There was no logical reason for D’Angelo Harrison to be as amped-up as he was, as nervous as he was, but then it took Harrison a long time at St. John’s to trust the destiny of a basketball when it was in other people’s hands. How was he supposed to act now that his destiny as a basketball player was in the same exact place?
“Bro,” Sir’Dominic Pointer kept urging his classmate. “Just calm down.”
“I can’t,” Harrison said. “I just can’t.”
This was Sunday afternoon, third floor at the D’Angelo Center, and two NCAA Tournament regionals had already been revealed on CBS. St. John’s wasn’t among the first 34 teams. That didn’t mean anything of course: Duke hadn’t seen its name, for one. Neither had Villanova. Neither had a score of other quality teams.
Still, Harrison fidgeted. If you’ve walked the path he’s walked these past four years, maybe you understand, because he had experienced some gloriously high highs and some extraordinarily low lows, he never won a Big East Tournament game, the only postseason he has known is the NIT, and this was his last shot at the NCAA.
“A lot of things,” he said, “start going through your mind, you know?”
The Johnnies had ended the regular season with a thud, hammered at Villanova, plastered by Providence, so there was that, even as the various bracketologists called for calm, insisted there was no need for St. John’s to panic, it was still comfortably in the field.
Then there arrived the Sunday news that Chris Obekpa would be missing the opening weekend of the NCAAs, as a minimum, for a suspension The Post later learned was due to some impossibly ill-timed marijuana use. Again, up and down social media, all over the TV and radio, those who know the ways of the NCAA selection committee issued favorable updates: this would in no way knock the Johnnies out of the tournament, would only cost them a seeding line – if that.
The band arrived. The students gathered. Pizza was delivered.
And still Harrison twitched and squirmed and fretted.
“You assume the worst,” he said.
This was a crowning moment for all the seniors who have fueled this St. John’s season, but for Harrison it was an especially meaningful quest. No player since Chris Mullin had shown such early promise filling up the score sheet – Harrison reached 1,000 points as a sophomore, only one game later than Mullin had – and from the start his passion, his energy and his willingness to compete made him a favorite.
“But I also spent some time in a dark place,” he conceded Sunday. “And that almost cost me everything.”
It is one reason Harrison wasn’t going to rip Obekpa, because he knew exactly what his teammate had to be going through. Three games from the end of his sophomore year, Harrison had been thrown off the team by coach Steve Lavin. Drugs weren’t his vice; a lousy attitude was.
“I can’t be a coach that is more concerned with the winning than the process,” Lavin said at the time, knowing he was certainly flushing away any chance the 2013 Johnnies had of making a run to the NCAAs, unwilling to concede Harrison would ever be allowed back. “Even if it means at the end of the day that it ends up costing you your job, it’s the way I operate.”
Harrison’s body language, his immaturity, his lack of respect for the coaching staff – all of that finally led Lavin to mete out the ultimate consequence. Most of the time, almost all of the time, these stories end badly. Except here there was one twist:
Harrison wanted to stay.
More to the point, he was willing to change. He spent time that summer at John Lucas’ camp in Houston, enrolled in its Wellness Program alongside ex-Rutgers coach Mike Rice, who had suffered through his own public shaming. He realized Lavin wasn’t being unreasonable, that his own behavior had too often sabotaged his talent.
He asked if he could come back. Lavin said yes. This year, at Butler on Feb. 3, he scored his 2,000th point, and he will end up third on the school’s all-time scoring list, behind only Mullin and Malik Sealy.
And now, Sunday afternoon, on the television, he saw the most remarkable sight: a bracket line with eighth-seeded San Diego State on the top slot, No. 9 St. John’s on the bottom. Finally, he could exhale. Finally, he would see the NCAA Tournament from the inside.
“All that’s ever mattered to me is winning,” Harrison said, and as he did a St. John’s staffer handed out a mimeograph sheet with the tournament’s brackets splashed on it. Harrison pointed to the South Region, where he saw his school’s name. Official.
“Wow,” he said. “I mean … wow.”