He has been portrayed as a visionary and a charlatan, as a moralist and a rank fraud, as a hurricane full of fresh air and an airhead just full of it. He has raged against Bob Knight and the NCAA. He has brought up terrorists Moammar Gadhafi and Yasser Arafat in a discussion of recruiting scandals, and himself recruited questionable student-athletes from the Dominican Republic
(Tito Horford), Argentina (Hernan Montenegro) and the Soviet Union (Arvydas Sabonis). He has kissed Billy Packer on camera and met Imelda Marcos.
He has taken a lightly-regarded team to the Final Four (in 1986), and, while talking of it, peppered a press conference with references to both Mr. and Mrs. Marcos as well as Venus, Jesse Owens, Mars, El Sicko (that`s Hitler), Pluto, Sirhan Sirhan, Red Square, John Wooden, Korea, Sergei Bubka (the Soviet pole vaulter), Barbra Streisand and Bunkie, La. He has ridden a raft down the Amazon and tried to climb the Matterhorn.
He has long presented himself as one of life`s eternal underdogs and peppered other press conferences with tales of his poverty-stricken childhood in Minot, N.D. (abandoned by his father while he was still in the hospital, he lived with his mother in a one-room apartment over a tavern and shoved newspapers into his tattered shoes to ward off winter`s chill). But never, never in his 54 years on this earth, has Dale Brown looked on himself as the favorite.
But now here he is in Atlanta along with the nine other basketball coaches from the Southeastern Conference, and all these others are saying nothing but nice things about the Louisiana State team Brown will guide this season. ”If LSU plays to their potential,” declares Mississippi State`s Richard Williams, ”the rest of us are playing for second place. They have a chance to be one of those outstanding teams.”
”I think,” adds Mississsippi`s Ed Murphy, ”that they`re going to win
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(the conference title) early. I think they`ll win it with two weeks to go.”
”Dale,” Alabama`s Wimp Sanderson says with an arm over Brown`s shoulder. ”Dale, you guys are so good this year, not even you can screw it up.”
”That underdog role, by birth it may have come, but later on it wasn`t by design,” Brown himself soon says. ”I would have loved to have had great players all along, but there are some jobs where it`s difficult to get them. So to be able to have them now is a role I`m looking forward to. It`s humbling and gratifying, and I want to be sure I play it as intelligently as I can. It`ll be a learning process, and I hope I can do a good job.”
Does that mean added pressure?
”I feel no pressure. None. Zero. I feel exhilaration. Excitement. The challenge. Fun. Pressure is when your mother tells you to come home as a 10-year-old boy, and don`t fool around after school, and you have to find a job because your father doesn`t send any money and the welfare check`s not enough. That`s pressure. Pressure`s going to the water fountain and drinking water to put in your stomach because you`re hungry, and you hear it splash around in there, and you`re embarrassed that the other kids can hear it too. That`s pressure.
”But this. This is fun.”
– – –
The fun, and the season, are now set to begin for LSU and De Paul and the 14 other teams who play first-round games in the Dodge NIT on Wednesday and Thursday. Nevada-Las Vegas is one of them, and these Runnin` Rebels should be attended for they are a collection of dazzling talents whom some favor to win the national title. Loyola Marymount, which has redefined the definition of scoring machine, is of interest in this tournament too, as are St. John`s and North Carolina State, two darkhorses in two powerful conferences.
But it is LSU, those Tigers from the Bayou, who will be most closely observed, for Brown, The Preacher Man, the self-styled Miracle Worker, has finally surrounded himself with players who are as impressive as his own monologues. In the post he can choose between the 7-foot Stanley Roberts, a Prop 48 sophomore who in high school was rated just behind Georgetown`s Alonzo Mourning, and the 7-foot-1 Shaquille O`Neal, a mere freshman already blessed with an NBA body and attitude.
On the wings there are Wayne Sims and Vernal Singleton, both 6-7 and experienced, and newcomers Maurice Williamson (a 6-foot, Prop 48 guard) and Randy Devall (a 6-4 guard out of Garden City Community College). Finally, and most importantly, there is sophomore Chris Jackson, who as a freshman last year merely averaged 30 points per game while proving himself both an All-America and the most exciting player in the land.
”Then on top of that,” says Georgia`s Hugh Durham, ”they`ve got one of the great book writers and motivators guiding them. Now, I say book writer tongue in cheek. But Dale Brown has proven over the years that he can get the most out of his young men. So we chuckle, laugh about Dale, but when you stop and look, you can see what he`s done.”
Brown, in fact, has constructed a successful program in his 17 years at LSU, and along the way has transformed himself into a lightning rod while winning 62 percent of his games and appearing in 11 straight postseason tourneys. But none of those numbers, nor any of the guises he has assumed, means anything now, for now the goals down in Baton Rouge are different from any in the school`s past.
Brown, a realist behind his bluster, knows this, knows he is blessed with multifarious talents, and he does not hide from the expectations his newfound wealth has delivered. ”Fellas,” he told his players before practices began, ”I`m going to try to lead you better this year. I`ve had diarrhea of the mouth. I`m going to order a diaper for my mouth this year and try to stay out of controversy and concentrate on the team.”
Even before meeting with that team, he sent his daughter Robyn and his assistant Craig Carse onto the road, and there they taped interviews with the legend named Wooden and with Norman Vincent Peale, the father of positive thinking. He aired their thoughts on success for his Tigers the first time they gathered together, and in the days that have followed, he has talked to them often of Soviet vaulter Bubka.
Brown, it turns out, saw him interviewed on an evening he broke the world record but missed cracking the 20-foot barrier, and he has never forgotten the interchange he witnessed. ”Do you think you`ll ever vault 20 feet?” the questioner asked.
”Through an interpreter, very demonstrative, he said there`s no question he`ll vault 20 feet,” recalls Brown.
”Why?” the questioner then asked.
”That was an intelligent question, and I told the kids the why is what we have to look at this year,” Brown now goes on. ”Because he said, every day at practice, he set the bar at 22 feet. He has never cleared it, but he sets the bar at 22 feet. I told the kids, `That`s how we have to practice.`
See, if you set the bar at 17 feet, your goal may be 17-6 or 18, but you`ll never break the world record or go over 20 feet.
”I want them to set their goals high also, your goals as a person have to change. For some of us in this business, it`s survival so you can feed your family. Then it changes to winning a conference championship, to a tournament bid, to the Final Four. Well, we`ve done all that. So our singular, worldly goal this year is to win the national championship.
”Now, it`s not going to be an obsession or blindness, and we want them to have fun, we don`t want them to have delusions of grandeur because of what everyone says. That`s hard. But the rankings are very much like cologne. They should be smelled, but not swallowed under any circumstances.
”Still, I want them to set high goals for themselves, and so yes, from the beginning of this year we`ve been talking about the national
championship.”
– – –
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Dale Brown is off-stage now and sipping a beer in a hotel lobby bar. The conversation, ever meandering, has moseyed back to his new status as favorite, and here he once more dips into his endless bag of tricks to explain his reaction to it. ”You have to use every situation differently, and you can use being ranked first as well as being ranked last,” he begins.
His eyes are burning here with a proselytizer`s fervor, and then, not at all bashful about his prospects, he offers this: ”Did your mother ever talk to you about the boogey man? `You go to bed or the boogey man`s going to get you.` Geez, I went to bed. She had me faked out for years. Well, maybe we can be the boogey man this year. If everybody`s going to concede the title to us, if everybody`s afraid of us, maybe after an elongated winning streak, they`ll think we`re unbeatable. Let`s use that.
”It goes back to The Art of War. Sun-tzu wrote a book 2,500 years ago called `The Art of War,` and many of his plans are still in effect. Psychological. It`s all psychological. I tell them that. I tell them if we perform up to our capacities, maybe we can intimidate. Maybe we can get that title. Maybe we can be the boogey man.”