Category Archives: college hoops

He used his time well

If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em. At least that’s how things regularly worked with Pete Carril’s basketball tactics. Coaching at one of the nation’s elite universities, where athletic scholarships were banned and only rich nerds could get in the door, Carril eschewed the folly of mimicking the standard high-flying, muscular NBA blueprint. He instead trained his players to out-think their taller, faster, stronger and more gifted opponents; to be deliberate, exacting, patient.

And in 29 years at Princeton University, Carril, who died this week at 92, experienced only one losing season.

“My strategies,” he said, “are forced on me by the things my players can’t do.”

He was known for his curmudgeonly mien, which mostly was a cover for sly humor. No airs. And he wasn’t so much a heretic as an improviser, making do with the materials at hand. No other men’s basketball coach won 500 games without having the use of athletic scholarships. He’s in the sport’s Hall of Fame.

In many ways, he wasn’t a logical fit. He was not a Princeton man himself, having played college ball (small-school All-American) at Lafayette, and got his graduate degree at Lehigh. Whatever truth there is to the Princeton cliché of a haughty, moneyed lot, Carril appeared in his small office, the one time I had a long conversation with him, his hair unkempt and wearing a golf shirt that appeared to have coffee stains and crumbs on it.

Conditioning his players to stifle the urge to shoot was not merely a desperate stalling device. He wasn’t simply playing keep-away to minimize the opponent’s number of shots and rebounds. Rather, the point was to run through his complete repertoire of offensive patterns, without seriously considering a shot, so that the other team was forced to work on defense longer than it was accustomed. Over and over, it was a test to see how long before the other team lost interest or got lazy.

When, halfway through his career, Carril was faced with the 1985 NCAA imposition of a shot clock—45 seconds to hoist an attempt—the pervasive theory was that Princeton would lose the one edge it had. He considered the rule one more step toward “the disappearance of the cerebral or mental element” of the game.

Yet the shot clock didn’t stop Carril from having Princeton continue to use its time wisely. Exploring and feinting until the most makeable shot presented itself. And in the 1989 NCAA tournament, when his 16^th-seeded lads came within one point of shocking top-ranked Georgetown, Sports Illustrated called it “The Game That Saved March Madness” because it provided compelling drama when a dull foregone conclusion had been assumed.

And seven years later, perennial underdog Princeton’s two-point tournament victory over defending national champion UCLA was a delightful shocker to any fan this side of UCLA, summed up by the Daily Princetonian headline: “David 43, Goliath 41.” That was another triumph of time management, of movement without the ball, spacing, passing, misdirection, teamwork. Riveting basketball. Not just following the fashionable trend.

Carril understood the realities—that a lesser team is handicapped by a being in a compulsory hurry, because the team that can run, jump and shoot will spend almost all of its time running, jumping and shooting. So Carril’s Princeton offense—in the face of opposing fans chanting “Boring! Boring!”—in fact provided grand entertainment by bamboozling and discombobulating superior foes.

“I’m not against the 45-second clock,” Carril said when the rule was introduced. “What I’m trying to protect is whatever mentality is left in the game. To be permitted to probe, to look around, to set up, to use your head a little bit. When you put a time factor of, say, 24 seconds, on it [as the NBA had done in 1954], then there’s such a thing as eliminating strategy. Or, maybe ‘eliminating’ isn’t the right word. ‘Reducing.’ Reducing the styles, not only within one game itself, but in making each game different from the next.”

It turns out that Carril’s high school coach in Bethlehem, Pa., believed the best approach was to have a team attempt 100 shots per game, minimum, so Carril had experienced a helter-skelter style. The other dichotomy in his biography was that, while Carril preached at Princeton that “passing is a lost art,” a fellow coach, Paul Westhead, couldn’t resist revealing how, in pickup games with colleagues, “all [Carril] did was shoot 20-foot set shots. He never, never gave up the ball.”

Bottom line: Whatever it took.

Black (school) power

Leave a reply

Among the aspects of racial awareness stirred by Black Lives Matter demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder in police custody, here’s one I hadn’t considered: Young African-American athletic prodigies choosing historically Black colleges over traditional high-profile powers such as UCLA, Kentucky and Kansas.

The New York Times last week reported several instances of top basketball and football hotshots either declining offers—or transferring—from predominately white institutions in favor of lower-profile operations at Howard University, Norfolk State, Arkansas-Pine Bluff and the like.

If that becomes a trend, it could precipitate a fundamental shift in control—from the rich schools and athletic departments which profit mightily off the exploits of uncompensated (mostly Black) athletes in the two revenue sports—to the labor force, the players. In basketball, especially, it takes only one star to carry a team and lure television’s visibility and big bucks.

With moves afoot to allow college athletes some compensation for use of their names and images, all jocks are beginning to acquire bargaining chips regarding their choices. For Black athletes, typically part of a tiny campus minority when they compete for predominately white schools, an added bonus would be that studies indicate they will experience more supportive professors and mentors at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

This comes more than a half-century after the good-news/bad-news of desegregation. While that nudge toward more equal opportunity belatedly opened some doors for Blacks, to polish their athletic skills and resumes at the professionally run white college factories, it meanwhile dried up the quality of sports talent at the HBCUs. And, as a consequence, lowered the already minimal public profiles of those schools.

As Clarence (Big House) Gaines put it to me a good 35 years ago, the last time the best Black players opted for HBCUs was “when it was the only place they could go.”

Gaines, who died at 83 in 2005, was the Hall of Fame basketball coach at Winston-Salem University for 48 years, averaging more than 18 victories per season. His proteges included Earl Monroe, 13 years an NBA star, and Cleo Hill, the first first-round NBA draft pick from an HBCU (in 1961). But with the lifting of Jim Crow restraints, Gaines soon was unable to compete for elite talent against the sport’s aristocracy.

Potential recruits would ask, “Are you Division I?”

“No,” Gaines would tell them.

“Will I be on TV?”

“Not hardly,” he would say.

Gaines described Winston-Salem as “a school with a Division II philosophy, a Division III budget and high ideals. We run this program on the money from student activity fees and gifts from alumni and friends. The gifts we get, I couldn’t support two kids. All our problems could be solved by one thing: Money.”

Among Gaines’ contemporaries was Davey Whitney at Alcorn State which, despite being the first HBCU to play in the NCAA Division I tournament (in 1980), hardly realized a recruiting bonanza.

“We used to get at least three of the best kids in the state of Mississippi [before Southern white schools began to gradually integrate in the 1970s],” Whitney said back then. “None of the major schools in the South cared about basketball. Now, we’ve got to recruit against the Alabamas and the Ole Misses as much as the DePauls.”

The chore was to “somehow show your kids that they’re just as good as anybody else,” he said. “They read about players from the white schools. They see them on TV, and they’re in awe.”

They wanted “to go where the action is,” Whitney’s athletic director, Marino Casem, said. “They wanted the bright lights”—something the underfunded HBCUs couldn’t offer.

If now, as some prominent young Black players have indicated, they can athletically prosper at an HBCU—even as they bring attention (and money) to schools in the Black community—it feels to them as if that piece of their lives will matter.

Jim Boeheim’s values and college sport’s big bucks

Leave a reply

Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim’s recent putdown of Greensboro, N.C., for having “no value” as a conference tournament site really was just the latest episode in college sports hypocrisy. Boeheim was reminding that his sport, on the Division I level, has nothing to do with proximity to campus life. Nothing to do with education. Nothing to do with the NCAA’s claim to be an amateur operation.

His typically prickly demeanor aside, Boeheim merely was verbalizing the state of affairs in his chosen racket. Just as conference realignments have severed schools’ geographical connections to chase bigger and better paydays, so do post-season tournaments increasingly gravitate toward the largest cities.

Because, as Willie Sutton supposedly said when asked why he robbed banks, “that’s where the money is.”

So the Atlantic Coast Conference, founded as a Carolina-centric league in the early 1950s, abandoned its traditional home in the burg that calls itself “Tournament Town” to play in New York’s Brooklyn borough this year. With Jim Boeheim’s hardy approval.

“Why do you think the Big Ten is coming to New York City?” Boeheim said of next year’s deal to bring that conference tournament from its Midwestern roots to Madison Square Garden. “It’s a good business decision. Everyone says this is all about business. The media centers, the recruiting centers, are Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York. How many players do their have in Greensboro?”

Boeheim, of course, is the crotchety fellow being paid roughly $2 million a year who has dismissed as “idiotic” any thought of sharing the wealth with college athletes. He is the guy who was suspended for nine games a year ago for failing to promote compliance of NCAA rules within his team for nearly a decade. He—and Syracuse basketball—are the embodiment of a gold-digging approach.

He noted that “Madison Square Garden made the Big East Conference” in the early 1980s, when Syracuse was a charter member of the league formed primarily to tap into the largest East Coast TV markets—$$$$: New York (St. John’s), D.C. (Georgetown), Boston (Boston College), Philadelphia (Villanova). The conference, in fact, mandated that its teams play the majority of their games in large public arenas, away from their campuses, to maximize ticket sales.

Long ago and in a galaxy far, far away, it was the ACC which concocted a post-season tournament to determine its league champion—and sole NCAA tournament participant. That was 1954, when only 22 teams made up the NCAA field. Between 1978 and 1980, the Big Dance grew from 32 to 48 teams, just when the Big East embraced the idea of a post-season tournament as a significant revenue stream. With as many as four of its original seven teams already guaranteed NCAA berths, its tournament essentially amounted to a series of exhibition games. But with large crowds paying top dollar at the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Famous Arena.”

As long ago as 1985, St. John’s Hall of Fame coach Lou Carnesecca admitted that the Big East tournament “means nothing. It’s nice for the league, to put a little money in the sack, to get the alumni together to discuss who’s better. It’s good because it makes a lot of noise…”

So isn’t it a bit ironic that none other than Jim Boeheim was grumbling back then that “any coach who feels he’s [already] qualified for the NCAA would rather not play a postseason tournament”?

Soon enough, he came around to the comforts of greed, until the Big East’s pursuit of further riches through a disorienting expansion of adding schools with a football emphasis led to its virtual demise. The conference eventually was forced to retreat to its old basketball model and Syracuse, meanwhile, ran away to the ACC’s greenbacks.

In Greensboro, many see justice in the fact that Boeheim and his Syracuse lads were immediately ousted by Miami from the ACC’s new Brooklyn stage in the first round, ending any hope of an NCAA bid. And that Syracuse subsequently was matched, in the consolation NIT’s first round, against the team from the University of North Carolina’s campus in Greensboro.

Surely there’s some value in that.

Beyond ESPN’s “Norm:” Mizzou’s J-School pests

4 Replies

One aspect not addressed in “Norm,” ESPN’s spot-on new documentary of venerable University of Missouri basketball coach Norm Stewart, was Stewart’s relationship with the school’s student journalists. Understand that Mizzou, as home to the world’s first School of Journalism, churned out an unusual number of wet-behind-the-ears pests whom Stewart often accused of “disrupting my team.” Realize, too, that Stewart—devilishly clever and never above haggling to get an edge—knew how to get across his point about school loyalty to us practitioners of theoretical neutrality. Often by announcing that he was “declaring war on the local writers.”

I was a reporter for the university-run Columbia Missourian when Stewart assumed the head coaching job in 1967, and therefore embodied so much of what annoyed him about J-School. “They’re in a learning situation,” he argued to me years later, “They don’t have any knowledge about history, or any interest in it. They’re like all kids. Live for today.”

Guilty. Unlike Stewart, who hailed from the tiny farming community of Shelbyville, near Tom Sawyer’s Hannibal, and had been a two-sport star at Mizzou in the 1950s, most J-School students are virtual foreigners, drawn by J-School’s reputation and not steeped in such matters as Missouri’s established hate for neighboring Kansas. I went to high school in New Mexico, and had classmates from California, New York, Iowa, Virginia, Oklahoma, Illinois and other distant points.

It further rankled Stewart, and justifiably so, that the state’s media centers of St. Louis and Kansas City were slow to acknowledge the rapid ascent of his teams into perennial contenders in the old Big Eight Conference.

In 1982, Mizzou opened the season with 19 consecutive wins and briefly was ranked No. 1, at last in line for some national attention, but the instant it lost its first game, NBC cancelled a planned feature on the team. “I guess I ought to go out and lose five or six games so I can get on TV all the time like UCLA and Notre Dame,” was Stewart’s sarcastic reaction.

It was that February that I maneuvered a Newsday assignment to return to campus, as a ploy to to introduce our Long Island readers to “Stormin’ Norman,” who had created an image throughout the Midwest of a cantankerous soul. Regularly wrangling with officials (and sometimes fans) as he stalked the sideline, Stewart inspired opposing fans to serenade him with “Sit down, Norm!” chants.

Yet, up close, Stewart could be as charming as he was caustic, with an open, sly sense of humor, a crooked smile and tales to tell.

When I visited in ’82, Mizzou was days from a nationally televised match-up of Top 10 teams at Georgetown, which was riding the all-encompassing skills of freshman giant Patrick Ewing. Stewart sat in his office, grinning mischievously, and gilded his reputation as an agitator by relating how he once spliced together a film of what he considered the worst officials’ calls and shipped it to the Big Eight office. He told of a Notre Dame fan who had been badgering him, and how he considered mailing the man a rosary and a snuffed-out candle with the note, “You have caused me to lose my Faith.”

That evening, after Mizzou’s game against Iowa State, Stewart invited me to his home to continue the conversation. He addressed his occasionally brusque coaching techniques and manic attention to defense with self-deprecation: “Players sometimes say, ‘Coach, how do you stop that [offensive move].’ I say, ‘As coaches, we don’t do that. We just identify problems.’”

He spoke fondly of his high school coach in Shelbyville, C.J. Kessler, who originally made a name for himself in basketball-mad Indiana but, as Stewart told it, happened to marry a Shelbyville girl and, when Kessler came to visit the in-laws, “some of the local boys took him out for golf and possibly drinks, and the next morning he wakes up as superintendent of schools and basketball coach. And his wife as the school’s English teacher.”

It was about then I felt the time ripe for a little good-natured J-School revenge, recalling that Mizzou’s coaching job had become open, following the 1966-67 season, not long after I had scrutinized the failures of Bob Vanatta in a column for our student newspaper, The Maneater.

Vanatta’s team had lost 43 of 49 games the previous two seasons. Might I, a smart-aleck sophomore possibly abusing the power of the pen, have hastened Vanatta’s departure—and therefore Stewart’s shot at the job that came to shape his legacy? (He stayed for 32 seasons, won 634 games and eight conference titles and appeared in 22 post-season tournaments. He also survived colon cancer and founded the Coaches vs. Cancer organization that has raised more than $87 million since 1993. All of that is in the “Norm” documentary.)

I don’t recall Stewart’s reaction, although the hurling of rotten tomatoes would not have been out of line. I fully suspect he grasped the jest factor.

And here’s the irony:

In the spring of 1969, months short of graduation, I had arranged to interview Stewart about his landing of prize 6-foot-7 recruit John Brown, the future second-team All-American and eight-year NBA veteran. Stewart was in the hospital receiving treatment for a bad back, but invited me to his bedside to detail the lengthy process of romancing Brown and keeping him away from the likes of despised Kansas U.

That drawn-out struggle, the neighborhood rivalry, the name of the lad whose physical presence was being fought over, put me in mind of Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic 1928 poem, “John Brown’s Body,” about the radical abolitionist in Civil War days.

(John Brown’s body in motion)

It was a cheesy premise for a column, but a visit to the university library unearthed lines in the poem that spoke to Mizzou’s basketball situation, of gaining a real edge on the bitter adversary across the state line only two years into Stewart’s tenure:

The papers praise, but the recruiting is slow,

The bonds sell badly, the grind of the war goes on—

And:

Go down, John Brown,

Go down, John Brown, and set that people free!

And:

Kansas, bleeding Kansas,

I hear her in her pain.

The vice president of the United Press International wire service happened to be in town for Mizzou’s annual Journalism Week and saw the John Brown column. He offered me a position in UPI’s sports department in New York City.

So it was Stewart who generated the opportunity to get me a job.

P.S. In 2008, when Missouri’s J-School celebrated its Centennial with three days of forums and exhibits, Stewart was in the audience for a panel discussion on the ethics and future of sports journalism. It was good to see him. The war was over a long time ago.

Time out for NCAA mascots

2 Replies

This is a pet peeve. Why is it that televised coverage of March Madness, which the NCAA insists is amateur sport contested by “student-athletes” motivated purely by devotion to Dear Old Alma Mater, skips the college atmospherics?

Instead of grave, ad nauseam dissection of strategy amid pauses in the action not already taken up with commercials—all that redundant hoops talk-talk-talk—how come we don’t get to eavesdrop on the occasional school fight song? Or catch a glimpse of some mascot high jinx?

During an early-round game in Memphis a couple of years ago, TV missed UCLA’s Joe Bruin acknowledging the geographic proximity to Graceland by donning dark glasses, scarf and white jump suit and hoofing to Elvis music. Can’t help falling in love with that.

Instead of official canned “CBS College Basketball Theme” music going in and out of advertising breaks at this weekend’s Final Four, why not linger briefly on the Oklahoma band pounding out a few bars of “Boomer Sooner”? (The music is a rip-off of Yale’s “Boola Boola,” but any fight song does a better job of placing the viewer on the scene than generic network tunes.)

What mostly separates the Big Dance from just another NBA production are the pep bands and anthropomorphically costumed wildcats and ducks and shocks of wheat—partners in high times for the schools and their most involved followers, the students and alumni.

Not so long ago, I found an interview of Iowa’s Herky the Hawk during a March Madness timeout every bit as stimulating as listening the coaches and players ponder tactics and who’s No. 1. Since birds don’t talk, Herky’s end of the conversation consisted of charades….

Me: How tall are you?

Herky: (Tapping a finger six times into his other palm, pausing, then tapping four times) 6-foot-4.

Me: What year in school?

Herky: (Tapping twice). Sophomore.

Me: Your major?

Herky: (Rubbing his thumb against two fingers). Business.

When lightly regarded Stephen F. Austin shocked West Virginia in this year’s first round, then gave Notre Dame a serious scare, the folks on the “electric teevee machine”—as my friend Charlie Pierce calls it—raved about the gritty, unemotional play of SFA senior Thomas Walkup. What never was mentioned was how Walkup, a muscular lad with a wilderness beard, was doppelganger to the school’s lumberjack mascot. (Newsday’s Laura Albanese noticed, and posted the Tweet below.)

West Virginia, by the way, joins Stephen F. Austin as one of the few colleges whose mascot appears in human form (also bearded) with its Mountaineer. Which is fine, though not as much a conversation piece as St. Joseph’s University’s student-inside-an-eagle suit, who tirelessly flaps his wings throughout games. Or Syracuse’s student-inside-a-giant-orange.

We all know the tournament has no real relationship to higher education. The NCAA’s current 14-year March Madness television-rights deal is worth $10.8 billion. A single conference, the ACC, already was guaranteed $30 million based on advancing six teams into this year’s Sweet Sixteen. The most successful coaches regularly are the highest-paid employees at their colleges. One of this year’s semifinals features two teams—North Carolina vs. Syracuse—shaking off the effects of recent academic fraud.

By stripping away the peripheral ambiance—which, I submit, is a saving grace for an otherwise cynical and hypocritical operation—television’s treatment of the event further amplifies the serious-business aspect. At least give me a hint of campus life with the periodic fight song. And a student in a wacky critter suit.

(Mizzou’s Truman, left, and me)

Upsets are the madness in March

Leave a reply

Bless the NCAA tournament’s custom of upsets, all of which are great things (except when they victimize your team). If it weren’t for Middle Tennessee State ambushing pre-tournament co-favorite Michigan State, Yale waylaying Baylor and Stephen F. Austin bushwhacking West Virginia over this year’s first weekend, where would the madness be?

Each March, when the traditional rich-getting-richer powerhouses—the Kansases, Kentuckys, North Carolinas and Dukes—set about chasing yet another national championship and bigger television payday, the real charm is provided by the underprivileged. It is the presence of gypsies in the palace, unlikely to assume the throne but meanwhile smashing some of the fine dinner China, that expands the audience.

According to the 538.com Web site, the 2012 first-round victory by No. 15 seed Norfolk State over my alma mater, No. 2 Missouri, remains the biggest upset since the Big Dance was expanded to 64 teams in 1985. That’s a moment I choose not to celebrate. Still, what is so appealing about the tournament is the sudden, sky-high growth by previously perceived pipsqueaks. Apparent finders of magic beans.

So, no offense to Norfolk State, but among my favorites were Valparaiso, George Mason and, 34 years ago, Middle Tennessee State’s first iteration of its NCAA fairy tale. On that occasion, when the tournament still was limited to 48 teams, with 12 seeds per regional, I had been dispatched to Nashville by Newsday in anticipation of a second-round showdown between in-state powers Kentucky and Louisville, their first since 1959.

Louisville, as the Mideast Region’s No. 3 seed, had a first-round bye, awaiting No. 6 Kentucky’s assumed romp over the lightly regarded No. 11 seed snidely referred to as “Middle Tennis Shoes State.” Kentucky’s advance past Middle Tennessee was so likely that I left my portable computer in my motel room, across the Vanderbilt campus from the arena, with no plans of reporting on the game.

Naturally, Middle Tennessee won, 50-44—its first-ever NCAA tournament victory—prompting my mayday phone call to the office and a mile sprint back to my writing machine, on deadline, with the lead sentence becoming obvious as I ran: “Never plan ahead.”

Middle Tennessee’s coach then was an aw-shucks fellow named Stan Simpson, who recalled growing up in Georgia, “sitting up nights and listening to Cawood Ledford broadcast the Kentucky games on WHAS out of Louisville. Lord, I never thought I’d see this day.”

In 1998, Valparaiso—a small, Lutheran-affiliated school in Indiana so little known that its proper pronunciation of Val-puh-RAY-so regularly was miscast in the original Spanish, Val-puh-RIZE-zo—rolled into the Sweet 16 despite its No. 13 seed. Against No. 3 Ole Miss in the first round, Valpo was trailing by two points when it in-bounded the ball under the Ole Miss basket with 2.5 seconds to play, executed a 60-foot pass, then a quick flip to Bryce Drew, whose 23-foot three-point basket shocked all concerned. Valparaiso in a most delightful way.

The personal downside to that uplifting development was that the crushed Ole Miss lads were coached by Robert Evans, a former high school classmate of mine in Hobbs, N.M. But that was offset, on a trip to Valparaiso the next week, when I encountered a community beside itself with giddiness. Valparaiso is the home of gourmet popcorn maker Orville Redenbacher, and its annual Popcorn Ball is described as the town’s “adult prom,” the biggest social event on the calendar. Yet that year, even Valparaiso’s mayor skipped the Ball to be in St. Louis for the university’s Sweet Sixteen game.

And Valparaiso’s coach, Homer Drew—Bryce’s father—told of how his son had turned down an offer from perennial NCAA tournament contender Syracuse to stay home with his dad’s team, in spite of Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim’s incredulous response: “Don’t you want to play in the Big Time?”

“When I was an assistant of Dale Brown at LSU,” Homer Drew said then, “I got to experience the Big Time. I’ve been coaching long enough to understand that fame is fleeting. I’m thrilled for my team, but you won’t be here next week. TV won’t be here. I’m just very blessed to have shared these four years with Bryce, because when fame is gone, family and friends will be there. That is most important.”

They’re still together at Valpo, too—Homer as associate athletic director and Bryce, since 2012, his successor as head coach.

Then there was the George Mason experience from 2006, when the school’s basketball team, an at-large addition to the NCAA field and seeded 11^th in its regional, levitated right to the Final Four by knocking off No. 6 Michigan State, No. 3 (and defending champion) North Carolina, No. 7 Wichita State and No. 1 UConn.

That run not only was a SportsCenter sensation and an underdog’s public relations windfall, but prompted then-university president Alan Merten to conflate the achievement of George Mason (the school team) with George Mason (the man). The latter, already dead 99 years before basketball was invented, “was the true bracket buster,” Merten gleefully informed me. One of the original American revolutionaries, a vigorous opponent of unrestricted power, an advocate for the little guy, Mason wrote Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, the blueprint for the U.S. Bill of Rights. And he told his neighbor and friend, George Washington, that he could not bring himself to sign the U.S. Constitution because it lacked a stipulation to eliminate slavery.

“We’re pesky,” president Merten said then. “I love that word that’s being used for our basketball team. As a university, too, we’re annoying, like George Mason was. We’re aggressive. We go by the rules but we don’t do it the way it’s always been done.”

This is the beauty of March Madness: The insistence that we revisit assumptions.

March Madness…and Stony Brook

2 Replies

When Steve Pikiell arrived on Eastern Long Island’s Stony Brook University campus in 2005, embarking on his first season as a head basketball coach in Division I, he had three small shelves installed in his office, one slightly higher than the other.

The lowest shelf was reserved for the game ball that would commemorate his first victory. (That souvenir appeared months later, on Jan. 2, 2006, in Pikiell’s 10^th game, after one of only four victories in 28 games that season.) The next shelf up was set aside for Stony Brook’s first league title in Division I. (That was occupied on Feb. 24, 2010, with a victory over America East Conference regular-season runner-up Vermont.)

The top shelf was left empty for “that NCAA ball,” Pikiell said shortly before his teams reached the first of five conference tournament finals in the last six years in 2011. “When the guys come in here and tell me how hard they’re working,” he said then, “I just point to that shelf and say, ‘If you’re working that hard, we’d have that ball up there already.’”

So now—not so terribly long after Pikiell envisioned what certainly seemed to be a stretch in 2005—his team has met that goal with a first-round NCAA Tournament date against the University of Kentucky.

A bit of history, in terms of context, is in order, since the match-up is widely construed as Stony Brook fighting with rocks against Kentucky bazookas.

First, Kentucky (where the emphasis on college basketball long has been so substantial that it has bordered on obscene): Kentucky is the most successful college basketball operation in history—more NCAA tournament appearances (55), wins (120), Sweet Sixteen (41) and Elite Eight (36) appearances than any other school, with eight national titles that rank second only to UCLA’s 11.

Kentucky also was caught up in the point-shaving scandals of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

By 1924, Kentucky was playing in the largest basketball arena in the South, seating 2,800, moved into an 11,500-seat coliseum in 1950 and now plays in 23,000-seat Rupp Arena, named for 42-year, 880-game-winning coach Adolph Rupp.

Stony Brook, in humble comparison, has been playing in a relatively palatial 4,000-seat on-campus arena the past two seasons after years in what resembled a high school box—1,700-seat Pritchard Gymnasium. Originally the State University College of Long Island, founded in 1957—shortly before Kentucky won its fourth national title—Stony Brook didn’t begin playing intercollegiate basketball (in non-scholarship Division III) until 1960, didn’t settle on its current campus until 1962 and didn’t move to Division I until 1999.

The first time I did any reporting for Newsday on Stony Brook history, I found far more emphasis on its health sciences and medical school than on its athletic prowess (nothing wrong with that), with even a quirky nod to its 1973 graduate school alumnus Stephen Kaplan, who became the world’s foremost vampirologist, founder of the Vampire Research Center. Kaplan conducted a world-wide 1980s demographic study in which he was curious to hear from people who had seen vampires, been attacked by vampires, knew vampires, claimed to be vampires, wished to correspond with vampires or wished to become vampires. (Kaplan, known as a skeptic of the infamous Amityville Horror hauntings of the mid-1970s, died in 1995.)

Stephen Kaplan

Anyway, when Stony Brook’s administrators concluded that big-time athletics was a reasonable endeavor to generate publicity and school spirit and opted for sports scholarships, they first hired veteran Canisius and Fordham coach Nick Macarchuk, then opted for Pikiell, a former captain of UConn teams that advanced to the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight.

There was no sexy heritage of Stony Brook basketball greatness when the 38-year-old Pikiell arrived. Nothing like Kentucky’s folklore. Then again, I am reminded of what celebrated coach Larry Brown told me when he was coaching at Kansas in the mid-1980s. Brown, now at SMU, led 10 professional teams and got perennial powers UCLA and Kansas to the NCAA title game. Yet he made the apparently counterintuitive point that “tradition is who’s been in the Final Four the last four years. The top recruits…think of tradition as what’s on the tube right now….”

True enough. To some extent, the way it works is that high school big shots want to be on ESPN or the networks, those arbiters of tradition. Yet Pikiell somehow kept selling recruits on that cramped, dinky Pritchard gym for years, gave them a Nostradamus view of a future NCAA Tournament status, and crafted some nice, entertaining teams.

So Stony Brook isn’t Kentucky. So what? My occasional dealings with Pikiell were of a committed, respectful, optimistic gentleman. A top-shelf guy.

Chris Mullin, 30 years later

Leave a reply

(Newsday/Paul Bereswill)

Obituaries always come too late for their subject to enjoy, and that could be said of the college basketball eulogy given Chris Mullin after his final game at St. John’s University. Rival Georgetown buried Mullin in the 1985 NCAA tournament semifinal before the Hoyas unconditionally praised him.

Not that Mullin, a legitimate hoops luminary, was ever the least bit unappreciated for his basketball acumen and craft throughout his four St. John’s seasons and 13 subsequent years in the NBA. But the way Georgetown coach John Thompson—and specifically Georgetown defender David Wingate—demonstrated their ultimate respect was with a singular assault on Mullin’s considerable talents.

That March 30 night in Lexington, Ky., exactly 30 years before Mullin was hired this week as St. John’s new head coach, Thompson essentially ordered Wingate to pay no mind to anything or anyone in the building except Mullin. While the other four Hoyas played a help-each-other zone defense, Wingate played Mullin. And the direct result, besides wearing out both Mullin and Wingate, was a 77-59 Georgetown victory.

Mullin had averaged 19.8 points that season, and he made half his shots that night. But Wingate allowed him only eight attempts, and thus a measly eight points.

“Never looking at the ball,” Wingate said in his team’s victorious lockerroom, “created a little problem for me. But when you’re covering Chris Mullin, you can’t take your eyes off Chris to look for the ball or Chris will be gone. He’ll be open with the ball.”

From the very outset, Wingate chased Mullin. He chased him outside. He chased him down low. He chased him through screens and a few walls. He seemed to chase him down the interstate, off the cloveleafs, down dirt roads and back alleys.

Mullin didn’t touch the ball for the first 3 ½ minutes while Georgetown built an immediate eight-point lead. With six minutes left in the half, Mullin’s basket tied the game, whereupon Wingate wouldn’t let him near the ball again for almost nine minutes while Georgetown went ahead by 14.

“There are lots of kids who can shoot like Chris,” Thompson said after the game. “But what makes him great is his ability to get open, and when he’s open, it’s not just his shooting that hurts you. It’s his passing, too. David is very quick, but Chris is very shrewd.”

That night in Kentucky, Quick put Shrewd in jail and threw away the key. But it was just one game, and there may be no larger compliment than the post-game fear of Mullin that Georgetown acknowledged.

Now, shrewd is clearly a Mullin quality St. John’s officials are counting on, given that Mullin never has coached on any level, and there is widespread agreement that the old star’s cleverness will serve him well in this new role. What he really will need, though, is a player like the one who demanded every second of Georgetown’s attention 30 years ago.

Curtain of gamesmanship

3 Replies

(azcentral.com)

There is something to be said for college students’ uninhibited ingenuity. A primary purpose of higher education, after all, is to stimulate the innovative gene, and college hijinks have a certain place of honor at sporting events, few of which can match the passionate, occasionally goofy scene at big-time basketball games.

But I’m not sure I’m impressed with the Arizona State students’ Curtain of Distraction. Its fevered, bizarre mini-productions—staged for the express purpose of impairing the free-throw proficiency of opposing teams—somehow has brought overwhelmingly positive publicity for its buffonish inspiration.

The perpetrators—essentially a small band of students but fully backed by the university, including associate athletic director Bill Kennedy—are proud of having devised an efficient “free-throw defense” behind the opponents’ basket, and the NCAA itself—that bastion of fair play—has given its blessing.

The NCAA.com Web site has posted a glowing video about the creation and operation of the curtain, and further approved the device’s continued use in the women’s championship tournament for Arizona State’s first-round home games. That, in spite of a New York Times analysis that cited a one- to two-point advantage per game for Arizona State resulting from the curtain’s deployment.

In case you don’t know: With the Curtain of Distraction, Arizona State pranksters, stepping away from the role of spectating just as an opposing player readies to take a free throw, whip open a black curtain behind the basket to reveal some weird, frenzied skit. A student rowing a blow-up kayak. A mostly naked fellow playing a guitar. An Elvis impersonator. A fat guy in an undershirt and tutu. A clown jumping rope.

The choreographed lunacy has been called “brilliant” and “the funniest weapon” against free-throw efficiency. The intent itself hardly is new. In the 1950s, when guide wires stabilized baskets at NBA games, there were tales of Syracuse Nationals fans grasping those wires and shaking the backboard during opponents’ tries.

Still, compared to the typical modern tricks, of fans waving their arms behind the basket or holding up silly posters—also not exactly respectful—the Curtain of Distraction is fan disruption on steroids. It is a show-stealing invasion of the athletic competition. And at what point is that tantamount to poor sportsmanship?

Ka’Nesheia Cobbins, a senior guard for the Arkansas-Little Rock team, preparing to face Arizona State’s women in the second round of NCAA play, was aware that “every time they open [the curtain], it’s a different character, and we’re, like, ‘How did they do that?’ The commentators were saying that they think that’s something good. It’s cool, I guess, but we’re just going to have to block it out….”

Why is it something good?

The man who wrote the Times piece on the Curtain of Distraction’s effect, University of Michigan economics professor and public policy scholar Justin Wolfers, is the same fellow who applied “forensic economics” to a 2007 study concluding there was point shaving in roughly one percent of Division I basketball games. Wolfers drew no conclusions that the Curtain of Distraction is a different form of cheating. But I will.

Isn’t the Curtain of Distraction also gaming the system? Shouldn’t players be players, officials be officials, coaches be coaches and fans just be fans? Arizona State has a drama department for the Curtain’s aspiring thespians, where there is no danger of visiting basketball players showing up and trying to mess with their focus.

(Arizona State University)

Happy 90th, Looie

Leave a reply

Some things are lost to antiquity, and it has been 23 years—a full generation—since Lou Carnesecca retired. But Carnesecca is still with us—a blessing, that—and his 90^th birthday, on Jan. 5, should not pass without some reflection on Carneseccas’s exalted status as a New York sports institution and endearing personality.

Far more than his enormous success coaching basketball, with more wins (526) than anyone else in St. John’s University history (and many more coaching high school and, briefly, the professional Nets), was Carnesecca’s passion for the job and devotion to an even-expanding circle of associates.

He reveled in the sport’s exhilarating highs and occasionally burdensome lows. He personified the stereotypical New Yorker—overreacting with outrage one moment, shrugging or spreading his hands the next. He never hesitated to loudly berate officials during the intensity of competition, but just as likely would share a whispered confidence to an acquaintance he barely knew, accentuated by a sincere touch on the arm.

“The game,” he said with obvious feeling, “I think it’s a melody. A composition. It can flow. There is a beauty to it.” But, too, “It’s an agony. It’s a suffering. And it’s still a game! Why? Why do we torment ourselves?”

“I ask myself, ‘What the hell am I getting so worked up about?’”

He was something of a benign Mafia Don in the basketball community, widely sought out and paid respects by colleagues. He kept a ragged old telephone book, stuffed with names of all his coaching mentors, longtime colleagues and former players, going back decades. When one would die, he would put an “R.I.P” next to the name—but never erase it. He was famous for sending flowers whenever someone’s mother died, or sending congratulations to celebrate a birth.

He often made light of himself, only 5-foot-6 and never more than a junior varsity player when he was a St. John’s student (though he hit over .300 for the first St. John’s team to qualify for baseball’s College World Series). He laughed at his own cartoonish gyrations while coaching, how he left his sideline seat forever empty while he slid or walked on his knees, arms outstretched; spun on his feet; turned and racewalked in the direction of an errant pass.

He said he always wore brown pants for games so the dirt wouldn’t show. He recalled a game in the late 1960s—at Madison Square Garden, against Fordham—when he raced downcourt alongside his guard, Carmine Calzonetti, eventually standing under the basket when Calzonetti completed a fast-break layup.

“I’m like those guys in a Shakespeare play,” Carnesecca said, “and they’re so caught up in it that they go right off the stage, out the side door of the theater, onto Seventh Avenue. Still swordfighting in the street!”

For St. John’s to have renamed its arena for him is the least it could do.

(St. John’s University)

During an enlivening interview in his office during his final season, Carnesecca fretted about what life would be after retirement, scolded himself for taking the game so seriously—even as he acknowledged that it was an “extension of myself” and gloried in his good fortune to be healthy and still a part of the action.

He raved a bit about unappreciative fans—“the cruelty. The venom!” that sometimes spewed from the stands—even as he delighted in his answer to those catcalls in his mid-60s. “It helps that I’m a little deaf,” he said. “Look. I take out my hearing aid.” He spread the various little pieces, battery and so on, on his office couch, cackling.

He kept a feather-duster in his office because his predecessor, Joe Lapchick, had once described coaching as “Peacock today, feather-duster tomorrow.” He acknowledged the celebrity that came to him fairly late in his career, with the rise of the Big East Conference and St. John’s highly visible duels with Georgetown and Syracuse in the 1980s.

“It’s ego, a little,” he said. “It blows a little smoke. It’s nice to be recognized, to be put in the limelight.” But he wouldn’t be carried away. “It’s a veneer,” he said, and basketball was “just entertainment, not important” in the greater scheme of things.

In the end, his love for basketball mirrored his love for his native New York City, which he described as “a city that gets into you. You’re alive.”

He thought a moment. “You have to stay alive, too. You have to be on your toes.”

Happy 90^th, Looie. Way to stay on your toes.

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

Category Archives: college hoops

He used his time well

Black (school) power

Jim Boeheim’s values and college sport’s big bucks

Beyond ESPN’s “Norm:” Mizzou’s J-School pests

Time out for NCAA mascots

Upsets are the madness in March

March Madness…and Stony Brook

Chris Mullin, 30 years later

Curtain of gamesmanship

Happy 90th, Looie