College Basketball / MARK HEISLER : Sorry, Pac-10--Vitale Deserves the PT and Pub

Hey, Al McGuire, Billy Packer, all you major network aircraft carriers!

I’m Dick Vitale, the little paisan from north Jersey who bombed out in the NBA and went to work for a hole-in-the-wall network! I can play, too! I’ll show you! Just gimme some PT, clear the paint, watch this J!

I can sky!

I can jam!

I’m a super, too! I’m pure hell! My pub is coming!

Someone pinch me to make sure I’m not dreaming.

This is going to be about Dick Vitale, the increasingly famous ESPN color commentator and current scourge of the Pacific 10’s reputation.

But first, a glossary of terms, without which any attempt at understanding this phenomenon is doomed. It should come in handy, since TV is now largely made up of soap operas and college basketball games.

And even if no one else quite can match Screamin’ Dick’s “Adrian Branch is saying, ‘Hey Michael Jordan, I’m a super too!’ ” a lot of announcers come close.

PT--Playing time, measured in minutes. All that stands between every player in the universe and the greatness forecast for him, by his parents if no one else.

Light--Same as PT.

Paint--The free-throw lane, which is painted a different color than the rest of the floor. From The World According to Al McGuire.

Aircraft carrier--A star center. Also from McGuire.

J--Jump shot. Also a very in thing to call Julius Erving.

Rock--A J gone very wrong.

Pure--Very good. Not infrequently, a euphemism. A player described as a pure shooter is often one who cannot do another thing on a basketball court, including walk and chew gum at the same time. In general, the most overused and meaningless word in basketball.

Sky--Jump. Also, to climb glass, or, from McGuire once more, to talk to God.

Jam--Dunk.

Dunk--Put the ball directly into the basket with your own hands, usually with some force.

Pub--Publicity. The light at the end of the tunnel.

All this can wear thin, not to mention its potential for confusion. Viewers tuning in some nights must wonder if their sets have just started picking up radio transmissions from some cop car in Brooklyn.

At the same time, it’s fun. It recalls the days before basketball started earning big money and became corporate in style, like football, with security provided by state policemen and players encouraged to conduct themselves like role models.

And all the best ones, Vitale, McGuire and the No. 1 guy, CBS’ Billy Packer, work the college game.

For all the money CBS is waiting to lavish on the man who can make NBA telecasts fun, the league has been monitored by one lame-o after another.

Jack Twyman was polite. Bill Russell was either cryptic or cackling. Oscar Robertson said mostly, “Whoa!” Even before he remarked on Russell’s “watermelon smile,” Rick Barry had demonstrated that he was as abrasive as he was incisive. Tommy Heinsohn, the noted ex-Celtic, not only sounds as if he has a nodding acquaintance with the game, at best, but he also thought that Kevin McHale’s saving tackle on Kurt Rambis was an OK play.

A lot of the college announcers, however, are capable of the rarest thing in broadcast journalism--telling you something about the game. In the world of the talking head, they dare to hold opinions.

Packer once scorned Indiana State’s No. 1 ranking in its Larry Bird days and got angry letters for a season. He was the first to pick up on how quickly Soviet basketball was closing the gap. He is now campaigning against the importation of foreign players by NCAA schools.

Vitale is currently telling viewers that the Pacific 10 is the worst major conference in the country, a statement that still has conference coaches grumbling in their bean sprouts.

“Everyone says they want you to be candid, but everyone wants you to front for them,” Vitale says from a hotel room in Boston where he’s warming up for Boston College-Syracuse.

“I’ll tell you one reason for it. California high school basketball is down. Look at the high school rating sheets. Of the guys I call four-star players, who’s out on the West Coast now? One guy, Tommy Lewis.

“It’s just one guy’s opinion. I might be right. I might be wrong. Hey, I’m not out to hurt anyone, but I feel my job is to be honest. Like I thought I had to say the other night that DePaul had a little problem with their curfew. Those are the things I think people are interested in.

“I tell people I’m coaching every major team in the country and I’m still undefeated. All the coaches are calling me up. (Iowa’s) George Raveling told me yesterday, ‘You’re the godfather of basketball, the man who knows all.’ I’m like a kid in a candy store here. I haven’t lost a game in six years. I don’t have to go back to the hotel after a loss and have 12 guys staring at me angry because of PT. . . .

“How’d I start? I got fired by the Pistons Nov. 8, 1979, and I was as low as I’d ever been in my life. I’d always had the philosophy, a boy, a ball, a dream. I’d climbed the ladder of success, from junior high coaching, all the way to the pros, without shooting a jump shot.

“I was no player. Believe me, I was a non-player. I played like one year at Seton Hall, as a walk-on. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t jump and I couldn’t shoot. But, oh man, could I talk about the game!

“Then I got to the pros and I found out it wasn’t the rose garden. I was fired with a 4-8 record in my second year. That was when Scotty Connal called me from ESPN. I didn’t know. But my wife told me, ‘Hey, what are you going to do, sit around the house and mope?’ ”

Now he works up to four games a week. On Sunday nights, he flies into out-of-the-way Hartford, Conn., and is then driven to farther-out Bristol for ESPN’s weekly college basketball report show. He has a weekly call-in show on KMOX, a St. Louis radio station, that he does via telephone from his home in Detroit.

Also, he does motivational speeches for corporations and banquets. “This month, no kidding, I’ll be home like one day,” he said.

He’s also cleaning up. His ESPN salary has been increased to something near the $100,000 a year he made, briefly, with the Pistons. Outside income bumps it up some more.

He has all the PT he can handle. Now he just has to survive.

Vitale’s best of the senior class, by position.

Centers: 1. Patrick Ewing, Georgetown. 2. Jon Koncak, SMU. 3. Joe Kleine, Arkansas. 4. Uwe Blab, Indiana. 5. Alton Gipson, Florida State.

Power forwards: 1. Keith Lee, Memphis State. 2. Ed Pinckney, Villanova. 3. Lorenzo Charles, North Carolina State. 4. John Williams, Tulane. 5. Mark Acres, Oral Roberts.

Small forwards: 1. Xavier McDaniel, Wichita State. 2. Detlef Schrempf, Washington. 3. Alfredrick Hughes, Chicago Loyola. 4. A.C. Green, Oregon State. 5. Adrian Branch, Maryland.

Point guards: 1. Sam Vincent, Michigan State. 2. John Battle, Rutgers. 3. Kenny Patterson, DePaul. 4. Tony McIntosh, Fordham. 5. Delaney Rudd, Wake Forest.

Big guards: 1. Chris Mullin, St. John’s. 2. Milt Wagner, Louisville. 3. Steve Black, LaSalle. 4. Joe Dumars, McNeese State. 5. Steve Harris, Tulsa.

And his All-American team by position, regardless of class:

Center: Ewing. Power forward: junior Wayman Tisdale of Oklahoma. Small forward: junior Len Bias of Maryland. Big guard: Mullin. Point guard: junior Steve Mitchell of Alabama Birmingham.

And three top undergraduates who may turn pro after this season: Tisdale, sophomore guard Pearl Washington of Syracuse, and 7-foot junior center Benoit Benjamin of Creighton.

Vitale ranks Tisdale ahead of all the senior power forwards, Washington ahead of all the senior point guards, and Benjamin second only to Ewing among the centers.