It was a deal with either McGregor or Wilson, and for $2,500 a coach or $5,000. All these years later, the details are a little fuzzy. Some folks remember it one way. Some say it was the other. Regardless, it was definitely a ball deal, it most certainly was not for a whole lot of money, and Dave Gavitt figured his coaches would be thrilled just to get a little extra cash in their pockets. He agreed to the deal, cut the checks and presented the information to his coaches at their annual meeting in Bermuda in the summer of 1985. At which point all hell broke loose.
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John Thompson Jr., who rarely attended a meeting, refused the deal by way of speakerphone, opting instead to negotiate his own. “I didn’t want a group deal,’’ he recalls now. “Why would I take that?” An irate Rollie Massimino refused to accept his check, furious that he, one year removed from a national championship, was getting the same amount of money as Rick Pitino, just hired at Providence. Pitino, young, brash, fearless and livid that his coaching peer would even suggest he take a lesser cut, started screaming at Massimino. “Dave stands up in his shorts and says, ‘I’m going to ride my motorbike for an hour. You guys work it out while I’m gone,’’’ says Gary Williams, then the coach at Boston College. “Then it got uglier.’’
This week we celebrate rivalry week, paying homage to the animosity that breathes life into sports. It’s getting harder to find the hate these days. The one-two punch of conference realignment and expansion has sucked some of the joy out of the haters, and political correctness has diluted much of the public vitriol (anonymous message boards not included). It makes it hard not to be nostalgic, to recall when the venom was real and oh so entertaining. When people not only didn’t pretend to like each other, they were perfectly fine admitting they loathed one another.
Four decades ago, Gavitt had this harebrained idea to build a conference out of like-minded schools along the Northeast Corridor. It grew into a monster, the Big East bringing a new swagger and nastiness to college basketball. The rivalries were as fierce as the games themselves, the animosity not just contrived anger between the fan bases, but genuine between the coaches themselves. The public stuff is now the stuff of legend — Thompson declaring Manley Field House officially closed, the “Sweater Game” between No. 1 St. John’s and No. 2 Georgetown, Walter “The Truth” Berry rejecting Pearl Washington on a would-be Syracuse game-winner — but it didn’t end when the buzzer sounded. Behind closed doors, at the annual coaches meetings, that’s where things got real. “I don’t remember much in the way of specifics,’’ Thompson says with a big laugh. “There was too much yelling.’’
Consider the personalities — Thompson, Massimino, Williams, Pitino, P.J. Carlesimo, Jim Calhoun, Jim Boeheim, Lou Carnesecca, Rick Barnes, Bill Raftery — and now try to imagine a room big enough to house them all. Every year, Gavitt chose an inconspicuous hotel ballroom, closed the door and attempted to work through a season’s worth of grievances, petty, pretend or otherwise. Every slight was resurrected, every missed called dissected in language that was NSFW before NSFW became a thing. Meeting agendas were fluid, created by whichever coach rotated into the president’s role that year. “Us young knuckleheads, we’d have an actual agenda,’’ says Carlesimo. “Then you’d get Louie and he’d walk in and say, ‘Shit, I didn’t know I was president this year.’ ’’
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The agenda was pointless anyway, the meetings generally heading off the rails once pleasantries were exchanged. The league was in its infancy, and the coaches fairly young themselves, each trying to establish his place in the pecking order. “Young blood boils quicker,’’ says Art Hyland, the league’s former supervisor of officials. And there was plenty to simmer over, everything viewed through the prism of getting an edge. The coaches bickered over snide comments, alleged rule circumvention and in-game gamesmanship. Rumored backbiting by assistants or negative recruiting ploys were all aired out, accusations flying even with nothing in the way of real evidence. Who got to schedule games at on-campus gyms and who was forced into bigger arenas was presented as perceived favoritism, Carlesimo ticked when Seton Hall could no longer use Walsh Gym but St. John’s could still pick and choose when it would venture off campus and play at Madison Square Garden.
Recruiting, not surprisingly, was an especially big point of contention. The grassroots basketball landscape was much smaller then, and the coaches all essentially fought over the same pool of players. A recruit never merely chose a rival school; the program did something not necessarily on the up-and-up to entice him.
That the teams were so good and the games so competitive only made the bad blood run deeper. Consider the 1985 season: Villanova finished 9-7, tied for third in the league and won a national championship. Three Big East teams went to the Final Four that year (Georgetown and St. John’s joining the party), another went to the Sweet 16 (Boston College) and six of the nine teams earned a bid (including Syracuse and Pittsburgh). “It was an extension of the games,’’ Williams says. “You didn’t want anyone getting an edge anywhere.’’
Big issues were voted on, though not even that went so smoothly. Barnes, still fairly young and slightly intimidated when he replaced Pitino at Providence, remembers sitting at the back of the room for one meeting. Carnesecca sat nearby, a sweater tied around his neck. When it came time for a straw vote on an issue that Barnes has since forgotten, Carnesecca was suddenly nowhere to be found. No one could remember seeing him leave the room, and for a few minutes everyone screeched, “Where’s Louie?” Barnes happened to look down at his feet, spying the St. John’s coach on the floor and under the table. “He had dropped one of his hearing aids,’’ Barnes says. “He didn’t even know what we were talking about.’’
The lone subject everyone could agree on was the referees. Nobody liked them. “Everyone wanted to blackball somebody,’’ Boeheim says. “If we all had our way, we’d have no officials.’’ In the early years, they’d spend hours, if not an entire day, haggling over officiating. Every missed call required an audience, with the subsequent rebuttal from the opposing coach who thought the call was just fine. One year, Hyland brought all of the officials to the annual meeting, held at the Montclair (N.J.) Country Club. He hoped a forum would allow for better dialogue. It went well until someone mentioned enforcement of the three-second violation, complaining that only one official called it. The official, who Hyland declined to name, was in the room. “We did that just the one time,’’ Hyland says. “It was an experiment that was not made into policy.’’
Even in a roomful of alpha males, Gavitt ruled. He had come up as one of them, a basketball coach from the Northeast Corridor (he spent 10 years at Providence), and the Big East was his vision. Its immediate success gave him life rights on his coaches’ trust and respect. “He was the only man John (Thompson) listened to in the history of the league, Georgetown or the NCAA,’’ Boeheim says. “But we all did. I can’t overstate the strength he brought to that table.’’ Gavitt’s instincts were almost always right, and he knew his coaches well enough to recognize when the room needed massaging and when it needed a dictator.
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When the conversation over scheduling got overheated, he issued a memo. “From the league office: you’re playing whenever we say you’re playing,’’ Williams recalls it reading. In 1988, Gavitt floated the idea of an ACC-Big East Challenge, but the coaches, not excited about giving a league rival a chance to gain supremacy and less than thrilled at the prospect of facing such a tough game so early in the season, voted unanimously to reject the proposal. Gavitt walked into the room and told them the league was going ahead with it anyway. In the first year, three of the eight games were decided at the buzzer and a fourth went into overtime. After the three-year deal expired, the coaches again voted to end it, citing an expanding conference and an earlier tipoff to the season. The Big Ten replaced the Big East in the challenge, one of many interleague battles that exist today. “He was so smart,’’ Barnes says. “He saw it before anyone else.’’
Gavitt used the idea of golf in luxurious locations as the lure, moving the meeting from Saratoga, N.Y., to Johns Island, S.C., to Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and much to the ire of athletic directors, even for a one-year sabbatical to Bermuda. “Can you imagine that flying today?” Tranghese says. It worked for everyone save Thompson. “I don’t golf,’’ he says now, by way of explanation. Consequently, his booming voice filled the room over a speakerphone.
Everyone else spilled out of the meetings and onto the golf course, Gavitt setting up the day’s pairings to suit his needs. At one of the early meetings in Saratoga, Massimino and Raftery arrived at loggerheads. The contentiousness continued through the meeting, and when it adjourned, Gavitt motioned to a golf cart. He’d put the two together, with an edict to work it out or kill one another — but settle things by the time the round was over. “They come back hugging each other and drinking beer,’’ Tranghese says.
The idea to assuage the anger within the span of 18 holes didn’t always work. Once in Florida, Carlesimo and Boeheim were partnered, everyone playing Wolf for money. Carlesimo had maybe a three-foot putt on the last hole. Before approaching his shot, he asked Tranghese how much his side would win if he made it and how much it would lose if he missed. “He then wraps the ball off the green and yells, ‘Jimmy, you’re so cheap, I wanted to see you lose and have to pay,’ ’’ Tranghese says. “Total chaos. There are like 15 people on the 18th green, and everyone is screaming.’’
They all laugh now, recognizing the inanity of it all, and if they’re being honest, missing it a little bit too. Old wounds have healed. Even Boeheim and Thompson, who didn’t even try to pretend they liked one another, get along just fine. “I get along with all of them,’’ Thompson says. “With Boeheim and Louie. Rollie’s granddaughter came up and hugged me. What people don’t understand, there was always a level of respect.’’ Certainly at times, when the vitriol really spewed, it was hard to find. But the hardly veiled dislike, tempered by the reluctantly given respect, only made the rivalries on the court better and more authentic.
That, too, was fostered by Gavitt, who always preached a league-first message. It was better than fine, he would explain, to try and beat the snot out of one another during games. The intensity of the rivalries, and even more the genuineness of them, is what made them so good. But when league play was over, to root for each other’s failure was to root for the demise of the league and counterproductive to building their own programs. “Dave somehow knocked us all with a hammer in the back of our heads, and essentially told us, ‘He might be an asshole, but he’s our asshole,’ ’’ Carlesimo says. “It was us against the other conferences.’’
About that ball deal: What no one knew — not Massimino, not Pitino, not anyone — is that Carlesimo started the whole thing. He decided to have a little fun and fan the flames, pointing out to Massimino that Pitino was getting the same cut even though he had yet to coach a game in the league, and telling Pitino that Massimino thought he ought to get a smaller portion — even though Massimino had never said such a thing. “I walked in and I thought there was going to be a brawl,” Tranghese says. The meeting ended, in fact, with Massimino refusing to take his check and storming out.
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Months later, Tranghese went to a Villanova game and caught up with Massimino afterward. He was still mad. “That freaking Pitino,’’ he said to Tranghese. “I tell him to forget Rick. It was P.J.’’ Newly enraged, Massimino called Carlesimo and chewed him out for a good five minutes. When he finally finished, he calmly turned to Tranghese and smiled. “I’ll take the check now. Do you still have it?’’
Tranghese pauses for effect as he retells the story. “You cannot make it up.”
(Top photo, from left: Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, Boston College’s Jim O’Brien, Georgetown’s John Thompson Jr., Seton Hall’s P.J. Carlesimo, Villanova’s Rollie Massimino, St. John’s Lou Carnesecca, Pittsburgh’s Paul Evans, Big East commissioner Dave Gavitt, Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun and Providence’s Rick Barnes: Big East Conference/Getty Images)
