SELECTIVE POLICY : Basketball Trials Open to Few in Media, While NBA Scouts and Sponsors Sit In

Another year, another lockout. Four years ago, it was Stalag Bob. Now, welcome to Fort John, the Rockies.

As it was under Bob Knight in 1984, it remains under John Thompson in ’88.

Reporters said hello and goodby Thursday to the 93 young men trying out for the United States Olympic basketball team. There will be no further contact until Sunday’s practice games in Denver are over, when the dressing room door will swing open--for 15 minutes.

Only selected pool reporters may watch practices, and that concession wasn’t tendered until a late protest by the United States Basketball Writers Assn. and the Associated Press Sports Editors.

Meanwhile, National Basketball Assn. scouts and even representatives of the sponsoring athletic shoe company sit in as guests. The NBA is a partner in exhibitions. The shoe company kicks in something like $500,000 annually.

That raises a question: If this team is supposed to represent America, and if we’re supposed to be proud of being an open society, shouldn’t the selection process be public?

Say, as public as the trials for all the other Olympic sports, which are wide open?

Say, as public as the tryouts for the women’s basketball team, also administered by the same Amateur Basketball Assn. of the U.S.A., which were wide open?

“Maybe you’d better ask Bill Wall,” Thompson rumbled affably. “I came here to pick a team, not to fight with you. (Smiling.) Unless I have to.”

To Wall, executive director of ABAUSA, goes the honor of fronting this policy, which sometimes results in his being labeled anti-press. In fact, he is pleasant and approachable, not to mention very plain-spoken.

“There’s not really a defensible answer,” Wall concedes. “You guys have a job to do. There’s great interest.

“People get angry when I say this, but men’s basketball doesn’t need the publicity. We’re not selling anything.”

If Wall gets to do the explaining, Thompson gets a lot of the blame or credit for designing it, or re-implementing it. Actual responsibility, however, lies with the ABAUSA Council, which is considered the province of two men deemed as progressive, or media-wise, as any in the game: Big East commissioner Dave Gavitt and North Carolina Coach Dean Smith.

But both are former Olympic coaches, too, and aware of the enormity of the task: the haste in which a team must be assembled; the national disgrace which any loss would be held to be. The U.S. team’s Pan-Am upset at the hands of upstart Brazil last year isn’t thought to have loosened anyone up around here.

Not that there haven’t been parallel developments in the college game. As basketball’s popularity has increased, with the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament taking off, basketball programs that were once refreshingly low key have become more like their high-powered, super-controlled football counterparts.

Actually, says Mike Moran, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s director of public information and media relations, the banning of the press goes back to the 1981 National Sports Festival in Syracuse, N.Y.

Until then, all festivals and Olympic trials and attendant practices were been open. At Syracuse, however, Thompson, coaching one of the four basketball teams, decided to close his practices. He pleaded time constraints, but his squad also included Patrick Ewing, his young center from Georgetown, around whom he had already erected a protective shell.

“We had a meeting with John and the other three coaches, Jim Brandenburg, Bob Weltlich and Lute Olson,” Moran said. “I protested, ‘That’s not our policy.’

“John said, ‘I don’t care.’ Unfortunately, the other three coaches went along with it. By the next day, ABAUSA had decided that would be its policy for the festival.

“So we met again with the coaches afterward, back here. They said things like, ‘We can’t chew people out with the press in the gym.’ I heard all the stereotypes: ‘Players are distracted. The press will report if two players get in a fight, or if one player looks better than another.’

“I said, ‘How many of you have closed practices back home?’ The answer was none. I said, ‘Why then are you thrusting this on us?’

“I think it’s a case where they take advantage of us to do something they wouldn’t do at home. Then they go back home and they’re your (reporters’) friend again.”

The USOC has no power to compel ABAUSA to do anything, and so Moran, having fought Wall on this issue for several years with little result other than rancor, says he has pulled back.

“It sticks in my craw,” said Moran in his office here, which is next door to Wall’s ABAUSA office.

“It reflects on us, no matter what Bill says. But Bill is very good about taking the monkey off our back.

“I’m either getting too old to care, or I’ve just lost. I think I’ve just lost.

Of course, there have been spinoffs--such as the handball federation trying to close its practices.

“I asked them, ‘Close them to whom?’ ” Moran said.

Handball succumbed and remains open, a continuing advertisement for the American way.

Olympic Trials Notes

An ABAUSA official walked up to Sports Illustrated’s Alex Wolff, one of Thursday’s pool reporters at practice, and told him he had to stop talking to NBA scouts at the session. . . . Scott Williams, the North Carolina center from Hacienda Heights, left the trials for what was termed a “personal family emergency.” Oregon State guard Gary Payton went home “for further medical evaluation.” No other details were released.

Ens. David Robinson, the former Navy star feared to be badly out of shape, ran rings around J.R. Reid in Thursday’s drills. Also impressive were Pitt center Charles Smith, Auburn’s Chris Morris, Indiana’s Keith Smart and UCLA’s Pooh Richardson. Richardson, point guard on the Pan-Am team, is considered a longshot to keep the job away from Syracuse’s Sherman Douglas, Iowa’s B.J. Armstrong and Purdue’s Everette Stephens, but had several steals playing against DePaul’s Rod Strickland. Said Golden State Warriors personnel director Jack McMahon of Richardson: “Don’t be surprised if he makes it.”

Alonzo Mourning, the high school senior from Chesapeake, Va., played well, if inconsistently, looking not at all awed. He sank a 20-footer and a hook shot in about six attempts, blocked three shots but picked up lots of fouls. However, official measurements here say he’s not 6-feet 11-inches or 6-10, as advertised, but 6-9. . . . Not impressive: Reid and Temple freshman Mark Macon, who shot an unofficial 2 for 11. Said an NBA coach of Macon: “He’s a great player and all, but when they start talking about Oscar Robertson, you could bust out laughing.”