In a perfect world--one where college coaches with $300,000 contracts don't get busted driving away from crackhouses with a whore in the front seat--Mackey would have been forever defined by the good moments, the made-for-Hollywood splendor of March 1986.
There they were, the boys from Cleveland State--the Vikings, as if. They counted among their ranks a kid who spent his high school years ushering in a movie house, another dude who played ball in a Canadian junior college, one nicknamed Black Rambo by his teammates. These were the freaks and geeks of Division I, a few of them stump-legged scrappers who weighed 220 and stretched no taller than 6 foot 3.
No way a man wins with a team like that, unless that man's Kevin Mackey, who never met a feisty baller he didn't love. It ain't all about talent, he likes to say in that Bah-ston accent of his, but about heart--what's inside a man, what you can see in his eyes.
In March 1986, Mackey's Vikings, having lost only three games all season, got a bid to play in the NCAA tournament. No one expected the team to advance beyond the first quarter, much less the first round: Cleveland State, after all, had been scheduled to play Bobby Knight's Indiana Hoosiers, and Knight had never been booted out of the tourney in the first round. Until, of course, he ran into Mackey's Vikes, who dispatched the No. 3-ranked Hoosiers with a final score of 83-79.
Mackey's ride ended when David Robinson and his Navy team reminded Cleveland State where it was--playing so far above its talent level, the air became a little too thin. But when a team like Gonzaga makes it into the Sweet Sixteen, those Vikings get dredged up from the history books, reprised once more as columnists write of the great Cinderella stories of all time. Such tall tales have kept Mackey's name from disappearing altogether.
After beating Indiana, Mackey became a bona fide celebrity in Ohio--"The King of Cleveland" they called him, despite earlier allegations that he had committed recruiting violations when he brought Manute Bol to Cleveland State. He even had his own McDonald's commercial, and on June 7, 1990, Cleveland State offered him a contract extension worth $300,000 a year. It was enormous money, more than he had ever dreamed of making at such a tiny school. Yet Mackey never had enough, always borrowing from friends who turned a blind eye to his addictions.
Mackey can't explain how he ended up in a Cleveland crackhouse six days after signing that contract. It just happened, beginning with a few beers, leading to a little casual coke, and ending in a self-made hell. But the whole city got to watch it, the moment the King of Cleveland was caught selling his crown for crack rock. News cameras captured the entire bust, broadcast everything.
In the time it took for the cops to cuff him and the hooker, Mackey's career was over. He was fired from Cleveland State, and any shot he had at coaching in the NBA disappeared.
Never mind Mackey's talent; never mind his eye for talent. Never mind that he never got a single moment of jail time for what he did. He instead submitted to rehab, including a 90-day stint at New Spirit Treatment and Recovery Center in Houston, founded and run by his old friend (and soon-to-be head coach of the San Antonio Spurs) John Lucas.
People expect that kind of behavior from athletes--it's excused, ignored, forgiven. It's written off as the excesses of youth, dismissed as stupidity or arrogance...anything to make it seem so all right. But when a coach gets caught with coke and alcohol in his blood stream, he's forever condemned to pay for his sins.
That is how Kevin Mackey ended up in the USBL, the IBA, the CBA, the Global Basketball League, in South Korea...anywhere men don tank tops, run up and down a floor, and try to put an orange ball into a round hoop. His resume reads like an alphabet soup, a mishmash of letters signifying the bottom of the bottom rung of professional basketball--a place where coaches make $25,000 a year, where players are lucky to pocket $1,500 a month after taxes.
And that is how Mackey ended up in Dallas on a Saturday afternoon in April, instructing grown men and young boys how to play a game he knows as well as anyone.
Perhaps one day he will get his pardon, be allowed to coach in the bigs. He can't wait for the day, and has even been promised an assistant coaching job every now and then, though no one's yet followed through. And he knows that for a long while, all anyone will mention is that day in 1990 when he nearly destroyed his career and his life. But that's fine with him. It has taught him to give others a second shot.
"I always root for someone who's had a problem, any type of a problem, or who's made a mistake," he says. "I will always give a guy another chance. Whatever he did somewhere else, I will say, 'Hey, you start fresh with me, you got a blank slate, let's go from here.'"
Now, if only someone will say it to him.
