A Banner Year for Meanness

By Tom Callahan

Patrick Ewing comes ungently to the Big East tournament

The sophomore season of 7-ft. Georgetown Center Patrick Ewing has been a mean slide back to the hard times of Jackie Robinson. Signs along the way: at Providence College, EWING CAN'T READ; at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, THINK EWING! THINK!; in Philadelphia's Palestra, EWING IS AN APE. When Ewing was introduced there someone in the crowd tossed a banana peel onto the court. T shirts and buttons have been manufactured bearing the slogan: EWING KANT READ DIS, which is also a recurring chant at the games. Not surprisingly, Patrick Ewing, 20, has had a few fights this year. Racism is not surprising. It pervade sports and life. But the overtness of ape banners and bananas on the floor is chilling.

Basketball is a most intimate game. Observing a baseball or football player from a distance, the first impression of color might be the color of his uniform. But basketball players are running around in their underwear, and the spectators are close enough to see the players' beards dripping sweat. Since a giant black center is no novelty, something about Ewing must be particularly affecting. "He looks like a big, bad, mean guy," says John Thompson, his coach. "Actually he's a big, quiet, sensitive guy."

Ewing is an aggressive player. The most popular black basketball players in the world are the Harlem Globetrotters, grinning minstrels "aping" their game. But the next most popular black basketball players are those without a black presence, whose talent may be intimidating but whose style is unthreatening. Ralph Sampson, the University of Virginia's 7-ft. 4-in. senior center, is more docile and less abused. In fact, fans are given to wondering how much better Sampson would be if he had a rougher temperament. Ewing plays angry. "The way Ewing plays," says Thompson, "he doesn't ask questions, he makes statements."

Neither does he answer questions very often. In the manner of U.C.L.A. Coach John Wooden, whose players frequently needed postgraduate work in smiling, Thompson has sheltered his star from the public and press. "I'm not going to make Patrick talk to someone if he doesn't want to," Thompson says, "and usually he doesn't want to." Though just a few words from Ewing might lower the banners, Thompson wonders, "Should it be up to him? We've received letters from people trying to rationalize the abuse, to justify it. 'He should get used to it,' they say. 'It comes with the territory.' Do we want a young kid to get used to this?"

Thompson, too, is black and around 7 ft. tall. For a couple of seasons after his playing years at Providence, he backed up Bill Russell for the Boston Celtics. A few banners have stretched across Thompson's life as well. In 1975, his third year at Georgetown, this one was hoisted in the school gym: THOMPSON THE NIGGER COACH MUST GO. Last season, when Ewing and Thompson came within one basket of winning the national championship, a great deal was made of Thompson's being the first black coach to bring a team to the National Collegiate Athletic Association's final four. So much talk of color distressed him. "Ignorance has no color," Thompson says. "The point isn't that this season has been degrading to a black man. It has been degrading to any man. On the airplane last week, I asked Patrick again how he was holding up. He told me, 'I've grown accustomed to it. I got so much of it in high school.' That made me saddest of all."

Ewing's high school was Cambridge Rindge and Latin in Massachusetts, his coach a concerned man named Mike Jarvis. In a well-meaning letter that became the source of the KANT READ slurs, Jarvis explained to swarming recruiters that Ewing had lived his first twelve years in Jamaica and still spoke with an island patois that made him selfconscious. According to the letter, Ewing had learning deficiencies that would require such licenses as un-timed testing and lecture taping. "My approach was to argue against the terms of the letter," says Thompson, who insists Ewing has received no concessions of the kind requested and that he is faring well in school. "I told Patrick's father, 'Don't send your son to me to be educated and then tell me how to educate him.' " Naturally, after Ewing chose Georgetown, copies of the letter were well distributed by the losers. In any case, for the bigots in the stands, the letter is only an excuse. The grudge existed before Ewing.

Unconventional, mysterious, Ewing wears a gray T shirt under his game jersey, a shield from the cold but also an emblem of individuality. The shirt is festooned with NIKE insignias, Thompson being a consultant for that sporting-goods company, as many college coaches serve one company or another for a significant fee. Nobody looks down to question the propriety of manufacturers' logos on the socks of collegiate players, but Ewing waves the practice not only under your nose but over the rim. Unwittingly or not, he never softens anything. Says Thompson: "He has an unbelievable strength that is close to arrogant pride, but a good arrogant pride. He'll learn to hook and roll eventually, but for now he's a banger."

The banging in the Big East, a four-year-old conference with five teams ranked among the country's top 20, has been almost as loud as the signs, and nearly as ugly at times. Both Georgetown-St. John's games this year have featured fistfights, and Madison Square Garden is in a tingle for the Big East tournament this week. Georgetown's record is 9 and 5 in the conference (19 and 8 overall). Two graduated guards have been missed this season: opponents have been able to concentrate on Ewing and bang on him. "Our games are not for the faint of heart, that's for sure," says Commissioner Dave Gavitt, who disputes "the chatter about violence in the Big East." As for the banners, he has directed administrators to be quick in getting them down. At his angriest, Thompson says, "First a sign, then a banana, then a rock, .then a riot." But then quietly he adds, "There is learning in negatives too." Ewing is certainly getting an education.

-- By Tom Callahan This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.