8601140148 DETROIT FREE PRESS 860328 Friday, March 28, 1986 STATE EDITION

SPT

1D Photo Color MITCH ALBOM Copyright (c) 1986, Detroit Free Press GREATEST TEAM YOU NEVER SAW SEASON'S END MEANS THE END OF WEBBER COLLEGE'S SEASONS BABSON PARK, Fla. -- The gym is empty now. Just two baskets staring at each other across a hardwood floor. There are flies circling overhead. The air is sticky. It's hot. It's still. It's dead. It's over. Dies the season, dies the program. Almost nobody knows what went on here at Webber College and almost nobody ever will now. Most American eyes this weekend are on the NCAA Final Four in downtown Dallas. Millions will watch it. Millions will bet on it. It's a big story. But this is a better story. This is a story about a chance of a lifetime, a deal you'd be crazy to take and crazier to pass up. This is a story of a tiny college and its gunslinging president, named Buck, who gave a basketball coach, named Nick, a chance to bring a handful of kids from the streets of New York and Baltimore and Buffalo down to the middle of nothing in Florida, to an auditorium with two backboards nailed to the walls and red ants crawling on the floor, and to work a miracle. And damn, if they didn't almost win it all. This is a story about the Webber College Warriors, who disappeared forever last week, and who might have been the best college basketball team you've never seen. They just ran out of time. I magine the conversation. You're a young basketball player on the fringe. You couldn't make Division I -- maybe grades, maybe lack of recruiting -- so you've been playing junior college ball, or maybe not playing at all, and you're just hanging around in August of 1983 trying to decide what you should do next and the phone rings. "This is Nick Creola," the voice begins. "I'm the new coach at Webber College down in Florida. I'm looking for a man of your caliber. I want to offer you a chance to get in on a growing program. I'll give you full scholarship, you'll play right away, you'll get a chance to see sunny Florida. If you're interested, there'll be a plane ticket waiting for you next Thursday. Come down. Look around. If you like the place we'll sign you right there." Webber College? Yes. And this was the sales pitch Creola used on his prospects -- all of whom he'd collected in two weeks time. And as he drove to the Orlando airport that Thursday he still had no idea how many of them would buy it. "I had no recruiting budget," he says. "What else could I do?" He had only taken the job himself a few weeks before. Who takes a coaching job in August? Especially in central Florida, the curve of the Bible Belt, in a college known mostly as a girls school with less than 500 students and no gym? Heck, the whole idea was just a stunt by the Webber president to get some badly needed publicity. It was a gimmick. An investment in advertising. It was just the kind of thing the G.W. (Buck) Cleven, a 67 year-old former bomber pilot, was prone to do. He is a big man, with white hair and ice-blue eyes, and he rules Webber. As president, he calls himself "a benevolent despot," keeps a .357 magnum in the desk drawer, and once fired a shotgun at joyriders who were disturbing his campus. Get the picture? Only now he wanted a basketball team. A nationally renowned basketball team. Get some ink for his college. So he hired Creola, who is short, tanned, overly muscular, moves fast, talks faster -- and wins. And wins and wins. He was a successful junior college coach at Jamestown, N.Y. -- his team was ranked No. 1 in the nation -- and back then, in 1983, he was 40 and single and figured this Webber thing might work out. Might help him move up in the coaching ranks. Of course, he had no idea who he'd be coaching. And then he got to the airport. I "I looked around the baggage area and there were five or six big black kids, and they were talking, some of them knew of one another, and I said to myself, 'Holy jeez. This town is in for the shock of their lives.' " T o understand why, you need only visit Webber College once. Here are the directions: take route 27 to Fat Boy's Barbeque, turn right, and keep going. You don't look for any other landmarks, because there aren't any. Just some orange groves and baked grass that's as hard as bristle. And after a few miles, it's just sort of there, like a sudden hot breeze. A handful of small yellow buildings. Webber College. It was here that Creola brought players like "Rockin' Rodney" Jones from the East Side of Buffalo, and Big Joe Farmer from the Bronx, N.Y. and Dennis Pope from Baltimore and Carl (Jete) Jeter and his brother Gary, and Joe Patterson, who can dribble the ball behind his back and through his legs and over his head while on one knee. Brought them into an auditorium with no air conditioning -- it had to be at least 100 degrees -- pointed to the makeshift baskets and said "let's go, let's get started.". The floor was carpeted -- carpeted? -- and the ball kept skipping away. There were gnats flying around that stuck to the wet skin of the ballplayers. One player took off his socks and wrung the sweat out like a sponge. Creola, wearing shorts, leaned down on one knee to watch a drill and jumped up yelling, "What the hell?" and there were red ants all over his legs chewing on him. A fight broke out that first practice, a fight between two players, and the others instinctively rushed in and broke it up. And then they looked at each other, sweat washing their faces, and there was a sudden realization that they either died through this separately or lived through it together. "I owe you guys the chance to be national champions," Creola said that first day. "How can you get beat? How can you get beat with what you're going through here?" They had nothing. But nothing plus desire is no longer nothing. It's a beginning. There are only about 120 people on this earth who can tell you about that first game. And half of them had their heads in their books. That was the custom at Webber, which never had a team that mattered before. The basketball games were played down the street in a high school gym -- Frostproof High School; can you believe that one? -- and basically it was just another place to do homework. But in October of 1983, that first tap was thrown up, and Rodney Jones, who can jump high enough from a standing position to bang his head on the rim, took the ball in for a reverse dunk and from that moment on, nothing would ever be the same. The Warriors laughed through that game, won it by something like 50 points, with alley-oops and slams and jams. And they kept winning. It was movie material. These kids, mostly from northern cities, whirling and juking and sending a buzz through the state. Winning? Is that the word for 141-62? And 137-50? And 95-36? All real scores from Webber victories. "The word spread on us like wildfire," Creola says. Webber was then in the National Little College Athletic Association (NLCAA). Once during a game against an NCAA Division II opponent -- which is like Cyclops playing Harpo Marx -- the big school coach came over to Creola and promised to "take it easy" on his kids. "Thanks," Creola said. The Warriors then blew the team away by 22 points. By the time that season ended, Webber was on its way to the national NLCAA championships. It wasn't magic. It was more like chemistry. The Webber players were all similar; all good, flashy basketball players who had somehow missed the boat for bigger schools. Their common denominator was the dunk shot. And poverty. "The first time I had Joe Farmer at school," said Creola, "he opened up his suitcase and there was only a toothbrush inside. I said, 'Joe, where's your clothes?" And he said, "Coach, I'm wearin' them." Creola raised money to buy Farmer and several others a decent wardrobe. He and assistant Steve Prevesk ran bingo games every Sunday night to help pay for the players' books (which were not covered by the scholarships). The local folks were willing to chip in a buck or two through bingo, but their emotional pocketbooks were not so easily opened. "It was weird here the first year," said Jones. "We weren't really well liked. We were pretty much the only blacks around. Sometimes, it got a little uncomfortable." Let's face it. This was a basketball team full of sleek, street-smart blacks in a white southern school in a white southern community in a region where Ku Klux Klan activities were more than an occasional rumor. "They burned a cross out on highway 27 five or six years ago," Creola says. "You knew it was gonna be tough." There were incidents. A black player and a white student scuffled in a bar. Ugly feelings arose over the players dating some of the white female students. This is a place where such emotions still bubble close to the surface. So when the school threw a party to wish the team well in post- season play, most students boycotted. The Warriors traveled north and came home with the NLCAA national championship anyway. Their first year, national champions. They finished 32-4. And the next year they actually got a gym. Things should have gotten easier. Instead, when Prevesk came back from summer vacation he had a meeting with President Cleven which he says he remembers word for word. "Cleven said, 'Now listen to me, you son of a bleep. See this hand? This is my wedding ring? See this hand? This is my national championship ring? I don't need any more rings. Now we do things my way.' " It was the first notes of the death song. Cleven had bragged about how the team he dreamed up would win a title in their first year, and now that they had done it, he wasn't sure he wanted them around any more. "We were stealing his thunder," Creola says. Cleven began to talk about "quitting this gag" in a few years, maybe sooner. Meanwhile, the Warriors had moved up a class, to the NAIA, and were now finding a different problem. No one would play them. There were 10 Division II schools within a 90 mile radius, and not a single one wanted Webber on their schedule. "Why would they?" Prevesk laments. "They're trying to build their program in the early going. Trying to build confidence. Why would they want us to come in and kick their butts?" Instead, the Webber team had to take games as far north as Georgia and as far south as Miami. They traveled in a Dodge van, drove eight or nine hours, ate at McDonalds, listened to Walkmans, talked. Once they broke down in a town called Yeehaw Junction, and a few players got out to roam around. Then someone spotted a bull behind a fence and the players came running back into the van as if bullets were being fired and they slammed the doors. "Half these guys had never seen a bull in their lives," laughs Prevesk. "They didn't know what it was going to do.' The competition was tougher, but the team was winning even more easily than it had the year before. Same style. Fast. Lots of offense. A pressing defense that stole the ball often. And dunk, dunk, dunk. "Every player on the team dunked," Creola said. "People used to come out just to see our warm-up drills. We had an alley-oop play from halfcourt that was our trademark. It was beautiful." That season the Warriors went to Hawaii with money Creola had raised, and they beat everyone they played -- including Chaminade, a team that had knocked off national powers Louisville and SMU. The team wound up 32-5 and made it to the district semifinals of the NAIA. And then the roof fell in. They used to have an expression at Webber: "We don't have time to lose." It was prophetic. Time ran out last October. Cleven, the eccentric president whose whim had created the basketball program, decided suddenly to dismantle it. "After this year we will drop basketball for a one year moratorium," came the announcement. "It'll never come back," interpreted Creola. Cleven had once been quoted as saying "We're using basketball to let people know we're here. After that, the heck with it." Apparently, enough people knew. Boom. No more team. No more future. The dunking days were numbered. "It's terrible," said sophomore forward Greer Wright, who was looking forward to two more years of the now-famed Webber style. "We could be the best team in the state except for the University of Florida." But there was no arguing the decision. "This is Cleven's kingdom," said Prevesk, 'what he says goes." All the team could do was go out in a blaze. Go for the NAIA National Title. And they went for it. Won 24 regular season games and lost only one. Averaged over 100 points per contest. Led the nation in that departement. And a funny thing happened: support. People began to come out to the games. Signs started popping up. The racial tensions that had once existed had eased, if not to where we dream, at least to where we can co-exist. "A lot of times this schools isn't fun," Prevesk says. "It's too small. But the team was something fun. Something to rally around." Webber won their district championship and was headed to the nationals in Kansas City. In their last home game, the crowd actually stood up when the players were announced, and when the first basket was scored, a roll of toilet paper was thrown out on the court. Their last home game. Their first roll of toilet paper. It certain ways, it was big as a victory can be. There is no happy ending. Webber lost in the first round of the NAIA championships. The program is over. The players are without a team. The coach is looking for a job. The gym is empty. "It's taken a few years off my life, I'll tell you that," Creola says. "But what a few years! I wouldn't trade them." "It's been beautiful," said Jones, whose friends back in Buffalo still can't figure out where Webber is. "It's been like a family. It's sad it's over." And that it is. For a brief moment something special happened here. Something was taken from nothing, some colors of life were mixed together, black and white, and there were problems at the beginning, but towards the end they were learning how to get along. Basketball was teaching them. And one gets the feeling this is the way the game was before NCAA's and TV cameras and recruiting violations. Dies the season, dies the program. And it rests there, inside the quiet gym near the orange groves. The arc of the story, just waiting for a passerby to stop and take a listen. CUTLINE Webber College basketball paraphernalia is now destined to become something of a collector's item. BASKETBALL;COLLEGE;NCAA