He’s Making the Best of Another Shot

You have to be good in this life to be known only by your first name--Bing, Ike, Babe, Rocky. But you have to be really good to be known only by your initial. I can think, offhand, of only a couple of sports figures who made it. The Big O, Oscar Robertson, and, of course, the super-great Dr. J.

And, now comes Quintin Dailey of the Los Angeles Clippers, who makes our all-alphabet team and gets the 17th letter all to himself.

There wasn’t much Quintin Dailey couldn’t do with a basketball. Shoot it, pass it, dribble it, steal it, post up with it, score with it.

But Quintin became known for another, more melancholy phase of his life. There was a time when he was not known as Q Dailey but as San Quentin Dailey, when the fans in the stands held up signs jeering, “What are you doing here, Quintin? This ain’t the girls’ dormitory!”

You have heard of guys who got famous as the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo or the man who shot Jesse James? Well, Quintin came into focus as the one who made San Francisco drop basketball.

That’s the U. of San Francisco we’re talking here. Where Pete Rozelle got his start. Where Bill Russell and K. C. Jones and Ollie Matson came from. The Jesuit school that won back-to-back Final Fours and 60 games in a row on the basketball court back in the ‘50s.

Quintin Dailey was supposed to return USF to past glories. Lord knows, he had the game for it. Almost every basketball school in the country wanted him when he was a high school phenom in Baltimore. At USF, he led the team to 71 wins in 3 seasons and was averaging 20.5 points a game.

Then something so inexplicable happened that the resultant uproar not only rocked the campus, it split it.

What happened was that the resident supervisor at a women’s dormitory, a nursing student, reported that a 6-foot 4-inch basketball player whom she identified as Quintin Dailey showed up in her bedroom at 3 o’clock one morning, demanding sexual favors.

What happened next wasn’t rape exactly--no one got raped--but the woman said that Quintin pressed unwanted attentions on her, together with threats of what he might do if she didn’t comply.

He had been drinking, she said, and she had to cajole him out of it with kisses and caresses he insisted upon until he finally fell asleep and she escaped.

No one could believe it and no one ever got Quintin’s side of the story because he steadfastly denied any knowledge of it until he finally conceded that he had been in the woman’s room and pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of aggravated assault. He said he wanted to get probation and get on with the National Basketball Assn. draft and sign with the Chicago Bulls, who wouldn’t take him with a criminal charge hanging over his head.

It was an ugly story. Quintin had been a popular big man on campus and a disc jockey on the university radio station up to that time. But when the school investigated the basketball program in the wake of Dailey’s dorm excursion, corruption after corruption was uncovered.

When the investigation was over, Father John LoSchiavo, the school’s president, announced that USF was dropping its Division I basketball program with all its proud traditions because of “the damage that has been done to the university’s most priceless assets, its integrity and its reputation.”

Quintin was a marked man. The law forgave him, but society didn’t. When he got to Chicago, women’s rights groups were waiting with their pickets.

A popular local columnist wrote: “I can’t help believing that if Daileyweren’t a basketball player, if he were just another creep off the streets, he would still be learning what a chamber of horrors a hall of justice can be.”

Recalls Quintin, ruefully: “One night at Sacramento, they had a guy in a basketball suit with my number on it chasing a guy in a nurse’s costume through the stands.”

Or, they would hang up signs saying, “Hey, Quintin, shouldn’t you have 10 other digits in your number?”

They wouldn’t relent even though the victim in the case had written the court:

“I have no sympathy for Quintin Dailey, but I do not feel a jail sentence is called for. He made threatening remarks . . . but he did not seriously hurt me, use a weapon or rape me. I feel lucky that I wasn’t seriously harmed and feel it is because it is not Quintin Dailey’s character to behave violently.

“He certainly could have raped me because of his strength and size. He has certainly not escaped this whole thing unpunished. He is now marked for life and it is bound to have some negative consequences in his future. I feel jail is not an answer. . . . Probation will serve as a constant reminder of his mistake and I highly doubt it will ever happen again.”

This did not mollify those eminent jurists, the basketball fans. They continued to hound Dailey.

“Even my wife said that before she met me, she had this horrible image of me,” says Dailey, shaking his head.

He needed a friend. So, like a lot of young athletes, he turned to an enemy: drugs.

“I had to feel good about myself again, to destroy this negative image even I was beginning to have.”

Adds Quintin: “I’m not making excuses but, you see, both my parents died when I was 13. I had no real role model, no direction. I had to learn life by trial and error as I went along. I erred a lot.

“People were scared of me because of this reputation. But I was the one scared. I was scared of everything. I was scared of failure.”

Some people do cocaine in party situations. Dailey did it in a locked lonely room. He wanted to get rid of the world, not join it.

Getting rid of the drug habit was not as hard as getting rid of the reason for it, Dailey says. He went to a rehab center to get that monkey off his back.

The other one stayed in the stirrups longer but is finally falling off. USF has even dipped a toe back in the basketball picture.

And Dailey has never had another episode even remotely resembling the nightmarish one of Dec. 21, 1981.

The basketball skills had never really left. Dailey can still do more things with a basketball than most players and is still a highly respected and useful member of the L.A. Clippers, whom he joined as a free agent 2 years ago after he had drifted down into the head-knocking, elbow-bashing, what-foul? bush leagues.

Happily married now and the father of an infant daughter he adores, Dailey is recognized as one of the Clippers most available for community service. On a team, clustered--if not cluttered--with young, inexperienced players, he is a steadying influence.

“I want to be kind of an explosive sixth man, one who comes off the bench like a (John) Havlicek and takes charge of the game in bursts.”

He does that so well, he is the team’s leading scorer, per minutes played, with 303 points to date, a point every minute and a half. The Clippers take their cue from Q and, you might say, mind their P’s and Q.

One thing’s for sure: The Q doesn’t stand for quit.