FIU and Isiah Thomas; College Basketball ‘Tournaments’

In most newspapers around the country it was a brief item yesterday with a headline that said something about Florida International being upset about opening its basketball season playing defending national champion North Carolina—in Chapel Hill.

The back story—in short—is this. Carolina and FIU are part of a 16 team tournament that bears the imprimatur of Coaches vs. Cancer but always has some corporate name slapped on it by The Gazelle Group, the entity that runs the event. FIU thought it was going to play Ohio State in the first round. When the ACC announced its schedule for the season earlier this week, the school learned it was going to Chapel Hill.

In defense of FIU, the tournament is bogus in a lot of ways. To begin with, it isn’t really a tournament. Four host schools are ‘designated,’ to play the semifinals in Madison Square Garden, regardless of what happens in the opening round games. So, if FIU, under new Coach Isiah Thomas goes into Chapel Hill and stuns the Tar Heels, they don’t go to New York but instead go to another site along with three other smaller schools to play a round robin while the four glamour schools—Carolina, Ohio State, Syracuse and California. Move on to play on ESPN.

Having been burned in the past by upsets the corporate and TV folks are no longer taking chances. They even announced the semifinal matchups before they announced the first round matchups.

This is not the first time The Gazelle people have pulled a fast one on a smaller school. A few years back, Holy Cross was invited to play in the event. Coach Ralph Willard looked at his schedule and saw that his players had exams the following week. But he really wanted to play since one of his players, Andrew Keister, had beaten cancer as a kid and he knew how much it would mean to Keister and his family to see him play in the tournament.

So he told the Gazelle people he’d like to play but only if The Crusaders could make a one hour bus trip to Connecticut—one of the four hosts that year—rather than being sent across the country someplace on an airplane.

The Gazelle people agreed. When Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun found out he might play Holy Cross in his second game he wasn’t happy. Under Willard, Holy Cross played a rarely-seen 3-2 zone that gave teams fits, in part because it was unusual, in part because Willard coached it so well. Calhoun told Willard that summer, “I don’t want to play you guys. It will mess up our offense for weeks.”

Willard thought Calhoun—a friend—was more or less joking. After all, he expected to lose the game to the Huskies by at least 20 points. In September, he found out that Calhoun wasn’t joking when someone from Gazelle called to tell Willard his first round games were at Oklahoma.

“I told you we can’t go there,” Willard said. “We can’t travel for that long right before exams. I thought I made that clear.”

“Well,” the guy said. “We think this gives you a better chance to get to New York. (This was before upsets were banned).

Willard knew that was a lie. He knew Calhoun had gone to Gazelle and demanded the switch. He pulled out of the event rather than travel his kids even though it was a huge disappointment.

This time is different. The contract FIU signed stipulated it could be sent to Ohio State or North Carolina. Thomas says he had been assured he was going to Ohio State. Why the switch was made to send Alcorn State to Columbus is anybody’s guess but, in truth, it doesn’t matter—FIU is going to get crushed in either place. In fact, if there’s ever a time to play Carolina in a season opener this might be it with four starters gone from the national championship team.

While it is impossible to sympathize with Gazelle and its bogus event (it would be interesting to request the 501C3 for the tournament and see how much money goes to Coaches vs. Cancer and how much to corporate entities) this is classic Isiah for any and all who know him. Trouble seems to follow him whether it involves being the most disliked player in the NBA; saying that Larry Bird would be no big deal if he wasn’t white (!!) or the sexual harassment suit the Knicks lost while he was running them into the ground the last few years.

I know first hand how little one should trust Isiah. Remember when Bob Knight was fired at Indiana? Isiah was coaching the Pacers at the time and he instantly came to Knight’s defense, saying he wouldn’t have become the person he was if not for Knight. No one stood up for Knight more than Isiah.

I found that interesting since the one and only ex-Indiana player who had refused to talk to me about Knight when I was researching ‘Season on the Brink,’ was—you guessed it—Isiah Thomas. I drove up to Indianapolis to see him when the Pistons came to town. When I told him what I was looking for he shook his head and said, “Can’t do it.”

I thought he meant this was a bad time and I started to tell him there as no need to do it then, that we could schedule it another time. “That’s not it,” he said. “It’s just that my mother always told me, ‘if you don’t have something nice to say about someone, don’t say anything at all.’”

He gave me that Isiah smile, wished me luck on the book, shook my hand and was gone. I found out soon after that he and Knight hadn’t spoken since a well-documented incident in Fort Wayne in which Thomas had described in detail some of the words Knight liked to use when talking to his player during an awards dinner. Knight, who was there, was embarrassed and furious and told Thomas so the next day when Thomas was playing pickup ball back at IU. At the very least Isiah and I have something in common: incurring Knight’s wrath for ‘revealing’ that he can be profane at times.

This time around it would be tough to feel much sympathy for Isiah—he’s going to lose the opening game regardless. Except you DO have to feel sorry for any coach who is told before he plays a game in a ‘tournament,’ that even if he wins, he doesn’t advance.

I just hope this doesn’t give the NCAA any ideas. If The Gazelle Group had been running the tournament in 2006, George Mason never would have gotten out of the first round.

Pitino Talk....

I was traveling most of the day Wednesday so I only heard snippets of the Rick Pitino story throughout the day. Some of the details made me wince. Others were just, well, shocking--if in fact they are true. None of us has the right to sit in moral judgment of others but it just strikes me as downright STUPID--especially as a major celebrity to end up having sex with someone you just met on the table of a restaurant. What's remarkable is that such a story stayed secret this long.

Hearing the lurid details, I thought about a number of things, one a line I heard years ago from a prominent basketball coach who was describing some of his own escapades. "The problem with drinking," he said, "is that it makes you think you’re invisible."

I also remembered another coach who often explained to other coaches that his policy was to walk into a bar and look for the most unattractive woman he could find. His logic was simple: “It’s easier that way."

Look, it's sad but true that basketball coaches, like men--and, let's face it women (this woman in the Pitino story sounds like a real charmer)--do things like this every day. That's not a defense of Pitino, I'm not a believer in the, "everybody does it so it's okay," defense but we all know people who do things late at night and then wake up the next morning saying, "Oh My God, what have I done?" That doesn't mean, however, that they don't do it again.

We all know divorce is the American Way. I speak first hand. On the PGA Tour, divorce is so frequent that second wives are called, "mulligans."

This, however, is the kind of story that is going to be hard to escape.

Whether Pitino can survive this is hard to say. One thing is for sure: if he was just an average coach or a good coach, he'd be gone this morning. But he's a Hall of Fame coach who won 31 games last year and has taken three different schools to five Final Fours and won a national championship at Kentucky in 1996. That means Louisville isn't going to be eager to get rid of him. Winners are frequently far less guilty than non-winners. Already I have read one column this morning saying that this shouldn't hurt Pitino's recruiting. I'm not sure what's worse, the fact that the question is raised or that it's going to be an important factor in whether he survives.

My own experiences with Pitino have been all over the map. I first met him when he was coaching at Boston University and, like everyone in basketball, knew this was a coach on his way up. I remember his run to The Final Four at Providence which, tragically, coincided with the death of his infant son. We fell out--big time--when he was at Kentucky. I've never been a big fan of Kentucky basketball as an entity because I don't like the idea of, "basketball as religion," the way it is embraced there.

That wasn't what really turned me on Pitino. It was an incident in 1994 when, after a second round loss to Marquette in the NCAA Tournament--a game in which Rick stubbornly refused to back off his press against a point guard who was shredding it--he sat next to his three seniors at the postgame press conference and said of a team that had won 28 games, "this Kentucky team lacked leadership, chemistry and drive."

In other words, "I coached good--they played bad."

I can't stand coaches who do that and I wrote that and said that even as Rick did a stunning job the next few years at Kentucky. Still, I was pretty tough on him. After North Carolina beat Kentucky in the 1995 regional final I wrote, "The numbers for Rick Pitino remain the same: two autobiographies, no championships."

Accurate, but pretty mean.

A year later when Kentucky won the title, someone sent me a Pitino interview in a Kentucky basketball magazine in which he was breathlessly asked if he was going to write another book. "I said I wasn't going to write one until we won a title," he answered. "Because I wasn't going to give guys like John Feinstein the chance to rip me again. Now, I'm going to write one."

I dropped him a note saying, "NOW you should write one." You'll be shocked to learn he didn't write back.

Then he went to the Celtics and demanded the title of team president even though Red Auerbach had been team president forever. Red had no intention of interfering with Rick--he was retired by then and was there as a sounding board for anyone who came to him, but he wasn't going to tell anyone in Boston what to do--but Rick had to have the title. Needless to say I came down hard on him for that and his subsequent failures with the Celtics.

It was Ralph Willard who played peacemaker between us. I got to know Ralph well while researching, "The Last Amateurs," in '1999-2000. He had come to Holy Cross after coaching at Western Kentucky and Pittsburgh but was close to Rick--they are both from Long Island and Ralph worked with Rick in New York and then for him at Kentucky.

"You guys don't get along because you're exactly alike," Ralph told me. "You're both ball-busters."

One afternoon during a summer camp Ralph was sitting with Rick and waved me over to sit with them. I did, for about an hour. Pitino was at Louisville by then. He was willing to let bygones be bygones--I'd certainly ripped him a hell of a lot more than he'd ripped me--and we went from there. He even came and played in 'The Bruce Edwards Celebrity Pro-Am,' a couple years ago, which was a really nice thing for him to do.

Let me say this: I'd have felt badly about this if we HADN'T smoked the peace pipe. This is a sad state of affairs for a great coach who I know has impacted a lot of people's lives in a positive way. Of course what's really sad is that his future won't ultimately be decided by adding up how much good he's done, how much charity work he's been involved with (a LOT) or any testimonials from coaches or past players about his character.

It will be decided by whether the school thinks he can still win basketball games. That doesn't make Louisville any different from anyone else in Division 1 basketball.

And that really IS a shame.