Coming to The

By Tom Callahan

The National Collegiate Athletic Association will present its Final Four this weekend in a domed stadium in New Orleans too spacious for the intimate exercise of basketball and yet too small for the size of the event. From a regional sport with a national name, college basketball has grown into a national game with a regional flavor, the most consistently satisfying championship on the calendar. It has become a spectacle on the order of the Kentucky Derby, in the sense that the aficionados constitute the minority of the spectators. There cannot be this many basketball nuts.

Born in 1939 as an exclusive eight-team cotillion, the tournament guaranteed each entrant $750 and expenses in 1940, compared with the $1 million assured all four schools in New Orleans. Throughout the '40s, the rival National Invitation Tournament was more prestigious. In 1949 vaunted Kentucky lost in the first round of the N.I.T. but won the N.C.A.A. championship. Eventually, the field was expanded to 16, 22, 25, 32, 40, 48, and, two years ago, to 64.

Time's passing was perfectly expressed this season by Jack Haley, the UCLA center, who admitted, "When I first came here, I didn't know that Lew Alcindor and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were the same person." Coach John Wooden's ten championships over twelve seasons -- the great '60s and '70s stewardships of Alcindor, Bill Walton and Sidney Wicks -- are distant memories. The last three dominators to frequent the Final Four -- Virginia's Ralph Sampson, Georgetown's Patrick Ewing and Houston's Akeem Olajuwon -- won one title among them. Other sports only talk of parity.

Few areas of the country possess major league baseball or professional football, but it is only a slight exaggeration to say every state has a contender for this super bowl. In the past two weeks, network and cable- television stations have fairly throbbed with elimination games, often featuring heroic and nameless underdogs with authentic chances. Within 90 minutes of Southwest Missouri State's invitation, a spontaneous pep rally of 3,000 fans lighted up Springfield on a Sunday night. The Bears upset Clemson and almost Kansas.

Last week, when the Austin Peay Governors came home to Clarksville, Tenn., overtime losers to Providence after conquering Illinois, the whole town met them at the interstate in a caravan complete with fire engine and mayor. Senior Forward Bob Thomas missed the foul shot that would have won the Providence game in regulation, and the anguished picture of him leaving the court is one of the tableaus of the tournament. Thomas was the last player to get up to speak to the caravan, but he never got anything out for all the cheering.

That seems the charm, though the charm is not always what it seems. In the championship game two years ago, Villanova was directed to an implausible 66-64 victory over Georgetown by an appealing point guard named Gary McLain. The Wildcats' pizzaman coach, Rollie Massimino, said in the afterglow, "I've screamed at this group more than any other, not because they are such good players but because they are such good kids." McLain described Massimino as "a brother, a friend, a father, your boss, your coach."

But in a cynically timed confession, McLain wrote in Sports Illustrated two weeks ago that he was a cocaine addict during the 1985 tournament, and had been allaying Massimino's suspicions with transparent lies. "I honestly believe nothing ever came of it not because he didn't have enough to go on but because he had so much." Before the semifinal game against Memphis State, McLain says he did a quarter-gram of coke in the bathroom of his hotel. The true attitude of the smiling backcourtman, the beautiful dreamer of all the glorious press dispatches, came down to this: "I just wanted the season to be over." He says, "Now I wish Coach Mass had tested me then, or got me some help, or something."

Possibly thanks to McLain, only a few coaches have criticized the tournament drug-testing procedure inaugurated by the N.C.A.A. this year, a painstaking postgame process that forgot to allow for dehydrated athletes. Coach Norm Sloan of Florida, fearing passive contamination, packed up the whole team and fled a Syracuse Holiday Inn when one of the Gators thought he detected a wisp of marijuana smoke curling out of the room next door.

Fresh problems confront the coaches on the court too. A brand new 19-ft. three-point shot and a fairly new 45-sec. shooting clock have permanently changed the game and for the moment improved the drama. "One of the most important balances in basketball," says Pete Newell, who coached championship teams at San Francisco and California, "is the value of the ball against the penalty of the foul. That might be out of whack now. Promiscuous fouling could be coming." The wiliest coaches, like Jerry Tarkanian of Nevada, Las Vegas, have been passing up three-on-two fast breaks for three-point shots. What do you do with guards who run away from the basket?

One advantage the Final Four has over football's Super Bowl, in particular, is the compression of time. Always preoccupied with the opponent at hand and left only one weary day to turn to the final game Monday night, no one is overcoached or overprepared. "You have no choice but to be concerned with your own team," Newell says, "to coach in positives and make your own promises to yourself." No event delivers so reliably on its promises.