The Hoya Sequoia Is Gone, but Tarp the Sharp Is Back : Without Ewing, Tarpley May Be Post With the Most, but There Are Others

All right, all you 8-foot foreign exchange students from Bulgaria, all you point-makers and point-shavers, all you funky dunkers from inner-city projects and precision chest-passers from suburban driveways, all you Cal States and Loyolas and Central Northern A&M; Wesleyans, all you patent-leathered assistant coaches and itchy-trigger-fingered clock operators, and all you strategy-conscious, press-credentialed (“What were you thinking about when you took the shot?”) inquiring minds out there. Get your game faces on.

It’s tipoff time. Time for college basketball. You remember college basketball--the game UCLA used to beat everybody at? Well, it’s back.

You can tell it’s back. The major colleges are rehearsing for the really important games by going man to man against the minor colleges.

Oh, those season openers. Minnesota is messing with traditionally dangerous San Francisco State. Missouri confronts upset-minded Texas Southern. Clemson should have its hands full with Maryland Eastern Shore. Iowa returns from a tournament to tangle with electrifying Abilene Christian. Oklahoma goes out on a limb to play UC Santa Barbara. Penn State expects full network coverage for its anything-can-happen engagement with Lock Haven. And Georgetown, as usual, will open the season playing hula hoops with Hawaii Loa and Hawaii Hilo.

By January, conference play will be under way, whereupon the brotherhood of the Big East will begin a series of contests that will culminate in March with Syracuse playing St. John’s for the fifth or sixth time. A year ago, three of the Final Four teams in the land were from this very conference, and by then Georgetown had become so blase about beating Villanova that it suddenly forgot how to do so.

“April Fool! April Fool!” Villanova hero Ed Pinckney hollered to the people who mobbed the playing floor in Lexington, Ky., after his team had bumped off Georgetown, 66-64, on the first day of April, 1985.

“What?” teammate Dwayne McClain called to Pinckney.

“April Fool!” Pinckney said. “Look at that score!”

“We did it!” McClain yelled.

“Fooled everybody!” Pinckney yelled back.

It was the surprise of surprises--bigger and better even than 10-time loser North Carolina State’s upset of Phi Slama Jammin’ Houston in 1983, on Lorenzo Charles’ last-second dunk.

The Georgetown Hoyas had been the No. 1 club in the country, all season long, as well as the reigning champion of 1984. It had two of the most foreboding figures in the country--Coach John Thompson, a 6-10 tree trunk of a man who sheltered his players as much as possible from outside interference, and 7-foot center Patrick Ewing, the Hoya Sequoia, an intimidator in an undershirt.

After Georgetown was defeated, Ewing was called to the stand to receive his postgame award, and took the occasion to wave his “We’re No. 1” finger to the crowd. Said a Villanova cheerleader to Pinckney and McClain: “He’s telling the crowd how many championships Georgetown won in a row.”

Fact is, though, Ewing had been head and shoulders above his opposition week after week, as Ralph Sampson had before him.

Season after season, certain players have dominated college basketball, even players who could not look the young Lew Alcindor eyeball to eyeball. David Thompson was such a player at North Carolina State. Neither Magic Johnson nor Larry Bird played center during their war between the States, Michigan and Indiana, in the 1979 NCAA title game. Darrell Griffith of Louisville was no skyscraper, either.

Hard telling who the leading man of 1985-86 will be. If it is anyone, it probably will be Kenny Walker, a forward from Kentucky who is smoother than smooth. But at face value, no one player seems to be the one who will have every basketball fan buzzing and every NBA scout drooling long before the Final Four in Dallas.

At least one case has been made for an All-American first five of forwards Walker and Reggie Williams of Georgetown, center Roy Tarpley of Michigan and guards Mark Price of Georgia Tech and Pearl Washington of Syracuse. Another national magazine projected the NBA’s top three draft picks in 1986 as Walker, 6-11 Danny Manning of Kansas and 7-foot William Bedford of Memphis State. Neither Manning nor Bedford, we might mention, is a senior.

Extremely good players do not stick around long. Magic Johnson played only a couple of years of college ball. So did Isiah Thomas.

Some good players do not stick around at all, for various reasons. N.C. State had been counting last season on a highly recruited kid named Chris Washburn, but he was arrested and convicted of swiping another student’s stereo, and was suspended for the season.

Both Houston and Louisiana State, meanwhile, thought they had their hands on 7-1 high school player Tito Horford, but he is not on any campus at the moment. Maybe he will show up at Montana State, which is the much-feared opponent LSU has lined up for its season opener.

The favorite for the national championship is anybody’s guess, and coaches, as usual, will have a lot to do with who does Dallas.

Back to run their programs are the old chair flinger, Bob Knight of Indiana; the famous fashion plate, Lou Carnesecca of St. John’s; the happy wanderer, Larry Brown of Kansas; the prince of pasta, Rollie Massimino of Villanova, and those human towel racks, Guy V. Lewis of Houston, Jerry Tarkanian of Nevada Las Vegas and Thompson of Georgetown. Maryland’s Charles Driesell no longer wishes to be called Lefty. Maybe it turns out after all these years that he is right-handed.

Kentucky took Arkansas’ coach, so Arkansas took Tulsa’s coach. Kansas State’s Jack Hartman is back after bypass surgery sidelined him for the last half of last season. Marv Harshman of Washington has joined DePaul’s Ray Meyer in the retirement community, leaving Ralph Miller of Oregon State as the golden oldie of the over-65 crowd.

Most coaches would trade a couple of years of their lives for a tall freshman who can shoot. Some, like Bill Frieder of Michigan, will luck out. While he was occupying himself the past three years recruiting such high school hotshots as guards Antoine Joubert and Gary Grant, and forward Glen Rice, he happened to stumble upon a clumsy, still-growing kid named Roy Tarpley, who, when it came to being recruited, was as lonely as a Maytag repairman.

Not only did Tarpley shoot up to 6-11, but he learned how to shoot, how to block shots and how to move and groove. “It was like he fell out of the sky,” Frieder said. Tarpley has become one of the top--if not the top--pivotmen in the nation, and makes Michigan a serious threat for the Final Four.

Georgia Tech also got lucky along those lines. Colorful Bobby Cremins knew that if he was going to be a successful coach he needed to find large people like John (Long Tall) Salley, the 7-footer who patrolled the hoop with the Haitian Sensation, 6-11 Yvon Joseph, during last year’s 27-8 season. What Cremins didn’t know was that a nondescript 6-footer named Mark Price would turn out to be Mr. Outside to Salley’s Mr. Inside, a pure shooter, to the point that opposing guards can no longer afford to zone Georgia Tech.

There are shooters and there are scorers. Dave Hoppen of Nebraska is a shooter. He is 6-11 and makes nearly 65% of his shots. Dan Palombizio of Ball State is a scorer. He did not make half of his shots last season but averaged 26.3 points a game.

There are big guys and there are small guys. No one stands as high as Bridgeport’s 7-7 Manute Bol did last season, with the possible exception of the Statue of Liberty, on this season’s college rosters, but there are several teams with NBA-style twin towers--such as Kansas, with 6-11 Manning playing forward, alongside 7-1 Greg Dreiling. Representing America’s small fries is Carl Golston, the 5-9 lightning bug from Loyola of Chicago who led the nation in assists. You don’t have to be tall as Bol to play ball.

There are great players and there are great names. In the 1980s alone there have been such memorably christened individuals as Anicet Lavodrama, Napoleon Lightning, Goliath Yeaggin, Cherokee Rhone and Uwe Blab. Memphis State still has one, starting forward Baskerville Holmes. Pittsburgh has another, outstanding sophomore Demetrius Gore. And Illinois has Uwe Blab’s baby brother, Olaf.

Care for some names to remember this year? Try David Rivers of Notre Dame, who might very well be the nation’s best guard. Try Dallas (Situation) Comegys--say Komm-uh-jeez--of DePaul, a sharpshooting forward who is missing only muscle. Try 6-11 Brad Daugherty of North Carolina, and 6-11 shot blocker David Robinson of Navy, and 6-8 Walter Berry of St. John’s, a determined scorer who also picks up an assist every month or so.

Do not rule out Georgetown as championship material, since practically everyone but Ewing is back. Michael Graham is not back, though. The bold and bald enforcer of the ’84 champions lost his eligibility last season and now has decided to play for pay in the Continental Basketball Assn.

It says here that Michigan, Kansas and Pitt will be even better than experts believe them to be, but Kentucky, UCLA and Illinois will be not quite so good as some expect them to be. This, of course, is sheer speculation. North Carolina State and Villanova lost 10 games apiece before tournament play began in their championship seasons. No one accused them later of having disappointing seasons.

The early going will not tell us much. Oklahoma State will be busy playing College of the Ozarks, Arizona has a big date with the University of Denver, and Notre Dame will be walking into an absolute firestorm that includes St. Joseph’s of Indiana, Butler, and Valparaiso, preparing the Irish for the big ones in February against Fordham, Manhattan and Miami of Florida.

Meanwhile, the big news in the basketball-crazy Carolinas is not what Dean Smith or Jim Valvano or Duke or Clemson are doing. It is that the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, alma mater of Cedric Maxwell, has formally requested that references to the school no longer include a hyphen. That’s right--none of that NC-Charlotte business. OK, consider it done. This is the least we can do for you nice folks from the great state of North-Carolina.