Death Penalty: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of USF Basketball (Prologue)
“There Was Really No Choice”
The Board of Trustees of the University of San Francisco decided yesterday that the men’s intercollegiate Division I basketball program at USF should and will be discontinued.
--Reverend John Lo Schiavo, S.J., university president (July 29, 1982)
WITH THOSE WORDS, A HERALDED athletic program with over seven decades of history, including three national championships, seven Elite Eight appearances, and twelve Sweet Sixteen berths, while featuring the likes of Bill Cartwright and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductees K.C. Jones and Bill Russell, suddenly was no more.
It was a grim mood on the morning of July 29, 1982, when Father Lo Schiavo strode up to the podium to make an announcement that would send tremors up and down the West Coast college basketball landscape for the first time since perhaps 1959. That year saw an illegal-payouts scandal that rocked the UCLA, Stanford, USC, and Cal basketball programs and led to the dismantling of the Pacific Coast Conference (the precursor to today’s Pac-12). But those were bigger schools, residing in one of the NCAA’s major conferences.
In contrast, the University of San Francisco was a small school that since 1952 had played hoops under the auspices of the West Coast Athletic Conference (WCAC), which featured other small schools, such as Loyola Marymount, University of Santa Clara, Pepperdine, Gonzaga, and, across the Bay in the leafy, sleepy exurb of Moraga, St. Mary’s. What the hell kind of scandal would be big enough to knock a successful basketball program like the Dons off their pedestal and become the first major collegiate sports program to go into a self-imposed exile?
Close observers of the program had their suspicions. After all, USF had twice been the subject of an investigation, and had spent two years on probation.
The Dons’ main booster club certainly knew; as it would turn out, they were in small part complicit.
The rest of the world would find out.
Standing next to Lo Schiavo was Frank “Sandy” Tatum, a senior partner at the San Francisco law firm that conducted the investigations that led to the decision, and, ultimately, this press conference. The angular Tatum had been an accomplished golfer while at Stanford University in the early 1940s, during which time his teams won back-to-back NCAA titles and Tatum himself captured an individual championship. He returned to Stanford as a law student, earning a J.D. in 1950 and was admitted to the California State Bar the same year. More recently, Tatum had headed up the United States Golf Association (USGA) for three years – his tenure ending in 1980 – and had served on the body’s executive committee as early as 1972. “He is a purist of the highest order when it comes to the rules,” San Francisco Chronicle sports editor Art Rosenbaum once wrote about Tatum. “He applauded, for example, when Beth Daniel called a [penalty] stroke on herself last week at the USGA women’s open because the ball moved ever so slightly as she prepared to putt.” Under Tatum’s direction, the investigations had revealed a series of recruiting violations and, later, details of a player’s receipt of illegal funds. “There can be no deviation,” Tatum declared in the aftermath of the first investigation, in 1979. “We know the NCAA code and our athletic department knows the NCAA code. Whether or not we think some rules are harsh, they exist and must be followed to the letter.”
“Anyone who is familiar with this institution and its proud history will understand what a painful decision this is,” Father Lo Schiavo said. “In all the circumstances, however, the Board had no other responsible choice. The circumstances centrally involve problems with the basketball program which have been plaguing us and which the university has been unsuccessfully trying to solve for many years. Those problems have put us in the position of defending ourselves before the NCAA Committee on Infractions twice in the past few years. The price the university has had to pay for those problems has been much greater than the heavy financial price. There is no way of measuring the damage that has been done to the university’s most priceless assets, its integrity, and its reputation.”
It was a painful decision for the university president. Not because he felt he had to terminate a successful basketball program that had seemingly become a victim of its success. It was a painful decision because Father Lo Schiavo was a basketball fan. In his younger days, he had been a player and a coach, “though not very successfully,” he once said. Born in San Francisco in 1925 to parents who hailed from the small Italian island of Salina, John Joseph Lo Schiavo was an All-City basketball player at St. Ignatius High School before matriculating to Gonzaga University, a Jesuit school in Spokane, Washington, that years later would compete in the same athletic conference as USF.1 He earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree at Gonzaga before gaining ordination as a priest in 1955 and joining the USF faculty. After eight years serving on the school’s board of directors, Lo Schiavo was elected its president.
In 1978, Lo Schiavo facilitated fundraising efforts to acquire Lone Mountain College, formerly the San Francisco College for Women, and annex it to the main campus. His administration also, according to a New York Times obituary written in 2015 upon Lo Schiavo’s death, “balanced budgets, eliminated debt, and increased the endowment more than eightfold, to $38.7 million from $4.6 million. New degree programs established included hospitality management, Judaic studies, Asia Pacific studies, and sport management.”
But as the Seventies melted into the Eighties, Lo Schiavo had a blossoming problem on his hands, and it was threatening to grow larger and larger and explode through the concrete walls of War Memorial Gymnasium, the basketball facility on Golden Gate Avenue that opened in 1958. Within those walls was not just great basketball – in the 1970s alone the Dons won six regular season conference championships, making the NCAA Tournament each year – but in the background, boosters were doling out money to players, there were recruiting improprieties by coaches, and tutors were taking exams on behalf of the players. The NCAA conducted a pair of investigations: once in 1979, and again in 1980-81. In both instances, a head coach was terminated. Bob Gaillard, a former USF player who had shepherded the Dons to five WCAC titles and five NCAA tourney bids, resigned as the first investigation began. His replacement, Dan Belluomini, led the Dons to a 44-14 record, two West Coast Athletic Conference2 titles, and an NCAA tournament appearance across two seasons. Belluomini was fired on May 12, 1980, for what were termed “minor” infractions involving the recruitment of high school All-American Sam Perkins, who wound up at the University of North Carolina. The infractions involved direct contact with a recruit (a no-no) and a cheeseburger (while delicious, also a no-no). The remaining three years of Belluomini’s contact were settled eight days later.
Belluomini’s replacement, Peter Barry, was a USF alum and student-athlete. Barry played not basketball, but shortstop on the baseball team, graduating from the Hilltop in 1970 and then spending two seasons in the low minor leagues with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The appointment of Barry to the top hoops post was an odd choice; yes, the soft-spoken, mustachioed thirty-two-year-old had been on Belluomini’s staff as an assistant, but he was a relative unknown whose résumé included three years as a high school head coach and time as a Weber State assistant.
But Reverend Lo Schiavo didn’t choose Barry because of his basketball knowledge.
Reverend Lo Schiavo chose Barry to be USF basketball’s “Mr. Clean.”
Peter Barry’s objective was twofold:
Win basketball games.
Win basketball games while operating the program aboveboard.
Belluomini’s 1978-79 and 1979-80 USF squads had too many good players, a product of strong recruiting that ultimately created a logjam; after all, there is only one ball to go around and having a bunch of hungry mouths to feed can become a daunting situation for even the most august gaffer. The competition for playing time had a deleterious effect on team morale. Before Barry could even take the reins, five players transferred to other schools, easing the hardwood gridlock. With Quintin Dailey, John Hegwood, and Wallace Bryant all averaging 16 or more points per game, Barry’s first team went 24-7 overall and 11-3 in WCAC play, but the season came to a sudden halt with a four-point loss to a ranked Kansas State team in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The following year, Barry’s Dons, once again led by the Dailey-Hegwood-Bryant trio, finished 25-6, including a ten-point upset of No. 2-ranked Wichita State at the Rainbow Classic in Hawaii (“They were loaded,” Barry recalled years later, referring specifically to Wichita State “Bookend Forwards” Antoine Carr and Cliff Levingston, both of whom would jump to the NBA). The Dons once again went 11-3 in conference play, including a five-game winning streak in February. Another NCAA tourney invite followed, and with it, came another first-round exit.
Barry led USF to a 49-13 composite record in those two years as the basketball program’s “Mr. Clean.”
Well. Except that he wasn’t so clean after all.
Pete Barry gave Dailey $1,000 cash, or so Dailey claimed. Barry denied ever doing so, and the accusation led the coach to file a $10 million libel suit against the player in August 1983, long after Dailey, who had been investigated for assaulting a female student in her campus dorm, had been drafted into the NBA. During the investigation, Dailey revealed to police that he had also received money for a no show job provided by a J. Luis Zabala, the owner of a company in Salinas who also happened to be a former president of the Century Club, at the time the school’s booster organization. (The Century Club has since been disbanded.)
Then, there were also charges of illegal recruiting two prep players, including Paul Fortier, a post player from St. Ignatius High School who ended up going to the University of Washington. A member of the Century Club had paid Fortier’s high school tuition. Taken together, these revelations were what ultimately led Reverend John Lo Schiavo to that podium and the microphones on July 29, 1982, to declare that the University of San Francisco Dons basketball program was, indeed, closing up shop.
Hilltop hoops would be extinguished for only three years, as it turned out, resuscitated for the 1985-86 season under a new head coach, Jim Brovelli, a Dons star player in the early 1960s. After the program shut down, indications were, should it be reignited, that USF would not compete at a Division I level. But in 1985, there were the Dons, back in the WCAC, ready to once again do battle with the likes of Pepperdine, San Diego, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, Santa Clara, St. Mary’s, and Portland. Except that, well, in that first year back they went to war “with a virtual pickup team” consisting primarily of freshmen and some junior-college transfers. Perhaps not surprisingly, the ‘85-’86 Dons went 2-12 in the conference, their only triumphs coming against St. Mary’s to kick off conference play, and against Gonzaga on February 7, 1986. Although the reconstituted Dons were able to achieve periodic spells of respectability over the ensuing years – the early and late 1990s, the mid-2000s, the late 2010s – they have achieved nowhere near the brilliance of the Bill Russell and K.C. Jones teams of the 1950s, the Ollie Johnson-Joe Ellis-Russ Gumina-Erwin Mueller squads of the early-to-mid 1960s, the Phil Smith-Kevin Restani-Mike Quick outfits of the early 1970s, or the Bill Cartwright-Winford Boynes-Chubby Cox-James Hardy-era Dons of the late 1970s. The New Dons have reached the NCAA Tournament only twice: in 19983, when they lost in the first round to Utah; and earlier this year, when they once again fell in the first round, this time to Murray State. They also can claim a pair of NIT appearances (2005, 2014) and three trips to the College Basketball Invitational (2012, 2017, 2018)4. Although Todd Golden, the young, baby-faced coach who led the Dons to their most recent Big Dance appearance has since decamped for the bigger money and brighter spotlights of the Florida Gators and the Southeastern Conference, the foundation had been poured on the Hilltop for a new run of success.
Next: “Part 1 - A Once Elite Program” will detail the history of USF basketball from its beginning in 1910 up until the early 1970s. To be alerted when posts go up, feel free to subscribe!
Sources
“Belluomini, USF Make it Official,” San Francisco Chronicle. May 21, 1980, pg. 67.
Boyle, Robert H. “Bringing Down the Curtain,” Sports Illustrated/Vault.SI.com, August 9, 1982. https://vault.si.com/vault/1982/08/09/bringing-down-the-curtain
DiMauro, Mike. “Yes, Virginia, There Is A San Francisco (Just Ask Pete Barry),” The Day (New London, CT). November 27, 2020. https://www.theday.com/article/20201127/SPORT01/201129465
Edes, Gordon. “FRESH START: USF Has Restored Basketball – Must Build Back to Glory,” Los Angeles Times. November 23, 1985. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-23-sp-1371-story.html
“Former University of San Francisco basketball coach Peter Barry...,” United Press Syndicate archive. August 22, 1983. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/08/22/Former-University-of-San-Francisco-basketball-coach-Peter-Barry/8727430372800/
McGrath, Dan. “Belluomini’s Fateful Dinner,” San Francisco Chronicle. May 23, 1980, pp. 75, 79.
McGrath, Dan. “USF Starts Search for New Coach,” San Francisco Chronicle. May 12, 1980, pg. 49.
McGrath, Dan. “USF Hopes New Coach is ‘Mr. Clean’,” San Francisco Chronicle. November 13, 1980, pp. 75-76.
Ratto, Ray. “Belluomini: What’s Behind the Firing,” San Francisco Examiner. May 11, 1980, pg. 5C.
Rosenbaum, Art. “The Honorable Intentions of Two USF Men,” San Francisco Chronicle. July 30, 1982, pg. 56.
Weber, Bruce. “Rev. John Lo Schiavo Dies at 90; University President Barred Basketball,” New York Times. May 19, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/sports/ncaabasketball/rev-john-lo-schiavo-90-who-barred-a-sport-dies.html?_r=0
Gonzaga would join the WCAC in 1979 after fifteen seasons in the Big Sky Conference.
The West Coast Athletic Conference (WCAC) would become the West Coast Conference (WCC) in 1989.
Current Boston Celtics coach Ime Udoka was on the 1998 USF Dons team. As you’ll see, there have been a few USF-Celtics connections over the years.
The CBI was founded in 2007.