No Morality Plays in This Game

One team wears blue and white, graduates everybody, never gets investigated by the NCAA, comes off a gorgeous green North Carolina campus and is coached by a churchgoing, suit-and-tie guy who coached and graduated from Army and whose tallest player is named Christian.

The other team wears red and black, used to have an atrocious graduation rate (said to be improving), is being investigated by the NCAA (again), relies heavily on junior-college transfers--athletes so academically inept they couldn’t get into a four-year school as freshmen--comes out of the Nevada desert and the sleaziest town in America and is led by a towel-chewing, sad-eyed, no-tie guy named Tark the Shark who knows nearly every Vegas lounge lizard on a first-name basis.

In this corner, representing much of what is right about scandal-ridden college basketball, the inappropriately nicknamed Blue Devils of Duke, articulate representatives of one of the elite private universities in America.

In this corner, representing much of what is controversial about college basketball, the Runnin’ Rebels of Nevada-Las Vegas, known in some quarters as the Runnin’ Outlaws, inasmuch as a few of their past recruits received as much attention from the FBI as UPI.

Tonight, they play for the NCAA championship. But they are not here to compare school standards or SAT scores or the fact that nine Las Vegas players were ordered suspended by the NCAA for one or two games this season for various offenses (fighting, failure to pay hotel phone and mini-bar bills, non-payment of a loan) while Duke had none. They’re here to play basketball. Period.

It’s easy to view tonight’s game as a match between good and evil. It’s also an oversimplification, because it ignores that, although Duke admissions are undeniably far more selective than UNLV’s, both schools bend their standards to admit athletes. All schools that give athletic scholarships bend admissions standards for athletes. When it comes right down to it, they’re all hypocrites.

But even knowing that, it’s hard not to admire Duke, which is making its fourth Final Four appearance in five seasons. In the imperfect world of college sport, it ranks as the finest blend of big-time basketball and first-class academics. And since Coach Mike Krzyzewski went there eight years ago, not one Duke player has failed to graduate.

“I’m not going to get caught up in this bad-guy, good-guy thing,” Duke center Alaa Abdelnaby said. “It’s UNLV versus Duke, and the things that happen off the court are the things you guys (media) talk about.”

But for the overwhelming majority, those who watch rather than play, it’s never that simple. The media in this country are drawn mostly from the middle class and therefore tend to hold middle-class values. The Duke players, who are more likely to come from middle-class homes than the UNLV players, tend to receive more sympathetic press.

But it’s more than middle-class values that cause people to perceive Duke’s players as the good guys. This, after all, is college basketball, and the Duke players tend to talk and act more like college kids. To media people accustomed to talking to big-time college athletes, many of whom seem never to have read a book, it’s comforting to interview a star who looks at his courses as something more than a necessary evil to stay eligible.

But if you think Duke’s higher admissions standards hinder its recruiting of top players, forget it. Duke has seven players who were McDonald’s high school all-Americas. UNLV has only one, Big West Conference player of the year Larry Johnson, a junior college transfer in his first season.

Although both schools recruit nationwide, they never find themselves recruiting against each other. UNLV recruits in places like Brooklyn. Duke recruits mostly in the ‘burbs.

UNLV, because of its outlaw image, often has trouble landing the bluest blue-chippers. Duke, despite its far more stringent admissions standards, has such a good image that it’s a magnet for kids who are first-rate players and good students.

“The best coaching job in the country is a school like Duke or Stanford,” UNLV Coach Jerry Tarkanian said, “where they have great academic reputations and give full athletic scholarships (Ivy League schools do not). When you walk in the home (as a Duke or Stanford coach), you’re on third base. You’ve got the parents where you want them. It’s an advantage not many universities have.”

As basketball coaches, Tarkanian and Krzyzewski greatly admire each other. Their teams play similar styles. Ask Coach K and Duke’s Robert Brickey about UNLV players such as Stacey Augmon and Johnson, their U.S. teammates at the World University Games, and Coach K and Brickey say what wonderful guys Augmon and Johnson are.

But nobody ever asks UNLV guys about the character of Duke players. Nobody questions if Duke guys are worthy.

“It’s not our responsibility to go out and prove we’re worthy,” said UNLV’s Greg Anthony, so articulate his teammates call him ‘The Senator.’ “It’d be a useless battle. We don’t feel we’re ‘the bad boys.’ That’s ludicrous.”