Lute Olson's arrogant smirk told all you had to know. Last Sunday's game against UCLA was proceeding according to plan.
The Pac-10 tournament final was a blowout for Arizona. And so Olson, the basketball coach with the largest ego west of Bloomington, Indiana, was on his way to a soft opening round in the NCAA tournament.
For the moment, basketball reigns supreme throughout the state.
Arizona State's Bill Frieder, the smarmy little towel holder who brags that he's skilled enough at counting black jack cards to have been ejected from several Las Vegas casinos, is safely ensconced in the opening round of the NIT tournament.
Mention Olson and Frieder and it's unnecessary to identify the universities at which these two wealthy egoists are coaching.
Olson came to Arizona several years back from the University of Iowa. Frieder was propelled here quite suddenly by the University of Michigan when he was caught trying to run a fairly slimy back-door play during last year's NCAA tourney.
Frieder secretly accepted the job at ASU, which offered him a conditional contract with incentives that could pay him as much as $700,000 a year. Frieder wanted to keep his new ASU job quiet until he'd finished the tournament with his Michigan team.
But ASU, desperate to have a new coach hired, demanded that the deal be made public at once.
So Frieder finally admitted he had taken the ASU job. Bo Schembechler, his boss at Michigan, promptly sent him packing in humiliating fashion.
Frieder's contract at ASU pays him additional money for doing everything except catching a cold.
He gets a guaranteed $40,000 profit from a basketball camp. He got $47,000 in relocation costs. He got another $25,000 for moving costs. There's the possibility of another $121,000 for a television contract as well as $50,000 for radio from KTAR.
Oh yes, he also gets $160,000 from the Nike shoe company if his players wear that kind of shoe for him.
That's not all. There's $20,000 more if ASU finishes above .500 and another $20,000 when attendance for the season averages better than 7,500 a game. If attendance goes to 11,000 a game, Frieder gets another $30,000.
For making the NIT tournament, Frieder will receive an additional bonus. If he ever wins the NCAA, he can earn enough extra to buy a new Mercedes Benz.
Is it any wonder that the first player Frieder recruited was Sam Mack, a young man only recently acquitted of armed robbery? This young student athlete had been shot twice by the police in a shootout at a Burger King restaurant where he and a friend had taken hostages.
Mack was a standout performer as a freshman at Iowa State, but after his acquittal it was determined by his coach that he'd better move west.
Mack wasn't on the ASU campus a month before a young woman filed charges that Mack had raped her.
The charges were finally dropped by the County Attorney's Office. Frieder grandly announced that Mack would be suspended from the basketball program for the season. Big deal. Mack was already ineligible to play because of the transfer rule. There was no way he could play for ASU until next season, anyway.
But Mack has boasted publicly of having an agent who can get him a pro basketball contract. If that's true, the NCAA may decide that Mack should move to the NBA. Since his reading skills are on the level of a fourth grader, that might be the best solution.
Mack apparently has a knack for getting in the news. This past weekend, while ASU was upsetting Oregon State and barely losing to UCLA, he was arrested once again. This time he's charged with making purchases with credit cards that didn't belong to him. After this, he was finally dropped from the squad.
The Mack case is fraught with similarities to the one Jim Valvano brought upon himself several years ago at North Carolina State.
He recruited Chris Washburn, a six- foot eleven-inch pivotman, into his program. Washburn could barely read but was a terrific basketball prospect.
When he took the college SATs, he scored 470 on an examination that awarded 400 points for merely showing up and writing his name.
Washburn was asked by a geography tutor at North Carolina State what country was directly south of the United States. He thought a moment.
"Canada," he said.
"No," the tutor said. "Will it help if I tell you they speak Spanish?" Washburn's eyes brightened.
"Spain," he said.
"Let's get on to something else," the tutor said. "Tell me what country's directly to the north of the United States?" "England," Washburn replied.
Late Sunday night, I heard Valvano being interviewed by Bob Costas for ninety minutes. Costas is a member of the media apparatus which glorifies the coaches for NBC. He sprayed the air with a series of softball pitches directed at Valvano.
At one point, Valvano protested that it should have been made clear what the university expected of him.
"I'm held responsible if one of my recruits fail," Valvano said. "A professor doesn't get blamed when one of his students fails a test. Because I recruit a kid and he doesn't make it, is that my fault?" It reminds me of something Jerry Tarkanian of Nevada-Las Vegas says:
"If I bring in a kid who can't read and write and he sticks around for four or five years and learns how to read, then I think we've done pretty good for the kid." Don't any of these coaches remember anything of what a college education is supposed to consist?
Under this philosophy, the business of recruitment becomes a process of collecting the biggest, strongest sociopaths you can find.
Washburn's record at North Carolina State is instructive but typical.
During his freshman year, Washburn beat up a co-ed and was placed on probation. Later, he climbed through a window and stole nearly a thousand dollars' worth of stereo equipment. His footprint was found on the window sill. When Valvano announced his suspension, the coach said nothing about the burglary. He described Washburn as having "personal problems." When the case went to court, it was considered serious enough by the county attorney to rate a maximum sentence of fourteen years. Washburn accepted a plea bargain and never had to serve a day.
You would have thought Valvano would have decided at that point that it was time for Washburn's scholarship to be taken away.
Not at all. Washburn returned the following season and immediately became a member of the starting five. Valvano reminded the press that Washburn's brush with the law might have benefited him greatly. Valvano compared his plight to that of Winston Churchill, saying: "Greatness also brings on great responsibilities." Valvano, I notice, has a fondness for quoting literary figures. In Sunday night's interview, he also quoted Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, not known as a basketball enthusiast, and a man he described as "the great philosopher, Santana." During his interview with Costas Sunday night he quoted "Santana" as saying that if you don't learn from mistakes, you repeat them.
George Santayana, wherever he is, must have smiled at the tribute.
Valvano was athletic director as well as coach at North Carolina State. In a speech one day, he openly boasted that he would recruit as he saw fit.
"We're not really a part of the school anymore," Valvano said. "Our funding is totally independent. You think the chancellor is going to tell me what to do? I doubt it." And so Washburn, who had developed a cocaine habit in addition to his criminal bent, took them to the NCAA tournament and then departed for the NBA.
His professional career has been hampered by the fact that he has twice been suspended for flunking drug tests. With Washburn gone, Valvano replaced him with another big man--Charles Schackleford, who has since admitted he was paid $65,000 for expenses while attending school at North Carolina State.
Schackleford says he accepted the money because he was broke. He denies, however, the charges that he dumped games for gamblers while playing for Valvano.
The problem with college basketball is that it's out of control. We've entered an era when it seems there remains no coach of major stature who displays a single admirable human trait.
Before it's over, Frieder could turn out to be one of the biggest offenders. He constantly boasts of his recruiting abilities. He claims to be the best in the business. His two assistants were formerly head coaches on their own. Often, they run the practices while Frieder takes off to recruit. You must also wonder about another thing.
Both assistant coaches worked as assistants for Tarkanian and Nevada-Las Vegas. That is hardly regarded as the Harvard of the West.
Television has twisted the vulnerable men who run this sport by pouring millions into their pockets. Under the flood of big money, coaches all over have revealed themselves as being every bit as greedy and selfish as your average briefcase-carrying Shearson Lehman representative.
There was a time when it was enough to win the conference championship or even a few crucial games with traditional rivals. Those days are gone. That's become small beer now.
Millions of dollars are at stake. The only thing that counts now is making the NCAA Final Four.
The mask has been torn away. The scars of the Phantom of the Opera have been revealed.
The face that shows itself to the public through the television screens today is glitzy beyond description. It is Budweiser and Miller Beer time, Chevrolet and Toyota and Lee Iacocca time.
And of all the actors in the television commercials, the only character as hard-faced as a college basketball coach is Lee Iacocca.
The irritating and shamelessly voyeuristic Dick Vitale is a failed coach turned carnival hustler. He is a charmless and terribly needy schlemiel, who has somehow come to be considered by television producers as an entertaining extrovert.
Vitale makes the dreaded Howard Cosell seem as reasoned and literate as Alistair Cooke.
In television, success demands imitation. So Billy Packer and Al McGuire now seem bent on trying to outtalk Vitale.
The age of reason is gone. Now it's all hype.
Who are the coaching heroes?
John Thompson of Georgetown stands on the sidelines and seems to be more frightening than Darth Vader. Digger Phelps of Notre Dame wears a flower in his lapel and makes an ass of himself every time his team takes the floor.
Billy Tubbs of Oklahoma looks like a sleazy undertaker. Bobby Knight of Indiana, growing more corpulent and meanspirited as time goes by, wears tight-fitting red sweaters that caress his stomach. He looks more like an early morning bartender on Ashland Avenue in Chicago than a college coach.
Make no mistake. These men have long since become prisoners of their huge annual incomes. So the desire to hold onto their salaries makes them capable of unspeakable acts.
Paul Westhead of Loyola Marymount is perhaps still unsettled by his sudden firing years back by the Los Angeles Lakers.
This month Westhead allowed Hank Gathers, a star player with a dangerous heart condition, to play out the season in an effort to make the NCAA finals.
Gathers collapsed and died after scoring a slam-dunk basket. By now, most basketball fans throughout the country have seen the television footage of Gathers collapsing to the floor in his death throes.
Now the Gathers family lawyer charges that the Loyola Marymount athletic department reduced his doses of medicine so his play would not be affected.
What precautions had Westhead taken to insure Gathers' safety? He had ordered a heart defibrillator on the sidelines during games.
But when Gathers was stricken with a heart seizure, there wasn't a doctor present who knew how to use the defibrillator. There were two doctors on the sidelines. One was an orthopedic specialist. The other was his family doctor.
The Gathers family, present at the game, kept screaming from the stands that it was the 23-year-old player's heart that should be checked. The doctors appeared to be checking his ankle.
Later, they admitted they didn't want to begin administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for fear it would alarm the crowd. So they carried Hank Gathers off the floor. He died shortly afterward.
Bruce Fagel, the lawyer for the Gathers family, is also a doctor with eight years' experience in emergency surgery.
"Gathers would be alive today if the defibrillator was used," he told Timothy Dwyer of the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I don't know if he'd be able to play basketball, but he'd be alive." Last week a reader wrote this letter to the Los Angeles Times:
"You mean a cardiologist told a basketball player he should not play ball again and a team doctor responded by buying a defibrillator? Everyone from the president of the university down to the coach and team doctor is accountable." In these days, coaches will do anything to recruit the players who can help them win at the top level. It has been reported that the University of Arizona sent 1,000 pieces of mail to a single high school player in an effort to recruit him.
But the effort was in vain. The letters were diverted and the player is now starring for UCLA.
But Arizona has turned up with two mysterious transfer players in recent years. Brian Williams suddenly decided to leave Maryland, where he'd become a star as a freshman, and move to Tucson.
Maryland used to be the school of Lefty Driesell, who coached there for seventeen years.
Now, it's remembered as the school of Len Bias, a gifted player who died of a cocaine overdose shortly after being drafted by the Boston Celtics.
And Chris Mills, one of the most sought-after players in the country, enrolled at the UofA when he was declared ineligible at Kentucky. There's an interesting chapter here that has yet to be written.
Thanks to some of the most famous coaches in the country, many of these players are able to spend two years in college before taking their place in jail cells or in drug-rehabilitation centers.
Many cannot read or write. They get through school by taking meaningless courses in classes conducted by immoral professors who give them passing grades.
School administrators and the people who care about education have lost out to the coaches. Show me a coach who tells you he cares about education and I'll show you just one more cynical liar.
Big-time coaches care only about their television appearances, their Nike shoe contracts and next year's recruiting class.
Your average big-time college basketball coach has the compassion of a World War II Gestapo chief and the conscience of an elite serial killer.
Watch Lute Olson stride up and down in front of his UofA bench this weekend with his blow-dried hair and his perfectly pressed blue blazer and slacks. Judge for yourself if this is a man with a sense of his own importance?
We have developed a mystical illusion about college basketball. For those who sit transfixed before television screens watching the NCAA tournament, the tension and the excitement will be almost unbearable.
We are fascinated by the public personalities of the men who coach the teams. They appear to be inspired generals. They seem to call the plays, design the strategy, battle the referees and, at the fateful moment, inspire their players to make the last-second shot that wins the game.
But the illusion is false. College basketball is only a game and a simple one at that, one which doesn't require the intelligence of a rocket scientist.
And judging by the SAT scores of the young men who play it on television, that's a good thing.
Your average big-time college basketball coach has the compassion of a World War II Gestapo chief and the conscience of a serial killer.
The business of recruitment becomes a process of collecting the biggest, strongest sociopaths you can find.
Doctors admitted they didn't want to begin administering mouth-to- mouth resuscitation to Gathers for fear it would alarm the crowd. These men have become prisoners of their huge annual incomes. So the desire to hold onto their salaries makes them capable of unspeakable acts.
