Pretty Night in New Orleans

By Tom Callahan

College basketball's unexpectedly becoming finish

In the embrace of John Thompson, 6-ft. 5-in. Fred Brown seemed unimaginably little, childlike and blameless. For a moment, so did college basketball, which is saying something. These days, a coach or recruiter is considered honest if he has never stolen a stove that's still hot. Then, in one hug last week, there was redemption. The losing coach, Georgetown's mountainous Thompson, wrapped his arms nearly twice around Brown, the Georgetown player who had just thrown a pass and the championship away. As if Brown were on a ledge, Thompson held him tenderly beside the court, while joyful North Carolina players and Gentleman Coach Dean Smith snipped the nets from the baskets. And Thompson whispered: "Fred, this is what it's all about." For one pretty night, it seemed so.

Leading up to the Final Four in New Orleans, the National Collegiate Athletic Association news had been dominated by the candor of Notre Dame Coach Digger Phelps--"revelation" was the word used in the dispatches, but it was hardly that. He merely said that the going rate for a player on the black market, usually situated in a black neighborhood, was $10,000 per year of his college career. Phelps knew coaches who were buying, and though he named no names, the name for men who make their living cruising the ghettos and romancing children is well known. A seamier sector in sport than college basketball can hardly be imagined.

Another dark side of the sport this year has been the unkindness shown Georgetown's 7-ft. freshman center, Patrick Ewing, including a death threat. Although Ralph Sampson of Virginia is two years older and 4 in. taller, Ewing is the awesome figure in college basketball now. He figures to play Bill Russell to Sampson's Wilt Chamberlain in pro seasons ahead. But for the present, Ewing has been a focus of cynicism. Records have been broken this year for cruelty in the stands, and the normal expression on Ewing's face has been a bolt of anger. When

Georgetown played in his hometown of Boston, the Boston College fans chanted: "Ewing can't read .. . Ewing can't read." To charges that the university made a mockery of its academic standards by admitting him, Georgetown President Father Timothy S. Healy answers: "Had Patrick Ewing been a Washington resident and gone through our Upward Bound [remedial-education] program, as he did in Boston--and had he been 3 ft. high--we'd have taken him. If he were 3 ft. high, nobody would have fussed."

Ewing is not 3 ft. high, and the fussing around Georgetown throughout the tournament was enough to prompt Coach Thompson to house his team 87 miles from New Orleans in Biloxi, Miss., making him the first black on record to move to Biloxi for peace of mind. First-black distinctions are not what move him, however. When someone asked how it felt to be the first black coach in the Final Four, Thompson snorted: "I resent the hell out of that question. It implies I am the first black to be accomplished enough and intelligent enough to get here."

Rancor of all kinds was thick before the final. Then the game began, and the rancor melted. The real surprise was not how stirring every minute of the game was, but how appealing every participant in it seemed, even the coaches. "I was outcoached tonight," Smith tried to say in victory afterward, but Thompson wouldn't let him. "That man's forgotten more basketball than I know."

Smith had won more N.C.A.A. tournament games than any other active coach, but in six previous Final Fours had neglected to win the championship. So no body begrudged him his moment above the basket after 20 years. Or one all-out "hugger" -- "that's when you run into the dressing room afterward," he explained, "and hug everybody." To Smith, "every body" naturally included Thompson. The warmth between them traces to when Thompson was the high school coach and guardian of a player recruited by Caroli na. Smith's concern for the boy, who never achieved much as a player, touched Thompson. Later, when Smith coached the 1976 Olympic team in Montreal, Thompson assisted. "In a sense," he said, characterizing his narrow loss to Smith, "the student wanted to show the teacher he knew a little bit about basketball."

The 63-62 game was physical and yet becoming. Ewing flared at James Worthy once, but they patched it up quickly. Worthy, who is 6 ft. 9 in., ran down Georgetown's 6-ft. 3-in. guard Sleepy Floyd one time and then worried whether his friend was all right; both come from Gastonia, N.C. Carolina Guard Jimmy Black had some rough words with Floyd during the game but only sweet ones for him later. And Brown, who mistook Wor thy for a teammate and in a horrifying misfire tossed his team's last chance away, stood up bravely to waves of questions.

"My peripheral vision is usually good," he said quietly over and over, "but it failed me." Thompson, observing from across the locker room, said softly: "It's a hard lesson in a national championship, but it's part of his maturity and educational devel opment." For a moment, education re turned to college basketball.

On the cover of the Georgetown basketball brochure, the five graduating seniors on the team may look a little silly standing around a piano in warmups and mortarboards, but the coach does not think so. He keeps a deflated basketball on his desk back at school, symbolizing that the air can be let out of a basketball career any time. When the players arrived home, a message was waiting for Brown on a banner draped on a campus building.

It read: FREDDY. YOU HELPED GET US THERE. YOU KNOW WE CARE. This is what it's all about. --By Tom Callahan

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