COLLEGE BASKETBALL : Vitale: Mind-Blowing, T.O.-ing, On-the-Go-ing

Last week was a fairly typical one for Dick Vitale, a guy who never met a modifier he didn’t like.

Over to you, Dickie Baby.

“OK, baby, better take a T.O. pronto to listen to this absolutely, amazingly brilliant inside info on the fantastic beauty of college basketball,” Dickie Baby said. “It just blows my mind.”

All right, so Vitale didn’t actually say that , but he could have. Tune in a college hoop game just about any night of the week, either on ABC or ESPN, and you’re going to hear him say a whole lot of things about a whole lot of things.

Tracked down at his home in Bradenton, Fla., Vitale took a brief T.O.--timeout, to the uninitiated--to review the state of the game and where he has been and will soon be discussing it. The travel schedule looked daunting, but not in Vitalian terms.

Vitale began with a game on Sunday in Champaign, Ill., an ABC matchup between Indiana and Illinois. Monday night, Vitale put on a mike for ESPN in Evanston, Ill., for Purdue and Northwestern. Wednesday night, he was in Chapel Hill, N.C., for North Carolina State against North Carolina on ESPN. Then he went home to Bradenton.

Vitale’s weekend itinerary includes an Illinois-Michigan game for ABC Sunday in Ann Arbor, Mich., preceded by a speech today for the Washington Speakers Bureau in Ann Arbor.

The 50-year-old 1962 Seton Hall graduate is developing quite a following for what he does on television. While Vitale may not be everybody’s cup of java, well, remember, basketball is supposed to be fun, and Dickie Baby is humorous, if nothing else. Love him or loathe him, Vitale is having a ball. He explained his feelings in a typical Vitale stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.

“I absolutely love what I am doing,” Vitale said. “To get paid handsomely, sit at courtside, people mailing me T-shirts with my picture on it now, it was amazing, down in Iowa just recently, all the kids had face-masks on, made of Dick Vitale, go to Wisconsin, the Bleacher Creatures had my name spelled out on the front of the T-shirts they were wearing.”

Try to imagine how this makes Vitale feel.

“It’s just blown my mind,” he said.

While acknowledging that some might wonder if such a thing truly has occurred already, Vitale said he is thrilled to the gills to be living in the old U.S. of A.

“I tell people all the time, only in America could a guy who can’t speak English make a living on TV, a guy who can’t write a sentence have a book that makes the best-seller list. We’ve got the greatest country in the world.”

Vitale began his broadcasting career with ESPN in 1979 after he was fired in his second season of coaching the Detroit Pistons. A former high school basketball coach in East Rutherford, N.J., Vitale was later an assistant at Rutgers and the coach for four years at the University of Detroit.

But talking, not coaching, is Vitale’s real love. Some samples:

--On the NCAA tournament: “It’s Russian roulette, the one-game shot. You don’t have four out of seven, it’s one game, baby, roll it, play it, bad day, pack the bags, go home.”

--On Oregon State’s Gary Payton: “I’ve always liked Rumeal Robinson as my point guard, but based on numbers and looking at the achievements of Payton, I have to say, ‘Move over, Rumeal, baby. You’ve got to move over. It’s got to be Gary Payton.’ ”

--On Loyola Marymount’s Bo Kimble: “He’s starting to send a message out he’s for real. He can shoot the rock. He can stroke it, shoot it, just do it.”

--On Purdue Coach Gene Keady (also UCLA’s Jim Harrick): “He’s done an absolutely brilliant job.”

And so on. How long can this go on? Better figure for as long as the season lasts. And what kind of season is it, Dickie Baby?

“Wild, zany, unpredictable--you can’t project who to project,” Vitale said. “It just blows my mind.”

More Vitale: He doesn’t believe that USC Coach George Raveling will leave at the end of the season to take the coaching job at Miami. Vitale said he thinks Raveling is determined to accomplish something positive at USC.

“That’s been an amazing story for me, probably one of the biggest enigmas and mysteries that I see in college basketball over the last five years,” Vitale said. “I thought it was Lock City for big-time basketball when George Raveling was named coach at USC. I thought that was a perfect marriage. I thought he was made to order for the whole scenario.

“He just hasn’t been able to get the break, the golden chance. Maybe, my feeling is, the win over UCLA, if they can build on that, that could be a stepping stone. I’m a believer in George. I think the guy is really a great salesman, a great communicator, a great motivator. And if they get O’Bannon . . . “

Vitale was referring to the highly regarded Ed O’Bannon of Artesia High.

Geometry lesson: Wake Forest Coach Dave Odom employed a triangle-and-two defense in an attempt to take away the three-point shooting of Georgia Tech’s Dennis Scott.

The Yellow Jackets’ Brian Oliver hit seven three-point shots in 10 attempts and scored 31 points in a 79-70 victory. Scott scored 17 points, despite a bruised shoulder.

“It backfired on us,” Odom said.

And the reaction of Georgia Tech Coach Bobby Cremins?

“I thought it was a pretty good gamble,” he said.

Young and restless: Yes, Indiana Coach Bobby Knight has six blue-chip freshmen on his team. No, Knight isn’t wait patiently for them to mature.

“To me, that’s all bull,” Knight told Skip Myslenski of the Chicago Tribune. “Now, let me ask you a question. As long as you’ve been around sports, do you think that coaches as a group are as protective about their futures as any group you’ve been around?

“See, I do. It’s ‘We’re too young.’ ‘We’re not big enough.’ ‘We’re not deep enough.’ There are more reasons why we aren’t going to be good enough, but none of them to me are acceptable. We lost not because we were young, but because we didn’t handle the ball well. You may say that’s because we’re young. I don’t believe that.

“You lose because you play badly, not because you’re young, or not big or not deep. All those are excuses, not reasons.”