From The Archives: A Look Back

From The Archives: A Look Back

We anticipate that many who visit this site during its inaugural week are unfamiliar with Basketball Times.  Thus, we'd like to catch everyone up.  With a history dating back more than 30 years, BT is rich with tradition.  The following is a story that ran in the Sept. 2003 issue, which celebrated the publication's 25th anniversary.  It's a round table discussion between such BT alumni as Bob Ryan and Dick "Hoops" Weiss, along with others, who recount their favorite memories of how a magazine born in a basement turned into a staple of the college basketball landscape.

***

“I expect during the coming years,” Larry Donald wrote in his first issue as editor and publisher of Basketball Times, back on Dec. 10, 1980, “we will, in fact, be the publication which will become known as the Bible of Basketball.”
And that, indeed, is how a little magazine published from the basement of Donald’s house in Troy, Mich. – and, later, from Pinehurst, N.C. – came to be known during the two decades that Donald was in charge, right up until his unexpected death on Nov. 16, 2000.
Donald wasn’t always so prophetic. His final preseason No. 1 pick – Seton Hall – wound up being eliminated in the first round of the NIT, but Donald’s forecasts proved right far more often than wrong.
Basketball Times, which Donald purchased following eight years at Basketball Weekly, turns 25 this issue.  To celebrate the occasion, six of those who were most influential in helping Donald bring BT to this point were gathered by teleconference to share their memories.  Mark Engel (currently the sports information director at Detroit Mercy), Dan Wetzel (who recently moved from CBS Sportsline to Yahoo Sports), Mike Sheridan (the SID at Villanova)  and Joe Kyriakoza (who is an advertising executive at Ford Motor company and, like Sheridan, continues to write an NBA column for BT) were BT employees at different stages of Donald’s days in the Detroit area.  Bob Ryan and Dick Weiss, two giants among basketball writers, were with Donald from the beginning at BT.  John Akers, BT’s managing editor, served as moderator.
If, at times, it seems like the six are talking as much about Donald as Basketball Times, there is good reason.  Over two decades, the two became synonymous. 

BT: First, a toast to Larry Donald and to Basketball Times. How is it that we’re here today, discussing the magazine’s 25th season?
WEISS: Larry was the ultimate visionary. He was always two years ahead of everyone. Some people are two weeks ahead; he was two years ahead.
BT: Give me an example.
WEISS: Well, besides picking Seton Hall No. 1 in the country (laughter) … That was a bad mistake. Everyone but Larry knew that was a bad mistake.
He was way ahead of his time in picking subject matter.  He would do a story on basketball in Mississippi before anyone got below the Magnolia Curtain.
SHERIDAN: I remember the Bevo Francis story.  I’ve seen a couple of Bevo Francis stories in recent years, in the last five years, retracing Bevo Francis’ years.  Larry did that back in 1986.
ENGEL: I remember, going back to the Basketball Weekly days, being assigned to do a story on Robert Parish at Centenary when nobody had heard of the player or the school.  Maybe Larry and Marty Blake.  We put it on the cover, and it was like, ‘Who is this guy?’  And the next thing you know, he’s on the All-America team and being picked up by the pros.  That was one of Larry’s gems, like his All-America teams.
WEISS: His All-America teams never gibed with the AP team.
RYAN: It was not allowed.
WEISS: And, also the pre-season No. 1s. That was his big quest every year, I guess to sit down with Mike and Dan and Joe at lunch and decide who was going to be his No. 1.  He was really hyper about picking someone who was unique.
ENGEL: Mike, you remember the argument at Mr. B’s over Kenny Smith as the national player of the year?
SHERIDAN: Kenny Smith has his jersey retired in the Dean Dome because Basketball Times named him national player of the year.  We chose him over David Robinson.
David Robinson was another guy who was a story like the one Mark mentioned. Larry had been to the first and second round of the NCAA Tournament in Dayton the year before and told me that there was this kid at Navy that we had to do a story on.  And I went up and saw David Robinson the following year.  We had David Robinson on the cover early in his junior year, and it was later on in that year where he really exploded and became a national player of the year.  Hersey Hawkins was another guy that Larry was on. But the Robinson story, to me, was one of those classic cases of Larry being on a guy who he had just happened to see play in an NCAA regional tournament.
WEISS: What I loved about Larry was his ability to incorporate the history of the game into all his stories.  I mean, some of his stories went on for eight or 10 pages.  He was great at really factoring in the history of the region, the program, the trends of the program and personalities of the program.  It really gave you a sense of who those people were, rather than just who those people were at the current time.
RYAN: I loved the way he could do those long, narrative stories.  He was a master of that.  He was able to do mix off-beat stuff in with the game stuff and make it flow.
The thing that I never want to get lost in the shuffle is that, I’ve never met anybody like Larry, period.  In this business, no one else, ever, has been the triple-threat that Larry was.  He was, A, a business guy, which is way beyond most of us.  No. 2, he was an editor who had an editor’s mind and editor’s vision and editor’s competence to the highest degree.  And, No. 3, and the one that I don’t want to be forgotten, he was a great writer.  I mean, a great writer.  Not just a good, pedestrian writer, not just a lucky writer.  He could really write.  He could write better than almost anybody that he edited, and he could have made his living as a national columnist at any major paper in America.  That’s a fact. 
That just blows me away, to think that somebody could be that skilled at all three things, because the rest of us are very, very fortunate if we’ve got one skill.  And he had three.  That’s why he was unique – utterly unique – not only in basketball writing, but probably in terms of American sports writing.  You find me one other person who combines the business head with the other two skills, because I don’t know anybody who does.
WETZEL: What I loved about that magazine is that he would go against the conventional wisdom that would enter these pressrooms.  All these reporters come up with these statements, like, ‘You know how that guy does it,’ and none of them have investigated anything about the coach.  And they just crush these coaches’ reputations. Larry got to know the coaches.
KYRIAKOZA: By choosing unconventional topics to write about, he trained the rest of us to think that way, as well.
WETZEL: What I did the last three years for CBS was Basketball Times on a daily basis.  I got an e-mail once from a guy from Ohio.  He wrote an e-mail saying you’re writing the way Larry would have wanted.  That was a great e-mail.
Bill Bennett (the SID at UCLA) and I were talking when the (Steve) Lavin thing was going down.  And he was saying he really missed Larry.  They were under a lot of stress at that point, and I said, ‘He would have loved this, wouldn’t he?’  And he just laughed.  He would have been there to write an eight-page story on Lavin’s last days.
SHERIDAN: He just treasured the history of a program like UCLA.  He loved North Carolina’s history.  Kansas’ history.  Kentucky’s.  He was fascinated by it.  He could tell you a story of when he was at Basketball Weekly, walking along with Adolph Rupp.  He had interviewed Adolph Rupp, and he had interviewed John Wooden.
Basketball, unlike baseball, doesn’t have as many writers who have been around.  A lot of college writers came to the scene in the ’80s or the ’90s, and they only knew Adolph Rupp as a name in a book or John Wooden as the kindly gentleman who sits at UCLA games.  Larry knew those people and had interviewed them and knew the whole scene.
You would go to lunch with him, one-on-one, and the stories would be fascinating.
WEISS: Coaches are so insulated these days.  I think Larry got in on the ground floor before it became mob coverage and got to know them one-on-one, back when coaches were making the same money as basketball writers.  I think that makes a huge difference, because you can get to know someone over a beer.  He got to know people before they became big-time talents, and they never forgot it.
SHERIDAN: Talk about visionaries, he was one of the first guys to go to the summer camps.  He did it grudgingly at first, but after his first one in Indianapolis and realized the connections that it made for you.  That stamped you as a basketball person.  He might not have liked the technical quality of the games, but he liked the whole scene and going out with the coaches and bonding with him.
He used to say that our more popular issues were not the ones in January and February, when everyone’s writing about college basketball.  They’re the June, July and August issues, when nobody’s writing about it.
KYRIAKOZA: I think my perspective might be a little bit different, because when I came on, Larry was in the latter stages of his career and was a little more hostile toward some things. 
But one thing, Larry definitely was a mentor.  He was awesome at teaching you how to do the right things in writing and reporting and investigating, etc.  He was a great guy to sit down with a beer and just talk, because he had such great perspective on so many things, besides basketball.  When I started there, I was 21 years old and just out of college and gung ho, and I think he helped bring me back to Earth a little bit and make me understand that I had to work for what I get.
WEISS: When Mike and Danny and Larry were all in the same office in Detroit, I had to call them almost every day.  It was addictive.  It was like one huge brainstorming session every day.  These guys would just sit around and talk about story ideas and perspective, and it gave the magazine an enormous edge against the competition, because it was light years ahead in terms of the way it was perceived and the angles it touched and people it reached.
It really set the tone for a lot of people. I thought it was way ahead.
The story that Dan wrote that became the genesis of his book (“Sole Influence”) about our favorite AAU coach in Kansas City, Myron Piggie, that was a brilliant piece of work.  And Larry gave Dan a stage to do that kind of stuff.
BT: Tell me more about those lunch sessions.
WETZEL: They would last two hours at Mr. B’s. You’d walk in and the hostess used to hug us, she knew us so well.
The thing about Larry, everything was interesting to Larry. You could go to the first round of an NCAA Tournament or an eight-team whatever, the Purdue Christmas Classic or the jayvee game at Terre Haute, and he would watch that game looking for stories.  He found something interesting in everybody.
He did a cover story at the end of his career about Texas-Pan American and why they stunk.  He called from Brownsville, Texas, because he was bored, and I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’  And the story came out, and it was good.  He was fascinated by everything.  He didn’t just care about the stars.
He was interested in everything, and he would put that on to you every day at lunch. He would talk college basketball 365 lunches a year.
SHERIDAN: He went into every story with an open mind.  That’s one thing I learned.  I remember one time going to Dave Odom when he was at Wake Forest, and I had this idea about how they had started succeeding at recruiting when they landed Tim Duncan.  And I ran this great theory by Dave Odom, and he goes, ‘No, that had nothing to do with it.’  You had to be prepared for that and be open-minded, and Larry always was.
He always had this line, where he’d say, ‘I hate it when facts get in the way of a good story.’  But he would always back off and say, ‘Oh, well, That wasn’t such a great idea.’  Not every one of those ideas we had at those lunches was a good idea.  There were some duds.
When Bob talked about Larry being a great writer, I think that’s also what made him an excellent editor.  He was a writer, and his attitude was to let the different voices speak, that everybody’s style was different and don’t try to over-edit. We edited very lightly, just some grammar here and there. We would proof-read it.  But everyone was allowed to have a different voice.
In the days of John Feinstein and Charles Pierce, you couldn’t have two more polar-opposite viewpoints.  But Larry really encouraged that, and it was good reading because of that.
When you would go out and coaches would be upset about a certain story – and I can still remember Billy Tubbs in the Oklahoma office chewing me out about something that Randy Holtz had written – but Larry was very comfortable with that.  Larry got that all the time.
WEISS: Roy Williams.
WETZEL: Yeah, Roy Williams was on him all the time about things written by Randy Holtz and everyone else.
BT: Some of those feuds and the give-and-take between Feinstein and Pierce, that was pretty good entertainment.
WETZEL: It was obviously a magazine that was going to be read by devoted fans of college basketball, exclusively, or else you weren’t going to get it. He was not afraid to say this is what’s wrong with the game or this guy’s wrong or to let other people do that.
RYAN: He wanted you to do that.  It can’t be exaggerated that he wanted the best columnists and writers he could find, because he wanted powerful opinions that would make the paper lively and diverse, and he got that.  It was a moth-to-the-flame type thing.  You wanted to be a part of this thing. 
I was always just happy to be a part of it and still am.  It was special.
ENGEL: I think Larry enjoyed (the feuds and the give-and-take).  There wasn’t a practical joke that he didn’t enjoy or a fight that he wouldn’t pick that way, just to stir it up a little bit.
Even the lunches at Maranelli’s before Mr. B’s.  I don’t know how many pitchers of ice tea we went through there.  Picking an all-region team was impossible, because we’d have to have 17 other stories that we’d go through first.  I mean, Larry found Abe Lemons before Abe Lemons was Abe Lemons.  He found the comedian in him before he became a big-time coach at Texas and then followed him at the downside of his career.  Once you became Larry’s friend or once you became Larry’s subject matter, it was friend or subject matter for life.
SHERIDAN: We would go in and vote on that all-regional team, and Dan and I would go in and think we all had votes.  In a lot of cases, Larry had already made up his mind because he had already talked to Hoops and Bob.  I can remember Dan and I getting into a heated Pepe Sanchez debate.  The decisions sometimes seemed like a democratic process, but he had already gotten his inside information and that deal was made.
WEISS: I didn’t have anything to do with Seton Hall, that’s all I’ll say.
SHERIDAN: My take on that is that Larry was already sick when he made that pick, we just didn’t realize it yet.
BT: One of the things I’ve come to admire is that Larry was able to make those kinds of picks that went against conventional wisdom and still maintain his credibility and reputation.
SHERIDAN: It goes back to credibility that he had built up over 30 years.  Another thing about Larry: He went out and did the (preseason No. 1) stories himself, and I can remember him telling me, ‘When you go to these places, you’ve got to look nice.’  He’d look the part, and he was a big guy who had a great presence.  People always remembered him.  He just built up an enormous amount of credibility.
When the rest of us would go out on a story representing Basketball Times, you would inevitably meet people who were impressed by Larry.  You were welcomed immediately.  You might not be Sports Illustrated, but within the world of basketball you were a big deal.  And that was just because of Larry.
WETZEL: I know about two-thirds of the assistant coaches in the country, or some ridiculous number, and it started through that.  Sometimes, the (publicists) wouldn’t figure it out, but you’d get to  the basketball offices, and they were excited that you were there.
Everybody wanted to be in that magazine.  Young guys, particularly, wanted to be in it.  Because Larry had so much vision, there was an element that if you were in there and were up-and-coming, someone was going to see it and realize that this was an up-and-coming coach.
WEISS: When I was in Philadelphia, more people knew me from writing for Basketball Times than the Philadelphia Daily News. That’s the type of clout that the magazine had.
BT: When was BT’s peak period?
SHERIDAN: There were highs and lows.  I was the first full-time employee.  I was hired in a bar … at Maranelli’s, by the way.
I think in the mid-’80s, we had a stretch.  And then we went through a period that maybe wasn’t as high.  But then around the ’90s, we had a period, particularly with the Pierce-Feinstein thing going strong.  When Dan came on, he brought a lot of energy.  I think Larry and I had been together awhile, and Dan brought a lot of different ideas.  I think that kicked off a period in the ’90s when we decided to take more stuff in-house and to write more of it ourselves.  We didn’t cut down our columnists to a large degree.  We did more features ourselves rather than farming it out.  I think that went pretty well and was a very good period.
ENGEL: During that era where more staff writers went out and did things, we always called it the Proximity Rule.  If a team was coming to the University of Detroit or to play the Pistons, or even Michigan or Michigan State, we would look for a story.  We nickel-and-dimed it at times.
WEISS: Remember when you had the rivalry year?
RYAN: Yes, I loved that.  I was just thinking about that earlier.
To do those (stories on rivalries), you’ve got to have the perspective that you can’t buy or manufacture or study up.  It’s got to be in your bones, and he just knew that stuff so well.
WETZEL: He knew how to do them.  He did Duke-North Carolina from the stands.  We did them in different manners.  It wasn’t just Duke-North Carolina.  It was North Dakota-North Dakota State women’s basketball, too.
SHERIDAN: I think as young reporters, you learned a lot about how to do these stories. It’s a little different from daily newspaper writing, as I think John has discovered. You have to come into it from a different standpoint, knowing that this is going to appear a month from now and you can’t be writing about so-and-so who scored 20 points last night.  We picked up on that and did it in our own unique way, and Larry gave you the freedom to write in your own style. It was a very fulfilling thing, because you could put your own trademark on it.
But you watched Larry, and I think a lot of times he didn’t know he was teaching while he was teaching.  Even now, I know stuff about dealing with printers that I didn’t even realize I was learning.
KYRIAKOZA: You knew Larry was well-respected when you would pick up the phone and say, ‘Uh, Larry, it’s Roy Williams.’
WEISS: That wasn’t always a good thing.
KYRIAKOZA: But it was like a who’s who of phone calls.
WETZEL: Right before the draft, everyone would start calling.
SHERIDAN: In ’93, that was the day that Chris Webber was going to be picked No. 1. (Orlando Magic general manager) Pat Williams called Larry that morning.  That wasn’t that unusual.  Al McGuire would call.  You would just pick up the phone, and you would never know who it would be.  It might be an irate subscriber, but it might be a famous person.  So, Pat Williams called, and Larry comes back and says: “Orlando is going to trade for Penny Hardaway.’  And they had done the deal and run it by Larry.  And three hours later, because the draft was at the (Pistons’) Palace that year, we go out, and we’re sitting there, and the deal was consummated.
ENGEL: I think Larry liked the subscriber calls, too.  He’d tell me,  ‘Guess what moron I just talked to?’
WETZEL: And he’d end the phone call: ‘You, sir, are an idiot.’
SHERIDAN: I was a witness to that phone call.  A subscriber called up to complain about a John Feinstein column that had inadvertently been used in Eastern Basketball.  We were short a column, so Larry threw it into Eastern Basketball.  A subscriber said he was upset with John Feinstein.  And Larry said, ‘John doesn’t write for the magazine. That was a one-time thing, and he won’t appear in there again.’
And the subscriber said he was canceling his subscription anyway.
And Larry said: ‘You mean to tell me you’re canceling your subscription to a magazine that this guy doesn’t write in, just because of who he is?’
And the caller said yes.
And Larry said: ‘You’re a moron.’
ENGEL: Larry had his favorite things.  Printers were always high on his list.  He regarded them as used-car salesmen.  Everywhere we would go, it was a battle.  They were always the bane of his existence, and if it wasn’t them, it was the U.S. Postal Service.
He was on top of those guys, relentlessly.  I don’t know what printers dreaded more, having Larry there to make sure an issue was going to go out on time, or having to renew contracts with him at the end of the year.
BT: Was BT always produced out of a basement while it was in Michigan?
ENGEL: There was one year we had an office. It was something that Larry wanted to have.  It was only five or 10 minutes away from the house in Troy, and then that got to be too big a commute, so we went back down to the basement.
I remember, Dan, you’re dad wondering what you were doing down in the basement with this guy.
WETZEL: Yeah, try explaining to your dad why you were going to work for some guy in his basement.
SHERIDAN: When I just got there, they had just redone the basement.  The desk they had was a former table top that they had laid on something.  And my chair was something that was essentially a lawn chair.
The first couple months I was there, I did a story on Missouri and Derrick Chievous.  And I was talking to Norm Stewart, and he said, ‘Mike, you remind me of a young announcer who was in St. Louis not long ago.’  And I said, ‘Who’s that, Coach?’  And he goes, ‘Bob Costas.’  So I’m feeling pretty pumped up about myself.
I go to the office the next day, still feeling pretty good about being compared to Bob Costas.  I walk down to the basement, and Larry’s little dog had left a package on the carpet in front of my desk.  I’m scraping that off and thinking, ‘ So much for being Bob Costas.  I don’t think Bob Costas is doing this.’  You came back down to Earth in the basement.
ENGEL: It wasn’t just the basement. It started when you’d walk up the driveway, and if the garage door was open, there would be nothing but boxes of back issues.  You’d have to fight your way to the door, and then you could go to the basement.
BT: What were those early production days like?
ENGEL: When I first started working with Larry, our first papers were done on linotype.  We used a printer in downtown Detroit.  The hours were crazy.  We’d go down on midnight of a Sunday night to finish the paper, sometimes, so it could get in the mail first thing on Monday.  You’d read galley proofs.  They’d put pages together with lead type, and then it evolved to cold type.
Larry went kicking and screaming to cold type, so you can imagine what computers were like for him.  I never knew that computers could fly, but I heard several times that they were airborne in that office.
SHERIDAN: By the time I got there, we were still using typewriters.  Larry first got one of those Tandy 200s, which was essentially a word processor.  He was in his office and was starting to fiddle with the computer.  Larry didn’t want to read directions, so he’s just banging on the thing.  And I hear him say, ‘This thing doesn’t work!’  And he picked it up … And there was a lake behind the house, and he says, ‘This thing’s going in the lake!  It’s going to be the biggest boat anchor ever!’
Nanci (Donald) and I calmed him down and we got it to work, and then he loved it.  He wouldn’t give it up 10 years later, when we’re up to the Macintosh and you could finally design the paper on the computer.  Larry kind of fought that.
I always told Larry that it was a good thing he wasn’t the first caveman, or we’d still be in the cave.
WETZEL: Remember our joke: ‘Wheel? Who needs a wheel?’
KYRIAKOZA: He finally embraced e-mail after awhile.
SHERIDAN: Someone asked how you could send Larry an e-mail.  I said you’d be better off sending him smoke signals.
RYAN: Guys, I have to go, but I want to add two things.
Basketball Times has been a very important outlet to me, because it enables me to write about a sport that I love and tackling topics in a certain manner that simply wouldn’t be viable for the Boston Globe.  For my general audience, frankly, it would be over their head.  But it’s not over the head – it’s playing right into the heart – of the Basketball Times audience.  It gives me a totally different personality and outlet, and I would even go so far as to say that I write freer and better in Basketball Times than I ever do for the Boston Globe.  Sometimes I think about that.  How can I capture this spirit and energy when I’m writing my column in the Globe the same way that I do for Basketball Times? And I don’t know if I’ve ever figured that out yet.
That’s No. 1.
No. 2 is my favorite story that fits into these stories about mechanics and logistics and so forth.  First of all, he took dictation from me countless times.  Either, I didn’t mail it on time or computer problems or whatever.  He took dictation from me a lot.  The one time I most remembered that was the ultimate was 1979, Bird-Magic in Salt Lake City, and I was his guy.  That was when he was having his NCAA problem (because of gambling ads that had appeared when he was at Basketball Weekly).  Remember?  I was his reporter.  I also happened to be covering this little team called the Boston Celtics, but  managed to sneak away for the weekend for the Final Four.  I wrote the story.  The game ends.  I go back to my room, sneak one or two in – in Salt Lake City, I’m not sure how – and write my story.  And I remember dictating my story to him in the airport and covering the Celtics that night. That was a massive dictation, but it was the ultimate labor of love.
And you guys were telling stories about the lunches … I’ve logged a few Mr. B’s hours myself.
SHERIDAN: Absolutely, and so did Hoops.
WETZEL: It was like All-Star Day when you guys came in.
RYAN: I loved coming to Detroit.  It was one of my favorite things.  I can still remember that Cadillac pulling up in front of Marriott on Big Beaver.
SHERIDAN: Larry would get some grief about the Cadillac.  He didn’t have a lot of showy things.  He led a very simple lifestyle.  But he liked driving a Cadillac.  I remember Charles Pierce one time giving him a lot of grief about, ‘You’re driving a Cadillac, but I haven’t seen a Basketball Times check in months.’  But that was Larry’s one little thing.
I remember Bob would come in when the Celtics were playing the Pistons in the late ’80s, and those were great days.  You talk about pure basketball symposium, people like Dan and I would just shut up and listen.
WETZEL: You wouldn’t do a lot of talking there.
RYAN: I miss him so much. I think about it all the time.
WEISS: I still remember the day it happened, and Mike calling me.  The week before, we were in New York at Coaches vs. Cancer.  Larry hated going to the Garden, because they never had his credential and would never give him a good seat.  He was the king of the world everywhere else, but at the Garden he hated the whole scene.  He was in a rotten mood and we got into an argument, and the next week, Michael called and told me he passed away.
RYAN: One of my last communications was one of those messages reminding me that I was, of course, late again.
I was probably late one-third of the time.
SHERIDAN: He would refer to you affectionately as his Delinquent Correspondent.
But when your stuff came in, or when Hoops’ stuff would come in, you would put down what you were doing and go read it.  There were certain ones you wanted to make a point to read.
BT: Does it surprise all of you that the magazine has lasted 25 years?
WEISS: I never questioned how long it would last.  I am surprised at how strong it is going now, with the internet.  I still think that it has a niche.  The tone was set early.  I think it’s the most unique specialty publication in the country.  And probably the best collegiate publication out there, on a regular basis.  It does give you stuff you can’t get anywhere else.
My biggest problem was that I never thought it got enough circulation.  I always thought that if enough people got a chance to read it, it could have been even bigger.
I thought this magazine was so good at times, that it deserved more circulation than it probably got.  It really had a cult following.  If you weren’t really wired to college basketball, people had never even seen the magazine.
WETZEL: I had never heard of it until I was at UMass, and Bill Bayno was reading it.  He told me you could buy it at a newsstand in Amherst that had it.  And I started buying it and said I wanted to write for this magazine, and that was when I was a junior in college.
ENGEL: That’s fate, because that might have been one of the five newsstands that carried it.
SHERIDAN: It almost had an independent movie-company feel to it.  And it might not have had some of the same charm … some of the things Larry did might not have fit in an office-powered manner.
RYAN: That’s a very good point.
WEISS: But wasn’t Larry worried at one point about the internet?
WETZEL: He thought the internet was like a 900-line or something. He did. He never thought the internet was going to be that big.
SHERIDAN: I think the most dangerous time for the paper came when Larry died.  Even those of us who had worked for the paper and had moved on immediately thought, ‘How do we move forward?’  To me, it was incomprehensible … you had never considered Basketball Times without Larry.
I worked for him as the No. 2 guy for 14 years.  It never occurred to me that Larry wouldn’t be around.  I used to tell people that I had peaked professionally when I was 22 years old.  I couldn’t go any higher.  I never thought in terms of editing the magazine, because it was always going to be Larry’s.  I think that part was such a shock, when he passed away.
Those six months to a year after he passed away were a very critical time.  The magazine was able to get through that and hire you, John, and restore some stability to it.  That was a huge turning point.  If there was any point it could have been in trouble, that was it.
KYRIAKOZA: The one time Larry talked about surviving was when he called Dean Smith’s retirement.  And he said, ‘If this one doesn’t happen, we’re packing it up, guys.’
WETZEL: That day, we had both been told.  Our sources called in, and Larry and I both heard that Dean Smith was retiring the next day.  And this was a bombshell.  We put it up on our internet site, and the next thing you know, it’s up on the AP national wire that Basketball Times, a monthly, is reporting this.  It was in USA Today, that Basketball Times was reporting this national scoop.  We put it up at like 7 p.m.  The phones went crazy.  Radio stations.  TV.  Everyone’s going crazy.  So we take all these calls. At 10, all three lines are going, and Larry says: ‘That’s it, Danny.  We’re going to Mr. B’s.’  We go to Mr. B’s, and I park next to Larry and get out of my car and say, ‘Larry, are you absolutely sure?’  I mean, this is absolute panic.  ‘Are you absolutely sure he’s retiring?’
And he says, ‘Well, Dan, if Dean Smith doesn’t retire tomorrow, then we are.’  And then we went in and had a couple beers and watched it on SportsCenter.
That was a heck of a day, the day the monthly from leafy Troy, Mich., beat everybody