Moving forward: just months after reluctantly leaving tragedy-stricken Baylor, Lawrence Roberts is raising his profile—and starting to smile again—at Mississippi State

Sporting News, The, Jan 26, 2004 by Mike DeCourcy

The game is not over, not officially, but Lawrence Roberts is out of here. The officials are over by the scorer's table, straining their eyes to view a tiny TV monitor and make certain the Kentucky basket should count. Roberts saw the net jostle, heard the buzzer sound and did not need to look at the scoreboard to know what that meant. He learned a lot in two seasons at Baylor, but no lesson was reinforced more regularly than how it feels to lose. Yep, this is it.

So why is this different? Why does Roberts stride hastily to the corner of the court and into the tunnel, while his Mississippi State teammates and coaches wait behind for the inevitable? See, this time his team had more than pride at stake. This time, his team had a chance. The Bulldogs entered the early-but-immense Southeastern Conference game with 13 victories and no defeats. Their coaches devised a sound game plan. They also had the best player on the floor.

Roberts' evening began brilliantly, with the arena lights darkened and the public-address announcer shouting his name above a screaming capacity crowd. Dick Vitale, ESPN's star analyst, was just 20 feet away, preparing to describe the game. Picturing himself in such a delicious setting was impossible four months ago, when everything Roberts knew about college basketball was poisoned by events as implausible as they were horrific.

Roughly two hours later, with Roberts owning 15 points and 14 rebounds and Mississippi State ahead by one, he deflected a Kentucky inbounds pass. It would have been another big play in a spectacular comeback, but Kentucky forward Chuck Hayes reached behind Roberts to knock the ball toward teammate Erik Daniels. It was Daniels' unchallenged layup that drove Roberts toward the exit.

"Two seconds is what decided the ballgame," Roberts says. "Couldn't hold off 2 seconds. That's going to hurt"

A lot can happen in 2 seconds. A life can end. A life can change. Roberts knows this. He never figured to be anywhere near this place, Humphrey Coliseum, on this January night. Had nothing disturbed his plans--his world--he would have been in Waco, Texas, probably playing video games, with four more days before Baylor would face a visit from Bob Knight and Texas Tech.

He would go back if he could. Roberts would go back to Baylor's perpetual rebuilding, back to his team being subjugated by the Big 12's heavyweights, back to being the best power forward nobody ever saw on TV, back to playing for Dave Bliss. Because if he were back there, that would mean none of the events that made summer 2003 so torturous actually would have occurred. That would mean Patrick Dennehy would be alive, Carlton Dotson would be flee, and Bliss still would be held in esteem by coaching colleagues and basketball fans.

Instead, Roberts had to start over at Mississippi State. He, of course, hadn't imagined this for himself. But it has had its rewards, including this: the sharp pain of losing a big game with the Bulldogs has supplanted the hollow feeling of yet another Baylor defeat. It's something.

Dennehy still was a missing person, gone more than a month, when Roberts arrived in Orlando in late July. It was obvious something horrible had happened back in Waco, and that Dotson might know what. The possibility that one teammate had harmed another turned their circumstance into nuclear fuel for the 24-hour news machine and threw Baylor into chaos.

Removing himself from that turmoil--spending a few days in Florida and competing for a position on the U.S. Pan American Games team--might have seemed a welcome diversion for Roberts. It wasn't powerful enough. "Once I got down there, I was thinking about the whole situation" Roberts says. "I was just ready to go home."

He was bothered by knee tendinitis while practicing against big men such as Missouri's Arthur Johnson and Arizona State's Ike Diogu. Roberts was bothered more by his struggle to concentrate. "It did appear he was looking for answers to something," says Washington coach Lorenzo Romar, an assistant for the U.S. team. "He'd have some good days; some that were bad." Roberts had played ferociously during the initial trials in Colorado Springs, which placed him among the 17 finalists for the Pan Am team. He seemed a likely choice for the final roster. Instead, he went home to Texas.

Roberts says the reason for his failure to make that squad was "about 60/40, me dealing with the (Dennehy) situation more than the knee. I could have played through the injury, but I was just at the point of, 'Where am I going to go from here?'"

In late July, Dennehy was found dead in a quarry, two bullets in his skull. Dotson was arrested and charged with murder; his trial is scheduled to begin March 22. Reporters picked through the Baylor program and uncovered NCAA violations, which resulted in Bliss' resignation. His panic as that day approached led to him being caught on tape asking an assistant coach and a player to suggest Dennehy was dealing drugs, the idea being to cover up Bliss' violations.