Hardcourt to Hard Time

Michael Abraham fidgets on a steel bunk, unable to sleep because of the chain-saw snoring and suffocating flatulence of three fellow inmates sharing a tiny cubicle with him in federal prison.

His wife and two small children are biding time at his parents’ home 80 miles away in Portland. His once-promising career as a women’s college basketball coach is in ruins.

But Abraham, 41, knows it could be much worse.

He could be dead from a yearlong addiction to crack cocaine he developed while coaching at Cal State Northridge. He could be serving far more than the 18-month sentence handed down in December for his role in an interstate drug-trafficking scheme. And he could be reviled by the players whose trust he betrayed but who mostly remain remarkably supportive.

Shame and remorse are Abraham’s bedmates. He relives poor decisions and wasted opportunities. He contemplates the devastation his addiction wrought on others. Three Northridge administrators lost their jobs. His team made the NCAA tournament after his arrest, yet seven players quit or transferred.

He tosses and turns some more, imagining the humiliation his family feels. Abraham’s father is a retired criminal judge. Several of his six siblings work in law enforcement. His wife, Trisonya, is a sports agent.

Tears come when he thinks of his children. Amirah, 4, believes her daddy is at golf college, fooled by the rolling green hills surrounding the minimum-security Sheridan Federal Correctional Institute.

Michael Jr., 21 months, isn’t sure who his father is. Born 10 days before Abraham was led away from the Northridge gym by FBI agents, the toddler turns to his grandfather for comfort when he falls during visits to the prison.

Once Abraham believed a drug user hurts only himself. He knows better now.

“Drugs become so overpowering you don’t think about the repercussions of your behavior on others,” Abraham said. “Never in a million years would I intentionally hurt any of the people who suffered because of my mistakes.

“The amount of pain I caused . . . I deserve more [punishment] than I got.”

*

A frantic and confused Northridge team gathered at Abraham’s home one block from campus the day after his arrest Oct. 27, 1998. His father had posted $100,000 bail. Abraham had some explaining to do.

“I know you don’t want to believe this, but I had a severe drug problem two years ago,” he told the players. “I got involved with some bad people and I was around these people when they dealt drugs.”

The consequences hadn’t sunk in. “So when are you coming back?” one player asked.

“I’m not,” he said.

The players were dumbfounded. All but one came to Northridge after Abraham had kicked his $1,000-a-week drug habit in December 1996, midway through his second season as coach. They never witnessed his emaciated body and erratic behavior. The season opener was a week away.

The charismatic man they called Coach Michael had recruited them from near (Compton, Cerritos and Palmdale) and far (Yugoslavia, Belgium, Sweden and France). They were on the verge of turning one of the nation’s worst Division I programs into a winner.

“I never saw him as a drug addict,” said center Viveca Lof, whom Abraham recruited from Sweden in 1997. “All I saw was a great coach and family man.”

The arresting officers told Abraham he was looking at 10 years to life in prison.

Was it possible?

Neda Milic, a forward Abraham recruited from Serbia, broke into tears. “He was much more than a coach to us,” Milic said. “He was a father figure. We all hung out at his house. We talked to him when we had a problem.”

The next day the team helped the Abrahams pack their belongings. Coach Michael and his family were off to Portland to prepare for trial.

“Some of these girls had come thousands of miles on faith,” Abraham said. “Some had been let down by family members with drug problems.

“Now the person they looked to for strength, their coach, had let them down the same way.”

The team pulled together remarkably well, winning the Big Sky Conference championship and qualifying for the NCAA tournament for the first time in Northridge history. Frozena Jerro, the interim coach, and many of the players called Abraham after nearly every game.

Abraham had turned around the program. But he missed out on the glory when his past came back to haunt him.

*

A marijuana user since high school, Abraham began snorting powder cocaine after resigning as Oregon State’s top assistant in the spring of 1995. The Beavers were coming off a 21-8 season, his fifth with the program, but the entire coaching staff resigned after an internal investigation uncovered minor recruiting violations.

Although no sanctions were imposed, Abraham felt tainted. And it wasn’t the first time. His five-year stint as an assistant at Long Beach State ended in 1989 with a reprimand for talking to a transfer player without the other school’s permission.

“I assumed people believed the worst and went into a funk,” he said. “I believed I should have been a head coach at a big college and instead I was out of a job. Self-pity took over.”

He gratefully but reluctantly accepted the position at Northridge, a downtrodden team coming off a 1-26 season.

“I didn’t like myself, and when you are trying to be a leader of people, that’s awfully tough,” he said.

Northridge went 5-22 in his first season and his drug use escalated. He learned how to convert powder cocaine into crack and began smoking it every night while a pregnant Trisonya slept.

By all accounts, he never involved his players in his drug use. Abraham literally was a closet addict, hiding in the back of his house, lighting a crack pipe in darkness.

During the worst period, he became paranoid. He believed police planted chips in his head and could read his mind. He heard voices even when he was sober. He peeked through his blinds in the wee hours, sky high from smoking crack alone all night.

Somehow, he prepared his team for the 1996-97 season.

“I only went on campus for practice,” he said. “I was tired, I was burned out, so I’d spend all day preparing for practice and sobering up. Coaching was the center of my universe. It became all I cared about at the expense of my wife, my family and my health.”

Players suspected something was wrong. However, it wasn’t until the season ended--three months after Abraham says he kicked his habit--that several players went to Paul Bubb, the Northridge athletic director.

“The reason for going to Paul Bubb wasn’t about drugs,” said Cathy Mahoric, a Northridge player from 1994-97. “It was the erratic behavior. We were saying, ‘Something is going on.’ ”

Players also expressed concerns to Jon Hatemi, a student government leader. Hatemi said he met with Ronald Kopita, the student affairs vice president responsible for the athletic department, and that Kopita told him the problem would be addressed.

Bubb relayed his information to Judith Brame, associate athletic director and Abraham’s supervisor. Brame confronted Abraham about the players’ suspicions, and he lied, telling her he had testicular cancer.

“I talked to several players and I called his former employer at Oregon State,” Bubb said. “Based on the information I had, I did what was reasonable and prudent to do. I didn’t feel [firing Abraham] was a road I could go down.”

Several players, including Mahoric, were in the program when Abraham arrived. He brought in recruits and the playing time of the holdovers decreased. Abraham cut Mahoric after the 1996-97 season.

“My only bitterness is that we lived his addiction every day,” Mahoric said. “Crazy things were always happening. Half the time [at practice] he’d sit in the stands and talk to himself.”

Even players who did not suspect drug use knew something was wrong with their coach.

“I assumed he was sick,” said center Sarah Bell, a junior in 1996-97 who is applying to become a police officer in Oakland. “I was as close to [Abraham] as I’d been to any coach, and I knew he cared about his team and his family. Whatever the problem was, I knew he was going to take care of it.”

Abraham recovered without going through a formal program. In December 1996, an exasperated Trisonya took 4-month-old Amirah and temporarily left him. His father, Philip, had heart bypass surgery scheduled in two months, but he flew to Northridge and moved in with his son for two weeks, never letting him out of his sight.

Abraham said he stopped using cocaine the day his father arrived. Within a few weeks he regained his enthusiasm for coaching and some of the 40 pounds he’d dropped during his addiction.

“I had a lot of hurt inside, but I never used angry tones with him,” Philip Abraham said. “I was never judgmental with him during that tough time.”

Philip Abraham, 71, spent his career putting criminals away as a judge in Multnomah County, which includes Portland. His oldest daughter, Leslie, is a district attorney in Portland. Another daughter is a U.S. marshal and his youngest son is a court clerk.

But he made no secret of his special relationship with Michael. Philip planned to spend his retirement following Michael’s career and rooting for whichever team he might be coaching.

“Michael and his father were best friends,” said Abraham’s mother, Patti. “They still are.”

The love and support of Abraham’s family--the very people he hurt the most--ultimately pulled him through his addiction.

“I see so many guys in prison who don’t have the family I have,” Abraham said. “Nobody was there to catch them. I am so blessed.”

*

Abraham wasn’t able to appreciate the irony, but after his paranoid delusions ceased, authorities really were after him.

Evidence assembled by prosecutors in the drug-trafficking case told this story: A woman named Johnetta Haynes and an accomplice were arrested at Burbank Airport in January 1997, carrying three kilograms of cocaine. The previous summer, Abraham had introduced Haynes’ sister, Jessica Haynes-Jackson, to his cocaine supplier, Javier Rios Espinoza.

Twice the women bought multiple kilos from Espinoza in Abraham’s house, strapped the drugs to their bodies and flew to their hometown of Omaha, where the drugs were distributed on the street by a local gang. Another time, Abraham drove Haynes-Jackson to a motel to meet Espinoza. On each occasion, Abraham said, Haynes-Jackson flipped him $1,000 or less and some free cocaine for his trouble.

By that time, Abraham had racked up nearly $50,000 in credit card debt to support his habit and was involved romantically with Haynes-Jackson, a former college and professional basketball player whom Abraham had known for 10 years.

“Thinking back, I was impotent to what was going on,” Abraham said. “I’d never seen a kilo of cocaine. I was a user who bought $100 worth every day. I just wanted them to give me some so I could get high.”

Once Espinoza and the women developed trust, Abraham said they cut him out of the loop. The deals continued until the arrest of Haynes, who told authorities of Abraham’s involvement and helped set up Espinoza in a sting operation.

Abraham had an opportunity to disclose what he knew when police detained him as his team boarded a plane at Burbank Airport headed for a game against Northern Arizona. He refused to cooperate.

“There are days I wish I would have [cooperated],” Abraham said. “These people knew where I lived. I wasn’t going to put my family at risk.”

Nearly two years passed. Abraham received a two-year contract extension before the 1997-98 season and Northridge went 14-14. He brought in another strong recruiting class and the team was poised for a run at the Big Sky Conference championship.

Then came his arrest. And the dominoes began to fall.

*

In the days after Abraham’s arrest, Northridge administrators denied knowledge of his involvement with drugs. But players who had gone to Bubb in 1997 stepped forward to contradict those statements, and Bubb and Brame resigned within days.

Kopita, already under media fire for cutting four men’s sports in 1997, resigned later in the year.

“I feel responsible,” Abraham said. “My bosses weren’t supposed to be in a situation where they had to decide how to handle this dope addict coach.”

The three administrators still work in education. Bubb is an athletics fund-raiser at Boise State, Brame is still on the Northridge payroll but not in athletics, and Kopita is student affairs director at Wichita State.

In July 1999 in Omaha, Abraham pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. By the time he was sentenced in December, the other defendants were serving time. Espinoza got 10 years, Haynes received 6 1/2 years and Haynes-Jackson got 2 1/2 years.

Prosecutors recommended Abraham serve 68 months, but after hearing impassioned testimony from Philip Abraham and Milic, the player from Serbia, U.S. District Judge Joseph Bataillon opted for the 18-month recommendation of Abraham’s attorney.

Under mandatory minimum federal sentencing guidelines, Abraham would have received at least 10 years had he been found guilty in a trial. His light sentence, Bataillon said, reflected his guilty plea, his lack of a criminal record and his compliance with authorities.

Abraham can be released as early as March with good behavior. The brevity of his sentence struck him during his first day in prison when he met his cellmate, Ron Jordan, a Los Angeles man who is halfway through a 14-year sentence for dealing drugs.

“Ron said we could be friends and hang out together as long as I didn’t whine about my 18-month sentence,” Abraham said. “He told me he’s been in the bathroom that long.”

Abraham works as the prison’s wellness coordinator, developing workout regimens for inmates. “Some of them call me coach,” he said. He exercises and lifts weights, reads voraciously and writes letters.

He also speaks at Oregon high schools through the prison’s teen awareness program.

“You can’t imagine how humiliating it is to be led into a high school gym wearing prison clothes, the same gyms I used to recruit in,” he said. “I ask the kids, ‘Who is an honor roll student? Who is a star athlete?’ When someone raises their hand, I say, ‘I was you.’

“I tell them to guard their dreams. So many people are vulnerable to [drugs] and end up like I did, out of control.”

*

Abraham says he has been clean for nearly four years and swears he will never use cocaine again. But he knows he cannot reverse the damage caused by his addiction.

“There are people less than forgiving, and I fully understand that,” he said. “Even some of the people who have been supportive until now, the parents of players I hurt, maybe they are waiting until I get out of here to let me have it.”

Release from prison will pose new obstacles. Abraham plans to remain in Portland, help his wife with her business and reconnect with his children.

“I’ve gotten over my anger,” Trisonya said. “Him being in prison is hard, but him being on cocaine was harder. Now I see light at the end of the tunnel.”

He wants to continue speaking at high schools. He’d love to coach again, but realizes the stigma might be insurmountable this time.

“I violated a position of trust,” he said. “I understand there will be a tremendous hesitancy to give me a chance.”

Those who know him best believe Abraham deserves another opportunity.

“I worked at a basketball camp, and other players made jokes, saying, ‘Oh, you played for that crack-head coach,’ ” said Lof, the former Northridge player from Sweden. “You explain to them the coach you knew, and it’s hard because people are judgmental.

“I loved playing for him. I walked out of practice every day having learned something new. He belongs on the basketball court. To me, he will always be Coach Michael.”