A Season Inside by John Feinstein

business.”
    Williams is right. Rutgers will lose twenty games and Littlepage will be fired. The new coach will be a Rutgers alumnus, Bob Wenzel. His first pledge as the new coach will be to keep New Jersey players—like Chris Jent—at home.
    Williams’s visit with the Jents is completely different from Brown’s. The Jents, while somewhat overwhelmed by Brown, are clearly comfortable with Williams. Chris, almost silent during Brown’s visit, talks up a storm with Williams. Surprisingly, for a family that would seemingly have seen every recruiting trick there is, the personalized tape goes over big.
    “Hey, that’s really something,” Chris Jent says when the narrator mentions his name.
    Williams stays two hours, more to socialize than to sell. There isn’tmuch new to say. Fraschilla does give Jent four typed pages listing the benefits of Ohio State. It lists all of Williams’s assets and fourteen reasons why Jent should go to Ohio State. It ends with a list of OSU’s great players: “Jerry Lucas … John Havlicek … Kelvin Ransey … Clark Kellogg … Herb Williams … Brad Sellers … Dennis Hopson … Chris Jent … The tradition continues!”
    Williams doesn’t “negative recruit.” He won’t put down another program. But Fraschilla does make this point: “Chris, the reason you should come to Ohio State is Gary Williams. He’s signed on for the long haul. I hope
I’ll
be there a long time, but with assistants you never know. We come and go more. You should never pick your school because of an assistant coach.”
    Fraschilla isn’t talking about himself when he says this. He’s talking about Calipari.
    When the visit is over, Williams feels confident. “I really think I have a good thing going with him,” he says. “If he has a good visit to school and feels comfortable with our kids, I think we’ll get him.”
    Jent will visit October 30, the same weekend that Eric Riley and Mark Baker will visit. That weekend will be as important—if not more important—to Williams than any he will face all season.
    That is the nature of college basketball. No one wins without players. That is why the games on the court are so much simpler than the ones off the court. In recruiting, everyone has an angle, a pitch. Those are the good guys. The bad ones are the cheaters, the ones who pay players and get away with it because the NCAA enforcement staff is so undermanned that it can only catch the amateur cheaters like Marist and Cleveland State. The experts, the ones who have been doing it for years, never get caught. They are too smart and/or too powerful.
    Valvano says it best: “If you are a decent human being on any level you must hate what we do in recruiting.”
    And no one is a better recruiter than Jim Valvano.

4
YOU’RE IN THE ARMY, (OR NAVY) NOW
    The first player chosen in the 1987 NBA draft rounded the corner, car keys in hand, and started for the door.
    “And just where do you think you’re going?” The woman’s voice was stern, though she was fighting a grin.
    “Lunch,” he answered. “If that’s okay with you, that is.”
    “Okay then,” the woman said. “But you still have work to do when you come back.”
    Ensign David Robinson nodded, smiled, and ducked his head going through the door of the trailer. It was a warm November day in south Georgia. Ten days earlier he had signed a contract to play basketball for the San Antonio Spurs that had made him rich, extremely rich. Over an eight-year period, the Spurs would pay him about $26 million. “It’s the kind of money,” he said, “that doesn’t even seem real to me.”
    This, though, was very real. This was King’s Bay, Georgia, the offices of the Resident Officer in Charge of Construction on what would become, during the next three years, a giant submarine base. Robinson, six months removed from the Naval Academy, worked for the ROICC negotiating with contractors. For this, he was paid considerably less than $26