Jim Valvano Should Think This One Over

Jim Valvano was born to the fast lane. Rocco and Angelina’s little boy Jimmy hit the ground running, and he never found a good enough reason to slow down, much less stop.

He coached North Carolina State--the little team that could--to an NCAA basketball championship two years ago, wisecracking every step of the way, and it looked as if he had finally gotten where he wanted to be. Not Coach V. He never broke stride.

Sure, he was a famous basketball coach. But why stop there? There were more jokes to tell, more money to make, an empire to build.

So, Coach V became a cottage industry unto himself.

He published Jim Valvano’s Italian Cookbook. He does weekly and daily radio shows. In the middle of this basketball season, he somehow found time to be TV analyst for a game between Indiana and Illinois, far from Raleigh, N.C. It isn’t unusual for him to stray from home, however. He’s a big name on the lecture circuit, dispensing jokes and motivational techniques to corporate executives.

Too much, you say. Well, it’s his life and his fast lane and his need to stay in the race.

And whether or not he knows the meaning of the word burnout, Coach V is no dummy. He knows he needs more than a sparkling personality to keep pace. He needs to win basketball games, too.

To win, of course, you need players. To acquire these players, coaches often compromise their principles. At least those coaches who have principles.

Which brings us to Chris Washburn.

Chris Washburn is a young man from Hickory, N.C., who grew up to be a 6-11 wonder, a basketball player to make a coach’s eyes go round and his stomach to growl. But Washburn was a troubled young man, in and out of mischief. He attended three high schools, playing great basketball and usually making terrible grades. His last high school was one that has traditionally catered to athletes who needed to improve their grades enough to get into college.

Washburn scored a total of 470 on his Scholastic Aptitude Test, just 70 points above the minimum. That put him in the lower 3% of all prospective college students who took the test.

Some schools stayed away, figuring Washburn was not a candidate for scholastic honors. North Carolina, Duke and Wake Forest--all traditional basketball schools in the state of North Carolina--stayed away.

Coach V wanted him, however. He needed him.

According to a story in Sports Illustrated, N.C. State sent Washburn scores of letters over a period of years, sometimes daily. Coach V and his staff were relentless in their pursuit, which was anything but trivial. Love, they say, is blind. So is lust. Coach V wanted Chris Washburn. Finally, he got him.

It didn’t matter that the average freshman at N.C. State scored 1,030 on his SAT. It didn’t matter that Washburn was not in the running for any good-citizen awards. He could play basketball.

You know what happened. They loaded Washburn’s schedule with easy courses--history of American sport, composition and rhetoric, sociology of the family, public speaking--and kept him out of academic trouble. But they couldn’t keep him out of other kinds of trouble. He was allegedly caught shoplifting on the team’s preseason trip to Greece. On Sept. 20, he was convicted of assaulting a woman on the N.C. State campus, and got a 30-day suspended sentence and a $25 fine.

Finally, on Dec. 22, he was charged with second-degree burglary for taking $800 worth of stereo equipment from a student’s room. He was kicked off the team and later pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor offenses. He was sentenced to three days in jail, ordered to perform 320 hours of community service and was put on a five-year probation.

So, who’s to blame?

There is Valvano, whose cynical recruitment of Washburn is nothing to joke about.

There is the N.C. State chancellor. Nobody with a 470 on his SAT gets into a college without the chancellor’s knowledge and acquiescence.

There is the system, which encourages this form of behavior from coaches and chancellors. It encourages schools to cheat by making it easy. It sets standards for admittance so low as to be without meaning.

Valvano is a great one for paying lip service to the ideals of college sport. He tells you how important his players are to him, how important the university is to him, how important integrity is to him.

But, in this case, all we can see is how important Jim Valvano is to Jim Valvano.

Of course, a lot of coaches would gladly have taken Chris Washburn. Bob Knight wouldn’t have. Dean Smith pursued him early, but then stopped. There are others--voices in the wilderness.

During the last recruiting season, Walt Hazzard badly wanted a local high school star for UCLA. But UCLA administrators, in the aftermath of the Billy Don Jackson case, have raised their academic standards for athletes, who must also be students. At a time when qualified students are being turned away at UCLA, the administration turned Hazzard down. Let other schools, other coaches, bend their principles.

Washburn wants to come back and play, and Valvano says he is considering what action to take. What is clear is that Washburn can’t simply be put back on the team. Take away his scholarship, make him take legitimate classes, see if he stays out of trouble, see if he belongs at N.C. State. Give him the rest of this season and all of next to work on being a respectable student.

If he passes that test, then maybe he can return to the basketball team. If Valvano really cares about Washburn, that’s the least he’ll do.

There is something more important than winning basketball games, after all. There are standards. Coach V needs to slow down long enough to learn that.