Losing to gain
LESS BROWN COULD BE MAN OF RENOWN FOR U.VA. HOOPS TEAM
BY JEFF WHITE
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER Jul 08, 2003

CHARLOTTESVILLE Elton Brown tries to ignore his critics on Internet message boards. Fans are fickle, he says, and you can't please everybody. Still, he knows how many University of Virginia basketball followers perceived him during his up-and-down sophomore season.

" 'He's fat, he's out of shape, he's at the donut shop,'" Brown said.

His demeanor during games also rankled fans. They saw Brown exchanging words with his coaches and sulking on the bench, and they concluded that his attitude stunk.

"Yeah, I pouted a lot last year and my freshman year," said Brown, who's taking summer classes at U.Va., "but it's part of growing up."

Brown doesn't turn 20 until September, but his maturation, say those close to the Cavaliers' program, has been marked since the end of last season.

"I think he's one of the hungrier guys on the team," Virginia coach Pete Gillen said.

Given Brown's reputation for carrying too many pounds, that might have been a poor choice of words, but Gillen's point is well taken. The 6-9 Brown, who played at about 275 pounds last season, weighed in at 256 the other day.

He's running more - much more - and eating less. Banished from his diet, Brown said, are hamburgers and pizza. He's stronger, too, and no longer looks as if he'll require oxygen after a few trips up and down the court.

"I want to play at 255, 250, and I'm close to it," Brown said. "I'm going to prove a lot of people wrong."

On a team that must replace 6-8, 255-pound Travis Watson, a four-year starter in the post, Brown will have ample opportunity to prove his point. Watson led the Cavaliers in scoring, rebounding, blocked shots and steals last season.

"With Travis gone, everybody's looking toward me now as the big guy: somebody to score, somebody to rebound, somebody to get the big basket at the key point of the game," Brown said. "I like it that way. I've been waiting two years for it, and now it's my turn."

During those two years, Brown has tantalized the U.Va. faithful with a number of dazzling offensive performances. As a freshman, he had 20 points and 10 rebounds in a victory at Georgia Tech and twice was named ACC rookie of the week.

As a sophomore, he started 17 games. Brown averaged 17.3 points in three games against Duke and totaled 16 points and nine rebounds at Wake Forest. He had 14 points and seven boards in a victory over Georgetown. He also failed to score in double figures in U.Va.'s final three-regular season games and finished the year with modest averages of 9.6 points, 4.3 rebounds and 18.7 minutes.

Brown shot only 53.3 percent from the foul line, and his defense earned him no accolades. Poor conditioning contributed to his inconsistent play.

"He just got tired," Gillen said. "He couldn't play hard every possession."

In terms of pure athleticism, Brown ranks below many of his peers in the ACC. But he has an impressive array of post moves and the size to create problems for opponents down low. Dragging extra weight around the court, however, has reduced his effectiveness.

Countless people told Brown he needed to get in better shape. As he staggered to the finish line in 2002-03, Brown could see that they were right.

"He did OK, but he wanted to do more," Gillen said. "I think he realized time was slipping away."

Brown said: "It's my junior year. Either I'm going to produce or I sit down. There are no excuses for me this year."

And so he logs mile after mile on the treadmill, watches what he eats and looks forward to his junior season. He knows that many of the ACC's top post players have moved on, including Chris Bosh, Josh Powell, Ryan Randle and Tahj Holden.

"I just can't wait for the season to start, because personally I know I got a lot of critics out there," Brown said. "A lot of people don't think I'm ever going to get in shape to reach my potential. People ask me what I expect this year, and I'm like, 'Just wait and see.'"

 

'Football U'
No Longer 'Suntan U', Miami Has Built a Gridiron Program Second to None
By CHIP ALEXANDER, Staff Writer

CORAL GABLES, FLA. -- For many, the images still are as sharp and clear as a sunny Miami morning, even with the passing of almost 17 years. A plane landing in Phoenix. A football team strutting off in combat fatigues. Unbeaten, ranked No. 1 and cocky about it. Irreverent, thuggish in appearance.
It was a football team representing the University of Miami that a few nights later, wearing the same fatigues, stalked out of a steak-fry dinner with Penn State, the Hurricanes' opponent in the Fiesta Bowl for the 1986 national championship. Just up and walked out, later saying the Nittany Lions didn't belong in the same room with them.

Said Sam Jankovich, then the Miami athletics director: "I liked to have died when that happened."

"Those were some of the darkest days, the saddest days for us," said Clyde McCoy, the school's faculty athletics representative. "But even that shouldn't detract from what's happened at Miami through the years. Over the last 30 years here, I've watched as a miracle occurred, and football has been a big part of that miracle."

McCoy was talking of the school's emergence from the tag of "Suntan U" to a university that has garnered national acclaim for the diversity in its curricula, its faculty, its student body. It's an urban university, chartered in 1925, that has five campuses, including the largest medical campus in the country. It's a university with marine and atmospheric science programs that are globally renowned.

It's a university that was devastated by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. South Florida rebuilt and recovered. So did the university under the direction of former school president Tad Foote.

But it has been football, nearly all agree, that has been the bond during the school's rise the past three decades. It's a bond as tough and lasting as, well, the leather on a football.

"Let me ask you this -- who would ever know where Penn State was if not for that football team in State College?" Jankovich said.

Even in a city enamored with the Miami Dolphins, the famous 'Fins of Don Shula and Dan Marino, Hurricanes football is big business and the games at the Orange Bowl big events.

"We've bucked the trend and haven't been swallowed up by the pros," McCoy said.

The Canes have won four NCAA titles in baseball, but that's still mostly a spring diversion, strong as the program is. Men's basketball lost a lot of games, and money, last year. The women's sports haven't been that prominent nationally (even as the school proudly claims to have awarded the first women's athletics scholarship in 1973).

"Think of Miami, and people think 'football power,' " said Suzy Kolber, a Miami graduate who is a reporter for ESPN. "OK, football and sunshine.

"People don't realize that it's also a private school that's hard to get into, one that has steadily been building its academic reputation. But, yes, it has had to work on its football reputation."

The Hurricanes, minus the fatigues, were undressed 14-10 by Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 2, 1987. The Miami coach, Jimmy Johnson, later moved on to the NFL. He was replaced by Dennis Erickson, whose Hurricanes teams would add another dark, sad, controversy-filled chapter to the school's sports history -- not to mention bringing on five years of NCAA probation.

"People always say, 'Oh, man, that's a great football school,' but they also think of it as somewhat of an outlaw school," said Rick Law, a 1971 graduate and former Hurricanes basketball player. "I don't know if we'll ever get over that showboat reputation."

But McCoy said those outside the university -- including Miami's brethren in the ACC -- shouldn't overlook "all the good" football has done for the school.

"In the early '70s, football was played on Friday nights before small crowds," he said. "We were bad."

So bad, the school nearly dropped the sport.

"Look at us now," McCoy said. "We have a strong president. We have a football coach who has won a national championship who is a man of high character and demands it of his players."

The president is Donna Shalala, who came to Miami in June 2001 and now has helped usher it into the Atlantic Coast Conference. The coach is Larry Coker, who was promoted from assistant to the head job when Butch Davis left for the NFL after the 2000 season. Coker led the Hurricanes to the national title in 2001 -- the school's fifth in football -- and to the brink of another last season.

"President Shalala has made the point that she only is interested in excellence, in everything," said Aaron Podhurst, a member of the Miami board of trustees. "She wants the athletic department to be excellent in the behavior of the athletes, in performance and in its financial strength."

It is that need for more financial stability that led Shalala to accept the ACC's entreaty to move out of the Big East Conference. Miami was a relative latecomer to the Big East after a long sojourn as an independent and quickly became the ranking football heavy in the conference.

But in 2001-02, despite the national football championship, the athletics department lost about $1.4 million. The men's basketball program was leaking red ink. Women's sports figured to become more expensive in order to meet Title IX requirements.

"In the last four to five years, we've gone from 60 percent men to 60 percent women in the student body," McCoy said.

The men's basketball team, under third-year coach Perry Clark, slumped to 11-17 last season even as the Hurricanes moved into the Convocation Center, the new 7,000-seat arena on campus, and celebrated the opening by upsetting North Carolina. By year's end, the program's "Get Blown Away" promotion had another meaning.

"From a student's standpoint, basketball has been a concern," said Mike Johnston, president of the student body this past year. "There is a lot of room for improvement. Going to the ACC will raise the bar significantly."

Consider, however, that Miami did close down the basketball program in 1971 because of awful attendance and mounting financial losses. At the time, the trustees called it a temporary move.

"We played in so many different places that we were like the 'Miami Nomads,' " said Paul Dee, who served as university counsel for 12 years before becoming athletics director in 1993. "I think in the history of the university, we've played in 16 different venues in the city. We once played in a theater where the stage was the court."

The basketball program was re-instated in 1985. The Hurricanes reached the NIT in 1994-95, then made it to the NCAA Tournament for three straight years beginning in 1997-98. They were 24-8 and again in the tournament in 2002 under Clark.

"I've never seen anybody bring back basketball in such a short time," said former basketball coach Leonard Hamilton, now at Florida State. "For the program to progress as quickly and fast as it has says a lot about the commitment the school has to that program. "

Jake Morton played basketball at Miami in the early 1990s, when the school made its entrance into the Big East. Now an assistant at St. Francis (Pa.) College, he said the move to the ACC offers "instant credibility."

"We never had any real rivals in the Big East," Morton said. "In football, it was always Florida and Florida State and an in-state football rivalry that bordered on hate. But we didn't even have that in basketball.

"Florida is a football state. Students camp out for tickets. The Orange Bowl is a wild place, every game. That hasn't been the case with basketball, so this should help. "

And so now Miami is an ACC school. Coker could soon be sitting by FSU's Bobby Bowden at the ACC coaches meetings.

Clark, who once coached at Georgia Tech under Bobby Cremins, is back in the ACC. Baseball coach Jim Morris, who also was at Georgia Tech and won ACC titles, takes his program into one of the country's toughest leagues. The women's programs have new rivals, new challenges.

In fall 2004, ACC members will start making trips to the campus hard by U.S. 1 , where weathered, low-slung buildings sit in perpetual shade beneath the palms. They'll play football at the Orange Bowl, increasingly decrepit but historic.

Coral Gables is a city where Mercedes, Porsche and Jaguar sales have flourished and per capita income is high. But the pace slows once the turn is made onto Stanford Drive, the main entrance to the university campus.

Brian Cockerham worked with N.C. State's Wolfpack Club before coming to Miami in 2001 to head up the school's athletics fund-raising. An NCSU graduate raised on ACC sports, he believes the ACC offers a nice fit.

"When I used to look at Miami, I always thought 'big state school,' " he said. "But we're small and private, much like Duke or Wake Forest. We will blend in well, academically.

" From the standpoint of football, we will help the ACC and the ACC will help us in giving us more quality opponents. It definitely will help in basketball.

"The Big East had a lot of good things going for it. But being in the ACC will be better for us long-term."



 

Changing times have made ACC change outlook
Conference has gone from lean and mean to big and powerful
By John Delong
JOURNAL REPORTER


There was a day when the ACC didn't think that bigger was better.

When the ACC was formed in 1953, it was largely because its founding members felt that the 17-school Southern Conference had grown too large to function properly.

They wanted a smaller, more-compact conference in which all members could play each other in football, play home-and-home series in basketball and be close enough to make travel easy in other sports.

It's an interesting concept in light of the ACC's recent decision to expand to 11 schools, adding Miami and Virginia Tech.

And it's even more interesting with the potential for further expansion to 12 schools, or perhaps 14, down the road.

'It looks,' Frank Weedon, the assistant athletics director emeritus at N.C. State, said recently, 'like the ACC has come full circle. It split from the Southern Conference because it was too big and too unwieldy, and now it's going that direction again.'

But Weedon and others who have been around from the start don't seem to think that parallels between the circumstances of 1953 and today apply all that much.

There are no particular history lessons to learn from, no specific mistakes from the past to avoid.

'Bigger has never been better, but growing and adjusting to the times is better,' Weedon said. 'This is a different situation than 1953. Travel isn't the issue it was then, and television revenue is a big factor because it is the foundation for keeping your entire athletic department afloat.

'What the ACC just did was a matter of survival. We've got the best TV contract now, but that wouldn't be the case five years down the road without expansion.

'If you don't keep up with the Joneses, you're going to lose out. The SEC and the Big 12 already have 12 teams. The Big 10 has 11. So this was necessary.'

Weedon's office in Case Athletics Center on the N.C. State campus is a short walk from the site of old Riddick Stadium, which is now a parking lot. 'I've always said if you don't grow, you're going to become an historic landmark,' he said. 'We don't want Carter-Finley Stadium to go the way of Riddick Stadium.'

Skeeter Francis, the sports-information director at Wake Forest in the early days of the league and then the ACC's service-bureau director for more than 20 years, had a similar assessment.

'The problems that existed with the Southern Conference don't apply that much now,' Francis said. 'They will apply a little in football, but if you can get a conference championship game, that won't be a problem. Basketball is going to work itself out. Baseball, you've got no problem whatsoever because they all play 100 games anymore.

'So I kinda like this. I'm not saying bigger is better. Bigger isn't always better. But in this particular case, looking at the situation and knowing John Swofford and the people who were involved, you just knew something like this had to happen. It's progress, I guess, or whatever you want to call it.'

There is an interesting connection between the ACC's decision to split from the Southern in '53 and its decision to expand in 2003, however. It seems that both decisions were driven largely by football.

The ACC evolved into the premier basketball conference in the country, thanks to the likes of Everett Case, Frank McGuire, Vic Bubas, Dean Smith and a progression of great coaches.

But in 1953, football was king at most schools that would become the ACC. Maryland won the national championship in 1953 under Jim Tatum (despite losing its bowl game). Duke was a perennial national power, and Clemson had a strong program with Frank Howard.

'Everybody thinks now that the ACC was formed to be a basketball conference,' Weedon said. 'But that wasn't the case. It was because Tatum and Howard and those guys wanted to keep the football up.'

Francis said: 'Basketball wasn't that much of a factor (in the formation of the ACC). Basketball came later.'

Weedon, who was a student at Maryland in 1953 working in the sports-information office, recalls that N.C. State almost got left out in the cold when the ACC was formed because its football program was so weak.

'State came very close to dropping football at that time,' Weedon said. 'The program was losing money. They couldn't draw at Riddick Stadium, so they were playing seven road games and three home games every year, and so they'd wind up only winning two or three games a season.'

In June 1953, State's athletics council met to decide the program's future.

'They wound up deciding to put more emphasis on football, and they went out and hired Earle Edwards,' Weedon said. 'That's the only way they could get into the new conference. They had to promise that would put more emphasis on football before they could get into the ACC.

There's little question that bigger wasn't better at the time. The 17-school Southern Conference was inherently dysfunctional, according to Weedon and Francis.

'You would have two or three teams claiming to be Southern Conference champions in football, because a lot of teams didn't play each other,' Weedon said. 'Then you had private schools who had the resources, and private schools who were cutting back, and the state schools. It was definitely too big.'

And not just in football, either.

'Back then, the minor sports played on a dual basis,' Francis said. 'Maryland's golf team would have a dual match with Wake Forest, instead of today where all the ACC schools go to different tournaments every weekend. You'd have dual swim meets. With 17 schools, that was just impossible.

'The Southern Conference wasn't a conference at that point. Seventeen schools is a group of schools, it's not a conference.'

That might be something to remember now.

But still, these are different times, with different circumstances.