Some Big B for Big D : Final Four Has Brought Dallas Into Frontcourt of Collegiate Basketball

Texas, that is. The new basketball capital of the world, for the weekend at least.

You don’t believe it? Drive down the Stemmons Freeway, past Reunion Arena. It’s the blockhouse with the letters 20 feet high spelling out “NCAA Final Four,” with the map of the state next to it and a star over this little bit of paradise.

How does that sit with the promoters of the old kingpin, spring football?

Does anyone care?

In a word, nope.

Stories about the Horned Frogs’ new tailback sensation and the comeback of that old A&M; boy at outside linebacker after shooting his toe off in a hunting accident have been relegated to the back pages.

What is on people’s minds this week is Danny Manning’s sleight of hand, or whether Denny Crum’s experience will be the key. Or since almost everyone in town has been frozen out of tickets and will have to watch it on TV, on concerns closer to home.

“Do people here care?” Ira Zack, the owner of Belle Star, a country music bar a few miles up the Stemmons, is asked.

“We’re trying to figure a way to suck some business out of it,” he says.

Downtown, the spirited newspaper competition between the Times Herald and the Morning News continues, with the tournament held happy hostage.

The Morning News has guest columns by Billy Packer and Al McGuire.

The Times Herald counters with Dick Vitale.

The Morning News hires a free-lance writer named Joe Rhodes, puts him in a van and sends him all over the country. He writes stories all season long that run next to a box in which are enumerated his days on the road, 132; teams watched, 185; states been through, 33; miles driven, 25,067; flat tires, 1, and estimated total games, 142.

You see that many games and you’ll be reduced to estimating, too.

Rhodes files his final impressions in a two-page layout, including:

--Best interviews--1. Bob Knight; 2. John Thompson.

--Worst interviews--1. Dana Kirk; 2. No one else comes close.

--Most obnoxious mascot--Georgetown. “They’ve got some guy in a bulldog suit who spends the whole game dancing around with his dukes up, as if he’s about to punch somebody out, usually the other team’s mascot. I hate him.”

--Coach most likely to be arrested for impersonating a 5-year-old throwing a temper tantrum--Mike Pollio, Virginia Commonwealth.

--Coach outfitted for Victory Tour--George (Rocket Man) Raveling, then of Iowa, now of USC.

All in all, a good time is had by all, and that’s even before the first coach tells the first lie to his opposite number over at Loew’s Anatole.

Watching the coaches schmooze in the hotel lobbies is a highlight of any Final Four. Since Loew’s has an atrium, not just a lobby, with enough air space to suspend a 747, this year’s congregating may be memorable.

Predictably, it’s truly Texas-sized.

I don’t care ‘bout my gas ‘n’ oil, long as I got my Darrell Royal, dangling from the windshield of my car.

--Local ditty, circa 1965 One thing you almost have to live there to realize, the University of Texas, Texas A&M;, the big state schools are so huge, they turn out so many students. Dallas has SMU and Fort Worth has TCU but they’re hugely outnumbered by Texas and Texas A&M; people. The hometown team everyplace in Texas is the University of Texas.

--Novelist Dan Jenkins,

a native of Fort Worth That is, it would have been predictable, had it occurred to anyone 25 years ago that Dallas would ever care a fig about having this event.

In Texas, basketball was that ball that bounced up, instead of doing funny things like the pigskin on the Darrell Royal Show. It was played by defensive tackles who never filled out, or halfbacks who didn’t want to lose all their conditioning in the off-season, or inner-city kids interested in scholarships from Big Ten universities.

In Texas, the earth stood still for one day each year, when OU (Oklahoma, if you have to ask) came down to the Cotton Bowl to play UT after the boosters had staged a memorable pregame drunk resulting in incarceration for many of them.

“They’d arrest literally hundreds of them,” said Bill Blakeley, former basketball coach of North Texas State, of the American Basketball Assn.’s Dallas Chaparrals, and of several area high school and junior college teams.

“People would throw bricks through windows. They’d be all juiced up, get in fights. It’s really calmed down. The last few years, they’re probably arresting 25-30 at most.

“When I was coaching at St. Mark’s High School here in Dallas, I had some assistants who said they wanted to go down and observe. They were observers, neutrals, and someone threw a brick through their car window. That was the last time they observed.

“Basketball at that time was simply tolerated. At high schools, the football coach a lot of the times was the athletic director, and if a kid didn’t play football, he wasn’t allowed to play basketball.

“They had off-season weight programs which they’d make the kids participate in while they were playing basketball. Lots of times they’d only allow one hour for basketball practice. It was really a stepchild.

“Was acceptance of blacks a problem? Oh definitely. It took a while. Took a while is not the right terminology. It was a real, real tough hill to climb.

“I think I was the first coach in the state of Texas to start five black kids, at Christian College of the Southwest in Dallas. I had other coaches calling me up, guys I had known a long time but maybe I hadn’t heard from in a long time. They thought I was young, coming out of high school, that I didn’t know, maybe.

“They’d say: ‘Hey, Bill, maybe you could start two blacks and three whites at home, and when you go on the road, you can start more blacks.’ I couldn’t understand that. I was going to start my best five guys.

“There were some places still segregated. If we went into a place and they didn’t want black kids, we just got up and left. That was still happening in the mid-1960s.

“That definitely held the game back. All the good black players in Texas high schools, and there were an abundance of them, all of them wanted to go out of state. Black kids had their own state tournament. They weren’t part of the Texas Interscholastic League. They went down to Prairie View.”

The 20th Century was lurking out there somewhere. In Houston, Guy V. Lewis built a big-time program and proved it to the world one night in 1968 at the Astrodome, where Elvin Hayes and the Cougars upended Lew Alcindor and UCLA.

Guy V. and the Cougars were independents at the time, and not fully accepted throughout Texas. But several years later, the NBA brought a failed San Diego franchise, with Hayes on it, back to Houston. Elvin didn’t last, but the Rockets did.

The failed Chaparrals migrated south to San Antonio, where there were military bases full of potential fans who welcomed them. When the Spurs survived and were merged into the NBA, the league suddenly had a Texas rivalry.

And if all those other burgs were going to have representation in this NBA, how about Big D?

Reunion Arena was built. The Mavericks came into existence as an expansion franchise. Six years later, with the huge early promise having ominously flattened out and the team struggling along, several games above .500, the Mavericks still lead the NBA in attendance.

Jenkins said: “Population shifts are part of it. There’s 10,000 people a week moving in from Cleveland.

“Dallas is a pain in the rear end to me. Dallas isn’t even in Texas anymore. It’s like Atlanta and Houston, one of those new cities, plastic. You dig down a couple of layers and you can still find Texas.”

The Mavericks have been embraced by the chic crowd from North Dallas, and the corporations. They had their moment in February, when they were host to the NBA All-Star Game, before which a Dallas native, Spud Webb, won the slam-dunk contest.

After that, the regular season seemed a little on the drab side, and Dallas reporters started to buzz-saw the Mavericks’ front office--”definitely a first,” said Blakeley--for its draft record: Taking Kiki Vandeweghe, whom the Mavericks couldn’t sign; taking Mark Aguirre instead of Isiah Thomas or Buck Williams; taking Bill Garnett fourth in the first round, or at all; taking Sam Perkins instead of Charles Barkley.

Also Dave Bliss, who built SMU into a power, is lamenting the difficulty of drawing fans, and looking elsewhere. And Guy V. has just stepped down. And Eddie Sutton has left Arkansas, and this year, of all years, the Southwest Conference went to hell and wound up with one NCAA berth, which was one less than even the Pac-10 got.

But they can work on those problems some other time. Basketball is having its bar mitzvah in the Lone Star State. Get along, little dogies.