THE BIG EAST : Turn Back Clock, Take Out Sweater, Show Off Pearl--This Is for No. 1 as College Ball Returns to Garden Spot

As of old, the nation’s devotees of college basketball look once more to the East. To basketball’s Mecca. To the Garden.

It has been a while, and things have changed a little since NYU and CCNY were center stage. Most players these days, as an example, can dunk. And, of course, they moved the Garden years ago and put it on top of a train station.

So it’s not what it used to be, but then, what is?

The point is this: Georgetown and St. John’s will meet tonight at Madison Square Garden. They are the best that college basketball has to offer, and they’re playing for a third time this season.

They are brought here courtesy of the Big East Conference, whose tournament has been selling out the Garden since Wednesday in a four-day tribute to the city game and with a frenzy rarely seen here outside of subways.

We have seen bands playing. We have seen fans in various degrees of delirium. We have even seen people dressed like oranges.

There has also been some serious basketball, Big East style. Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing, between dunks and blocked shots, squared off Friday night with Syracuse’s Pearl Washington, who can throw something other than passes.

Looking for some space under the basket, Ewing (7-0, 240) not so gently moved Washington (6-2, 190) out of the way. Washington claimed Ewing hit him in the head. Ewing wouldn’t say. Replays suggested he got him in the shoulder. In any event, Washington hit Ewing with a surprise shot below the ribs. Ewing, stunned, took a swing at Pearl, who tried to swing back. Benches emptied. Tempers flared. Ewing and Washington exchanged stares throughout the game.

Afterward, nobody seemed upset. Just another pushing match between stars. Ewing, of course, has been involved in these things before. The last time against St. John’s, Ewing, in establishing position, had knocked Chris Mullin off the floor. Anyway, Washington said it was nothing personal.

All Georgetown Coach John Thompson had to say was, “It gave me a chance to get some exercise and run out on the court.”

Welcome to the Big East. You don’t have to wonder why they call it the toughest conference in the land.

It all seems so obvious now--like gravity. One day, the apple falls on your head and the next day you’re rewriting the laws of physics while you eat your applesauce.

One day, Dave Gavitt was hit on the head with an idea the size of the Big Apple.

College basketball was changing. The NCAA was taking more and more teams into its tournament, and more and more it was taking conference teams. Many of the Eastern powers were independents.

Why not, thought Gavitt, Providence College basketball coach turned athletic director, make up a basketball league of the traditional Eastern powers?

On the drawing board, it looked this way:

--Call the conference the Big East.

--Bring together teams from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington--some of the biggest TV markets in the country.

--Create and encourage rivalries, putting these teams together twice a season.

--Hold a season-ending tournament and make a lot of money. Maybe put the tournament in Madison Square Garden.

Gavitt got on the phone, called a lot of his colleagues and sat amazed while they told him all the reasons they thought it was a bad idea whose time had not come.

“Today, it looks obvious,” says Gavitt, now commissioner of the Big East. “When we were trying to put it together, there was a lot of resistance.

“You had teams who were doing fine. They were winning 20 games a year, going to the NCAA tournament or the NIT most seasons. Basically, there was a fear of uncharted waters.”

If it ain’t broke, the saying goes, don’t fix it. But Gavitt and supporters persisted. Among the biggest doubters was Lou Carnesecca, the coach at St. John’s and the wearer of The Sweater.

“Who knew what it would turn into?” Carnesecca says. “No one thought it would be like this.”

Temple said no. Holy Cross said no. So the conference began six years ago with eight teams--St. John’s, Georgetown, Villanova, Providence, Connecticut, Seton Hall, Boston College and Syracuse--and with high hopes.

“If you go back to the beginning, in all honesty, I don’t know if we had any expectations,” Gavitt said. “We were like the paratroopers who hit the ground running.”

They haven’t stopped. Pittsburgh was added three years later, and there was no risk by that time. The Big East was a hit right away, and it is getting bigger all the time.

How did it happen? Well, it was a natural. All it needed was someone with Gavitt’s vision.

“He showed us the way,” said Rollie Massimino, the Villanova coach. “He saw the possibilities before anyone.”

Of course, there was also a little luck involved. One of the biggest breaks occurred four years ago when Patrick Ewing turned down several Atlantic Coast Conference schools and chose to attend Georgetown. If Ewing had gone to Maryland, this might be a very different story. In the same year, Chris Mullin picked St. John’s over Duke. On such decisions is history made.

Also in that same season, the Big East, three years old, put three teams into the final eight of the NCAA tournament. Villanova and Boston College lost in that round, but Georgetown went to the championship game before falling to North Carolina. A lot of people noticed.

In 1982-83, the Big East placed five teams in the top 20. You had to notice.

And, of course, Georgetown won the NCAA title last season.

Now, we have Georgetown and St. John’s ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively. Syracuse has been nationally ranked all season. Villanova has been ranked off and on. The best conference of them all? Well, you could make an argument.

Certainly, as in the ACC and the Big Ten, the interest is there. The Big East, having signed agreements with five different television outlets, is on the tube more often than Bill Cosby.

The New York tabloids have served almost as Chris Mullin’s diary. “Chris had Wheaties for breakfast today. . . . “

Carnesecca’s sweater has become the most notable fashion news in the nation’s fashion capital. The New York Daily News devoted a picture page to Carnesecca sweater look-alikes.

In Syracuse, at the Carrier Dome, they can pack in 32,000 fans, many of whom take the word’s root--fanatic--seriously.

It used to be that Boston College had trouble getting even the Boston papers to cover their games. Now, if BC is in a Monday night TV game against, say, Syracuse, papers from New York and Washington may be there.

Patrick Ewing and his coach, John Thompson, were featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated alongside a familiar face--basketball fan Ronald Reagan.

And there’s a story about Grady Mateen, a blue-chip center from Arkon Central Hower High School, who, with other top high school scholars, toured the White House last spring. Mateen met Nancy Reagan, who told him how if he went to Georgetown she would be able to see him play.

That’s how Big the Big East has become.

And what it used to be. During the season, all those years ago, every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, the old Garden was host to college basketball. Frank McGuire, the famous coach, played in the first doubleheader there, in 1934.

McGuire played for St. John’s against Westminster in the first game, and Notre Dame played NYU in the second.

There was a full house, 16,500 fans. St. John’s lost, but a tradition was begun.

Some of the best basketball was played in New York at NYU and City College and Long Island and Fordham and St. John’s. In those days, a team hadn’t proved itself until it had played in the Garden. Adolph Rupp used to bring his Kentucky teams to Noo Yawk. Everyone who was anyone came.

“It was a big date night in town,” McGuire said. “College basketball started and ended in New York.”

Then, suddenly, it all disappeared. In 1950, CCNY won both the NCAA and NIT championships, and the next season, a point-shaving scandal rocked the city. One school after another was implicated.

Soon after, college basketball simply slipped out the back door. NYU and CCNY dropped their teams, and hardly anyone seemed to want anything to do with the game anymore.

“It was like somebody ripped the heart out of the city,” said McGuire, who at the time was coaching at St. John’s.

Eastern basketball, without its New York focus, went into decline. There were some exceptions, as when LaSalle won the NCAA title in 1954. Many of the other Eastern teams continued to be good, too, but something was missing.

Even in Philadelphia, home of the Big Five schools--Villanova, LaSalle, St. Joe’s, Penn and Temple--college basketball was something of a cult sport. The teams would sell out when they played each other but not when they were playing someone else.

Basketball had gone South. So had Frank McGuire, who moved from St. John’s to the University of North Carolina and started the underground railway from New York.

“Every time we lost, I’d come home to New York and leave the assistants to run the practice,” said McGuire, who now works for the Garden as an advisor. “I’d come here looking for players. The first time we won the (NCAA) championship, I had four Irish Catholics and one Jew. That was Baptist country, and we had people starting to bless themselves.”

He got Lenny Rosenbluth and Doug Moe and Billy Cunningham and Larry Brown. And when McGuire left for South Carolina, where he got more New Yorkers to play for him, the railway simply added another stop. The ACC teams were getting the best players from Philadelphia, the best from Washington, the best from New York.

“Nobody wanted to stay home,” Carnesecca remembers. “I don’t know if we would have gotten a Chris Mullin 10 years ago.”

Said McGuire: “If I was still coaching there, Chris Mullin would be in the ACC right now.”

It isn’t that the ACC has gone into decline. Two of the last three national champions were from the ACC, and the league has four teams in the top 20 this season. Top to bottom, the Big Ten and the ACC are both stronger.

It is just that the Big East, with the top two teams and with as many as five, or even six, headed for the NCAA tournament, is having its season of seasons. And they can’t get enough of it in these parts. No one is going to worry about next season just yet.

“Certainly, this is an exceptional year,” Gavitt said. “We lose Ewing and Mullin next year, and we probably won’t have the two best teams in the country.

“We are flattered still when people ask if we are as strong a conference as the ACC and the Big Ten. They have stood the test of time and we haven’t. Will we stand the test of time? The answer is yes.”

The conference has developed some big-league trappings, starting with its tournament in the Garden. Postseason conference tournaments don’t mean much anymore, but people enjoy them, and this one has gotten to be a really tough ticket.

It doesn’t match the ACC tournament in tradition or in audience fervor, but they do play it in New York and not in Greensboro, N.C. That’s a nice plus.

The Big East has also developed its own tribal rivalries--Syracuse-Georgetown, Villanova-Pitt. The coaches are colorful, and you can’t beat Mullin and Ewing for players.

The most interesting--one way to put it--fans are found in the Carrier Dome, the home of the Syracuse Orangemen:

--They have the Dome Ranger, who is dressed in orange and otherwise looks like the Lone Ranger. This is, presumably, a grown man.

--They have the Dome Knitter, who sits along the baseline, yes, knitting.

--They have Dome Eddie and his orange hair.

--There are the Dome Dog, the Beast of the East--someone who looks something like an orange, malformed Sesame Street character--and the school mascot, you guessed it, an orange.

They’re funny, and yet they can get ugly. They don’t like Georgetown, and some of the fans have chosen provocative ways to get their message across.

It was at Syracuse that signs were held up saying: “Patrick Ewing can’t read this sign.” This season, someone threw a banana on the floor in Ewing’s direction. Someone else splattered an orange against the backboard when Ewing was taking a foul shot.

Georgetown Coach John Thompson said he would have taken his team off the floor at that point but was afraid that with 32,000 people in attendance, he might have set off a riot.

At Providence, where Thompson went to school, fans were comparing Ewing to a gorilla. It was not pretty.

Nobody much likes Georgetown, of course. Not only do the Hoyas win, but they win with an aggressive style and with an attitude that has often been described as Hoya Paranoia. You may remember when Ewing took a swing at BC’s little Michael Adams.

Thompson doesn’t try very hard to get along. He hides his teams from the media and has passed along to his players an us-against-the-world mentality.

Thompson isn’t the only interesting coach. Villanova’s Massimino and BC’s Gary Williams, who was punched by one of his players last season, storm on the sidelines with arms flailing, feet stamping, voices baiting and all the dramatics you’d want.

Then there’s Carnesecca, everyone’s favorite grandfather, who speaks in whispers--he’s always hoarse--and even the officials don’t seem to mind when he yells at them. Maybe they just can’t hear him.

But the Big East is not consistently big time. The conference is an amalgamation of mostly small schools without football that don’t have the necessary machinery in place to deal with crowds of fans or crowds of reporters. Most of them play in small, outdated arenas, and they even think small. They’re building a new place at Villanova. It will seat 6,500. North Carolina just built a new arena that will seat 25,000.

Seton Hall can pack 3,200 inside its gym. Even St. John’s seats only 6,000. The average attendance in the Big East is more than 10,000, but that’s because at Syracuse they average more than 20,000 in the Dome.

It’s press day, the day before the tournament opens. The coaches have come to be interviewed. Almost every one of them is wearing an NIT watch. This is Eastern basketball, remember.

Now, says Massimino with real affection, “We’ve grown into a monster.”

Carnesecca remembers the old days. “We’d have good teams and nobody noticed,” he says. “There wasn’t much pressure. Nobody knew what you were doing.

“Now we got five TV cameras at the gym. That’s for practice. It’s different.”