Читать книгу Indiana University Olympians - David Woods - Страница 9

Steve Alford, 1985.

IU Archives P0030877.

Steve Alford

1984

America’s Last Amateur Gold

STEVE ALFORD WAS COMING OFF A MOMENTOUS FRESHMAN BASKETBALL season. He averaged 15.5 points a game, scoring 27 in the Indiana Hoosiers’ 72–68 upset of top-ranked North Carolina and Michael Jordan in the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16.

Although the Hoosiers didn’t make it to the 1984 Final Four, coach Bob Knight did. He appeared on TV at halftime of one of the games on CBS. Alford was watching at home in New Castle, Indiana, with friends.

Knight looked into the camera and said, “I know Steve’s watching back home. The thing I want him working on all summer is his defense and moving without the ball.”

Alford shook his head. Here was Coach, two thousand miles away, chiding him about his defense. The next week, back in Bloomington, Alford was playing pickup. Those games were strictly for fun because no coaches were watching.

“I’ve got the whole summer to get better,” Alford told Todd Meier, another freshman for the Hoosiers. “And no Coach Knight on my butt!”

Or so everyone thought.

Days later, Alford went to the mailbox at his dormitory, which usually had nothing other than letters from his mother. This time, there was an invitation to be among seventy-three players trying out for the US Olympic team, coached by Knight. That started the Hoosier on a summer in which he would see plenty of his coach . . . and Jordan.

Alford not only made the team, he was fourth in scoring (10.3 points a game) and second in assists for the 8–0 gold medalists. The Los Angeles Olympics were the last played before NBA pros were allowed. Alford is the fourth-youngest gold medalist in Olympic basketball history, at nineteen years, 260 days.

“To be the last amateur team to win gold is pretty special,” he said.

Alford had not expected an invitation to the trials. The only younger players were Delray Brooks, eighteen, the Indiana Mr. Basketball who had committed to IU, and high schooler Danny Manning, seventeen, of Greensboro, North Carolina. Of the twelve players chosen, eleven were selected in the first round of the 1984 or 1985 NBA draft. The twelfth was Alford.

Six invitees went into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame: Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, and John Stockton. And Barkley, Malone, and Stockton did not make the Olympic team.

“Back then, when it was strictly amateur, no pros, you really had to hit it right,” Alford said. “You almost had to hit the Olympics when you were a junior or senior in college. I was very fortunate I got invited.”

He was a gym rat with a chance to play against some of the best players in the sport. That was going to be enough. Making the team was out of the question.

Trials began April 17. They were held at the IU Fieldhouse, across the street from Assembly Hall. Players were assigned to teams on each of eight courts with a simple instruction: play. Knight watched from a scaffold as a football coach would do.

Knight assembled a staff of nineteen college coaches to conduct three-a-day workouts and coach the games. There was a seven-player selection committee, although it was widely assumed Knight would have the final say.

In addition to the fact Alford played without burden of expectation, he found he had two other advantages: he knew Knight’s motion offense and thus did not move tentatively, and he was in the best shape of his life. The workouts, drills, and scrimmages were as much a test of stamina as skill. He grew more confident after shooting seven of seven in his first scrimmage, and three of five in the second.

Alford was trying to study for final exams but found himself writing down names of players he would have to beat out to make the team. Also trying to guess those making the first cut were hundreds of pro scouts and journalists.

Alford recalled the sentimental favorite being Barkley, then a 280-pound forward out of Auburn nicknamed the “Round Mound of Rebound.” Barkley’s thunderous dunks and demonstrative fist pumps delighted onlookers but did not impress Knight. Coincidentally, Barkley was Alford’s roommate during the trials on the top floor of the Memorial Union.

In a 1989 autobiography (written with John Garrity), Alford speculated that pairing him with Barkley was “one of Coach’s little jokes, putting me with a guy who looked as if he could eat the furniture.”

Alford hid food from his roomie. “If I had any Cokes or candy bars, I stuffed them away in my gym bag,” Alford wrote.

Otherwise, Barkley was delightful, playing H-O-R-S-E with ball boys after practice or wrestling Auburn teammate Chuck Person on Alford’s bed.

Alford was mesmerized by Jordan, whose maneuvers were so unconventional that those at the trials could barely describe them. There were dunks with 360-degree spins, jump hooks, alley-oops—you name it. The one thing that Jordan did that Alford also could was wipe the soles of his shoes on a wet towel on the floor.

Knight spotted the mimicry and yelled, “See that, Jordan? You think Alford can leap from the foul line and dunk now?”

Alford could not. He could shoot.

So when the cut to thirty-two players was made, and the list was announced, Alford was on it.

Public scrimmages moved to Assembly Hall, which featured the atmosphere of college games, complete with cheerleaders and the IU pep band. Behind the scenes, Barkley was wavering on whether he wanted to play in the Olympics at all. He had already planned to leave college early, and if he went pro before Jordan, Barkley speculated he could make more money from endorsements.

Following weekend play, another cut was made, this time to twenty. Among those not making it was Antoine Carr of Wichita State. Carr was good enough— he already had a $225,000-a-year contract with an Italian team and had played for the silver medalists at the 1982 World Basketball Championship. Carr played for sixteen years in the NBA. Yet Knight’s message had been clear: he would not be picking the twelve best players but the twelve making the best team.

There were no leaks about who was going to make it and no politicking by players or their advocates.

“I played in an era when there was no social media,” Alford said. “Not every person was able to voice their opinion publicly like they do now.”

Players returned for a minicamp in May and full practices June 15. The NBA draft, held June 19, was not the spectacle that it is now. Instead of traveling to New York for the draft at Madison Square Garden, those still in contention for the Olympics watched from Bloomington. Once drafted, players were led to a WTTV studio for a live feed to the USA Network.

Eight of the first eighteen selections were would-be Olympians: Jordan (drafted third); Sam Perkins (fourth); Alvin Robertson (seventh); Lancaster Gordon (eighth); Leon Wood (tenth); Tim McCormick (twelfth); Jeff Turner (seventeenth), and Vern Fleming (eighteenth). That did not include two players—Barkley (fifth) and Stockton (sixteenth)—who did not survive the cut to sixteen.

In 1985, five of the top seven picks in the NBA draft were from the Olympic team: Ewing (first), Wayman Tisdale (second), Jon Koncak (fifth), Joe Kleine (sixth), and Mullin (seventh).

The Olympians had multimillion-dollar contracts waiting, but there was a gold medal out there waiting too. Knight “didn’t deny” the draft happened, according to Tim Garl, the IU basketball trainer who served in that same role for Team USA. “But he said, ‘Hey, you need to do the Olympic thing first. We have a job to do.’”

When it came down to the final cut, Alford did not have to sit in a chair and wait for names to be called. Knight told him, and told him he earned it. Predictably, there was an outcry that an Indiana player had been picked by the Indiana coach. Knight responded just as predictably.

“We had twenty coaches who voted unanimously to keep him on the team,” Knight said. “What am I supposed to do, keep him off because he played at Indiana?”

Alford felt no resentment from teammates. Knight yelled at him too often for that to happen. Alford and Tisdale were the most frequent targets of Knight’s invectives.

Before heading to Los Angeles, the Olympic team went 7–0 on an exhibition tour against NBA players. The Olympians averaged 103.6 points a game and weren’t challenged against out-of-shape, out-of-season pros.

One exhibition, on June 20, was played against a team of former Indiana greats: Ted Kitchel, Isiah Thomas, Kent Benson, Tom and Dick Van Arsdale, Randy Wittman, Mike Woodson, and 1976 gold medalists Quinn Buckner and Scott May. Team USA won 124–89.

Patriotic and Indiana fervor were underscored in a July 9 game against NBA stars, which drew 67,596 fans—then the most ever to witness a basketball game— to the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis. The NBA team included Thomas, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Kevin McHale. Team USA won that one 97–82.

The Olympic team practiced in San Diego for two weeks before heading to Los Angeles. There were team-building activities such as trips to the San Diego Zoo and a Padres baseball game, and Alford said some players slipped away for some “cheap thrills” in Tijuana, Mexico. Players took a bus trip to a JCPenney warehouse, where they were issued credentials, outfitted for uniforms, and allowed to stuff as much Olympics swag into a shopping cart as they could: T-shirts, jackets, caps, bags, sweats, shoes, pins, mugs, posters, and so forth.

It would be no exaggeration to assert the Americans won the gold medal not by what they did in Los Angeles but by what they did in Bloomington, San Diego, and elsewhere. Alford said they had the best player on the planet, Michael Jordan, and the best coach on the planet, Bob Knight. Give Knight time to prepare for an opponent, Alford said, and “he was almost unbeatable.” And Knight had all summer.

“We had a phenomenal leader in Jordan,” Alford said. “He’s as good as it got. . . .

It was a phenomenal team that couldn’t help but get better. Those guys really did get better and better during that time.”

In Los Angeles, players stayed in the Olympic Village on the University of Southern California campus. The team rode on the same bus with athletes such as gymnast Mary Lou Retton and boxer Pernell Whitaker. Alford met sprinter Carl Lewis and diver Greg Louganis. Alford said the experience gave him a lifelong appreciation of athletes from other sports.

“We were a part of the Olympics,” he said. “We weren’t the Olympics.”

Team USA swept through group play with a 5–0 record, beating China 97–49, Canada 89–68, Uruguay 104–68, France 120–62, and Spain 101–68. Alford came off the bench to score thirteen points against Canada on six-of-eight shooting. Against Uruguay, the Americans once made fifteen consecutive shots.

Alford was taking antibiotics for a staph infection before the game against France, but it was not evident. In twenty-three minutes, he shot eight of eight from the field and two of two on free throws for eighteen points. For years, he has teased his basketball-playing children about it.

“Anytime France comes up, whether it is in french fries or anything to do with France, I tell them, ‘That country can’t get over me. I shot that country out. I was eight for eight.’”

His shooting in the quarterfinal was more consequential, considering he led the Americans with seventeen points in a 78–67 victory over West Germany. It was their closest game of the Olympics.

Knight was so vexed that he did not allow players to address the media afterward. He surprisingly pulled Alford aside to ask what was wrong with the team. Alford said he “took a deep breath” and responded that players were not paying attention to their notebooks during pregame. At Indiana, Alford said, players studied information Knight asked them to write down.

“You know, Steve, if you’re not with us tonight, we probably don’t win,” Knight said, according to Alford’s autobiography.

Alford could not respond. His coach had never paid him such a compliment.

At practice the next day, Knight said players would study those notebooks or would not play. No exceptions.

Mullin scored twenty points in a 78–59 victory over Canada, setting up what Knight and the twelve American players had focused on since mid-April: the goldmedal game. They would face Spain, a team they had already beaten by thirty-three points, at the Forum in Inglewood.

The Americans needed no more preparation, explanation, or motivation. After Knight stepped out into the hall for final consultation with assistant coaches, Jordan went to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, wrote a message, and signed it “The Players.” He wrote: “COACH: DON’T WORRY. WE’VE PUT UP WITH TOO MUCH SHIT TO LOSE NOW.”

Knight returned, started to speak, and saw Jordan’s message. He smiled, looked at each player individually, and said, “Let’s go play.”

Knight told the other coaches the game against Spain would be over in ten minutes. It was. Alford started for Team USA.

By halftime, amid chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” the score was 52–29. In a 96–65 victory, Jordan scored twenty points, Tisdale fourteen, and Perkins twelve. Alford added ten points and seven assists.

Spectators stormed the court. Alford was hoisted up and handed a pair of scissors to cut the net; he then handed them to a teammate. Players were going to lift Knight on their shoulders, but he pointed to eighty-year-old Henry Iba, who had been a consultant. Knight wanted to honor Iba, who was coach for the US team that controversially lost the gold-medal game to the Soviet Union at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Witnesses said Knight might have shed a tear for the coach he respected above all others. After players put Iba down, they carried Knight off the floor to chants of “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!”

Of all the days, weeks, and months of his journey, the Olympic moment Alford remembers best is of standing on top of the podium and hearing the national anthem. He said he gained a better appreciation of the entire experience as the years passed.

“The thing I watch the most in each Olympics since is the playing of the national anthem when you’re on the gold-medal stand,” he said.

He did not see any other sports while at the Olympics, and that wasn’t really the point anyway. That was reiterated regularly by Knight.

“He was there to win the gold medal,” Alford said.

Alford did not stick around for the closing ceremony. He and his parents and brother, Sean, rode home in a van at a leisurely rate. They stopped for two hours in Las Vegas and walked around Caesars Palace. Steve had been “put through the ringer,” as his father, Sam, put it, and he slept a lot. As they crossed the Illinois-Indiana border, he saw the first sign: “WELCOME HOME, STEVE. CONGRATULATIONS.”

There were more signs and banners on Interstate 70 overpasses. East of Indianapolis, he saw a police car in which a girl was waving from the backseat. It was Tanya Frost, his girlfriend at the time and his wife since 1987. Past the Greenfield exit, the Alford van pulled over, and Steve and Tanya loaded into a convertible for a caravan home.

For six miles along I-70, all the way to the State Highway 3 exit, cars lined both sides. Helicopters hovered overhead for TV cameras. After arrival in New Castle, townspeople reached out to shake Alford’s hand, and hundreds of people were lined up on both sides of the family home on Hickory Lane.

“The reception in New Castle is something I’ll never, ever forget,” Alford said.

Two nights later, on Steve Alford Day in New Castle, the world’s largest high school gym filled with spectators. The ceremony was capped by Alford’s speech, in which he lamented never winning a state championship for Sam, his father and high school coach. Steve took the gold medal off his neck and put it around his father’s.

As his father had told him on the phone while the Olympic team was in San Diego, “There’s a lot of players in Indiana who can say they’ve won a state championship. Very few can say they’ve won an Olympic gold medal.”

Steve Alford was seemingly fated to be basketball royalty in Indiana.

He was born November 23, 1964, in Franklin, Indiana, the son of a coach. Soon after his second birthday, his parents, Sam and Sharan, sent Christmas cards forecasting that their son would be a Mr. Basketball in Indiana. Mom and Dad were right.

By age three, Steve was sitting on the bench at Monroe City High School, where his father was the coach. He learned to add by watching numbers on the scoreboard and to read and spell by looking at game programs and last names on the backs of uniforms. At five, he was playing in a YMCA league in Vincennes while his father coached at South Knox.

He would shovel snow from the driveway to shoot baskets if he couldn’t get in a gym, practiced broadcasting games in a closet, and kept journals of his progress. Until he left for IU, he missed just two of his father’s games—one when he had the chicken pox, another when he finished fourth in a regional Elks Hoop Shoot free throw contest at age ten in Warren, Ohio.

Sam Alford coached for four years at Martinsville, where local hero Jerry Sichting was idolized by his young son. (Sichting went on to be an All–Big Ten guard at Purdue and played and coached in the NBA.) Then his father moved onto New Castle and its 9,325-seat gymnasium.

If there is anywhere in the world for a basketball junkie to grow up, it is New Castle. Alford was no physical specimen—he was all of five foot ten and 125 pounds when he got his driver’s license—but he tirelessly worked on his body as well as his game. He would shoot one hundred to three hundred free throws a day, charting them all and punishing himself with fingertip pushups or sprints when he missed.

He played in nineteen varsity games as a freshman, totaling 30 points, and averaged 18.1 for the 13–9 Trojans as a sophomore. He averaged 27.3 as a junior and 37.2 as a senior for teams that went 12–10 and 23–6. He was indeed Mr. Basketball in 1983, finishing with 1,078 points, one off the single-season state record set by Carmel’s Dave Shepherd in 1969–70. Alford was 286 of 304 on free throws for .944, which would have led the NBA or NCAA that year.

In the next-to-last game of his high school career, he scored fifty-seven points— one off a state postseason record that has stood since 1915—at the Hinkle Fieldhouse semistate in Indianapolis. New Castle beat Broad Ripple 79–64 but lost to eventual state champion Connersville 70–57 that night, despite Alford’s thirtyeight points. So he scored ninety-five points in one day. He was eighty-two of eighty-three on free throws in seven sectional, regional, and semistate games.

He and Tanya missed prom so he could play in the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic at Pittsburgh. Alford scored just four points, but he said, “The basketball game still was better.”

At IU, Alford averaged 15.5, 18.1, 22.5, and 22.0 during four seasons in which the Hoosiers were a collective 92–35. As a senior, he was a consensus All-American for the 30–4 Hoosiers. He scored 23 points, featuring seven-of-ten shooting from the three-point line, as Indiana beat Syracuse 74–73 for the 1987 NCAA championship. Alford shot .530 on threes in the first season it was used by the NCAA.

He left Indiana as the Hoosiers’ all-time scoring leader with 2,438 points (a record broken by Calbert Cheaney) and a record .898 percentage on free throws.

Alford was the first pick of the second round by the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA draft. He lasted four seasons as a pro, three with Dallas and one with Golden State, before retiring at age twenty-six. He totaled 744 points in 169 NBA games, more than 300 points less than he scored as a high school senior.

He became a college head coach at twenty-seven, returning to his home state at Manchester University. After a 4–16 first season, he was 78–29 in four years, including a 31–1 final season in which Manchester lost in the NCAA Division III championship game.

He subsequently coached four seasons at Southwest Missouri State (78–48), eight at Iowa (152–106), seven at New Mexico (155–52), and more than five at UCLA (124–63). He was fired at UCLA after a 7–6 start to the 2018–19 season. He returned to the Mountain West Conference when he was hired by Nevada in April 2019.

He took teams to the NCAA Sweet 16 four times, including three with UCLA and once (in 1999) with Southwest Missouri. His best records are 31–5 with UCLA in 2016–17 and 30–5 with New Mexico in 2009–10.

His sons, Bryce and Kory, both played college basketball for their father. Kory set a New Mexico high school record with 1,050 points in his senior season, averaging 37.7 per game. Kory left UCLA with the school’s career record for threes made.