The Tom McMillen Affair

Each spring, Pittsburgh's Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, the most prestigious high school all-star basketball game in the nation, matches the ten best players from Pennsylvania against a team made up of the number-one competitors from ten other states. College coaches from every region of the country jet in for the game, where they either recruit players still undecided on which college to attend or keep rival coaches away from prospects committed to their own universities. Occasionally they have to do both, for the event, founded seven years ago by Pittsburgh's charity-minded Dapper Dan Club, annually showcases at least eight of the top ten high school players in the nation. Coaches call such talented prospects "blue chippers"--players who, in their estimation, are good enough to be three-year starters for any college team in America. Although nearly 100 high school seniors qualify as blue chippers each year, the number of lads who can conceivably become superstars is much lower. In 1970, basketball's insiders felt that only 25 prospects possessed such skills. One of these was Tom McMillen, a 17-year-old from Mansfield, Pennsylvania, who was the most recruited high school player in history--and the main reason coaches from more than 275 schools had come to watch the Dapper Dan: McMillen had not yet announced the college of his choice.

Most professional observers of basketball (including Sports Illustrated, which devoted a cover story to him) rated McMillen the best high school player in America. A reed-thin 6'11", Tom had set a Pennsylvania scoring record of 3608 points at Mansfield High, averaging 20 points a game in his freshman year, 30 as a sophomore, 40 as a junior and just under 48 as a senior. An A student, he was also known to be shy and courteous, qualities that further endeared him to college coaches, many of whom are having problems with the radicals on their teams. The majority of coaches who had come to Pittsburgh for the game had already seen McMillen play, at least on film. Extremely agile for his size, he possessed a superb offensive repertoire--jump shots accurate past 20 feet and left-handed hooks, both of which he released with a soft delicate touch. In his senior year, Tom had scored on almost eight of every ten field-goal attempts; boys are considered excellent shots if they average 50 percent. Although many tall players achieve high scoring percentages by standing around the basket and stuffing in teammates' errant shots, game films clearly revealed this was not the case with McMillen. Furthermore, even though he was far from the world's greatest jumper, he was an aggressive rebounder. The college coaches polled couldn't recall a player of his size with such well-rounded skills. Many remarked that he was "a real student of the game."

McMillen is perhaps even more cerebral in his approach to basketball than Bill Bradley, the New York Knickerbockers' former Rhodes scholar. Two years ago, Tom read Psycho-Cybernetics. "I like to read about things like that--I think the mind is really an important thing. If you can find visually what you want to do it's a lot easier to do it physically. Like if you can visualize how your foul shot's supposed to be, can visualize rebounding, it's easier to do. In a way, you've got to be mean. When I finally go out to play, I try to be as ornery as heck out there. You want to concentrate. That way you're preplaying the game. I have about 15 index cards on what I want to do during a game. 'Rebound--be aggressive, be a team player, watch your fouls.' Little reminders, things to think about during a game. Everybody has a tendency to forget or omit; this way you don't."

Based on his collection of index cards, McMillen has also evolved a set of scoring values for his game performances. "I score my game based on 15 cards. I set goals for myself. A perfect game for me is based on 100 points. I score my game in a way that I can practically give myself a letter grade. It's hard to get 100--it takes 36 points, 26 rebounds, only two fouls, hitting 100 percent from the foul line, 65 percent from the floor, blocking five shots, handing out two assists, having only one turnover. You have to have a darned good game to get 100 points."

On the morning of the Dapper Dan Classic, McMillen would have gladly settled for a B-minus: He awoke feeling ill and, after attending a short practice session at Pittsburgh's 13,500-seat Civic Arena, returned to his hotel room and went to bed. He had a fever of just over 100, and not until two hours before game-time (and after he'd received an injection of penicillin) did the team doctor give him permission to play.

"The game was sort of a proving ground--Pennsylvania against the nation," McMillen said. "It's like here's your big tryout--sort of like when Alcindor played against Elvin Hayes the first time. In that situation, you want to go out and play until you practically drop, rather than play a rotten game and say, well, I was sick--that's no consolation. I was playing before a big crowd for the first time--around 16,000. I'd played before 8000 or 9000 before. They were really a good crowd, shouting things like 'Pennsylvania, go!' Sometimes the crowd is behind you and you just fit into the crowd and that helps you over the hump. The coaches were all there, wanting to see a performance against the best."

McMillen had correctly sensed the note of cautious pessimism advanced by a number of coaches in the stands. George Raveling, an assistant coach at the University of Maryland and one of the most successful recruiters in the business, summed it up best by saying, "Even though one player can't win a championship by himself, the fact is that McMillen played in a weak high school division and couldn't lead his team to a state title this year. I've seen him play once and I'm impressed. Tonight, though, he goes up against the best, and then we'll really know how good he is."

Tom was going up against the best--and they were determined to deflate the growing McMillen legend. Several members of the U.S. All-Stars had let it be known they considered Tom the lucky recipient of unmerited publicity. Ed Searcy, an exquisitely graceful and rugged 6'7" forward from New York's Power Memorial Academy, was the ringleader of the anti-McMillen movement. Power had easily defeated Mansfield High earlier in the season, and even though McMillen had scored 40 points against them, Searcy felt that Len Elmore, his school's well-regarded center, was better than Tom. "It's not a grudge, but I'm going to do him in for Lenny's sake," he said. More vocal was Harold Sullinger, a 6'7" All-Star from New Jersey, who told one reporter, "A cat who gets 40 points a game is doing it against dudes who don't care. A cat who scores 20 on me the first half is going to finish the game with 20, because I'll break his arm."

Moments after the game began that night, Tom attempted a jump shot--and Searcy, making an excellent block, nearly rammed the basketball down McMillen's throat. The loose ball rolled to a Pennsylvania teammate, who passed it right back to McMillen, and Tom brought the crowd to its feet by sinking a 15-foot hook, a shot rarely attempted from that distance. As if to prove it wasn't a fluke, he made three other long hook shots during the evening, and also scored on an assortment of jump shots and deft inside moves to wind up with a game-high total of 37 points. Pennsylvania lost the contest, 87-81, but McMillen, who was voted his team's most valuable player, left coaches slightly glassy-eyed. After the game, Raveling had revised his estimate. "I told you I was impressed by McMillen the one time I saw him play. Having seen him in action again, I am now superimpressed. He is probably the best shooter his size ever to play basketball. Barring an injury, I don't see any way he can miss being an all-American." The next day, the recruiters returned to their schools in a state of anxiety, pondering what McMillen would be able to do for (or against) their teams in the future. Although Tom had expressed interest in only about 20 of the 300 colleges that were trying to land him, scores of coaching staffs were now fully determined to persuade him otherwise. For three years, McMillen and his family had been under an increasing state of siege and, with the end in sight, recruiters prepared themselves for one final and desperate effort.

• • •

In 1896, a journalist named Gilbert Patten, writing under the pseudonym Burt L. Standish, began detailing the adventures of Frank Merriwell for Tip Top Weekly, a magazine that modestly billed itself as "An ideal publication for the American youth." For the better part of the next two decades, artists often depicted Yale's ace fictional base-ball hero wearing a big white Y on his chest and an expression of humble virtue on his face, capturing the mixture of Christian and Boy-scout ethics most athletes then aspired to. What would Frank think if he could see us now? Former St. Louis Cardinal linebacker Dave Meggysey charges that injured football players are shot up with dope in the morning so they can ignore their injuries in the afternoon. Former New York yankee pitcher Jim Bouton coyly informs us that baseball players get their jollies from "beaver shooting," a series of inspired ways to peek into windows or up a girl's skirt. Few, indeed, are the men who now participate in sport for the joy of it.

But McMillen is a bona fide specimen of what used to be known as a model youth: class valedictorian, president of the student council, first trombonist in the school band, regional winner of the American Legion Oratorical Contest, an altar boy and teenaged county cochairman of the March of Dimes drive. He is a Silent Majority dream come true. He was appointed to the President's Council on Physical Fitness, a 15-member body composed of such establishment youth images as astronaut James Lovell, Miss America 1969 and the head of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Bobby Richardson (a former New York Yankee, who presumably was never a beaver shooter). McMillen has channeled his energies mainly in two directions: athletics and academics. "I know there are (continued on page 158)Tom McMillen Affair(continued from page 150) people who take offense at, that, but my perspective is that I get a heck of a lot out of basketball that I can't get from the classroom and vice versa. To me, they are equal day-to-day priorities." McMillen schedules his days and nights so tightly as to almost Preclude dating. He wants to be a great basketball player and, because of a handicapped childhood, a great orthopedic surgeon.

When Tom was born, on May 26; 1952, the doctor who delivered him told his parents their son might never be able to walk normally, because of a birth defect: His knees were turned inward. To correct this condition, for three years Tom went to bed wearing a pair of shoes connected by an iron bar; the device restricted his leg movement and eventually straightened his knees. Already towering above his classmates when he got to grammar school, Tom spent many late afternoons with his father, Dr. James McMillen, a dentist, skipping rope, doing calisthenics and running to Strengthen his fragile legs. "Sometimes it was really sad," he recalls. "I'd try to do an exercise, really mess it up and then I'd Look at my father just Knowing he was thinking, 'I'm going to have a seven-foot invalid for a son."

"After my legs got better, I had a muscle deviation in my eyes. I couldn't even line up desks right, because my eyes just wouldn't focus." Two eye operations cured that problem and Tom soon found himself learning basketball from his brother Jay, already a formidable player. In 1963, when Jay was a 6'7" senior at Mansfield High, more than 80 colleges invited him to learn a degree as a four-year guest of the management. Jay decided on the University of Maryland, where he went on to become the second leading scorer in school history. (He has since slipped to third place.) Jay was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers upon graduating, but since he wasn't really looking for a career in pro ball, elected instead to play in Italy for a year on the Padua team, then returned to Maryland, where he is now a medical student. "When Tom was only in the eighth grade," Jay said a short time ago, "I thought he'd be a better player than he can, I think but his motivation is much greater and he can do more. Tom was always aware of little things like knowing you have to be able to work with both hands and getting in peak condition. The scope of his game is very broad."

That summer, Tom began attracting attention in Eastern basketball circles after attending several of the weeklong instructional camps operated by college coaches. When Tom showed up at North Carolina's camp, Tarheel coach Dean Smith, who couldn't recall ever seeing a 6'4" 14-year-old, watched him overwhelm boys his own age and then put Tom in with the 17-year-olds. The result was the same. The camp gave McMillen his first indication that college coaches would be interested in his future. "When my father drove me down to North Carolina, the coaches greeted him with the usual nice-to-meet-you sort of thing," he says. "But when Mom and Dad came to pick me up at the end of the week, the coaches were so cordial it was magnificent. They took the three of us out to dinner, and I remember they were so friendly."

A few weeks later, Tom entered high school and in his first real taste of organized ball, began scoring 20 points a game against opposing centers who were usually three years older and 50 pounds heavier. (McMillen then weighed 150 pounds; after seven more inches of growth and five years of weight training, he has built himself up to 219.) By the end of his freshman season, he had been contacted by 60 colleges, and his parents, two sisters, Sheila and Liz, and other brother, Paul, coaches' dropping by for coffee. "I'd been through it all with Jay, but the recruiters hadn't started to come around until his junior years," said Tom's mother. "I guess you'd have to say Tom was the team's star player when he was a freshman, and I just knew we'd be in for a lot of trouble from the schools that wanted him."

At the conclusion of his sophomore season, Tom heard from 150 colleges and after leading Mansfield to a class-B state championship in his junior year, the number of schools pursuing him doubled. "I didn't go to any more basketball camps after that, because coaches were really trying to sell me on their schools, and it's not easy to say no to a man you like," Tom says. "I didn't understand that the aim of all coaches is to become your friend, because then it's really hard to say no to them."

Tom didn't worry that he'd retard his progress as a player by not attending the camps. Over the years, he had experimented with a wide assortment of basketball-practice techniques, the best of which he noted on his ever-present index cards. By the summer of 1969, he had developed a demanding personal regimen that he rigidly followed every day. "I keep my summer schedule worked out on cards, covering all the skills I have the cards with me," he says. "It's like I'm my own coach. You always have a tendency to fool around when you're practicing, but by the time you're finished fooling around, it's time to leave. This way I get right down to work, go through all my drills and I'm finished. During the summer, I'll spend six or seven hours a day out on the basketball court. I don't consider weight training or running part of my practice, so I guess I really use up a lot of the day working out."

When his senior year started, what quickly turned into a daily avalanche of unannounced visitors, mail and telephone calls prompted Tom's mother to sit down with his coach (and chemistry teacher), Rich Miller, and make up two form letters. One was a polite turnoff to colleges in which Tom was totally uninterested; the other stated that he had expressed an interest in the school but would appreciate it if coaches waited until after the season to see him. (Basketball, his classes and the student-council presidency were putting heavy demands on his time.) Coaches, of course, ignored the letters; they'd show up at the McKinley household blithely explaining they just happened to be passing through town. Mansfield, an isolated hamlet of 4100 people in the wilds of north central Pennsylvania, is not exactly a town many strangers pass through, especially basketball recruiters from states like Kentucky and Georgia. The McMillens' telephone, meanwhile, rang nonstop from six P.M. to midnight. "I wanted to disconnect it but didn't because of my patients," said Tom's father. "Even the mail was getting us fed up. Tom was receiving about 50 letters a day from coaches, alumni and people who wanted autographs. Imagine that! Tom has ten cartons of the stuff put away in our attic and he probably threw out twice as much as he kept."

Occasionally, matters became even sillier. After one game, coaches from Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and West Virginia all turned up at the McMillen house for coffee. "We were waiting each other out," reported one recruiter present at that gathering. "Nobody would budge, so at midnight everyone got up to go. I still don't know how he did it, but John Lotz, an assistant coach at North Carolina, faked us out and managed to stay after the rest of us left."

When the season ended in early March, Tom had narrowed his choices down to seven schools: Kentucky, Duke, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania (where his sister Sheila is now a junior), Maryland (where Jay was checking out the new basketball coach, Charles "Lefty" Driesell) and North Carolina (where Tom's 23-year-old brother Paul was working in a Chapel Hill bank). The Dapper Dan Classic took place a few weeks later, and after that, the number of out-of-state cars parked daily in front of the McMillen home would have convinced almost any Federal agent that the Mafia was holding another summit (continued on page 234) Tom McMillen affair (continued from page 158) conference. To take some of the heat off himself and his family, Tom announced he would make a decision on April 15th and asked the recruiters to stop harassing him. The only ones who listened were those who knew Tom was giving their schools final consideration.

By early April, McMillen had cut his list to three: Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland. He decided to see each of the coaches once more before making his choice. "Even that wasn't easy," he remembers. "Each coach wanted to be the one who talked to me last." Vince Gibson of Virginia went up to Mansfield on April 10th; North Carolina's Dean Smith sat down with Tom on the 11th and on April 12th, Maryland's Driesell drove up with assistant coach Joe Harrington. (Harrington had been Jay's teammate and roommate at Maryland and had spent so much time with the McMillens he was practically considered a member of the family.)

The next day, unable to get any peace at home because of interruptions by coaches and newspaper reporters. Tom moved into his high school principal's country house for a few days. He took with him about 40 pounds of literature on the three schools, plus several reels of their game films. "I didn't know it then," Tom says, "but I was probably too methodical about the whole thing, going much too deeply into each school. I was comparing facilities like libraries and player personnel. And there was no easy way to judge the players, because coaches only sent up game films in which their players looked like all-Americans."

Around 11 P.M. on April 14th, McMillen telephoned Dean Smith in North Carolina and said, "Coach Smith, how will I look in Carolina blue?" Smith was elated; but the next morning, he got a call from Rich Miller, who told him Tom's parents were opposed to his choice and that a final decision wouldn't be reached for several weeks. At that point, Jay McMillen began lobbying for Maryland. "I'd never talked openly to Tom about coming to school down here," he said, "but when I became convinced that coach Driesell would be able to make Maryland's basketball team 'the UCLA of the East,' as he likes to put it, I told Tom that College Park, Maryland, was the place for him."

Tom wasn't in a receptive mood. "I wouldn't give Jay the time of day," he admits. "I know he was only looking out for me, but at the time I thought he was being domineering. There I was, getting hounded by so many people on the outside, and when my brother comes home for a visit, what does he do but give me the same spiel about one institution that I'd been hearing for years." To further complicate the situation, McMillen wanted to reach a decision before the end of June, when he and 43 other invited players would spend three weeks in Colorado trying out for the 12-man 1972 U.S. Olympic Development Basketball Team, which would afterward make a three-week summer exhibition tour through Europe.

On June 24th, Tom announced he would enroll at the University of North Carolina. "I liked coach Dean Smith and his assistants," he says, "and making a decision gets the pressure off. I'd once thought that when I picked my college, it would be a happy day, but the only thing I remember feeling was relief. And not too much of that, either--my folks weren't pleased about me going to North Carolina."

Tom's parents did not attend the press conference at which he made public his decision. For reasons that would not become known until many months later, they both bitterly resented coach Smith. "Tom's been brainwashed," Mrs. McMillen said at the time. The next morning, newspapers throughout the country speculated about the family's internal conflicts, and many reporters were highly critical of Dr. and Mrs. McMillen. A surprising number of coaches, however, publicly sympathized with them. "I'm disgusted to be associated with a group of men--and I'm talking about college basketball coaches--who are splitting up families," commented Villanova's Jack Kraft. "It's not just McMillen, it's all the superstars. When coaches split up a family, it's about time for everybody to take stock of themselves and time for the authorities to do something."

• • •

College basketball coaches don't start out as cynical, ruthless, high-pressure recruiters; they're made that way by a hypocritical athletic system that preaches mightily about amateurism while raking in immodest profits. Although college basketball teams don't earn the million-dollar profits a big-time football program can generate each year, schools with arenas seating 12,000 people or more can net as much as $200,000 a season. Basketball's lower operating costs make it a far more sporting proposition than football for most schools; approximately $700,000 is needed to underwrite a single football season at many major universities, but the average expense for basketball is about $130,000 and many manage it with a third of that.

Universities, one needs to point out, don't engage in intercollegiate athletics merely for money. UCLA's John Wooden, the most successful coach in the history of college basketball, says, "A fine athletics program produces increased student morale and increased diploma value." Even campus radicals will turn out to watch a Lew Alcindor or a Sidney Wicks, and by increased diploma value Wooden means that employers frequently smile on job seekers from colleges made famous by their basketball teams. Just a small sampling of such schools would have to include Dayton, Duquesne, Jacksonville, Kansas, Kentucky, La Salle, Loyola of Chicago, Marquette, New Mexico State, Niagara, North Carolina, Providence, St. Bonaventure, St. John's, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Temple, UCLA, Utah and Villanova.

But there are many other reasons basketball is so important to colleges. The publicity that winning schools receive quickly translates itself into ever-increasing numbers of freshman-class applicants, whose growing ranks make it necessary for a college to expand its physical plant. Just as businesses seek to grow, so, too, do universities. Successful basketball seasons have also been known to boost annual alumni contributions, which have, in turn, helped erect such nonathletic edifices as science buildings and libraries on scores of campuses. Obviously, then, a victorious basketball team means a great deal to a great many colleges in a great deal to a great many colleges in a great many ways. To a coach, however, it primarily means continued employment: Should he fail to produce a winner, out he goes.

The only way a coach can build a nationally ranked team is to acquire the services of at least one or two superstars. But the nature of the sport makes it difficult to come up with the players most in demand: talented lads who are close to seven feet tall. The selectivity involved thus makes the recruiting of high school basketball stars far more pressurized than the annual man hunt for college football players. While schools can always find plenty of 6'3" strong-armed quarterbacks, there simply aren't enough truly excellent tall basketball players to go around. Fewer than a dozen such prospects come out of America's high schools each year; so when coaches encounter a phenomenon like Tom McMillen, who possesses a surfeit of skills as both a pivot man and a forward, they naturally go just a little but crackers. When, after all, was the last time either Chamberlain or Alcindor was seen popping 20-footers through the nets?

Coaches quickly learn about prospects like McMillen in a variety of ways: through newspaper and magazine reports and reporters, high school and other college coaches and athletically inclined alumni and friends they cultivate throughout the country. They also rely on several high school player-rating services; although N.C.A.A. regulations prohibit member schools from doing so, they subscribe to these confidential reports and guard their copies zealously. The two most authoritative, it's generally thought, are published by Howard Garfinkel (covering primarily Eastern basketball) and Dave Bones (national).

But even without building an extensive information network, a college coach can find players easily enough. The greatest sources of raw basketball talent are America's big cities and the biggest of these, New York, is a basketball scout's paradise. If New York players are the most desired commodities in college basketball, it's only because they have consistently been good investments and, during the Sixties, practically dominated the sport. In 1963, Loyola of Chicago won the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship using two starters who were graduates of New York high schools; three New Yorkers led the University of Texas at El Paso (then Texas Western) to an N.C.A.A. title in 1966. The rest of the decade was reserved for UCLA's Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, a graduate of Manhattan's Power Memorial Academy. Power is a member of the Catholic High School Athletic Association, which each year turns out some of the nation's finest players; two C.H.S.A.A. alumni, Marquette's Dean ("The Dream") Meminger and South Carolina's John Roche, were all-Americans this past season.

Jack McCloskey, Wake Forest's respected coach, notes, "New York players have a well-earned reputation for being tough and hungry out on the court, but they're no different from any other kids when it comes to deciding on a college. If you don't convince them you're interested in them as individuals as well as players, they'll go elsewhere." But coaches don't really enjoy wooing prospects and privately agree with John McKenna, Georgia Tech's assistant athletic director, who recently said he'd never return to coaching, because of the "fawning on teenaged athletes that the job requires."

Recruiting was not always so complex and cutthroat. In the late Forties, a kind of neighborhood school system was still in effect: Any university in or near a big city usually produced fine basketball teams. But the first wave of college basketball scandals changed all that. In 1951, it was discovered that players for City College of New York, then rated number one nationally, and Long Island University had been fixing betting point spreads and/or games in return for payoffs from gamblers. CCNY and LIU corrected the problem by de-emphasizing the sport--and by so doing, unintentionally restructured college basketball recruiting. Unsure if New York's other colleges would continue big-time competition, young men began deserting the city for universities in other parts of the nation. When Wilt Chamberlain accepted a grant-in-aid to the University of Kansas in 1955, he further set the style for East Coast players. "I was supposed to have been made all kinds of lavish offers by various schools, involving money, cars, big jobs after graduation and help for my family," said Wilt after he left Kansas at the end of his junior year to tour with the Harlem Globetrotters. "Actually, there are very few such offers. But there was every kind of high-pressure salesmanship. Coaches seldom try to sell you on an education. They try to sell you on other things--campus jobs, summer jobs, big athletic programs and affluent alumni."

That kind of selling still prevails, but in the case of an honest and fairly sophisticated young man like Tom McMillen, many more approaches must be attempted. Most coaches delivered almost identical sales pitches that Tom listened to, with increasing irritation, for three years: He alone was the final ingredient the coach needed to take his team to the national championship; the coach's offense was geared to a player of exactly Tom's talents; the publicity Tom would receive by playing at the coach's college would lead to his becoming an all-American and getting a lucrative pro contract; campus life was the best in the country; the school's coeds were the prettiest; the school's weather was ideal (if it wasn't ideal, the coach would offer something like, "Who wants to live in a place where it's hot all year long?"). A few recruiters were bright enough to spot McMillen's interest in academic excellence quickly, and every time a professor accomplished something newsworthy Tom would get a copy of the college press release accompanied by a personal note. McMillen was also thoroughly familiar with two other standard attractions: a major schedule and a spacious, modern home courts. This last is a crucial selling point and an important reason such basketball lowers as UCLA, Notre Dame, Purdue, South Carolina, New Mexico State and Princeton have all built new arenas in the past several years. But Jerry Conboy, a former assistant coach at Davidson and now head coach of Pittsburgh's Point Park College, observes: "You can't finally tell what will be important to a 17-year-old, although we all try. I know of one school that lost a great prospect because he didn't like its uniforms."

Because boys like Tom McMillen are hotly pursued by the nation's most famous schools, they rarely come in contact with the handful of free-lance recruiters who can be found hanging around high school gymnasiums in every major Eastern city. Free-lancers, who are known as spooks, procure players for remotely situated schools that will pay at least $1000 per player. The spooks' best markets lie in the Western half of the nation, although in the past few years business has been picking up in the South, particularly in Florida. It's a shabby scene, since the spook will get a chance to earn his commission only when the player he's after has compiled an abysmal academic record and is just below the level of a superstar. (If he's that good, scores of colleges will accept him as a probationary student.) If the prospect hasn't been graduated from high school, the spook can still sell him to any number of junior colleges where he can make up his academic deficiencies by merit or by favor. He will then transfer to a big-time basketball college where he'll be eligible to play in his junior year. Spooks never talk about anything as mundane as the value of a college diploma to their kind of recruit, since these athletes are rarely graduated. Instead, they talk money. The current average wage for a ballplayer attending a "renegade" school (one that will flout just about any N.C.A.A. recruiting regulation in its quest for national sports publicity) is about $200 a month. Much of it will be paid in the form of game tickets and merchandise the player can easily sell on campus.

Illegal recruiting practices, however, are hardly the exclusive domain of spooks and their clients. Many high school boys, especially those from urban ghettos, can be easily persuaded to attend a school by such inducements as the use of an automobile, a handsomely furnished offcampus apartment, a complete wardrobe, a stereo rig, a color television and a high-paying part-time job (such as making sure no one absconds with the basketball court). It's exceedingly rare for all of these items to be dangled before the often-jaded eyes of an outstanding prospect, but it's just as rare for none of them to be. And if a blue chipper is on the take, all he has to do is indicate it and too many coaches will quickly contact local businessmen willing to support the team in such a fashion.

If a highly sought-after blue chipper is still undecided after all the standard inducements (legal or otherwise) have been presented, a coach will enlist the aid of illustrious alumni or well-known friends of the university. James Brown, the top prospect from Washington, D.C., in 1969, was personally contacted for Harvard by Senator Ted Kennedy. In McMillen's case, several schools pulled out all the stops. The University of Virginia, aware of his career aim, invited him to watch an operation performed by Dr. Frank McCue, its famed orthopedic surgeon. Dr. McCue afterward sat down and talked medicine with Tom--and also informed him of the excellent premed training he could receive at Virginia's medical school. The University of Maryland had Tom to lunch with Senator Joseph Tydings and Governor Marvin Mandel. West Virginia dispensed with alumni altogether and introduced Tom to Lyndon Johnson.

In the end, however, McMillen's choice of North Carolina brought to mind words spoken by Jack Kuhnert, former coach of Power Memorial. "I've seen a lot of boys pick a lot of colleges. All ten seniors on our team received basketball scholarships one year. And in almost every case, it turned out that the coach who was the first to pay attention to the ballplayer was the one whose school the boy selected." North Carolina's Dean Smith had been the first college coach to notice McMillen, and Tom had chosen the Tarheels. But while on that summer tour of Europe with the Olympic Development Team, McMillen had begun to re-examine his decision.

"Right after I left for Europe," Tom said a few months ago, "I realized our whole family had been pressured until we'd all become hypertense." McMillen had listened too carefully, he maintains, to the countless teams of recruiters who had visited his home. "I'd let them troop in night after night, the head coaches who brought along deans and faculty advisors. It had taken me two whole years to decide on North Carolina, Maryland or Virginia. They're all members of the Atlantic Coast Conference and offer about the same combination of basketball, academics and social life. When we were playing in Russia, it occurred to me that I would be happy at any of those schools. Thinking that way, I decided to weigh my parents' feelings on the subject when I got back home."

Tom's mother wanted him to attend the University of Virginia, mainly because she admired coach Vince Gibson, an old family friend who'd coached at Mansfield State College for six years before moving on to Charlottesville. Dr. McMillen wanted him to go to Maryland, so that Tom could play under coach Lefty Driesell, who'd turned tiny Davidson College of North Carolina into a basketball powerhouse before being hired away by Maryland the year before. More importantly, Mansfield is only a six-hour drive from College Park, compared with a ten-hour trip from Chapel Hill, North Carolina--and Dr. McMillen had rarely missed seeing Tom play a game during his four years of high school competition. "I'd have to say I rationalized about the distance factor when I originally made my decision to go to North Carolina," Tom said. "At the time I thought, 'Well, it's not such a long drive.' After I came back from Russia, I realized it was quite a drive and I do want my father to see me play, I've always wanted that. We're very close and we'd miss each other a lot, especially if it wasn't necessary."

Tom's parents were in agreement on North Carolina: They didn't want him to go there, because they were unalterably hostile to coach Dean Smith. Although Smith incurred resistance simply for representing a school other than the two Tom's parents preferred, at least two incidents deeply offended them. Before Tom announced for the Tarheels, Smith sent him a package of University of North Carolina basketball equipment, which Dr. and Mrs. McMillen felt was a tactic designed to make Tom feel obligated to UNC--and, as such, was a breach of ethics, however slight. More serious was an incident that took place one evening when Smith visited the McMillen home shortly after the close of the 1970 basketball season. Smith asked Tom to telephone another superprospect, 7'4" high school all-American Tom Burleson, to break the happy news that both of them would be playing for North Carolina. Tom stepped into the kitchen to tell his mother he'd be making a long-distance call but that the family wouldn't have to pay for it--Smith would allow McMillen to charge it to his credit-card number. Mrs. McMillen ordered her son not to make the call, explaining that since Burleson hadn't yet selected a college, Tom would be acting as a recruiter for North Carolina by calling him. Minutes later, she entered the living room and found Tom on the telephone with Burleson. Dr. McMillen is still angry about it. "Smith smiled sheepishly at my wife and told her Tom insisted on placing the call. That was an outright lie."

Equally unsettling to the family (and rarely alluded to) was the fact that before the start of Tom's senior year, his brother Paul had been persuaded by Tarheel recruiters to switch from Pittsburgh's Duquesne University law school to North Carolina. When Paul dropped out a few weeks after the semester began, he conveniently procured a job as a bank officer in Chapel Hill. Such intriguing tactics were not confined to Carolina, however. It was an open secret that Maryland's Driesell hired Joe Harrington as an assistant coach primarily because of his close relationship with Tom and his parents. Harrington never disguised the fact. "But I couldn't ever come on like a recruiter does," he says, "because I happen to like Tom a lot and I wasn't about to betray a trust I'd shared with the McMillens for six years."

A few days after returning from Europe, Tom, his father (who had just gotten out of the hospital), and Len Snyder (whose brother owns the Buffalo Braves, a professional basketball team) drove down to Ocean City, Maryland, for the Labor Day weekend. Harrington drove up to see them. "Tom began asking me questions about Maryland's campus and subjects he wanted to take as a freshman," Harrington says. "In the past, he had asked neutral questions, but now I could see he was off North Carolina and really thinking about Maryland for the first time. I was starting to get my hopes up."

When McMillen got back from Ocean City, coach Gibson of Virginia received a telephone call from a friend in Mansfield informing him that Tom definitely would not enroll at North Carolina; Gibson flew up to Tom's home a day later. After a talk with Tom and his parents, Gibson asked Dr. McMillen if he objected to the school. "He said no," Gibson told a reporter, "and I looked at Tommy and his face just lit up. Right then I figured I held all the aces. Later on that night, Tommy asked me questions about stuff he would need for school. I knew we were in."

The next night, however, Jay McMillen drove up from College Park and he, Tom and their father stayed up until six A.M. exploring every aspect of the three schools. Tom had to make a final decision by morning, when college registration would begin. After a few hours, it became clear to all three that Tom's choice would finally hinge on who his freshman teammates would be. Jay reports, "Tom had gone through four years of high school playing against teams that would surround him with their three biggest players. He didn't want to go through college ball the same way."

The three men sat down and began reviewing freshmen who would be playing for the three schools. For the first time in many years, North Carolina had suffered bad luck in the recruiting wars. Burleson, the prospect Tom had phoned for Dean Smith, had signed with North Carolina State, and neither of UNC's two top frosh, 6'8" Bobby Jones and 6'6" John O'Donnell, was considered a true blue chipper. (If Burleson had been teamed with them, however, Tom would have opted for North Carolina.) Without another highly rated player to take some of the scoring and rebounding pressure off McMillen, North Carolina was quickly eliminated. Virginia's freshmen were weaker than the Tarheels'. The team's big man, 6'9" Lanny Stahurski from Pittsburgh, was not rated a potential superstar--and he was the Cavaliers' only exceptional player. That left Maryland. In his first full year of recruiting, coach Driesell had signed up three high school all-stars and an underrated ball handler--and all four seemed to perfectly complement McMillen's abilities. Mark Cartwright, 6'11", who chose Maryland over 200 other colleges, was a fine outside shooter who could help out underneath; Jap Trimble, a superb 6'4" scorer from Power Memorial, would further keep defenses from sagging on McMillen; and Rich Porac, Tom's roommate at the Dapper Dan, was a less heralded playmaker who might be able to feed McMillen as many as 16 points' worth of assists a game. The key man, however, was Power Memorial's 6'9" Len Elmore, generally considered the rebounding equal of any high school player in America. Elmore's defensive skills are reminiscent of former Boston Celtic Bill Russell, and his natural position is center. At the other schools, Tom might have wound up playing center, but he feels his best position is forward--where he would obviously be used at Maryland.

The next morning, Virginia's Gibson was astonished to learn Tom had left town with Jay and was heading south for College Park. That afternoon, I'affaire McMillen was finally concluded when Tom registered for classes at the University of Maryland. "When I got there," he says, "all I wanted to do was get things back to normal--playing basketball and attending classes." When the news reached North Carolina, coach Smith said that Tom had been set upon by his parents; Dr. and Mrs. McMillen began receiving threatening and obscene letters from people in North Carolina.

In his freshman year, Tom averaged 29.3 points on the court and a nearly perfect 3.98 in his classes. The freshman Terrapins, rated the best in the country, finished their season with a 16-0 record, all the more remarkable because Elmore suffered two leg injuries and had to sit out most of the season. This year, at least three of them will start for Maryland's varsity, which is already being touted as one of the top ten college teams in the nation. In addition, McMillen was selected to several pre-season all-American squads.

Mrs. Margaret McMillen is calmer now, but she still won't talk about what she feels was the roughest year of her life. "Every day I just thank God that 1970 is over with," she says. "I hope I never have to bear the brunt of such pressure again."

Tom feels just as strongly as his mother does. "When it was all happening to me," he says, "I used to sit back and say, 'Boy, I am going to figure out some way to make recruiting better.' I never really came up with one, because I was too involved in trying to avoid the recruiters. I'm just glad it can only happen to you once. And now that it's over, I want to put it all behind me and never, never think about it again."