A Season Inside (43 page)

Barnes, hearing it on the phone, felt the same way. Now Armstrong was working Barnes’s biggest game so far. So was Donnie Vaden, a talented young official Barnes liked. But he also remembered the notebook Joe Harrington had left him, listing the strengths and weaknesses of the league’s officials. Next to Vaden’s name Harrington had written, “gutless.”

The officials had little to do with the first half. Richmond was as tight as George Mason. The Spiders did lead 11–4, but GMU came right back to lead 12–11. They proceeded that way until the last 3:30 of the half when both teams virtually shut down with the score tied 34–34. After Rodney Rice put Richmond up 37–34 with 3:15 left, neither team scored the rest of the half.

Barnes wasn’t happy, but he was calm. “These guys don’t think we
can play with them,” he told the team. “You have to get the ball inside where we can score. You’re giving up on the offense too quickly.”

Walking back to the floor, Barnes said to his assistants, “I could rip them but they might overreact if I did. Let’s just stay calm for a while.”

The second half was much like the first. Richmond led for the first twelve minutes, but never by more than four points. Finally, Amp Davis, who had been struggling all night, hit a three-pointer that put the Patriots up 52–51. The lead got to 56–51 before Rice hit a three-pointer to make it 56–54. With 4:18 left, Ken Atkinson, the Richmond player Mason most wanted to see shoot, hit another three-pointer. Richmond led 57–56.

Now, both teams struggled on offense. The Spiders hit a free throw, the Patriots missed several shots. But Kenny Sanders was fouled while going for a rebound. He hit both foul shots to tie the game at 58–58 with fifty-five seconds left.

Then came confusion. When Sanders went to the line, Barnes told Amp Davis that if Sanders hit both shots, Davis should call for a zone defense. But if he missed, Davis should call man-to-man. Davis heard wrong—and with the score tied called for man-to-man. With Barnes screaming for his players’ attention, the ball went inside to bulky Peter Woulfolk who scored easily with thirty-nine seconds to go.

Now it got wild. Davis missed from three-point range with fourteen seconds left. Sanders got the rebound but it slipped out of his hands and out of bounds. There were eleven seconds left on the clock. Richmond inbounded and Mason immediately fouled Mike Winiecki—put in the game by Coach Dick Tarrant because he could shoot free throws. Winiecki made two with ten ticks left to make the score 62–58. Davis came down and hit a drive to cut it to 62–60. Now there were only four seconds remaining. Again, Mason fouled right away, this time getting Scott Stapleton. He missed, Sanders rebounded and urgently called time. There were two seconds still to go.

Barnes had two things he wanted to try on the last play. He wanted to throw a pass to midcourt to Sanders, knowing he was the player Richmond would focus on. There was a chance the Spiders might get overzealous and foul. If Sanders caught the ball and there was no foul, he was to throw it immediately to Miller, who’d be cutting for the corner. Miller would then catch the ball and shoot in one motion.

Before the ball was inbounded, Barnes walked over to Armstrong and
Vaden and said, “Watch carefully on this play. They’re going to foul Sanders. Be watching.”

Sure enough, as Sanders cut crosscourt to catch the pass, Steve Kratzer bumped him. Vaden was right on the play. Was it a foul? Maybe. But in this kind of situation, very few officials are going to call anything. And, it can be argued, they
shouldn’t
call anything—unless the action is so flagrant and strong it legitimately changes the result of the play. In this case, no foul was called.

Sanders caught the pass, turned and flipped it toward Miller. But the pass was deflected. By the time Miller caught up to it, the buzzer was sounding. He grabbed the ball and threw it up from the corner anyway—and it went in.

Clearly, the shot had come after the buzzer. But Barnes tried to steal the call, racing out with his arms up, giving a three-point signal. The officials weren’t buying it. They knew the shot had been late.

So did Barnes. Walking off the floor, he turned around and said, “No way the shot counted, right?” Right. That didn’t bother Barnes. Vaden’s noncall did, especially when he remembered what Harrington had written about him.

“Joe called that one,” he said. “It would have taken a lot of guts to make that call and he didn’t make it.”

In fairness to Vaden, it took guts not to make the call. Sanders had caught the pass, meaning that the bump had not caused him a disadvantage. But Barnes isn’t paid to be objective. He asked his managers to get him a tape right away. Barnes looked at the replay and saw the bump. That was enough for him.

Barnes strode down the hall to where the officials dressed and asked if they were still inside. Told they were, he was about to knock on the door when it opened. Armstrong, Vaden, and the third official, Allen Felts, emerged. “Donnie, I just looked at the tape and you missed a foul on the last play,” Barnes said to Vaden.

The officials didn’t stop. “I’ll look at it,” Vaden said.

“
Look
at it? What good does
that
do? I told you there was going to be a
foul
and you looked right at it and didn’t call it. You know it and I know it.”

Vaden kept walking. Armstrong didn’t. He stopped, turned as if to say something, then just shook his head and turned to leave.

Barnes looked at his athletic director, Jack Kvancz, who had witnessed the scene. “Now I’ve really got ’em pissed off, don’t I?”

Kvancz nodded. But neither one of them knew yet just
how
pissed off.

Don DeVoe still had his sense of humor. “Maybe I’ll just walk onto the floor tonight and wave a white handkerchief,” he said. “Or maybe I’ll just tell the team in the locker room to go out there without me and bring back a win. They walk out there without me they’ll probably get cheered.”

This was a day for gallows humor. “It’s almost time for my dealer to give me a new car,” DeVoe went on. “Maybe, I’ll ask him for a van.”

Times could hardly have been tougher for DeVoe. Kentucky was coming to town that evening for what was always the biggest game of the season. The Tennessee team it would meet was reeling. In the four weeks since the Volunteers had beaten Auburn, raising their record to 10–4, they had lost five of seven games, dropping to 12–9. Even more damaging, they were only 5–7 in the Southeast Conference.

But even that didn’t begin to tell Tennessee’s tale of woe.

After the victory over Auburn, the Vols had played Florida. The game had been close for thirty-five minutes. But in the last five minutes, with Tennessee fouling, Florida pulled away. The final was 76–56. It was Tennessee’s worst home loss in twenty-six years.

A victory over Mississippi State soothed things briefly, but then came a loss at Alabama—and Alabama was clearly beatable.

Things quickly went from bad to worse. Two days after the Alabama game, starting guard Elvin Brown was arrested in a Knoxville record store for shoplifting. When DeVoe asked Brown what happened he admitted his guilt. DeVoe felt he had no choice. Brown was the team’s third-leading scorer and best defensive guard but he had admitted to shoplifting.

“I’m just not going to have guys on my team who do that sort of thing,” DeVoe said. “I told Elvin that. I told him that if he needed help, we would get him help and that I would try to keep him in school but that he couldn’t play on my basketball team. If it means losing games or losing my job, so be it. I just can’t coach any other way.”

In their first game without Brown, the Volunteers, led by Dyron Nix’s 28 points, pulled together and beat Georgia, 92–81. But then
they lost at Mississippi and next, in their first national (cable) TV game of the year, they were pummeled, 90–62 at Vanderbilt. Three days later at LSU, also on ESPN, they were embarrassed again, this time 92–73.

DeVoe felt helpless and he could hear the wolves baying at his door. He was angry with himself, with his team, and with the situation. “No matter what I do, I can’t seem to get this group to care enough about winning,” he said. “When we lose, they don’t
hurt
the way you should after a loss. The other night, Anthony Richardson had six turnovers. He’s a
senior
. But he wasn’t really hurt by it. Mark Griffin shot zero-for-five and didn’t get a rebound in seventeen minutes—and he wasn’t that hurt.

“Do I yell at them, scream, go crazy? Sometimes I really think they get tired of my bitching, but it hurts the way they play. To go into Vanderbilt and LSU and get beaten up that way, especially on television, was just awful.”

DeVoe was exhausted when he got home Sunday after the LSU game. And discouraged. These were not easy times for him. The person he talked to most about his troubles was his wife, Ana. “After the LSU loss I said to Ana that, if truth be told, it would be a lot easier for Doug Dickey if he just made a change. That would give him a two-year honeymoon with a new coach. It might work out perfectly because there are five top juniors in this state next year and, for the first time since I’ve been here, none of them are from Memphis.

“A new coach can walk in here and if next year’s senior class doesn’t get it done, he can go out and recruit those kids with the new building as a lure and maybe be in Shangri-la in a couple of years. But I also told her that because Doug used to coach [football], I thought he understood coaching and that whatever happened he would be fair.”

That evening, DeVoe and his wife went to bed early. Not wanting to be awakened, DeVoe turned off the telephone. Shortly after 8
P.M.
, he heard a loud knocking on his door. He got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the door and found Dickey standing there. He let Dickey in and then went upstairs to tell Ana who it was before going to talk to his boss.

Ana DeVoe was terrified. “She was sure Doug had come over to say he was releasing me,” DeVoe said.

That thought had never really crossed DeVoe’s mind. Dickey had
come over because he had tried to call and, getting a constant busy signal, figured DeVoe had taken the phone off the hook. He had missed the Vanderbilt—LSU trip and was leaving town the next morning so he wanted to stop by just to give DeVoe a pep talk. DeVoe appreciated it. But his wife’s frightened reaction triggered something in him.

“If
she
felt that way,” he said, “I wondered what in the world the players were thinking at this point.”

DeVoe had never directly addressed the issue of his job security with his team. He knew they were aware of the situation because it was impossible to be anywhere near Knoxville and not be aware of it. But he had never said anything to them because he thought doing so might make it a larger issue than it was. Now, however, he felt he had no choice.

“They had been asked about it all through preseason, then when we won nine of our first ten it faded for a while. But now it was back stronger than ever. It had become
the
thing to talk about in Knoxville.”

The following day DeVoe walked into his locker room and, instead of talking about the Kentucky game two days hence, he talked about himself. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve heard or what you’ve been told,” he told his team. “If you think I’m quitting or if you’re going to let up because you think you’re going to have a new coach next season, you’re mistaken.

“We still have one third of our conference season left. We’ve proven we can play good basketball. Kentucky may be a better team than we are. But on Wednesday, all we have to do is be better than them for forty minutes. That’s all. No matter how good they are, they can only put five guys on the court at once, just like us.”

Now it was six hours before the Kentucky game and DeVoe had no idea how his team would react to his talk. He only knew what a victory over Kentucky could mean. “In this town if you ask people in April what our record was during the season they won’t be able to tell you,” he said. “But if you ask them about the Kentucky game in Knoxville, they’ll know all about it. That’s the way it is. This is the biggest game of the year to people here.

“But I have no idea how we’ll react tonight. I knew before the season started that this was a swing team. Right now, it’s swung down.”

DeVoe shook his head. He was a baffled, confused man. Always, he had known success in coaching, but now he was fighting for his job.
For the first time in his career, he found himself wondering exactly what the best thing was for him.

“You get to a point in a job where, if the people are really down on you, it might be best to leave, even if you think you’re doing the job,” he said. “I’ve thought about what I would do next year if I wasn’t here. Maybe I would take a step back, take a year off and try to get some perspective on things. I have a young family, I could spend some time with them, then start back in another year, refreshed.

“But when I think about that I wonder what would happen in a year. In this business you take a year off and maybe getting a job isn’t so easy. I don’t mean just any job. With my background, I can’t see myself coaching in a place where, realistically, you have no chance to win a national championship. I just couldn’t do it. Basketball has been the most important thing in my life for forty-one years now. I just can’t see myself coaching someplace where it isn’t as important to everyone else as it is to me.”

There were other frustrations. “I’ve always felt that Tennessee wanted a clean program and that’s the way I’ve run the program here. In the last ten years, Vanderbilt and Tennessee are the only two schools in the SEC that haven’t been under some kind of NCAA investigation at one point or another and I’m proud of that. I’ve never felt I could coach kids you made deals with, anyway.

“But is there a reward for that somewhere along the line? Maybe there is. Maybe running that kind of program will help me get another job if I lose this one. I don’t know. I had seven straight good seasons at Tennessee and then two bad ones. Does that make me a bad coach? Or is Tennessee just going through the down cycle that almost every program goes through sooner or later? The whole thing has really been an ordeal. I lie awake at night wondering how in the world I can be coaching a team that accepts losing the way this one does. We work hard in practice but we just don’t have a relentless drive to win. Whose fault is that? Mine? Maybe it is, I really don’t know.