(Originally published by the Daily News on Sunday, March 29, 1998; written by Luke Cyphers)
As he threaded his way down ramp that spilled out of Madison Square Garden, Larry Abney, a 6-9 Nyack native, came upon a remarkable sight. A woman, presumably an employee of the recently arrived Ringling Bros. company, was soaping up and scrubbing down five llamas.
“What do you do at work?” asked Abney, starting an imaginary conversation. “Oh, wash llamas,” he answered himself, laughing.
For the first time all week, Abney had witnessed a vocation more circus-like than his own: playing basketball for Fresno State University.
Depending on the last media outlet you saw, Fresno’s hoops team is either:
A) The most corrupt crew of villains this side of a Dick Tracy strip, whose coach, Jerry Tarkanian, embodies the evils of college sports (see “60 Minutes”).
B) The most misunderstood, media-maligned, unfairly treated group of fine young men you’d ever have the pleasure of meeting (see Fresno boosters, Jerry Tarkanian).
C) The dopiest oops, make that hippest collection of counterculture ballplayers anywhere, led by Rucker League legend Rafer (Skip-to-My-Lou) Alston, “the Best Point Guard on the Planet” (see Slam Magazine), and his backcourt mate, Massachusetts legend Chris (Skipped-Too-Much-School) Herren, “the only white guy in America who doesn’t look like an idiot in baggy jeans and a backward baseball cap” (see Rolling Stone Magazine).
When they rolled into town last week for the NIT, Coach Tark’s Bulldogs did indeed carry the aura of a traveling circus. Cameras including their own personal documentary crew mobbed them at the tournament kickoff luncheon.
Freshly pilloried by Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes,” freshly scandalized by center Avondre Jones, who had just been kicked off the team after his arrest for allegedly robbing a career small-time criminal of $275 at sword-point, and fresh off two dramatic victories that propelled them to the NIT semifinals, they were a hot story for an attention-starved tournament.
With a roster that featured five ex-Parade or McDonald’s All-Americans, and nine suspensions for drugs or assaults, they had an almost thrilling air of danger about them. Heck, they’d even had a federal gambling investigation before it was cool.
“Admit it,” said Alston’s mother, Geraldine, “you guys (in the press) are waiting for them to lose and go after the other team with samurai swords and a gun.”
But when they left the city five days and two losses later, the ‘Dogs were something altogether less compelling – an underachieving team that at times was painful to watch.
How could a team picked in preseason to finish seventh in the country, a team with five prep All-Americans, not make it to the NCAA tournament?
As Alston aptly put it, “We stink. Offensively, we stink. Defensively, we stink even more. No one knows their role. Our work ethic as a team is terrible.”
It was enough to make Alston, a certifiable playground legend, pine for Utah, a team picked to finish behind Fresno in the WAC before the season but spending this weekend in San Antonio at the Final Four.
“They approach the game with a different attitude,” Alston said. “They know how to play how to cut, when to cut.”
Says Herren, “Utah and Stanford made it with just regular guys. I wish we had more regular guys.”
Blinded by now-meaningless prep credentials, and perhaps fooled by all the second chances they’ve been given, Fresno State may be just regular, even if they don’t know it.
“I keep hearing about how all these guys are considering leaving to go play in the pros,” Tarkanian said. “Where are they going? Argentina? The CBA?”
To prepare for the NIT, a tournament whose best days are behind it, Fresno practiced at NYU, a long-ago basketball powerhouse brought low by scandal. In this setting, Tarkanian longed for better days. Rival coaches used to say that no matter what one thought of Tarkanian’s recruiting or discipline at UNLV, the man could run a practice and teach the game.
“Billy Packer one time said we had the best practices he’d ever seen,” Tarkanian said. “Now look at this. We just don’t have any bodies. We have seven scholarship players. We can’t even practice full court.”
The half-court action wasn’t too impressive. With Jones and Daymond Forney (positive drug tests) thrown off the team, the ‘Dogs were low on big men. Winfred Walton, a 6-9 transfer from Syracuse, made the situation worse by being constantly sidelined with minor maladies all week. One day, his back bothered him. The next, the out-of-shape Walton had a temperature of 101. After practice, it was down to 97.5, producing smirks from the coaches.
With so few people, FSU had to use managers and assistant coaches to fill out an opposing five. Nearby NYU student games looked less ragged. Tarkanian was the first to admit it.
“We can’t do anything because the kids are so worn out,” he said. “We have to save their legs.”
Back in Vegas, when he had Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon and Greg Anthony, the practice moved, with players killing themselves to improve. He told them how to pressure the ball, how to convert defensive stops and turnovers into points, and they did it until it was second nature.
Now, there aren’t enough players. Tark’s “monster squad” of sneaker-camp and summer-league all-stars with troubled pasts turned around and bit him.
“Tark is a very compassionate man who is very trusting,” said John Zelezny, a university spokesman. “Sometimes that ends up hurting him.”
His best player, Forney, a high-scoring forward, was booted via the university’s stringent new drug-testing policy.
“Daymond, he’s my favorite person on this whole team,” Tark said. “But he was raised in a crackhouse, and he’s been smoking pot since he was 9 years old. We had him clean for 11 weeks, but . . . ” Tarkanian is still claiming a victory, though. “Daymond’s going to get his degree,” he said. “He’s stayed on scholarship and he’s finishing school.”
People don’t know about the players he’s helped, he says. Rickey Sobers, a Bronx kid who played at Vegas, is now a successful realtor. Others, though, he couldn’t help. Richie Adams, another Bronx kid who also played at Vegas, was arrested 16 months ago for murder. Forney was one of four players suspended for positive marijuana tests this year.
One source close to the program said some players felt they could beat drug tests by drinking vinegar.
“They have trouble making their SAT, but all of a sudden they think they’re biochemists,” the source said.
Herren checked himself into rehab for three weeks, saying he had to clean up a cocaine and alcohol habit. Alston was also suspended early in the season, after a conviction for misdemeanor battery on an ex-girlfriend.
The team’s play fell off as players came and went. Tarkanian’s basset-hound eyes and protruding stomach tell the story better than his words.
“This has been the worst year for me, no question,” he said. “When Avondre got arrested, I just sat and ate for about 48 straight hours. My doctor says I have to lose some weight, it’s bad for my health. My brother calls me from Vegas all the time and says, `You don’t need this. Come home.'” He thought about it. “I couldn’t leave with a bitter taste like this,” he said.
Chris Herren was darting through Midtown, bopping and shopping with teammate Pat Miller. He was looking for a belt at the Gap “You only have black, dude?” his accent a mixture of Cheers’ Cliff Clavin and rap’s Puffy Combs and a Rolling Stone at the newsstand.
In the magazine, he can read about how tutors have to wake him up for class, how he’s become a new man after rehab, how a scout thinks he can have a 10-year NBA career, how he denies any role in an alleged point-shaving scheme last year, and basically, about how cool he is. That is, if Herren reads it.
He’s the subject of an acclaimed book, “Fall River Dreams” by Bill Reynolds, about his hardscrabble Massachusetts high-school career, but he’s never read it.
“I love the writer, though,” he said. Herren believes coping with his basketball gifts hurt him. He’s a hoops version of Good Will Hunting.
“I just wanted to be like a regular guy, so I hung out and partied and drank with my homies,” he said. “I didn’t want to be this important person.”
He flunked out of Boston College before landing with Tarkanian, who admires him for his courage in facing his alcohol and cocaine problem and for telling the world instead of trying to sneak away for treatment. Herren admires himself for that, too.
“People think that because I went to rehab, that’s some kind of bad thing,” he said. “What’s bad about that? I think it’s a good thing.”
On the NIT trip, the once-unreliable Herren was one of the few players to show up on time to any functions. Teammates were constantly late to practice buses and meals. Most embarrassingly, Herren was one of just three players to make the team bus to an NIT banquet at Tavern on the Green.
After the Herren table for three watched the other three NIT teams assemble promptly in coats and ties, the rest of the Fresno squad, apparently out sightseeing, showed up 45 minutes late, dressed in warm-ups. Tarkanian, on the phone to a friend, tried to explain how a local businessman had offered to supply the team with dress clothes “but that’s an NCAA violation.”
On the court, Herren can still drive people crazy. A gifted natural athlete, he has yet to work hard to fulfill his potential. He rarely practices free throws. He often plays out of control, going on safaris to the basket and chucking up wild shots. He blames it on substance abuse.
“I shot the ball like two times all last summer,” he said. “I was too busy partying.”
As for the rest of the circus, he claims he doesn’t care. He’s not about to cast stones at teammates who fail the team by failing drug tests.
“Who am I to tell somebody to stop smokin’ weed?” he said. Besides, he adds, “None of that affects me. I’ve got other things to worry about, like my sobriety.”
Rafer Alston and Larry Abney are affected by it all. The two New Yorkers are embarrassed.
“I think a lot of us are overrated,” Alston says. “When you get so much attention when you’re young, maybe your drive is not there. How could we have wound up in the NIT?”
Simple, says Abney, who unlike his more celebrated teammates, is glad to fit in as a role player.
“We didn’t get together at all (for unofficial workouts) before Oct. 15,” he said. “Then, we didn’t work hard after Oct. 15 in practice. Other good teams, they play together all the time.”
Almost all of the Fresno players vow that will change. They’ll hang out together this off-season, try to be a team, try to absorb yet more transfers coming in, including guard Courtney Alexander, who left Virginia after assaulting his girlfriend.
Tarkanian thinks his team learned from the season. The logic? “How could they not?”
There’s lots of blame to go around, Alston said. The one place he won’t point fingers is at the media, which makes him almost alone in the Fresno camp. Tarkanian and boosters say Mike Wallace ambushed them and the Fresno Bee abused them this year. Alston laughs that off.
“The media’s job is not to satisfy me,” he said. “My thing is us, who decided to say, `Yes, Let’s go on 60 Minutes, that’ll be great for our school?’ . . . Mike Wallace didn’t do us wrong. We did ourselves in. They gave us a rope and said, `You can either jump rope or hang yourself.’ We put it around our neck, and tied it to a hook, and that’s where we ended up. Hanging from a rope.”
