The Sporting News Book Review for Are You Watching, Adolph Rupp?

"Irish Eyes, and Rupp, Are Watching Doyle"

Monday, April 3, 1989
Joe Gergen
The Sporting News

NEW YORK - Dan Doyle picked his Final Four some time ago, long before the start of the college basketball season. Three of the teams that qualified for his national championship semifinals at the Kingdome, North Carolina, Indiana, and Iowa-were traditional powers. The fourth-State University of New York-was an outsider of his invention.

A former college coach, a part-time promoter, and a full-time educator, Doyle recently entered the field of fiction. His theme was ethics and morality in an era of greed and corruption. His vehicle was basketball, a sport with which he has been involved for most of his life and with which he remains romantically linked.

Are You Watching, Adolph Rupp? traces the resurrection of a college program through sound coaching, clever marketing, and illegal recruiting inducements. It's a story as old as sin and as new as the next package of cash to a poor family delivered by an air freight company. Perhaps mindful of the little problem at Kentucky, Purolater was the choice of Doyle's antagonist.

The book, offered by Stadia Publishers in Kingston, R.I., examines many of the abuses with which we have grown all too familiar. But it does so with an abiding affection for the game that is evident from the first chapter, the Holiday Festival showdown between Bill Russell's San Francisco Dons and Tommy Heinsohn's Holy Cross club told from a small boy's perspective. The title is illustrative of the man's feel not only for the rhythms of the sport, but for its history.

It refers to an actual event at the NCAA coaches' convention held in conjunction with the 1977 Final Four in Atlanta. Doyle, then in the process of moving from an assistant's job at Brown to the position of head coach at Trinity (Conn.), was among the coaches who listened to speeches made by three of the most accomplished men in the history of college basketball-Henry Iba, John Wooden, and Adolph Rupp.

"Rupp was the last to speak," recalled Doyle, now the executive director of the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island. "Everyone seemed to know he was close to dying. He gave this incredible speech about basketball and life. I remember him freely quoting Parkingham Beatty and Rudyard Kipling. He called Kipling 'Roodyard.' He got a standing ovation that lasted several minutes."

Doyle confessed he would have liked to have spoken with Rupp after that address. So he did the next best thing. He put his protagonist Jack McHale, in his seat and had him follow the legendary Kentucky coach back to his hotel room, where he introduced himself and told Rupp what an effect that speech had on him. Rupp's imagined response? "I'll be watching you, son."

In the book, McHale takes his State University of New York team all the way to Seattle for the NCAA title game. But the price of the trip in human lives is considerable, the result of payoffs and deceit on the part of school officials. Real coaches as well as real problems within the sport are woven into the fabric of the story, one that remains basically hopeful.

"I'm very optimistic," Doyle said. "I think 99% of the people in the game go in for the right reasons. And I think (Executive Director) Dick Schultz will be good for the NCAA."

If there is one thing Doyle would like to see changed, it is freshman eligibility rule. "A lot of people talk about the Proposition 48 and 42," he said. "To me, they miss the point. Freshmen now miss too much school. You're always better off with a period of preparation. I think one of the problems has been that people on the fringes have grabbed too much power base. If productive changes come about, it has to be the presidents who take control."

Doyle knows something about administration. After he earned a master's degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, he started the Irish American Sports Foundation, a volunteer organization that has sent more than 300 coaches-among them Hubie Brown, Jack Ramsay and Billy Cunningham-to the Emerald Isle in the last six years and has provided the funding for the first major indoor arena in Dublin.

Doyle's institute at Rhode Island, the first of its kind in the country, has prepared to carry the ideals of sport to foreign lands.

Despite his heritage, the connection with Ireland came about by accident. Doyle was taking a sabbatical from coaching in 1981 after a 22-4 season at Trinity in order to spend more time with his autistic son, Dan Jr., one of six Doyle children.

"I had promised the Czech basketball people a clinic," he recalled, "and my flight had a stopover in Ireland. A story about my upcoming trip appeared in the local paper, and a neighbor of mine, who had connections in Ireland, talked to people over there. So I got a call from the Irish Basketball Federation.

"Noel Keating, the president, met my plane. He's a 5-4 schoolteacher, and he was standing with a sign that had a basketball painted on it. He said, 'You're not going to believe how bad our facilities are.'" Certainly, that statement was accurate.

In time, Doyle coached the Irish national team and initiated the foundation that has contributed to athletics throughout the island. From that sprang the seeds for the institute at Rhode Island, a program that awards master's degrees in international sport and trains sports educators for duty overseas. Doyle's occasional forays into promoting will continue with the New England closed-circuit telecasts of Sugar Ray Leonard-Thomas Hearns rematch in June.

The book was a three-year undertaking that drew on his international experience as well as his knowledge of basketball and coaching. Not only had the finished product given him satisfaction, but it has provided Doyle with an opportunity to monitor the sports closest to his heart. He has attended book autographing sessions in Providence, R.I., and Lexington, Ky., in conjunction with the NCAA Tournament events and will do the same in Seattle, site of the real, and his imagined, Final Four.

There's nothing coincidental about the scheduling. "At this time of the year, I kind of miss coaching," the author said. "(The NCAA Tournament) still is a great event."