A Season Inside Page 6

  Once in Cleveland, the coaches went straight to the Riley house. They found it by 5:45, well before the scheduled visit. This is part of the recruiting manual: find the house first, then go look for something to eat. Almost always, dinner is the first fast food place that shows up. This night, it was McDonald’s.

  At 7:25, five minutes early, the coaches were back at the Rileys’. Eric and his mother lived in a middle class neighborhood which, on a warm early fall evening, was full of children playing in the street. Eric Riley was a slender youngster with a baby face and an easy smile. He looked Williams in the eye as they shook hands. Williams liked that.

  Once everyone was seated, Fraschilla took out the tape that had been made especially for this visit. This is a new thing in recruiting, a creation of the age of VCRs. Almost every coach in the country brings a tape with him into a recruit’s home. Some even bring portable VCRs in case the family doesn’t have one. Rarely is the portable needed.

  Most of the tapes are similar. They recount the virtues of the school, the coach, the players, the conference. There are prominent former players talking about how lucky they were to attend the good old alma mater.

  The Ohio State twist is the start of the tape. In this case, the tape began with a shot of St. John Arena, Ohio State’s home court. It is empty. Into it walks the narrator who is saying, “St. John Arena. Many of the greatest names in basketball began their careers here. Players like Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek, Clark Kellogg, and Eric Riley.”

  There is a pause to give the recruit and his family a chance to drink in the last name. And then: “Well, maybe not yet, Eric, but you could very easily join those great names if you choose Ohio State.”

  This is a fairly simple thing to do and Ohio State certainly isn’t unique in using this tactic. At N.C. State, Valvano plays recruits a dummy radio tape in which they score the winning basket in a crucial game.

  Even so, people notice. It shows them that extra time was taken. Just as important, it is a good ice-breaker at the start of a visit when everyone is a little nervous. As the tape finishes, Fraschilla says, “I’m ready to sign.”

  Everyone laughs. Beulah Riley has a number of questions for the coaches. She is a tall, dignified woman who has an older son, Jerome, playing at Kentucky State. Ayers, who has known the family longest, calls her Beulah. Williams and Fraschilla call her “Mrs. Riley.”

  Ohio State has been in the news recently because of the controversy over football player Cris Carter, who had signed illegally with an agent and lost his eligibility. Beulah Riley is concerned about this. Could Eric lose his scholarship while at Ohio State?

  “If he signed with an agent, yes,” Williams answers. “Or if he cheated in school or flunked out.”

  Eric Riley is confused. “Coach,” he asks, “do I have to get an agent?”

  For a moment, Williams is stunned. Coaches often forget in recruiting they are dealing with teenagers. Some are street-smart beyond their years. Others, like Riley, are just kids.

  “Eric, you can’t have an agent under any circumstances while you’re in college,” Williams says. “It doesn’t matter where you go. If you ever take anything from an agent, you’ll never play in college again and you’ll lose your scholarship.”

  Beulah Riley is nodding. “We understand, right, Eric?”

  Her son nods. “Now I do.”

  That hurdle cleared, things begin to loosen up. Suddenly, there is a knock on the back door. Eric answers it. A middle-aged man walks into the room with him. Beulah Riley looks up, sees him, then stares at the floor without saying a word.

  “This is my father,” Eric Riley says softly.

  The coaches jump to their feet. There are handshakes all around. Beulah Riley never moves. Benny Riley sits down on the couch next to his son. The mood has gone from relaxed to awkward. Williams speaks first.

  “We were just sort of answering any questions that you all might have about Ohio State, Mr. Riley. If you’ve got anything you want to add or ask, please go ahead because that’s what we’re here for.”

  Benny Riley nods. “Wherever he goes, I want him to get a degree,” he says. Everyone agrees that is of paramount importance. The rest of the visit goes by without any problems, though Beulah Riley is very quiet. She and her husband never exchange a look or a word.

  Finally, shortly after nine, the coaches leave. “We’ll see you at school October thirtieth,” Williams says, a reference to Riley’s official visit.

  Once in the car, all of them—even Ayers—are talking at once. The back-door arrival of Benny Riley, both literally and figuratively, is just the kind of thing recruiters hate. What does it mean? What is his role? They have been dealing with Beulah Riley all along. Has someone else gotten to the father? Dark thoughts cross a recruiter’s mind late at night.

  “For the moment,” Williams says, “let’s pretend it didn’t happen. Keep dealing with Beulah because we don’t want to upset her. She and the father obviously don’t get along. But you guys keep your ears open and see if you can find out anything about Benny.”

  Williams leans back in his seat. “I hate surprises,” he says, knowing he is smack in the middle of a game that is full of them. Tonight is just another example.

  The key out-of-state recruit for Williams was Chris Jent, who is from Williams’s home state—New Jersey. Jent was exactly the kind of player Williams felt he had to get—in addition to the Ohio players—because there was such impressive competition to get him.

  Georgia Tech had been involved with Jent early and, during the summer, had been considered the favorite to land him. Pittsburgh was heavily involved, aided by the fact that Assistant Coach John Calipari had roomed with Jent’s high school coach, Dennis Tobin, at North Carolina-Wilmington. “I won’t bring up the fact that we kicked their ass while I was at American,” Williams said, “unless we lose the kid.”

  And then there was Louisiana State, a late entry in the Jent sweepstakes. Jent had caught Dale Brown’s eye during the Nike summer camp at Princeton, New Jersey. The Nike camp is a late but powerful arrival on the summer camp scene. During the last twenty years, summer camps have become an important part of the recruiting process. They give college coaches a chance to see top players going up against other top players on a daily basis, sometimes two or three times a day.

  Because they have become such showcases, the three major camp operators—Nike, Howard Garfinkel, and Bill Cronauer—have become almost as cutthroat in recruiting players to their camps as colleges are in recruiting them to their schools.

  Nike was started in 1978 under the name “Athletes for a Better Education.” The players were required to attend classes in the morning that purportedly helped prepare them for dealing with the academic pressures of college.

  Now, that name has been dropped, and what you see is what you get at Nike. It is a basketball meat market—coaches watching players while players watch coaches to see who is watching them most carefully. Coaches who have contracts with Nike can use their influence to get players invited to the camp, and they let recruits know that.

  Nike puts a lot of money into college basketball. It pays a lot of coaches a lot of money (unlike the pros, Nike can’t pay the athletes to wear their shoes—that’s against NCAA rules—so it pays the coaches, often more than $100,000, to provide shoes); it sponsors the annual coaches’ all-star game at the Final Four and it runs the summer camp. No one wants to mess with Nike.

  It was in Princeton that Dale Brown noticed Jent. In some ways Jent did not have, as the scouts put it, a good camp. A shooter, he did not shoot very well. The consensus, and no one is ever sure what creates a consensus, was that his stock dropped during the camp.

  But Brown loved him. He liked the way he played, diving for balls, willingly giving up his body. “I can coach him,” he told his new assistant Craig Carse. “Let’s try to get involved, even though it’s late.”

  Brown wrote Jent and his parents a long letter telling them how impressed he had been with Chri
s and asking if they would consider adding LSU to the list of schools that would visit Jent’s home. “The letter was so flattering,” said Arnie Jent, Chris’s father, “I really couldn’t say no.”

  Once Brown decides he wants something—or someone—he will do almost anything to get it or him. Brown is one of college basketball’s true characters. Some hate him and ridicule him. Others see him as a twentieth-century Don Quixote, always tilting at a windmill somewhere. Brown has done battle with the NCAA, “as crooked an organization as there is in this country”; with Bob Knight, “a truly evil, cunning, and sick person”; and the recruiting process itself—“What we really are, all of us, is a bunch of white slavers going into Africa to bring back the biggest, best studs we can find.”

  He is a nonstop talker who will tell you about his poor, fatherless boyhood at any hour, day or night. He loves to recite sayings. “I can still remember sitting on the fire escape of our building when I was ten years old, and my mother coming out and telling me, ‘Be different than me. Be yourself. Don’t be frightened.’ I’m not frightened of anything.”

  Probably, that is true. Brown took over the LSU program in 1972 when it was one of the worst basketball schools in the country in a league, the Southeast Conference, that had traditionally been Kentucky and the nine dwarfs. He had turned LSU into a power, reaching the Final Four in 1981 and 1986 and the Final Eight in 1987.

  The ’87 loss rankled, though, because it had been to Indiana and Knight, a game in which LSU had a big lead only to lose by a point at the buzzer. The game had been controversial, Knight drawing a technical foul in the first half and then slamming a phone in anger while the officials watched and didn’t react.

  “He should have been out of the game, gone,” Brown said. “He stole that game from us. He intimidated the officials. Everyone in the country knows it but no one will say it. Well, I’ll say it. I want that son of a bitch to know there’s one guy who isn’t afraid of him. I want to play him, anywhere, anytime, but he won’t do it. And before the game, I’d like the two of us to be locked in a wrestling room naked by ourselves and let’s see which one of us comes out.”

  As Brown talked about Knight this cool Friday September afternoon, his assistant, Carse, was driving toward the Jent home. Pittsburgh had already visited Jent, Georgia Tech would be in on Sunday, and Ohio State would visit the following Wednesday. Brown was wound up.

  He was under fire again, but didn’t care. He was about to receive a verbal commitment from Stanley Roberts, a 6–10 center from South Carolina. In August, Brown had made a commitment to hire Roberts’s high school coach the following season. One month later, without ever visiting LSU, Roberts committed to the school.

  There is nothing in the rules against what Brown had done. What’s more, the move was hardly unique. In fact, it was the fifth time Brown had done it during his LSU career. But because Roberts was so highly regarded, this had attracted a lot of attention.

  “The NCAA called me and said they were looking into it,” Brown said, “I said to the guy, ‘What are you looking into? Where’s the violation? You guys have been after me so long, you think there’s one rule out there I don’t know?’ ”

  One of the schools that had been after Roberts, and lost him to Brown, was Georgia Tech. Two days later when Tech Coach Bobby Cremins and his assistant Kevin Cantwell visited the Jents, Arnie Jent would comment on how charming he had found Brown. “I was afraid,” Cantwell said later, “that Bobby was going to throw up all over their rug.”

  Brown knew he had only an outside shot at Jent. His mission on this visit was to convince Jent to visit LSU. If he could do that he believed Jent might make a last-minute switch in his thinking.

  Sparta is a comfortable, upper-crust suburb in northern New Jersey. Chris Jent is the third of Arnie and Trish Jent’s four children. His two older brothers, Tim and Eric, were athletes too. Arnie Jent was a basketball player at the University of Detroit and is now an account executive at the Atlantic Design Company.

  Brown and Carse arrive shortly after 6 P.M. and are welcomed by Chris, his parents, and Megan, Jent’s four-year-old sister. There is nothing subtle in Brown’s pitch. He is selling from the minute he sits down in the comfortable Jent living room.

  “Craig,” he says to Carse, “when Nike was over, who did I tell you was my favorite player in the camp, my absolute number-one favorite player, the guy I wanted more than anyone?”

  “Honest to God, Mr. and Mrs. Jent, it was Chris,” Carse says, answering his boss. “I knew it, too. I knew the way Chris played that was what he was going to say.”

  Brown is rolling. “You remember when I called you this summer just to say hi and see how you all were doing?” The Jents nod. “You know where I was? The Amazon. I went down there to spend some time in the jungle and when I got to a phone I called you from there. Cost me $112. It was worth it, though.”

  The Jents are wide-eyed. Brown goes on. “You know, coming over in the car, I was thinking about this whole recruiting thing that all we coaches do. Let’s be honest about it. The whole thing is a giant hypocrisy. I’m sitting here with you tonight telling you why it would be great for Chris to come to LSU, how easy it is for all of you to fly from Newark to New Orleans and for him to get home when he wants to, how the travel isn’t a problem. Tomorrow, I’ll be home telling a bunch of in-state recruits how much it will help them to stay home and go to LSU.

  “We all do that. But, let’s be honest, it’s a business. We’ll all sit here and tell you how we want to do what’s right and we want to make the world a better place. Hell, if any of us were serious we’d drop all this, drop all the money we make, and go work with Mother Teresa. What are the chances of that happening?

  “But I will say this to you, Chris, and to you, too, Mom and Dad. I try to recruit leaders and I think that’s what Chris will be when he’s through playing basketball. We’ve got two kids ready to sign with us who play Chris’s position but I’ve told them I won’t offer them a scholarship until you tell us no because you are our number-one priority.

  “And I’ll tell you something, Chris, and I’ve said this very few times in my coaching career: You come to LSU and in four years you will be a number-one draft choice. I guarantee that. I’m certain of it. Our style of play is perfect for you.”

  There is more: Brown talks about the summer jobs program at LSU, telling Jent he’ll make $12 to $15 an hour. He talks about Ricky Blanton, his best player, saying, “You two would be like Siamese Twins. You both play like Attila the Hun.” When Megan wanders by, Brown grabs her and bounces her on his knee. Finally, he brings out not one but two tapes.

  The first one is a highlight tape of the ’87 season put together by Brown’s daughter. The second is a tape of Brown’s television show during the last weekend of the ’87 regular season. Brown always brings his seniors’ parents on the show, and in this case, the mother of Anthony Wilson had read him a lengthy poem, thanking him for taking care of her son the previous four years.

  By the time the second tape has been shown, Brown and Carse have been in the house more than two hours. Brown goes through his litany one more time and then Arnie Jent walks down the driveway to the car with the two coaches. By the time Brown gets in the car, he is flying.

  “Now I really want that kid,” he says, breathlessly. “I think we’ll get a visit from him, and if we do, we’ll get him. That kid should play for me.”

  The Jents were impressed by Brown. But not impressed enough to change the recruiting process they had started so long ago. Jent’s decision would come down to two schools: Ohio State and Pittsburgh. Brown and LSU had lost.

  Williams and his coaches had felt all along that Pittsburgh was their big competition for Jent. They were concerned about Calipari’s friendship with Dennis Tobin and about the lure of the Big East to a player who had grown up in Big East territory during the league’s remarkable recent rise to prominence.

  Their advantage, they felt, was that Jent had relatives in Columbus and,
coming from a close family, would feel comfortable going to school in a place where he had family nearby. Jent had made an unofficial visit to Ohio State during the summer, driving to Columbus and staying with his relatives.

  By the time Williams and Fraschilla visited Jent on October I, most of America’s coaches were near exhaustion. They had been on the road almost nonstop for fifteen days and still had six days left. “This is like a long sprint,” Williams said. “You have to go all out from start to finish but by the end, you’re running out of gas.”

  Before leaving his hotel for the Jents’ house, Williams calls home. His daughter, Kristen, has an important test that day. Like many coaching fathers, Williams feels guilty about the time he spends away from home.

  As he and Fraschilla leave the hotel, they run into the Rutgers coaching staff. Craig Littlepage, the Rutgers coach, starting his third season, is under fire after two twenty-loss years in a row. Not keeping New Jersey players at home has been Rutgers’s problem. The fact that Rutgers isn’t even involved with a player like Jent is symptomatic of the problems there.

  Littlepage greets Williams warmly. “What are you guys doing in New Jersey?” he asks. “Didn’t you know we’ve already bought all the players?”

  The coaches chat briefly, bemoaning the intensity of the twenty-one-day visitation period. Williams gets in the car and shakes his head. “I feel bad for Craig. I think he’s gonna get fired at the end of the year if they don’t turn it around. He may just be too nice a guy for this business.”

  Williams is right. Rutgers will lose twenty games and Littlepage will be fired. The new coach will be a Rutgers alumnus, Bob Wenzel. His first pledge as the new coach will be to keep New Jersey players—like Chris Jent—at home.

  Williams’s visit with the Jents is completely different from Brown’s. The Jents, while somewhat overwhelmed by Brown, are clearly comfortable with Williams. Chris, almost silent during Brown’s visit, talks up a storm with Williams. Surprisingly, for a family that would seemingly have seen every recruiting trick there is, the personalized tape goes over big.