The bus was waiting outside Marvel Gym for the dreaded Cornell-Columbia trip. Practice had just ended and the Brown University basketball players filtered out, laughing and talking quietly as they settled into their seats for the long journey from Providence, R.I.
Senior forward Todd Murray talked about a job interview he`d just had with Chase Manhattan. Guard Dom Taylor was being teased about his jaunty white cap. Players opened well-thumbed paperbacks. A few adjusted earphones of Walkmans. From the back, freshman Marc Rudolph`s boom box sent tunes dancing up the aisle.
”This trip is a killer,” said coach Mike Cingiser. ”It`s a real advantage for the other team. But it could be worse. When we play at Columbia first, you have to drive to Ithaca after the game Friday night, play Cornell on Saturday night, then drive seven hours home after the game. Naturally, there`s always a snowstorm.”
As the bus hit the Massachusetts Turnpike, trainer Russ Fiore broke out his dice and hollered, ”Who`s ready to lose some money?”
Fiore is the inventor of a special machine used by many schools to treat ankle injuries. To Brown players, he is better known as the inventor of a dice game called ”Around The Corner.”
Played on a formica table in the back of the bus, dice and card games are a road staple. Even in the wee hours, even after a tough loss, several players will be clustered around the table with Fiore and assistant coach Phil Ness, whooping and hollering as the dice heat up.
”Hey, I just saw a sign for Ithaca–it`s 20,000 miles,” senior co-captain Pat Lynch said as we approached Albany. ”Bus, bus, hotel, gym, restaurant. That`s how we spend our lives.”
With six playing, dice games are complicated. By the time I had lost my third game, five hours were gone. The bus stopped at a store near Binghamton, N.Y., at 9 p.m. Snowflakes were swirling. Players swarmed in, scooping up junk food. Taylor did a double-take at a beer display with a cardboard sign that said, ”Win A Free College Education!”
Players are provided two pregame meals, plus $20 that must last them for the weekend.
”We`ll probably have good budgetary skills when we get out of here,”
Lynch joked.
The bus chugged into Ithaca at 10 and landed at the Holiday Inn. Some players and coaches crossed the street to Friendly`s. Over a sundae, Cingiser outlined his plan for switching Ivy games to Saturday and Sunday afternoons. It would make travel less grueling, he argues, and players would miss fewer classes since they`d leave Friday afternoons instead of Thursdays. Some coaches are opposed, fearing afternoon TV games would hurt attendance. Cingiser notes that Ivy teams don`t draw well at night, either.
Freshman guard Dick Whitmore was sick Friday morning, and Cingiser, worried about a bug spreading to other players, called off shooting practice. The wind-chill factor was below zero, but we walked to a nearby Chinese restaurant with an all-you-can-eat buffet for $3.05, a meal tailored to an Ivy budget.
The players were boisterous at the pregame meal in the hotel dining room. A surprised waitress said, ”The Princeton players were here last week, and they didn`t say a word.”
The game began at 7:30 in Barton Hall, a dark, drafty, cavernous armory built during World War I. Beating Brown on the boards and capitalizing on offensive impatience, the Big Red quickly rolled up a 20-point lead. Late in the half, Cingiser had had enough of a heckler behind the Brown bench who had been taunting his players unmercifully. The coach got a cup of water from the cooler, turned and casually flipped the contents into the stunned student`s lap.
When Brown came out for the second half, Cingiser strolled over to the student and told him to leave his players alone.
”You`re not at Duke and these aren`t professionals,” Cingiser says.
”My players pay $15,000 to go to school. If you want to get on anyone, I`m fair game, but not them.”
When the game ended, a punishing 83-59 loss, Cingiser saw the student standing in front of him with a cup of water. The coach picked up a metal folding chair.
”I`m no longer fair game,” Cingiser warns. ”You`re going to pay for anything you do to me now.”
The student, who heckled Cingiser in the second half but said not a word about his players, backed off. The Cornell athletic director, hearing that Cingiser had thrown water on a student and unaware why, told the coach that campus security might be looking for him.
The players were on the bus by 10 and Cingiser was eager to leave for Columbia, joking that he`d better get out of Ithaca before he`s arrested. But Harvey, the driver, is nowhere to be found. It turns out he`s trying to fix the brake lines, which have iced.
Bus failures are notorious in the Ivy League. The Bruins got stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike in December when their bus ran out of gas en route to Virginia. Cingiser had to walk down the road, climb over a fence and call a garage, but the repairmen took their time coming. They were watching the Bears-Redskins playoff game.
Things like that don`t happen to Dean Smith.
The bus problem was fixed, but it was no surprise when, a little later, players smelled something burning. We stopped on a lonely back road, across from a church with a red neon sign proclaiming, ”Jesus Saves.” Harvey decided it was nothing serious and drove on.
The team, bleary-eyed, arrived at the Ramada Inn in Clifton, N.J., at 2:30 a.m. with a lively dice game going. In spite of fatigue, some players were too keyed up to sleep.
”There`s too much nervous energy,” explained Lynch. ”You have four hours sitting on a bus to linger on the fact that you haven`t played that well, and you just want to get off the vehicle and move around.”
After sleeping late and watching Syracuse-Louisville and Iowa-Illinois on TV, the team boarded the bus at 5:30 for the half-hour trip to Columbia, in the Morningside Heights section of Harlem. In the nearly-empty Levien Gym, as the junior-varsity game winds down, senior guard David Visscher reflected on differences between Brown and the University of Florida, which he left two years ago.
”The hardest thing is when you have a paper or test on Monday, and you know when you get back Sunday, you`ve got to spend all day studying,” says Visscher. ”At Florida, you could probably get it changed.”
At Florida, Visscher and the Gators traveled in a private plane, which was deathly quiet after a loss.
”If you know you`re not interested in playing pro ball, the Ivy League is the best place in the country to play,” he says. ”It`s more fun, and you`re not in the bush leagues. We`re good enough to hold our own, but all the craziness of big-time sports isn`t there.”
The Bruins were blown out again on another miserable shooting night, losing 91-78 to Columbia and dropping into last place. Jim Turner, Mike Waitkus and Darren Brady, co-captains of last year`s Ivy championship team now working on Wall Street, hold a brief postgame reunion with their former teammates before it`s time for the bus to leave.
On the four-hour trip home, team spirits remained high. There was music. Dice rolled through the night. The camaraderie of 14 hours in a bus, nearly 800 miles and two games in 60 hours, helps keep winning and losing in perspective.
”As athletes, we want to win, but our lives don`t depend on a scholarship,” reflects Lynch. ”There`s more to each and every one of us than just being an athlete.”
Concludes Murray: ”It takes a lot out of you. Bus lag is a lot more draining than jet lag. Sometimes I`ll ask myself: `What the hell are we doing this for? Why is it worth it?` Basically, we`re doing it to have fun.”
