Thompson has dropped Maryland, George Washington, and American from his schedule. He also refuses to play Howard University.

He is not alone. For years, Kentucky would not play Louisville. Dean Smith won’t play any in-state teams other than the ones in the ACC. Alabama will not play Alabama–Birmingham. Heck, Hawaii won’t even play Chaminade.

Dan Baker, the executive secretary of the Big Five, did not want to see this happen in Philadelphia. He knew he had no chance to keep the City Series in the Palestra as it had been in the past. So, he struck a compromise. Beginning with the 1986–87 season, the designated home team in a City Series game could choose the site. This meant that Temple and Villanova would get their home games on campus and it meant that Penn, LaSalle, and St. Joseph’s could continue to have theirs in the Palestra. The new contract was for ten years.

“It took hours and hours and hours of talks to get this,” said Baker, an unfailingly polite, soft-spoken man. “I think it’s a shame that some of the people involved don’t have more feel for the tradition of Philadelphia basketball. But this was better than losing the whole thing altogether.”

That much is true. There are not nearly as many games in the Palestra as there used to be. But they do still play here and, when they
open the doors on a cold winter night, there are few better places to be.

Tonight is a doubleheader night. Game one is LaSalle–St. Peter’s, two teams unbeaten in the Metro Atlantic Conference. Game two is one of the great traditional rivalries in the sport: Princeton–Penn.

Jam-packed, the arena can seat almost ten thousand people. The crowd tonight is 6,297. They come streaming in off 33d Street, working their way to the front door. Only when you are within ten feet of the building can you read the sign that says, “The Palestra.” Since the building opened sixty-one years ago, it has hosted more college basketball games than any gym in America. It is a place where even the bathrooms could tell stories if they could talk.

LaSalle–St. Peter’s will not go down with any of the Palestra’s more memorable games. LaSalle has the best player on the floor in Lionel Simmons and, even on a night that is not his best, Simmons is good enough, with fifteen points and eight rebounds, to produce a 56–47 victory.

Princeton and Penn is the main event. For the last twenty years, these two teams have
been
the Ivy League. Since 1968, when Columbia beat Princeton in a playoff to win the league championship, only Brown, in 1986, has interrupted the Penn–Princeton stranglehold on the league. Penn has won ten titles, Princeton eight during that time.

The difference between the two schools, besides the fifty miles that separates the two campuses, is in coaching. Tom Schneider is in his third year at Penn and is one of five different coaches to win the Ivy League at the school during the last twenty years. He is forty and ambitious. Like his predecessors, he probably won’t be at Penn for life.

One man has coached Princeton since 1967. He is Pete Carril. He has won eight Ivy League championships, several of them with mirrors. Carril is fifty-six and, in all likelihood, will end his career at Princeton. When he retires, he will do so as one of the most revered figures in his profession. The consensus on Carril among his peers is that he could probably take five charter members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and find a way to contend in the Ivy League.

Certainly, the Ivy League isn’t what it was in the 1960s or even in the 1970s, when Princeton had Bill Bradley and the Hummer brothers and Chris Thomforde, and Penn had Craig Littlepage, Dave Wohl,
Steve Bilsky, Bob Morse, Phil Hankinson, and Tony Price. In 1965, Princeton reached the Final Four. In 1979, Penn equaled the feat. No Ivy League team is likely to get that far any time soon. But that doesn’t mean the intensity in the league is any less or the games less fun.

In another life one suspects that Carril was Yoda, the diminutive
Star Wars
Jedi who taught Luke Skywalker about The Force and how to use it. In his blue sweater, Carril waddles around, scrunching up his face in anger when his Jedi screw up.

No game in the Palestra can really get underway until the traditional throwing of streamers after the first basket by the Philadelphia team is complete. Hassan Duncombe (pronounced
Dunk-em
), a huge Penn freshman from Brooklyn, scores the first basket, and the blue-and-red streamers come from everywhere.

But this is, after all, the Ivy League, and no self-respecting Ivy League school is going to come to a game as big as this one without an answer for a bunch of streamers. So, when Princeton freshman Kit Mueller ties the game, the Princeton fans pelt the court with blue-and-orange marshmallows. Take that, Big Five.