Feinstein - A season inside: one year in college basketball

Copyright 1988 by John Feinstein

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feinstein, John.
A season inside.

1. BasketballUnited StatesHistory. 2. College
sportsUnited StatesHistory. I. Title.
GV885.7.F45 1988 796.323630973 88-40147
eISBN: 978-0-307-80091-6

v3.1

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 possiblewhich wasnt muchand pulled the schedule out. PurdueMemphis State, and DePaulKansas 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. Im 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?

Hoopswho in real life is Dick Weiss of the Philadelphia DailyNewshad 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 dont 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 Gardenthe 1965 NIT finalwhen the St. Johns student section filled the old arena up with chants of, Lets 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 198788 that any college guard has had in recent years. I didnt get to see him play except on television and I feel I missed out. I missed the earthquake in Alaska because I got sickthank goodness it only happened once all seasonand I wish I had been there to see Richmond upset Indiana. I couldnt 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 Mannings extraordinary NCAA performance, Billy Kings 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 coachs 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 couldnt help remembering my experience in 1986 in Indiana, where Bob Knight didnt 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. Thats 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 didnt 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 wasnt 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: Kansas83, Oklahoma79. 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.