For St. Joseph's Fans, an End Too Soon

For St. Joseph's Fans, an End Too Soon

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East Rutherford, N.J.

Dwayne Jones's voice was far away as he cradled his head in his hands, his 6-foot-11 frame curled into a small ball of hurt.

"It ain't gonna hit me till I ain't got practice tomorrow."

Mr. Jones, the center on the Saint Joseph's University basketball team, was immersed in the grief that accompanies a heartbreaking loss. This loss, in the Elite Eight round of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's men's basketball championship tournament, ended not only his season but also a skein of wins that had become a rare feel-good story in yet another troubled year in college sports.

In a few days or weeks -- perhaps by the time you read this -- Mr. Jones, his teammates, and Saint Joe's fans everywhere will realize that the loss will not diminish the magic of an undefeated regular season. During its run, which fell one victory short of entry into the Final Four, a group of kids did what their coach and their fans asked, taking their university to the front pages of newspapers and magazines across the country -- not for cheating or abusing their success, but for winning with a level of dignity and class that even opponents praised.

Along the way, though, the players were sucked into the whirlwind that is big-time college sports. They had to get through two and a half months of cameras and reporters in their faces. They missed a solid month of classes. They found themselves inside a bubble of public attention that none of their classmates are likely to know.

Was the experience worth it to them? Absolutely, they say. They loved every minute of it, except for the bitter end. Was it worth it to Saint Joseph's? Of course. The university will be reaping the benefits of this season for years to come.

But the Hawks' experience stands in contrast to the public-service announcements repeatedly shown by the NCAA on television screens and scoreboards, in which toothy actors bragged that playing water polo prepared them for careers in protein chemistry.

For the Hawks, playing basketball on the national stage provided a rare and wonderful experience that they say had little to do with their education.

"This is what we live for, playing basketball," says Delonte West, half of Saint Joe's All-American backcourt. "If you ever had a job where you could just have fun, look forward to coming to it every day, that's definitely what we do.

"Just the season we've had, it's been so magical, you know. Practices are fun. We're just enjoying ourselves, enjoying our youth."

At that point Saint Joseph's was 15-0 and ranked sixth in the national polls. Soon, however, it became a national phenomenon, as other top teams each lost a game or two. By early March, the Hawks were the No. 1 team in the country. They clinched the first undefeated season of any Division I men's team in 13 years by beating St. Bonaventure University 82-50.

A setback in the second round of the Atlantic 10 Conference tournament, an 87-67 loss to Xavier University (which would also finish in the Elite Eight), hardly stopped the Hawks. Filling their tiny gymnasium with screaming crowds on Selection Sunday, they received one of the top four seeds in the NCAA tournament and played the first two weekends within driving distance of campus, enabling hordes of fans to turn arenas in Buffalo, N.Y., and northern New Jersey into virtual home courts.

The Rev. Timothy R. Lannon, a Jesuit priest who is Saint Joseph's president, even celebrated Mass for fans in the team hotel on both weekends, decked out in robe and Lenten stole. At least 150 fans showed up at the Buffalo Marriott, prompting Father Lannon to ask, "Do you think Texas Tech fans are gathering like this before the game?"

As for the NCAA tournament games themselves, they proved that the Hawks could play with any team from the power conferences, despite coming from a university which, administrators joked, should be renamed "little Saint Joe's" or "tiny Saint Joe's" after all the headlines to that effect.

In the first round, the Hawks dispatched the Liberty University team, the Rev. Jerry Falwell's pride and joy, 82-63. Next up was Texas Tech University, of the Big 12 Conference; Bob Knight's troops gave the Hawks all they could handle before succumbing 70-65.

In the Sweet Sixteen, Saint Joe's went up against a young but immensely talented Wake Forest University team, out of the Atlantic Coast Conference, and battled them back and forth all night. The game wasn't decided until Mr. Jones threw down a two-handed dunk, giving the Hawks an 84-80 win.

Against Oklahoma State University, another Big 12 member, the Hawks led by six at the half, and the game came down to one honest mistake and one poor shot. The honest mistake came from Pat Carroll, who left the man he was defending, John Lucas III, to pursue a loose ball with about 28 seconds on the clock. A Cowboy scooped up the ball and passed it to Mr. Lucas, who sank a three-pointer to put Oklahoma State up 64-62.

At the other end of the court, with a single second left, Jameer Nelson, the Hawks' star, launched a 16-foot shot with the Cowboys' Daniel Bobek in his face. It clanged sadly off the front of the rim, and before the Hawks or any of the thousands of Saint Joseph's fans here at the Meadowlands were ready for it, the final chapter closed on a storybook season.

Class Work? What Class Work?

A storybook season and a taxing tournament for the Hawks. Mr. Nelson is nursing a sore knee and suffering from back spasms. Dave Mallon, a backup forward, tore up muscles in his feet in September, and they have not yet healed. The Elite Eight game was the team's 31st since November 14.

At this time of year, class work for the Hawks has become something to fret over, not something to do. Arvydas Lidzius, a freshman forward, missed a midterm the week of the Sweet Sixteen and hasn't been to a Thursday lab class since sometime in February.

"This is a real challenge," says Hawks coach Phil Martelli. "First we had the UMass-Rhode Island trip, then spring break," when the Hawks traveled to Dayton, Ohio, for their conference tournament.

"Then the first round, and now the second round," he says. "Four weeks is a long time. So Sunday night I said, 'Our best students are now behind. So if you're a guy who struggles a little bit, you need to get the help you need.'"

Indeed, for the first time this season, an academic adviser traveled with the Hawks to the Sweet Sixteen.

Part of the reason for everyone's exhaustion has been the NCAA's dogmatic schedule. It creates a uniform, simple set of rules for everyone to follow, but these players have left campus every Tuesday for the past month, not returning until the following Sunday. During the NCAA tournament, they had news conferences and mandatory practices on Wednesdays, shootarounds and games on Thursdays, more practices and more meetings with reporters on Friday, second-round shootarounds and games on Saturday, and travel home on Sunday. Maybe a class on Monday, maybe not.

Critics of college sports chose Sweet Sixteen week to release a series of reports bashing basketball teams for their players' academic performance. Nationally, only 42 percent of male basketball players earned degrees within six years of entering college as freshmen, according to the latest NCAA data.

Saint Joseph's graduation rate isn't anything to write home about -- 44 percent for players who entered college between 1994 and 1998. But Mr. Martelli argues that when you're talking about such a small group of people, the raw numbers mean less. If a college has four basketball players in an incoming class, he says, and one transfers and one drops out, their graduation rate is 50 percent.

"When I talk to parents I say, Whatever the number is, my guess is that you don't care about the number. You want me to be one for one with your son."

Moreover, the number doesn't have much relevance for the current Hawks. Four seniors will earn their degrees this semester -- Tyrone Barley, John Bryant, Rob Hartshorne, and Brian Jesiolowski. Mr. Nelson is on track to earn his with one more summer session.

By getting so far in the tournament, however, the players have missed so much class time that Mr. Martelli is thinking about seeing if they can approach some professors who might give them incompletes and allow them to make up the work in May, between graduation and the start of summer school.

Hunched over a hotel dining-room table near the Meadowlands, the coach stares at a computer showing his team's graduation statistics. "I've never gotten a kid admitted to Saint Joe's, but I put my stamp on them," he says. "We try to get across this idea of values. You can teach values. Every kid might not graduate, but we can give them that."

Seriously. At a pregame dinner on the eve of the Atlantic 10 tournament, trays of the syrupy red drinks made their way to the Hawks' tables. Shrimp cocktails were de rigueur. So were filet mignons, generally ordered burnt to a crisp.

Life on the road is the main thing that separates Division I athletes from other students, especially in sports like basketball and baseball, in which seasons comprise dozens of games. On the minus side is the time commitment. John Bryant, majoring in management-information systems at Saint Joseph's, advises his teammate Pat Carroll and two managers to take their hard classes in the fall, before road trips start, and leave the easy ones for the spring semester.

On the plus side, players get per diems ($150 to $176 during the NCAA tournament), are put up in Marriotts, go to classy dinners (without alcohol, of course; they get on the coach's secretary for ordering a glass of wine), and get nice gifts like the long leather jackets many of them are wearing, favors from the Atlantic 10 to all of the players in the conference tournament.

They are privileged, and they know it. When they mention friends playing in the National Basketball Association's Developmental League, which has teams in small cities around the South, they talk about those friends having dinner at McDonald's. "Meal money really is meal money," says Mr. Carroll, whose brother, Matt, just graduated from the D-League to play for the NBA's San Antonio Spurs.

This is the tortuous deal the NCAA has struck with athletes. Players don't get paid for performing in front of thousands of fans 30 times a year. They get tuition, room, and board. And nice trips. And sometimes the long leather jackets. That's piddling compared to bigger conferences, which have given athletes at their own tournaments television sets and stereos.

The Saint Joe's players are very aware of their peculiar status as amateur athletes here for a highly commercialized event, especially when fans are paying $40 apiece for replicas of Mr. Nelson's jersey. "Sure, we're taken advantage of," says Delonte West, over dinner at a Buffalo steakhouse before the first-round game.

Tyrone Barley thinks that the players ought to get $2,000 a month on top of their scholarships. That, he thinks, would be fair considering the millions of dollars that he says they are generating for the university in ticket sales, television appearances, and tournament revenue.

Fifteen players times 10 months times $2,000. That works out to $300,000 a year, or roughly what it costs to operate, say, the Saint Joseph's lacrosse team.

If you had to choose, would you prefer that the university pay its basketball players or keep the lacrosse team, Mr. Barley?

"Doesn't matter," he says. The $300,000 is "tuition for what, like 10 kids?" If Saint Joe's could just attract another 10 students who would pay full tuition, he asserted, then he and his teammates would be set, and so would the lacrosse team.

Don DiJulia, the Hawks' athletics director, just smiled when told of Mr. Barley's suggestion.

Certainly the university is getting a good deal for its money. USA Today pegged the value of the season to Saint Joseph's at $2-million in increased ticket sales, television dates, and other direct income beyond what the Hawks would have made in a regular season. The newspaper attributed most of that to Mr. Nelson's decision to pass up the NBA draft and come back for his senior year.

Mr. DiJulia has another number: $4.5-billion. He's only half-joking. That sum doesn't represent direct revenue from this season, but the value that St. Joe's has received from the articles, headlines, and magazine covers on Mr. Nelson and his teammates throughout the season.

Not to mention the good will built up among people and politicians in Philadelphia, as well as among alumni and sports fans across the country.

"Every sixth-grader in Mission, Kansas, knows who Saint Joe's is," says Mr. DiJulia. One day those sixth-graders will grow up to be college students, and maybe they'll look at Saint Joseph's instead of Creighton or DePaul. Maybe they'll tell their friends about the great team the Hawks have. Maybe they'll just buy a T-shirt.

For now, it's much too early to start toting up the benefits the university has accrued from this season. Admissions inquiries are definitely up, as are deposits from accepted students.

By happy coincidence, Saint Joseph's is in the middle of an "image campaign" to raise its profile beyond Philadelphia and is also in the early, quiet stage of a capital campaign. There's talk of a new arena to replace the cozy but aging Alumni Memorial Fieldhouse.

Last week, though, it was still too painful to start talking about the season's good parts. The Oklahoma State loss was still too fresh for Mr. Martelli, who was off to the coaches' meetings and awards banquets that take place at the Final Four.

"It'll be a chance to share with people you compete against during the year and maybe you don't get to see too often," says the coach, sitting by himself in a closet-sized meeting room across the hall from his team's locker room in the Meadowlands. "But there'll be a little bit of emptiness because my team won't be there.