Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 6, 1990 TAG: 9003062136
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B7 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: JIM LITKE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But now college basketball, its simple pleasures sullied by scandal, brawling, bullying, out-of-control coaches and players in revolt, has lost Hank Gathers, too.
The 23-year-old Loyola Marymount star collapsed on the court Sunday within shouting distance of his mother and aunt in the stands. Now the best that can be hoped is that his death will force perspective on the game's administrators and its coaches and players, whose assessment of themselves and their deeds too often is taken in front of a mirror.
The picture, this season at least, is hardly a flattering one.
"Hank Gathers lost his life. You can't compare that to anybody or anything else that's gone wrong with college basketball," DePaul coach Joey Meyer said Monday. "You could consider this a bad year on that one incident alone.
"But yeah," Meyer said, "an awful lot of trouble seems to be cropping up at once. And that's the scary part. . . . If people hear these things often enough, and aren't shocked by them any longer, things can only get worse. Because then the assumption will be that everybody's doing it."
Everybody, of course, isn't doing it. But try to draw up a list of college basketball programs - ranking them by success, longevity, region, conference, whatever - and you can almost certainly find trouble of one sort or another.
North Carolina State is reeling under the weight of allegations that four players conspired to fix as many as four games during the 1987-88 basketball season. It is already on two years' probation for previous transgressions.
Maryland was punished Monday for recruiting violations.
It is not hard to envision a Final Four made up this year of teams pursuing the national title even as they are being pursued - or are about to be - by the NCAA. Try Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota and UNLV.
And it gets worse.
An altercation between players from North Carolina A&T and North Carolina Central began on the floor, but spread like a virus through the stands. Before it was over, chairs had been hurled and members of the A&T pep band waded into the melee, wielding instruments like weapons.
As anybody who has watched television knows, the players haven't been the only ones behaving badly.
Rick Pitino, brought in to clean up the scandal-scarred Kentucky program, got into a tiff with LSU's Dale Brown. Temple's John Chaney pushed John Calipari of Massachusetts, after the latter tried to stick his nose into a conversation Chaney was having with a referee.
Little wonder then, that the players are picking up bad habits. The kids at Drake and at Arkansas State were tired of what they regarded as demeaning treatment and threatened to boycott games. They got coaches Tom Abatemarco fired and Nelson Catalina chastened.
And that same old demon - money - appears to be at the root of this season's evils. Asked whether there was a common thread to the troubles afflicting college basketball, Joey Meyer didn't hesitate.
"The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," he said. "Look at how much the NCAA television package brings in, how much each school picks up just by being in the tournament."
"Think of college basketball like a competitive business, think how many people in big-money businesses cut corners," he said, "and it's not hard to see where the temptation is coming from."
But the game, clearly, is not beyond redemption. Hank Gathers' teammates will decide for themselves sometime later this week whether to take the NCAA tournament bid awarded Loyola Marymount after the WCC tournament was canceled.
They are likely to go, but money, at least in this instance, will not be the deciding factor.
"We can turn a negative into a positive thing," said Bo Kimble, Gathers' teammate and is sidekick since both fell in love with the game on the playgrounds of Philadelphia. "We're going to be up for the challenge. We're going to dedicate this to Hank."
by CNB