College Basketball / Tracy Dodds : Saga of Tito Horford Far From Finished

Here is one of those quotes that was meant to be saved and recycled:

In July of 1985, Houston Coach Guy V. Lewis said of 7-foot recruit Tito Horford, “Tito signed with us, Mr. Jacoby (Fred Jacoby, Southwest Conference commissioner) tells us it’s valid, and Tito says he’s going to be a Cougar. End of story.”

Not quite end of story. At that time, the Houston athletic director was filing informal complaints that Horford, although signed with Houston, was still being recruited by other schools. Since then, Horford was released from the Houston letter, enrolled at Louisiana State to play for Dale Brown, was kicked off the LSU team Nov. 3 for missing practice, spent several weeks hanging around American University in Washington, D.C. (where a friend from the Dominican Republic is playing) and is back in Houston.

Now the news is that University of Houston officials say Horford will join them in making a personal appeal to the NCAA, asking that he be allowed to play for Houston. They plan to make an appearance before the eligibility subcommittee of the NCAA during its annual convention in New Orleans in January.

Michael Johnson, the Houston faculty representative, said, “If we appeal, we want the best opportunity. And we feel in-person is far better than over the telephone.”

Horford, who visited Kentucky, UCLA and North Carolina as well as LSU and Houston, and was considered the top high school recruit in the country a year ago, has yet to play a college game.

Rest assured that this is not the end of the story.

When the official with the familiar face refused to shake hands with Duquesne University Coach Jim Satalin before a game last Saturday, Satalin told his assistants, “We’re in deep trouble.” He was right. Duquesne was about to lose its first game and Satalin was about to witness the most incredibly one-sided officiating he said he had ever run into.

Satalin told reporters after the game that the official, George Clark, kept telling him, “Take that, Atlantic 10,” as his Atlantic 10 team lost at Canisius (a member of the ECAC North Atlantic Conference). Satalin said Clark spent most of his spare moments swapping jokes with Canisius Coach Nick Macarchuk.

“I’m going to report him to the ECAC, report blow by blow what happened,” Satalin said. “He made a mockery of the whole game. I’d like to make sure he never does another game. Period. If we ever see him again, I’ll take my team off the court. He made a joke of it.”

Clark, who was kicked out of the Atlantic 10’s pool of officials, is now an ECAC official.

Women’s basketball is going big time. Jody Conradt, who coaches the undefeated and No. 1-ranked University of Texas women’s team, is quoted by the NCAA News: “There is some serious game-playing being done in recruiting. Things get so out of perspective . . . egos become involved to the point where ‘me’ is at the forefront of the priority list.

“It used to be that a coach could recruit an athlete to her school for the same good reasons that other students consider in choosing a college. That is not true any more.

“Athletes expect more . . . I’m waiting for the time that they expect shoe boxes full of money. Do we really want recruiting to go the same route that it has for men’s basketball?”

After Tulane abolished basketball in the wake of a point-shaving scandal, the coaches and the players scattered. Where are they now? Ronnie Grandison (a product of Playa del Rey’s St. Bernard High) is averaging 17.7 points and nearly 10 rebounds a game for the University of New Orleans; Mike Smith is averaging more than 10 points and six rebounds a game for New Orleans; Marcus Hamilton has broken into the starting lineup at Southwestern Louisiana; Theron Cojoe and Elden Irving are playing lesser roles at New Orleans; Stephen Bean is a backup point guard at Southwestern Louisiana; Whitney Dabney has yet to play for Southern University because of a twisted knee; Darrell Frazier played some for Fairleigh Dickinson before hurting his ankle, and Kenny Scott is playing at the University of Connecticut.

Coach Ned Fowler lives in New Orleans, where he is working in the home building industry and doing some scouting. He’s waiting for the beginning of the retrial for John (Hot Rod) Williams. He says that he still hopes to coach again, in the future. He told Basketball Times, “My story still hasn’t been told.”

Before their game last Saturday, both DePaul Coach Joey Meyer and Georgetown Coach John Thompson were worried about the difference in size of the two teams. Meyer had the big guys. Thompson had the little guys. This time, David beat Goliath, 85-70. Thompson said, “I thought the game would get down to a question of whether we would have to substitute up to match their size or if they would have to substitute down to match our quickness. I think we forced them to put quickness in and when that happens, it usually works to our advantage.”

Meyer was also forced to go to smaller players because his big guys were in foul trouble. Two of DePaul’s front line players, Kevin Holmes and Dallas Comegys, had three fouls in the first half. When Comegys picked up his fourth just 35 seconds into the second half, Meyer picked up his first technical foul as a head coach.

Summing it up, Meyer said, “We just couldn’t stop them. It was hard for us to go after them aggressively because they’re out there playing with four guards and we’ve got three big guys out there chasing them.”

With the shortage of outstanding big men in the college ranks these days, that has to be good news to a lot of coaches.