OUTSIDE THE LIMELIGHT: Basketball in the Ivy League

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Iwasn’t always obsessed with Ivy League basketball. I didn’t grow up watching any of the teams, nor did I know any of the players. Frankly, until I went to college, I’m not sure I could have named the eight schools in the league. This fascination I developed grew out of my love for basketball. I am one of those hoops junkies who can watch the sport anywhere, anytime. I’ll sit entranced for hours in a sweaty gym while a group of fifthgraders play a game most of their parents would prefer to avoid. Of all the sports I’ve covered through the years, none fascinates me as much as basketball...

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Outside the Limelight
OUTSIDE THE LIMELIGHT Basketball in the Ivy League KATHY ORTON Foreword by John Feinstein Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Orton, Kathy, 1968– Outside the limelight: basketball in the Ivy League / Kathy Orton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-4616-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ivy League (Basketball conference) 2. Basketball—Atlantic States. 3. College sports—Atlantic States. 4. Private universities and colleges— Atlantic States. I. Title. GV885.415.I88O78 2009 796.323’630973—dc22 2008051478 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2009 by Kathy Orton All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is "fair use" as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America
For my parents, Audrey and Duane Orton
Contents Foreword by John Feinstein ix Preface xiii 1. Origins of a League 1 Part I Great Expectations 2. A Mom-and-Pop Store 9 3. Great Scott 17 4. Multicultural Quakers 22 5. Getting Under Way 27 6. Roll Crimson Pride 39 7. Backdoor Cuts 45 8. A Tradition Tarnished 54 9. Bright Lights, Big Stages 63 Part II The Heart of the Season 10. Harvardization 79 11. Conference Calls 87 12. We Interrupt This Season . . . 96 13. The Road Is the Thing 108 14. Everyone Onto the Court 115 15. Brothers in Arms 125 16. A Rivalry Like No Other 134 vii
17. Topsy-Turvy Weekend 141 18. Dreams Deferred 151 19. And the Winner Is . . . 158 Part III Tournament Hoopiness 20. The Wait of Expectations 175 Epilogue 185 Acknowledgments 197 Ivy League Rosters, 2005–2006 Season 199 Index 205 viii
Foreword John Feinstein hen I was a kid growing up in New York City, my favorite col- W lege basketball team was the Columbia Lions. Frequently, I would ride the subway up to 116th Street and hope to find an unobstructed seat in University Gym to watch Jack Rohan’s teams play. I still remember 1968 when Columbia finally beat Penn and Princeton and won the Ivy League title with a team that was led by Jim McMillian, Heyward Dotson, and Dave Newmark. (The other two starters, for those of you scoring at home, were Roger Walaszek and Billy Ames). To me, Columbia was just a very good basketball team. After win- ning the Ivy League championship, the Lions went on to beat La Salle in the first round of the NCAA tournament before losing to Davidson in overtime in the round of sixteen. I can still remember Davidson coach Lefty Driesell calling a time-out with the score tied at 55 with one sec- ond left in regulation when Columbia’s Bruce Metz had a one-and-one that could have won the game. Metz missed, Davidson won in overtime and, forty years later, I’m still a little bit upset about it. What I didn’t understand—couldn’t understand—at that point was how special that Columbia team was. I was a little too young to fol- low Princeton and Bill Bradley in 1965, but I was aware of the fact that Princeton made the Final Four that year and that Bradley scored fifty- eight points in the third-place game (still a Final Four record) and then went on to something called a Rhodes Scholarship before coming home to play for the New York Knicks. Now, I understand. Bill Bradley was a once-in-a-lifetime person, not just a great bas- ketball player. What Columbia achieved in 1968 was extraordinary. The Penn team that went to the Final Four in 1979 was the best college bas- ketball story this side of George Mason in 2006, and Princeton’s upset of defending NCAA champion UCLA in 1996 was the perfect climax to one of the great coaching careers ever—that of Pete Carril. ix
x Foreword Those stories, of course, are the ones that a lot of basketball fans already know. Everyone knows who Bill Bradley is, and most remember Penn’s run under Bob Weinhauer in 1979 with a concert pianist playing center. And, if you follow basketball, you know that most of the Ivy League’s glory, especially during the last forty years, has focused on two teams: Penn and Princeton. In the 2005–2006 season, Kathy Orton set out to tell the Ivy League stories that people don’t know. One of the great myths about athletics is the notion that only the most gifted athletes are driven. People talk about the work ethic of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, athletes with once-in-a-lifetime talent, who were driven to be the absolute best at their sports. Jordan and Woods combined their natural ability with their work ethic and their smarts to become multi-multi-multi-millionaires. But there are other athletes, far less gifted, who care every bit as much and who work every bit as hard as Jordan and Woods. They work in obscurity, knowing that if they give their absolute best, they may help Brown finish second in the Ivy League or keep Harvard in the top half of the league for another season. They’re all very smart, so they under- stand that 999 out of 1,000 of them aren’t a Bradley or McMillian or, for that matter, a Matt Maloney or Jerome Allen, the Penn guards of the early 1990s who both went on to play in the NBA. Most Ivy League basketball players understand that when they play their last college game, that’s the end for them as serious athletes. A few might play overseas for a couple of years; others will continue to play pickup ball or rec ball for a long time. But the time when a large chunk of their lives are focused on being part of a team, on preparing for the next game or the next season, will be behind them. It is just as hard for an Ivy League basketball player to walk away from the game as it is for a guy who plays ten years in the NBA. Harder, perhaps, because it comes so much sooner, when one’s passion for the game is still at its peak. Kathy Orton first fell in love with the Ivy League at a Penn- Princeton game in the Palestra. That makes absolute sense because there is no college gym like the Palestra and Penn-Princeton is as spe- cial and as intense a rivalry as there is in college basketball. But she knew there was a lot more to the Ivy League than Penn and Princeton. She wanted to find out what it was like at the other six schools—Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale—grinding away year after year in pursuit of the league’s two icons. She knew there were plenty of stories to be told about the kids at those other schools, each of whom begins each season believing this will be the year when someone other than Penn or Princeton wins the league title.
Foreword xi She also learned how grim it could be in February for the players when their dreams have been washed away and they still have to get on the bus for the ride from Dartmouth to Columbia; Harvard to Cornell; Brown to Penn. The Ivy League is unique—mostly for good; on rare occasions for bad. The best example of the league not being perfect is the lack of a conference tournament. A conference tournament gives everyone hope. Every year, a team comes from at or near the bottom of some league and makes a run in early March that lands it in the NCAA tournament. All the disappoint- ments of the regular season are forgotten; injured players may get another chance; everybody has hope. In the Ivy League, however, hope often dies in a cold, half-empty gym in late January because there is no conference tournament—which is really too bad for those involved. Someday, maybe the Ivy League presidents will realize that the best thing for their student-athletes is to keep hope alive throughout the long winters and those long bus rides. As we all know, the kids who play basketball in the Ivy League are, in fact, student-athletes, unlike so many of the players on the so-called big-time teams that are ranked in the top twenty-five, week in and week out. The graduation rate for Division I basketball players in the NCAA is about 44 percent. In the Ivy League, as we would expect, it is closer to 100 percent. Most of those who play in the league will go on to major success away from the basketball court. They will become CEOs, doctors, lawyers, judges, and distinguished professors. Many will end up flying their own planes and owning fabulous homes around the world. But all of them will sit back and tell stories about their days playing in the Ivy League, about riding the buses, about the tiny locker rooms, about walk- ing into the Palestra and Jadwin Gym and feeling the history of those places. They’ll talk about tough losses and great wins—wins that per- haps only they and their teammates could truly understand—and they will call those The Good Old Days. That’s the way it is for every athlete, whether he is Jordan or Woods or the walk-on at Columbia or Brown who got into one game and missed a wide-open three-pointer at the buzzer that would have sliced the final margin to 83–65. Ivy League basketball players work every bit as hard, care every bit as much, and revel in victory and are saddened by defeat at the same level as—perhaps even a little higher than, because the end for them is nearer—the guys Dick Vitale is always screaming about. I guess the biggest difference is that when it is time to tell their stories, they can sit down and do so without ever saying: “We gave 110
xii Foreword percent,” “We needed to step up,” or “We just didn’t execute.” They are smart, they are funny, and they are also pretty good basketball players. Their stories are well worth hearing. Or, in this case, reading. Enjoy.
Preface wasn’t always obsessed with Ivy League basketball. I didn’t grow up I watching any of the teams, nor did I know any of the players. Frankly, until I went to college, I’m not sure I could have named the eight schools in the league. This fascination I developed grew out of my love for basketball. I am one of those hoops junkies who can watch the sport anywhere, any- time. I’ll sit entranced for hours in a sweaty gym while a group of fifth- graders play a game most of their parents would prefer to avoid. Of all the sports I’ve covered through the years, none fascinates me as much as basketball does. And college basketball completely captivates me. Still, I was only a casual follower of Ivy League basketball in February 1999, when my editor at the Washington Post assigned me to cover the Penn-Princeton game at the Palestra. The focus of the story wasn’t to be about the game; instead, I was to capture how unusual the rivalry between the teams was. After the first half ended, was I glad I wasn’t writing about the game. Even a basketball fanatic like me had a hard time staying inter- ested, with Princeton unable to make a basket and Penn ahead, 33–9, at halftime. With the outcome all but decided, I figured it would be an easy night for me—no overtime, no dragging out the game with late fouls, and no frantic push to make a 10 P.M. deadline. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. Princeton staged a record comeback, winning 50–49. I’ve covered Super Bowls, Final Fours, and U.S. Opens featuring Tiger Woods. This game topped them all. To this day, it remains the most thrilling athletic contest I have ever watched live. From that point on, I couldn’t get enough of the league. It wasn’t just the Penn-Princeton rivalry. It was the other six teams, which re- minded me of that figure from Greek mythology, Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up a hill throughout eternity. Time after time, one of these xiii
xiv Preface teams would come close to seizing the title from Penn or Princeton, only to fall short. It was the lack of a conference tournament, which created a fourteen-game, winner-take-all endurance test to determine the league champion. Such a format in a league that receives only one berth in the NCAA tournament means that even minor injuries can ruin a team’s season. As Harvard coach Frank Sullivan once put it, most Ivy League teams are “an ankle sprain from average.” It was also the Friday-Saturday schedule for league games. A nod to the importance of academics, the arrangement creates logistical diffi- culties for teams. No other league plays its regular-season games on back-to-back nights. It was the absence of athletic scholarships, which means if a student-athlete wants to play for an Ivy League team, he or his family must pay upward of $45,000 per year for the privilege. It was the travel-partner arrangement, which pairs the two traditionally tough- est teams in the league, forcing the other teams to play them on consec- utive nights. It was the bus travel between the schools. While many Division I teams are flying around in charter jets, the teams that play for the wealthiest schools in the nation ride buses to and from their league games. But most of all, it was the players: young men who will become doc- tors, lawyers, and leaders of government and industry. Overachievers who have been successful in every aspect of their lives—except one. Basketball humbles them. It treats them with disdain. The prosperity that comes easily to them in other areas proves far more elusive on the court. They pursue their sport even though few expect their playing days to extend beyond college. And they sacrifice for this most fickle mistress even though she rarely rewards them. They spend sleepless nights por- ing over textbooks and writing papers to make up for the time spent lift- ing weights, watching game film, and traveling to and from away games. Most will have more setbacks than successes on the basketball court, and as a result, few will still be playing their senior years. The demands are too great. Even those determined to stick it out all four years—such as Cornell’s Khaliq Gant, whose devastating injury cut short his career— discover how difficult it is to keep going. Those who remain are the ones whose love of basketball super- sedes nearly everything else. They enjoy the challenge of driving the length of the court as much as deriving the Fibonacci sequence, of breaking down a defender as much as breaking down Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, of penetrating a zone defense as much as penetrating the Riemann hypothesis. Along the way, basketball imparts lessons they probably won’t learn in a classroom: how to work with others, how to fail, and how to move past that failure.
Preface xv Because Ivy League players labor in obscurity most of their college careers, they often are lightly regarded by those outside the conference. They may not run as fast or jump as high as many of their big-school brethren, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of talented players in the league. What they lack in athleticism they make up for with solid fundamentals and court savvy. Some industrious parents, who view Ivy League basketball as a mere step above an intramural sport, see basketball as a way to sneak their children into a prestigious school, not realizing how good the league’s players are. The offices of Ivy coaches are littered with boxes of videotapes and DVDs of jump-shot-challenged kids who can barely make a layup yet think their skills are good enough to earn them a spot on the team. Another widely held misperception is that Ivy League rosters are filled with privileged white kids from upper-class backgrounds. In real- ity, the league’s players are a collection of ethnic, religious, and socio- economic backgrounds from across the country and around the world. Few Division I basketball rosters boast as much diversity as those in the Ivy League. Gone are the days of Bill Bradley, Corky Calhoun, Chet Forte, Jim McMillian, and John Edgar Wideman. They were student-athletes in every sense, excelling at their sport and in the classroom. Forte was the national player of the year. Bradley took Princeton to the Final Four before becoming a Rhodes Scholar. Wideman led Penn to its first Big 5 title before he, too, became a Rhodes Scholar. The Ivy League hasn’t attracted basketball players of this caliber in recent years. Smart kids with strong basketball skills tend to play for Stanford, Duke, or Van- derbilt, schools that will pay for their education. Ivy League loyalists lament the decline of talent in the league, fearing the conference’s bet- ter days are behind it. Yet, the league has lost neither its relevancy nor its distinctiveness. Although highlights from its games do not appear nightly on Sports- Center and its teams often bow out in the first round of the NCAA tour- nament, Ivy League basketball is at turns wildly entertaining, utterly exasperating, fiercely competitive, gut-wrenchingly emotional, artistic, and unsightly—sometimes within the course of a single game. In an era when Division I basketball is corrupted by recruiting scandals, star play- ers’ jumping to the NBA, and huge television contracts, the Ivy League has managed to steer clear of these pitfalls by steadfastly adhering to its principles. It has become one of the last refuges for players and coaches who truly respect the game. Before taking readers on my journey through the 2005–2006 season
xvi Preface of Ivy League basketball, I would like to include a note about why I selected that particular season and why I focused on the teams that I did. When deciding to write a book about Ivy League basketball, I realized that the 2005–2006 season was the fiftieth season of the league. (The league celebrated its fiftieth anniversary the following season, but if you do the math, the league played its fiftieth season in 2005–2006.) Second, Harvard looked like it might win the league that season. The possibility of the Crimson winning its first Ivy title presented an opportunity that was too historic to pass up. With those story lines in mind, I quickly realized it would be fool- hardy to try to chronicle the entire seasons of all eight teams. The book would be too unwieldy. Instead, I picked four teams—Cornell, Harvard, Penn, and Princeton—that I felt had the most compelling themes. I then tried to include the other four—Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Yale—as much as I could. My sincerest apologies to those teams if they feel overlooked. All interviews were conducted by me unless otherwise noted in the text. When not present at the games, I relied on press releases from the Ivy League schools and recaps from the following for background on what happened at the game. These sources included Brown Daily Herald, Columbia Spectator, Cornell Daily Sun, Harvard Crimson, Daily Pennsylvanian, Daily Princetonian, Yale Daily News, Ithaca Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, Providence Journal, Ivy .basketball-u.com, Princeton Basketball News, ESPN.com, and Asso- ciated Press. In the following pages, I describe a typical Ivy League basketball season, showing how teams come together and how they ultimately suc- ceed or fail. Starting with the October practices, moving into the pre- conference competition, then the league games, and finally the NCAA tournament, this book offers a chance to get to know the players and coaches that make this league special.
Outside the Limelight
Chapter 1 Origins of a League “The Ivy League is frequently accused of several kinds of snobbery, but never in athletics. Ivy League people, in fact, have a consider- able sense of inferiority about the quality of their teams in contrast to those schools in other parts of the country.” — John McPhee, A Sense of Where You Are he most popular explanation of how the Ivy League got its name T dates back to October 14, 1937. As the story goes, George Daley, the sports editor of the New York Herald-Tribune, and his assis- tant editor, Irving Marsh, were assigning writers to upcoming college football games. The weekend’s big game was Pittsburgh against Ford- ham at the Polo Grounds. They assigned their veteran football writer, Stanley Woodward, to that one. Caswell Adams, the paper’s boxing writer, drew the Columbia-Penn game at Baker Field. Adams, none too thrilled about the assignment, groused, “Do I have to watch the ivy grow every Saturday afternoon? How about letting me see some football away from the ivy-covered halls of learning for a change?” Woodward was said to have overheard Adams’s complaint and in- serted the phrase “Ivy League” into a later column, thus introducing the 1