5 Concerns, 64 Solutions

Gambling,Stars Leaving, Hoops for Sale. But March is Maddening!

One tone came from the conference rooms, while a very different one came from the streets. This was in Indianapolis at the end of last March, in the days just before the Final Four. The streets, more crowded each day, held anticipation. The convention center adjacent to the RCA Dome became the scene of dire reminders.

These were not party-poopers doing all that hand-wringing. These were professionals and leaders among the NCAA and its basketball coaches. These people understood that basketball, for too many reasons, remains the most fragile game. They knew that year after year, as the amount of money surrounding the sport escalates at a startling rate, the potential dangers intensify while the margin for error shrinks. The people sounding the alarm in the conference rooms realize that the streets have always gotten basketball into trouble.

All you had to do was turn on HBO on the Saturday morning of the national semifinals, when the brilliantly told story of the City College of New York described the joy of memorable games and the excess that shattered it all. How the artistry of the Beavers during the never-to-be-duplicated sweep of the 1950 NIT and NCAA tournaments would not be remembered as much as the devastation of a point-shaving scandal. How a city's pride in a team that blended races and faiths was replaced by shock, then disbelief, and then shame.

A half-century later, hundreds of millions of dollars down the road, the message delivered at the Final Four was that the game appears no less vulnerable. Here's a big hint: Dick Vitale, the game's most passionate supporter during two decades at ESPN, has written a book with Dick Weiss of the New York Daily News. The title is Campus Chaos. The subtitle: Why The Game I Love Is Breaking My Heart.

When Dick Vitale's heart is breaking, baby, it's time to pay attention.

The stakes are clear enough. It wasn't all that long ago that Opening Day for the old Washington Senators baseball team was considered more significant than a Final Four in nearby College Park, Md., by one Washington newspaper.

Graduation rates - an issue at the core of NCAA credibility - have become an eyesore in too many places. Campus leaders from coast to coast are dealing with issues related to gambling, an industry that has become as simple to join as point and click. A study conducted by the University of Michigan indicated alarming links between game officials and gambling.

The premature departure of outstanding talent, including the Kobe Bryant route from the high school prom to the NBA draft, has removed star power from the college game. The acceptance of money by universities from shoe and apparel companies has already begun to transform college team uniforms into race-car outfits or European soccer jerseys. Summertime recruiting remains a battleground that threatens to eliminate the access of coaches to athletes in 2002.

Cedric Dempsey, the NCAA president, cited the dangerous influence of summer-league coaches outside his association's reach. "The outstretched hand and the inverted eyeball," he told reporters last April. "The handout."

The premise that the culture of what's-in-it-for-me was perfected by untouchable summer league programs dating back decades does not address a basic reality. That culture may have been invented by too many representatives of too many colleges, in the intense pursuit of the player who can make a difference.

If there were simple solutions to the issues that threaten the sport, they would have been put in place years ago. Here is one unoriginal thought that seems the best place to start.

1	Who's In Charge Here?

The game needs a face.

Not a Czar. Not a figurehead. Not an uncontrollable, unchecked force. But it needs a face, a respected leader to cut through the layers, to build consensus, to find reasonable solutions. Football may still drive the bus, but until and unless college presidents abandon the bowl format in favor of a Division I playoff, basketball, and the tournament, provides the fuel.

The NCAA, in the streamlined management structure that has evolved over the last half-decade, has acknowledged the unique issues that big-time basketball has created. Filibusters on the convention floor, and the one-school, one-vote format, have gone the way of the peach basket. The response to the times has started; it just hasn't gone far enough.

Two years ago, the establishment of the Division I Working Group to Study Basketball Issues (now that's a mouthful) created a way to make meaningful recommendations. There are 29 committee members, respected names with decades of experience in the industry, including Dean Smith, C.M. Newton and Terry Holland. The purpose of the NCAA streamlining process was to eliminate the unnecessary obstacles of red tape. An identifiable leader would build on that progress with an ability to speak the language of coaches, athletic directors, college presidents and NBA representatives.

Choose any of the three names listed above. Or how about another nomination: Dave Gavitt, whose consensus-building skills turned a fragmented northeastern landscape into the Big East, and whose presence helped bring the NBA into the Olympics. He has no need for a fancy title. Just put him to work.

2	Summertime Blues

OK, the face is in place. The job is yours. The direction of a billion-dollar industry is in your hands. So start cleaning up the mess that summertime has become.

The mess could be traced to good intentions. When the early signing period was created more than 20 years ago, a big part of the intent was to return the senior year to seniors, to provide prospects a chance to finalize their college choice and end the torture at an earlier date.

Later, when the access of coaches to players was restricted in an attempt to stop the madness, an unintended result began to take shape. Control of athletes during the summer reached unprecedented levels of importance. Shoe companies tapped into the system. The cable explosion and the arrival of the Internet created new opportunities for media hype. The early-entry path to the NBA became a fast track. Adolescents became conglomerates in the making. And the illegal largesse of coaches such as Myron Piggie gave a new meaning to the line "This Little Piggie Went To Market..."

But here's the flip side: The summer camp system gives coaches beneath the elite level a chance to see hundreds of prospects within a fiscally responsible drive. Late bloomers, those lacking that rare height or quickness, may still benefit from exposure to dozens of coaches who might recognize their potential. The elimination of summer recruiting would damage the possibility of those discoveries and place the street agent in an even more influential position.

There's a telephone book-sized list of regulations that describes, in part, what constitutes unacceptable relationships for prospects. There has to be a way that NCAA rules can be enforced while the opportunities of summertime are preserved.

3	Who Are These Guys?

You watch the games. You hear the endless analysis. So why is it that when the Knicks and Heat grind out an NBA playoff game with a score in the 70s commentators applaud great defense and intensity, but when Michigan State and Wisconsin struggle on a similar level in the NCAA semifinals, we are led to believe that James Naismith is rolling over in his grave?

The answer is star power, a commodity that lifts the television ratings that lead to billion-dollar network deals.

One of the most remarkable sights of last March was the relentless defensive approach of Wisconsin's Mike Kelley, and how he would find a way, even if he had been beaten by a step as he struggled around a screen, to deflect a pass out of bounds at the last instant. He would overcome the temporary setback and extend the defensive sequence the way a batter, fooled by a perfect two-strike pitch, would manage to get enough of a piece of the ball to remain in the batter's box. Kelley's work was as subtle as it was inspiring as he displayed dozens of ways to influence a game.

But the camera is not much interested in subtleties, and Kelley's industriousness, no matter how essential to Wisconsin's stunning Final Four level of success, got lost somewhere between the arena floor and the living room. College officials can talk about the shift in importance from the names on the backs of the jerseys to the names on the front, but that misses the point.

Memories of the great games, retrievable by the remotes you have in your head, are made by the great players. Christian Laettner's overtime jumper that broke Kentucky hearts and sent Duke back to the Final Four in 1992 came near the end of a senior season in which he was named national Player of the Year.

If you think the drafting of teenagers was part of some kind of NBA conspiracy to take over the universe, you should have seen the looks on the faces of professional scouts as they described the addition of high school games to their duties. The choices to be made in the NBA draft are hard enough when the prospects are juniors and seniors in college (ask the teams that passed on Michael Jordan in 1984.) The roll of the dice is that much more risky when an 18-year-old is setting out in the world.

4	The Action's Off the Court

If you have ever drifted into a gambling website, you would already know how slick, and harmless-looking, and dangerous those places can be in the hands of a 18-year-old with a parent's credit card number. Lou Carnesecca, the former St. John's coach, made the passing of the clippings an annual event. Each year, another group of players would see the dusty scrapbooks, the sad stories and ashamed faces from the scandals of the 1950s. If you have paid attention to the recurrence of gambling-related campus scandals in recent years, you know the issue is far more current than black-and-white newsreels and faded clippings.

But the University of Michigan study of game officials raised even more chilling possibilities. A survey of 640 officials in football and men's and women's basketball (43.8 percent of those that received them) produced alarming findings.

Nearly 85 percent of the officials surveyed had gambled. A series of questions on professional and amateur sports established that approximately 40 percent of the officials had taken part in sports gambling. Fourteen of the officials (2.2 percent of those surveyed) acknowledged betting on sports with a bookie. Twelve officials (almost 2 percent) maintained that peers had not called games fairly for reasons relating to gambling. Thirteen officials were identified as problem gamblers, while four others were labeled as pathological gamblers. Two officials said they had been approached with the idea of fixing a game.

If many of those numbers seem inconsequential, ask yourself this: Exactly how many dirty officials would it take to bring this entire enterprise to its knees?

5	Hoops For Sale

Once upon a time, the idea seemed harmless enough. A little extra income to wear a certain brand of shoe didn't seem like such a bad thing. Coaches were underpaid, except for the rare lucky ones. Job security was non-existent. Exposure, for most, was limited to a few regional telecasts per season, if that. So what's the problem?

The problem is the increasing sense that if you remove the shoe companies, the game would vanish into some dark hole. The Final Four appears squeaky clean, with arena signs covered to create a non-commercial environment modeled after The Masters golf tournament. As of the 2002 tournament, arenas hosting early-round games will have the same requirement.

But the lack of screaming signage at the Final Four does not obscure an industry that has put itself on sale to the highest bidder. Universities and NCAA officials attack outside influences, but games on many campuses have been turned into a series of goofy promotions or intrusive commercial announcements during unnecessarily long television timeouts. Tipoff times are too often outrageously late. In-season tournaments are sponsored. Conference tournaments are sponsored. Individual games are sponsored. And the players have become billboards for shoe companies.

It's not like the NCAA membership is going broke. If outside influences are such a concern, they can be asked to leave. At some point, this exercise was supposed to have more to do with higher education than hucksterism. If all that is truly necessary to pay the bills, college basketball is in more trouble than we know.

The Good News

But then...

But then...

There's nothing quite like March.

Football can never be theater, not like this. There's nothing like one-and-done, with more to come a couple of days later. There's nothing like looking up into sold-out stands at a first-round game on a weekday afternoon and wondering how many faked dentist appointments, or suddenly deceased grandparents, could possibly explain the presence of all these people. There's nothing like the worn-out looks on the faces of students who have just completed their all-night bus ride, ready to start the game after a trip without any sleep.

Or the tears Larry Bird cried in 1979. Or the giddiness in the UCLA dressing room a year later, when a young group of Bruins that had barely made the tournament turned a trip to the Final Four into the last thing anyone in Westwood would expect - an adventure.

Or the sweatshirts and ballcaps throughout the stands of the RCA Dome for the first round in 1996, a hoophead crowd instead of a corporate one. As far from the court as some of those fans may have been, they were involved when Princeton challenged the defending champions from UCLA for one simple reason. The people in the stands could recognize and appreciate the Tiger backdoor plays taking shape long before the Bruins knew they were coming.

There's nothing like the arrival of the underdog Fairfield Stags in 1997 in hostile territory at Winston-Salem on the first-round night that Dean Smith could tie Adolph Rupp's career victory record. Before the game, the Fairfield starters, one by one, took a detour toward the Carolina bench to shake the coach's hand. At the end of the evening, after a bold Stag effort had pushed the Heels to the limit, Smith walked toward the Fairfield bench with his hand outstretched toward theirs.

There's nothing like the looks of relief and the sobs of disappointment, the euphoria created by buzzer-beating shots and the blank looks on the faces of those who have made the sad discovery that the time has come to go home.

This review courtesy of AthlonSports.com