A Season Inside Read Online Free

Okay. In ’86, they had been sent to play at LSU, an unfair draw since they were seeded higher than the Tigers. They lost in overtime. Okay. But in ’87 they played Florida in Syracuse, a perfectly reasonable place against a beatable team. They lost by 20.
    No excuses were left. And Coach Gene Keady had made it clear all summer that he was miserable about the way the ’87 season had ended—a 36-point loss to Michigan in the regular-season finale, ending their chance to win the Big Ten outright, didn’t help Keady’s mood—and that the three seniors had better show from day one that they were going to be the leaders of this team. Keady wanted to make damn sure they weren’t going to accept any more March failures. He wasn’t.
    “We know,” Todd Mitchell said, “that nothing we do before March really matters. We’ve done everything else. We’re going to be judged on one thing this season, the NCAA Tournament. That’s fine with us. That’s the way it should be.”
    But already, even before the first practice began, there were tensions. There were two other seniors on the team, Jeff Arnold and Dave Stack, who were academically ineligible to play. When Keady had called the senior trio that August to ask them how they felt about the situation, their answer had been unanimous and blunt: Get rid of them. Arnold and Stack, in their minds, had been in trouble almost from day one at Purdue. They really didn’t deserve another chance.
    Keady thought the team needed Arnold, who was 6–10 and could rebound coming off the bench. “One more chance,” he told the seniors.
    Okay, they thought, one more chance. Arnold and Stack were at practice that first day. It was the beginning of their last chance.
    The tension that existed as practice began at Villanova was very different from Purdue. Rollie Massimino, the little coach who had become a megastar almost overnight in his championship season of 1985, had been through the worst season of his coaching life in 1987.
    His team wasn’t very good. The final record had been 15–16. But that was only a small part of the problem. In December, Massimino had learned that Gary McLain, the starting point guard on that miraculous 1985 team, was in the process of selling a story to
Sports Illustrated
in which he confessed, at length, to having used and sold cocaine while at Villanova. Even worse, McLain claimed in the story that Massimino had been aware of the problem but had never done anything beyond warning him to stop. The implication was that Massimino didn’t want to deal with McLain’s addiction just so long as McLain continued to play well.
    Given a choice between being accused of that kind of exploitation or of having both his hands cut off, Massimino would have willingly given up his hands. Always, he had prided himself on the family atmosphere he had created at Villanova, not just because his players graduated but because even after they left, they were still part of Villanova and Villanova basketball. This was a coach who got his players up at 5:30 in the morning during preseason to work out, and then gave them milk and cookies after the workout.
    Now, for a price, Gary McLain was going to tell the world Rollie Massimino
didn’t
care, that he was just another coach who cared only about winning. It would be March before the story appeared. But Massimino knew in December. He told no one. “We noticed something was wrong with him,” said Mark Plansky, a junior on that team. “He wasn’t himself. The emotion just wasn’t there. But we had no idea what it was.”
    Massimino is known as the Danny DeVito of coaches. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of dollars he spends on clothes, he always ends up looking like an unmade bed at the end of a game. “He starts the game looking great,” his son R. C. once said, “but by halftime he’s sort of unraveled.”
    Not in 1987. Massimino might as well have been Tom Landry on the bench. “I was,” he remembered, “a