The drought is over

Sporting News, The, Dec 5, 1994 by Steve Buckley

And then there's Gary Trent. People usually do not say "one of the country's best college basketball players" and "Ohio University" in the same breath, but, then again, this is no ordinary college basketball season. Trent shaved off his hair and thus became the Shaq of the MAC (you know, Mid-American Conference), and a nationwide audience took notice last Friday night when he and the Bobcats defeated New Mexico State, 84-80, in overtime.

And then there's Lou Roe, the brilliant UMass forward who scored a career-high 34 points and grabbed 13 rebounds as the Minutemen, my Minutemen, defeated Arkansas, 104-80. Razorbacks star Corliss Williamson had provided some moxie for this game by suggesting that the Hogs' second-teamers could make short work of UMass, and though he later said he was joshing, the point had been made. UMass kicked tail, and Roe was the leading kicker.

A good college basketball coach is an old-fashioned daddy with a birch switch, and most college basketball players are old-fashioned schoolboys who have no desire to have a taste of that switch. Hey, they all want to advance to the NBA one day so they, too, can become selfish one-on-one players, and the way to get there is to listen to their college coaches, the guys with the switches. The result: College basketball has as much choreography as you'll find in the Broadway company of "Miss Saigon."

Oh, sure, college basketball has its stars. Roe. Trent. Certainly Corliss Williamson is a star, though he was pretty much Clueless Williamson in the UMass game. But college basketball still has a way of meshing its stars with its supporting players, and the best example of this is the UMass-Arkansas game. True, Roe was the star. But UMass Coach John Calipari has emerged as one of the nation's leading scholars in the we're-all-in-this-together science, which is why such names as Donta Bright (24 points), Marcus Camby (11 points) and Dana Dingle (10 points) had to be on your tongues by the end of the Arkansas game.

And what of the likes of Carmelo Travieso and funky guard Edgar Padilla? Calipari deploys his lads with a masterful deftness, and this is why UMass is going to be, um, awesome baby, this season.

UMass also is out to clean up some public-relations problems, making the victory over Arkansas even more important. You know how newspapers are always breaking stories about ineligible players? A while back the Boston Globe broke the news that UMass is actually playing with eligible players. It seems the Globe obtained some of the players' grades, and printed them, and there you have it: UMass had players with crummy grades. The school and the NCAA deemed the players eligible, but that wasn't good enough for the Globe. Even Sean McDonough, whose father, Will, is a distinguished sports columnist at the Globe, piped in during the UMass-Arkansas game that he had "a tough time defending the journalism being passed off by the Boston Globe."

Yet the Globe piece, though mishandled, made one vitally important point: These kids need to crack a book once in a while. Calipari is proud his program has a 75 percent graduation rate since he has been aboard, and it's possible the newspaper article will focus more attention on academics. Anyway, senior guard Mike Williams sat out the Arkansas game because he was on academic suspension, an absence that only proved just how powerful the Minutemen are: With Padilla starting in place of Williams, UMass still crunched a defending national champion that was returning all five starters.