The Final Four Read Free

you’d spent the year playing professional ball overseas? You’d have gotten paid for your work there, right?
    Malcolm: I don’t see why I should be forced to leave my own country to earn a decent living. Because I’m not nineteen yet? That’s age discrimination. I can vote. I can join the U.S. army. But I can’t play pro ball. Why? Because NBA owners wasted hundreds of millions on too many high school kids who couldn’t cut it in the pros before? That’s not me
(running his right hand back over his close-cut hair)
. Maybe I should go to work with my father in the auto plants for a year. Oh, that’s right—I can’t, because him and lots of other people got laid off from the assembly line. So that’s two jobs I can’t have.
    First Reporter: Malcolm, just to follow up, obviously you’ve passed your first semester of classes at Michigan State, or you wouldn’t be eligible to continue playing. But there have been reports that you’ve stopped going to class completely during your second semester, in anticipation of leaving school after the tournament concludes. If that’s true, do you feel like you’re manipulating the system?
    Malcolm: I had to take at least six credits my first semester, and I did—passed them all. It doesn’t matter if it was ballroom dancing or basketball 101. I passed. It’s like the second time I took the SAT and scored so much higher. Nobody believed it. And I had to take it a third time to prove I had some natural smarts. Well, I really can’t remember about this semester. It’s been too much basketball and travel for my
school
. So I’ll have to wait for grades in a couple of months to find out. For the second part of that question, it’s like what my father always says about living in the projects, about being trapped there—no one can manipulate the system who didn’t invent it, a system that was made to keep you down.
    First Reporter: Malcolm, there have been whispers that you may come under NCAA investigation for receiving some type of improper benefits. Do you know anything about that?
    Malcolm: All I can tell you is I’ve got no wheels, no watch, no rings
(looking down at his bare wrists and fingers)
, and no money in the bank. Ask anyone who knows me, anyone who sees mewalking around campus. People who are jealous of me are always going to be serving up that
Haterade
. So as far as I’m concerned, those rumors come under the heading of
Child, Please
.
    Third Reporter: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has proposed that schools which don’t graduate at least fifty percent of their scholarship basketball players should be banned from playing in this tournament. How do you feel about lowering your school’s graduation rate by leaving early, Malcolm? What if your teammates and school pay the price for that, being banned from a future tournament?
    Malcolm: I don’t care about none of that. I’m looking after number one—myself. I’ve seen what happens in this world when you don’t, when you put other people first. That’s why I wear eleven on my uniform. There are two number ones in a row, to always remind me, in case I forget. I pass the rock to my teammates when they’re open. That’s it. Nobody can ask any more from me. And no one should.
    Broadcast cuts back to the studio announcer.
    Announcer: Within an hour of Malcolm McBride’s comments, the Michigan State Athletics Department issued this statement
(statement appears on screen as announcer reads it)
: “We wholeheartedly believe in amateurism and the ideal of the student athlete. Our scholarship athletes abide by the rules of the NCAAand make great personal sacrifices to compete on the athletic field while maintaining their primary role as students at Michigan State.”
(Cut back to announcer)
Michigan State coach Eddie Barker, who has been battling laryngitis throughout the tournament, has yet to comment.

“Where I grew up—I grew up on the north side of Akron [Ohio], lived in the projects. So