Commentary : Was It Sincerity or Smoke Screen?

Jim Valvano is such a charming fellow, his skeptics ask to be charmed. He is what we would like a college basketball coach to be. He knows better than most what goes on out there in the swamp of college athletics.

After all, when he climbed from Iona to North Carolina State, he said he wanted to prove he could do it without indulging in what goes on out there.

“It had nothing to do with money,” he said on the brink of his first season in the really big time. “It had to do with the same things as when I got into this business as a coach: To see if I could coach on the highest level with the same philosophy.”

He was among the best and the brightest. It would be a shame if he turned out to be like the others.

In contrast to coaches who build walls of secrecy around their players and a pedestal beneath their own feet, Valvano was warm and open and funny. Not only did he say good things, but he also said the right things and expressed the right concerns. In a business in which coaches tell players to shut their textbooks on the airplane because they should be concentrating on the game, Valvano had perspective.

He upgraded tutoring for athletes. He harped on grades and going to class.

“I want the best of all possible worlds,” he said. “I want kids to be students. I want them to talk about things besides ‘the backdoor.’ On the planes, I want them to talk about the world problems, of oil. I want them to watch the presidential debates on TV and talk about that. I want the packed arena, the band playing, cheerleaders, and doing it with kids who are being educated and care about society.

“I want that. And a national championship.”

Two years later, he won the national championship in 1983 with a team that had no logical right of coming close. He was a brilliant coach. He could recruit; he could prepare a team, and he could baffle the opposition from courtside. And he could be charming.

He gave tribute to his father, who had spent his working life as a high school basketball coach. The late Rocco Valvano used to tell young people at Seaford High School in New York: “You can win every game and still be a loser. It’s all in how you go about winning. And you can lose every game and still be a winner.”

And Jim would raise those sentiments to a higher level just as he had raised his coaching. He celebrated his championship by endowing a scholarship at Rutgers, where he got his degree inEnglish.

He would write on the blackboard this puzzler to demonstrate the precise use of the language:

“I hit him in the eye yesterday.”

Insert “only” before any word in the sentence and see how the meaning is changed.

That’s the subtlety with which he coaches.

When his team went to the Final Four in 1983, it stayed in the same hotel as North Carolina State’s fans. He let his players talk to the media every day so they would get something more out of the experience than merely basketball. When they won, he called it “a triumph of sanity.”

He kidded himself and told of flying first-class across the country one day when the man next to him advised that the caviar wasn’t good. “Hey, I don’t want caviar,” Valvano related. “It would bother me if I ever got that way. I don’t ever want to say, ‘The caviar isn’t good.’ ”

He told his players that someday basketball would end, and that when they went to work, there would be no applause when they went to their desks.

That was what the school was looking for, said Dr. Robert Bryan, the philosophy professor who was chairman of the search committee that found Valvano. “I must say, Coach Valvano understood the nature of intercollegiate athletics and that athletics must play a subsidiary role in the students’ lives,” Bryan said. “I feel he is sincere.”

And normally critical listeners suspended disbelief. But questions about the honesty of the program have been creeping in for three years. Now the jacket of a book about to be published questioning the integrity of Valvano’s program has turned up. A former student manager, who was a source, stated his charges on television. A former professor detailed a claim that grades were altered on a transcript, Chris Washburn’s transcript.

Washburn was enrolled with an SAT combined score of 470. The average for entering freshmen that year at Nort Carolina State was 1,030. A combined 470 means that the outlook for college success would be very bleak. “I would not take a youngster who I did not think had a good chance of being successful at college,” Valvano said then.

Washburn was ineligible as a freshman because he stole a stereo and slapped a female student. Now Richard Lauffer, recently retired chairman of physical educaton at State, says that he saw three no-credit grades on Washburn’s transcript changed to Ds. He said the chancellor of the university told him that Valvano was too powerful to buck.

Washburn left for the NBA after his sophomore season and has spent time in drug rehabilitation.

Now Lauffer says the basketball program displayed no more interest in the education of Charles Shackleford, who dodged classes for three years before going pro. “He should never have been in school,” Lauffer said.

Just because there are accusations doesn’t mean the accusations are true.

The author of the book, Peter Golenbock, established a reputation for being sloppy with facts in a series of kiss-and-tell baseball autobiographies.

The former student manager, John Simonds Jr., tried to sell his information elsewhere before finding an ear.

The university has invited the NCAA to see for itself.

But when the Lexington Herald-Leader won a Pulitzer Prize for its expose of basketball at Kentucky, the NCAA’s investigation found nothing.

Because the sources of the allegations may be unsavory doesn’t mean they don’t have something to say. I hope it isn’t so, but we have learned to be skeptical about even those we regarded as the best and the brightest. That’s the tragedy.