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This story is about cocaine.
This is about sliding so far into the gutter that Vaseline looks like an adhesive.
This story is about throwing it all away and, in the end, well, what do you think of Kevin Mackey? He's 61 now, a scout for the Indiana Pacers. But they still call, the coaches who want to know how he did it.
"I've run life's race a few times," says Eric Shanaberger who was there to witness the whole thing. "I still say Kevin Mackey is the smartest man I've ever met."
Shanaberger was there at Mackey's side 22 years ago for an NCAA tournament moment that most likely will never occur again. Cleveland State, barely in the tournament as an at-large No. 14 seed, reached the Sweet 16.
Back in 1986 the street-wise Vikings smacked down Indiana in the first round. Beat St. Joseph's in the second round and then lost to Navy on a controversial basket by David Robinson.
"They took it away from us," said Shanaberger. He was a Cleveland State assistant then. Now he is a 48-year-old financial consultant with a team picture on his wall to stir memories.
"People still come into my office and say, 'I remember where I was when you beat Indiana,'" Shanaberger said.
This story is also about fairness. Mackey accomplished all those things but hasn't coached a college game in 18 years. Try to find someone to speak against him. You can't. So why are we asking Mackey if he deserves a second chance?
After some stammering and stuttering, the usually effusive Mackey says: "Yeah, especially with the money they're paying. Look at my record. Look at the whole thing."
Yeah, let's look at the whole thing.
A program was born that year. Mackey and that thick New England accent were going places. No at-large team that has been seeded as low has advanced as far -- before or since. Only 13 times in 23 years since the bracket expanded has a No. 14 seed won even one game. Cleveland State won two that year.
George Mason, you say? Not as pretty a Cinderella as you think. The Patriots were automatic qualifiers in 2006 and seeded a lofty No. 11 when they advanced to the Final Four. LSU got to the Final Four the same year Cleveland State pulled off its miracle but was a No. 11 seed from the mighty SEC.
Villanova in '85? Big East. Eight seed.
The Vikings were playing in the fledgling AMCU-8 (now the Summit League) which had not yet received an automatic bid. They had to sweat out an invite despite going 27-3 in the regular season. The team itself was not quite sure of its place in the world. Late in December 1985, the Vikings led Michigan at halftime and then trash-talked them all the way off the floor. You don't wake up the giant. Michigan won by 20.
"Kevin was the pope of Cleveland," Shanaberger said. "To be a Cleveland person back in the '80s you had to be a pretty forlorn soul, but the city just kind of eloped (with Cleveland State basketball) for a few weeks there. I think that's why everybody was so devastated."
Devastated? Read above. Remember what this story is about.
Mackey was an assistant at Boston College in the early 1980s when an ebullient do-anything student assistant named Bruce Pearl once suited up as the mascot in a pinch. BC coach Tom Davis always knew both were bound for greatness. Mackey helped his boss recruit the core of the team that would turn BC into a power in the early 1980s. Pearl went through his own tribulations but finds himself on top of the basketball world these days at Tennessee.
In 1983 Mackey got the Cleveland State job at a time when no one of substance wanted it. The program barely registered on radar. It was an urban campus where no one cared. His recruits were other people's rejects. He spotted forward Clinton Ransey at an Akron camp. Ransey scored 45 points and Mackey noticed while looking through the program that the kid had beaten out the point totals of former campers named Ewing and Dantley.
"I offered Ransey a scholarship and people said he still couldn't play," Mackey said.
The same Clinton Ransey scored 27 against Indiana.
"He certainly could coach, but he had a knack for finding balance," Davis said of his protégé.
Balance? It turns out there would be nothing balanced about Kevin Mackey. It was always more, more, more. Go, go, go. Shanaberger described it as being able to operate "on different planes."
"Kevin could exist very easily with kids in the ghetto or charm a group of businessmen," he said.
Mackey, though, couldn't charm the devil inside. Impose your will, he would tell his players. In the end, the coach's own will was weak.
A couple of days after Mackey signed a new $300,000 contract in July 1990, police got a tip the pope of Cleveland was inside a crack house. When the cops got there, Mackey emerged from the house -- stoned and/or drunk -- reportedly with a prostitute on his arm.
Three days later the pope was fired. A judge ordered him to rehab. The firing came so late in the year that Shanaberger couldn't find a college job. He eventually went into financial consulting and never looked back.
"I was as close to him as anybody," Shanaberger said. "I never, ever saw anything close to that. I knew well enough that if you attach yourself to a star and the star falls, you get out of there.
"It goes back to Kevin being able to exist on different planes. I don't know if you could even say he was a drug addict. I think it may have been the wrong place at the wrong time."
Whatever it was, something inspiring has happened. Mackey immediately took the cure. Eighteen years he has been clean and sober after going into rehab with the help of former NBA player John Lucas, a recovered user himself.
For a while Mackey tried to get back into a college job but couldn't even get a foot in the door for an interview.
Look at a short list of former college coach rogues. Larry Eustachy, Southern Miss. Mike Price, Texas-El Paso. Bob Huggins, West Virginia. All of them had their own issues with alcohol, sometimes more.
Rick Neuheiesel ran afoul of the NCAA before suing his employer and the NCAA, for gosh sakes.
Anyone else surprised that college basketball drew the line at Kevin Mackey?
"I've gotten a few calls from third and fourth parties to see if I was interested," he said. "I'm still interested in coaching if the right opportunity presented itself."
Tom Davis: "I think he could (coach again). People are understanding. He's certainly capable and he's proven he can coach."
Jim Haney, executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches: "To me one of the great difficulties anymore for a coach is if you're fired. You become tainted in some ways ... In this P.R. world that we live in. I just think it's really hard for guys to get back in."
Shanaberger: "To this day I haven't been given any rational explanation. He must be the only person who wasn't given a second chance. It wasn't like he committed murder."
After his arrest, Mackey spent 13 years at a variety of backwoods minor-league jobs, coached in Canada, Argentina and Korea too. It didn't bother him much because all his teams won.
Coaches still call to get the details on his Run-and-Stun style. Think of it as Arkansas' 40 Minutes of Hell on steroids. Even Pearl, the crazed student manager, taps Mackey now and then for trapping tips for his Volunteers. After four or five possessions of that long-ago Indiana game, Bob Knight had to send Steve Alford, his best player, into the backcourt to start bringing up the ball.
Preoccupied with breaking the Cleveland State trap, Alford wasn't the same offensive force.
"I had a lot of things on Knight," Mackey said. "I had his books, his tapes. I studied them because I thought he was a great coach."
Kevin Mackey was a great coach too. Pacers' president of basketball operations Larry Bird threw him a lifeline five years ago and asked if he'd like to scout. Mackey has a nice car, cell phone, sees five or six games a week.
"I'm not happy if I can't go to the gym every day," he said. "I've had like 36-plus guys go to the NBA. There's no one on the planet who has done that."
You get the feeling that Mackey won't be fully whole until he coaches again. Or maybe this is the way it was supposed to be -- a story about cocaine, booze, a career thrown in the gutter.
Then Mackey starts thinking he can do it again. Cleveland State itself might be waking from a long slumber. The Vikings beat a ranked team this season (Butler) for the first time since that Indiana win. Second-year coach Gary Waters got his team to the championship of the Horizon League tournament.
"The kids we had were passed over," Mackey said. "They were the wrong size for the position. They didn't fit the IBM computer printout. Guys who went to the wrong high school, played for the wrong coach, went to the wrong summer camp. Those are the guys I could get at Cleveland State.
"It was very easy to do, us-against-them."
Easier, it seems, than Kevin Mackey against the world.