MAN IN THE MIDDLE

ART BUFFS. WE ARE TOLD. MUST accustom themselves to the shock of the new. Dallas area sports fans, on the other hand, have become wearily habituated to the Flop of the New. The Cowboys’ Mike Sherrard. The Mavericks’ Bill Garnett. The Rangers’ Oddibe McDowell. Flash and fade.

But just when area sports fans are catching first-round draft choice phobia, relief may be on the horizon in the seven-foot, 244-pound form of Roy Tarpley. To Reunion Rowdies at their giddiest, he is the Ultimate Force, the Terminator, Roy the Rebound. See him out At twenty-four, Roy Tarpley may be approaching the inner sanctum of the NBA elite. He averaged 11.8 points and 13.5 rebounds while playing an average of twenty-eight minutes per game last season-and this is a guy who still hasn’t learned to play with his back to the basket, as NBA centers must. He became the only non-starter in NBA history to finish in the top ten in total rebounds. The Mavs may stand on his shoulders this year to snatch the championship flag from the Los Angeles Lakers.

If.

Sadly, Roy Tarpley’s name, at least for the edges that he’s had a substance problem. The question for him. the Mavs, and their future: what’s he going to do about it?

Of course, this was inevitable for the Mavericks. Sooner or later, the team was going to be dealt the drug card from the NBA deck. Take a group of talented young men, many from impoverished backgrounds. Shower them with absurd sums of money and give them plenty of adulation and free time. The temptations will be too much for some of them.

Stories of Tarpley’s hitting the party circuit began as early as his junior year at the there on the court, going elbow to elbow and bruise for bruise with Akeem and Kareem and Moses and the other Goliaths of the National Basketball Association.

For two seasons now, Roy Tarpley has been leaping and slamming with the best of them, hauling down rebounds like he’s harvesting pecans. Coach John MacLeod usually keeps him on the bench for the first five minutes or so before sending him in at center or forward. That’s like turning loose the Mavs’ version of the Seventh Cavalry. Last year, few of the roundball cognoscenti were surprised when Tarpley was voted the best sixth man in the league.

near future, must be spoken with a silent asterisk: could be great star, Mavs’ pillar for a decade-if he avoids drugs and alcohol. That’s because Tarpley, as worried Mavericks fens learned last year, is the club’s first entry into the swelling ranks of professional athletes playing under the cloud of drug problems. Dallas Times Herald sports columnist Skip Bayless gave the Tarpley story an alarming spin when he quoted from his own mother, a recovering alcoholic, and wrote that Tarpley was “one drink away from oblivion.” Strong stuff, but recall that Mavericks officials and players were muted in their defense of Tarpley, who acknowlUniversity of Michigan, which will never be confused with Ouachita Baptist. Rumors linked Tarpley to drinking, possibly to cocaine use. His name wound up on a police report when a girl accused him of striking her. In Tarpley’s final season, coach Bill Frieder let his Big Ten Player of the Year languish on the bench for much of an important NCAA battle. Reason: Tarpley had been drunk the day before. Later, reports would surface that Tarpley had tested positive in two drug tests, a report that Frieder would hotly deny. Tarpley says his college days were “a wild and crazy and fun time.” but he insists that stories of alleged debauchery have been stretched considerably.



IF ROY TARPLEY HAS STRAYED OVER THE white line into drug and alcohol abuse, he can’t blame some stereotyped background of violence and neglect. The Far Rockaway neighborhood of New York City may not be Smallville, U.S.A., but Tarpley’s mother, Selener, did her best to give him a protected, straight-arrow environment. To shield him from street influences, Selener sent Roy. his brother, and his sister to spend each summer with an uncle in Mobile.

Roy underwent a large growth spurt in the ninth grade, and, with the possibility of an athletic scholarship on the horizon. Selener decided to get Roy away from “those really bad New York City schools.”

So Roy moved to Detroit to live with Selener’s brother, a former coach who operated a summer basketball camp in Michigan. Tarpley began to put some polish on his raw skills, and even before he became a star in his senior season at Detroit’s Cooley High School, Michigan had signed him to a four-year free ride at Ann Arbor.

At Michigan, the seven-foot Tarpley became a big man on campus in every sense of the word. And his transgressions, seen in the context of big-time sports, were fairly minor. There was talk that he sometimes missed practice for dubious reasons and at one point may have faked an injury, according to a Michigan sportswriter. But the partying reputation was born and it stuck, which is probably why Tarpley was still available when Dallas picked seventh in the 1986 college draft. Mavericks general manager Norm Sonju, vice president of basketball operations Rick Sund, and owner Donald Carter, devout Christians sometimes called the God Squad, realized they weren’t getting Mister Peppermint with Roy Tarpley.

But the NBA is not a prayer meeting, and the Mavs’ brain trust was willing at that point to risk an investment of several hundred thousand dollars on Tarpley. The team had climbed to a level of respectability on the shooting skills of Mark Aguirre and Rolando Blackman, but lacked an outstanding re-bounder to crash and control the boards. After being buried by the Lakers in six games in the 1986 playoffs, it was obvious that the Mavericks would always be stuck in second gear until the bully-beneath-the-basket materialized.

Despite the rumored knocks on his personal habits, Tarpley showed immediate signs that he was a godsend for the God Squad. As early as preseason workouts. Dick Motta seemed to sense that Tarpley had a chance to survive and ultimately prosper in the brutal, every-man-for-himself territory located along the baseline in NBA arenas. Tarpley was more aggressive than the scouting reports indicated. Pleased, Motta spared Tarpley the drill-instructor intimidation he usually inflicted on first-year players.

By midseason, Tarpley had become an integral part of a combination that would win a franchise-high fifty-five regular season games. Sixteen rebounds one night. Eighteen the next. Riding such a wave. Mavericks fans were understandably shocked in October, when Roy Tarpley came forward to face the spotlight. The ugly, eight-column headlines said it all: “Tarpley Admits to Treatment for Drug, Alcohol Abuse.”

Tarpley, at a press conference, read a simple statement that he had handwritten. He had attended an NBA-sponsored drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in California in June of 1987. “I don’t want to let myself down or my mother. I don’t want to be a statistic. I don’t want people saying ’another one bites the dust.’ “

Tarpley may have hoped that these would be his final remarks on the topic, but the media aftershocks were concussive. Dallas fans had learned that it can happen here. The God Squad, particularly Sonju and Carter, rushed to Tarpley’s aid.

“Roy came to me in the summer and said he had been drinking, had tried cocaine, and wanted to stop a potentially bad situation before it really began to get out of hand,” Sonju says. “I’m grateful for his understanding that it could have become a problem.”

Despite Tarpley’s positive-thinking approach and the passionate backing he was receiving from the front office, a shroud had been draped across his career expectations. Tarpley was immediately transformed into damaged goods. Perhaps the most sobering analysis came from a longtime National Football League scout, who put the situation in bleak either/or terms:

“When an athlete enters treatment for dope or alcohol dependency, two things invariably happen. The ones who stick with the program never become the players they were before. A lot of them need that stuff to generate certain performance levels. But most of them simply wind up going the way of [former Rangers pitcher] Steve Howe. They claim that they’ve done the cure and that the problem is a thing of the past, then turn around and go on a six-day bender.”

The NBA, in its anti-drug agreement with the Players Association, has developed some rigid guidelines for its post-treatment problem children. If a player, after completion of drug or alcohol therapy, misses a game or two practices in a seven-day period, he must submit to a drug test. If he flunks or refuses the test, a thirty-day suspension follows, plus another run through rehab. Players who reach this point are in the “strike two” category. Another positive result on a drug test results in permanent banishment from the NBA. So far. the league has slapped four players with the death penalty.

Tarpley found the terms of his after-care program to be reasonable enough. He began his second pro season overweight but sober, and set about the business of living up to his all-star potential. As the 1987 season progressed, and the front office folks sat back with rigidly crossed fingers. Tarpley became a statistic in the rebound and scoring column, not the county hospital.

“When Roy first admitted his problem. I was upset with him. We had to be worried about him. We’re a team,” says Mark Aguirre. the Mavericks’ all-time leading scorer. “But you can’t turn your back on the guy, so we were all over him, making sure he got all the care he needed. And it didn’t take long to see that Roy was very sincere about wanting to whip his problem.”

By February, Tarpley was exploding with a series of twenty-point, twenty-rebound games. “His statistics speak for themselves,” said coach John MacLeod. “Those rebounds are like home runs in baseball.” In March, Tarpley became the third Maverick in franchise history to be voted NBA player of the week after a twenty-nine-point, twenty-four-rebound effort against the New York Knicks and their formidable center, Patrick Ewing. “I celebrated with a Sprite,” Tarpley said after learning of the honor.

“I couldn’t be prouder of him if he were my blood son,” said Donald Carter, who lent Tarpley support by attending some AA meetings with his young star. But a more constantly steadying influence comes from Selener Tarpley, who moved to Dallas to be with Roy following his rehabilitation. She now works as an assistant vice-president in the trust department of MBank downtown.

“After Roy finished rehabilitation, we had a long talk and it was decided that it would be better for Roy if I moved to Dallas,” she says. “I had lived all of my adult life in New York City and coming to Dallas meant leaving behind a lot of friends and a lot of seniority [at the Mellon Bank]. In effect, I had to sacrifice the life I’d known in order to save his. But I think I provide an element of security for Roy.”

Selener Tarpley obviously has worries of her own. How many mothers voice deep concerns about a son who earns too much money? “Yes, that bothered me at first. He signed his contract with the Mavericks and the first thing he does is go out and buy a Mercedes 560 SEL,” Selener says. “And I would hate to think how much money he spends on clothes.

“But you have to remember. Roy is only twenty-three years old. He finished high school at seventeen and he had only really started to mature after he had finished college,” says Selener, whose twenty-year marriage to Roy Sr. ended in separation in 1985. She’s thoroughly convinced that her son is bonded superstar material. “You haven’t seen anything yet. There is no telling how good he’s going to become.”

If. If Roy Tarpley stays clean, as he vows he will, he may mean as much to Dallas sports fans in the Nineties as Roger Staubach did in the Seventies. Tarpley has thought about that, he says, driving along Forest Lane in the black Mercedes.

“Not another Roger Staubach. necessarily, but someone who could be a positive element in the community,” he says. “Maybe a role model to kids. Kids recognize me around town. I get off on that.”

Naturally, The Problem is discussed. “I knew that I had a potential problem in my life, one that could wear out my body and ruin my career.” says Tarpley. “When I first looked at the numbers on the contract I signed with the Mavericks, I was overwhelmed and said, ’Thank you, God.’ It was a dream come true.” His salary-reportedly a base of $500,000 per year for five years-has bought him the Mercedes, a nice town-house near Harvest Hill in North Dallas, and freedom to shape his own life.

“I know how much this basketball career means to me,” Tarpley says. “People ask me what I plan to do after basketball. Well, I’d like to own a business of some kind. But the point is, if I play up to my potential and am fortunate enough to have a long career in the NBA, I won’t have to do anything I don’t want to. The whole key is taking care of my body.”

Tarpley says that he was a little startled to see Skip Bayless’s “oblivion” column last May, when the Mavericks were closing out a playoff victory over Denver.

“I did an interview with Bayless and I thought it was going to be a positive piece,” Tarpley says. “But I did tell him that I hadn’t been going to as many AA meetings as I would like. I hadn’t had the urge to take a drink for almost six months when I read that. Still don’t.”

Bayless applauds the Mavericks’ handling of Tarpley since the revelations, but he is quick to defend the column. “The Mavericks are on pins and needles because they realize that their star of the future-star of the present, really-is a recovering alcoholic. They worry because he goes to bars with Mark Aguirre, who is his best friend on the team, and even though he drinks pop, it’s still a potentially dangerous situation.”

Meanwhile. Tarpley says there are Quakers who lead looser and more flamboyant social lives than he does. There are those, however, who continue to worry about Roy. Foremost among them is Norm Sonju.

“It’s not so much the drug and alcohol thing, but just the pressures that young men with a lot of money like Roy are exposed to,” Sonju says. “They become successful and start making all that money, and suddenly, everybody wants a piece of him. The sycophants and promoters. Nothing good ever comes from exposure to people like that.”

Tarpley believes he’ll avoid the exploitative leeches that fasten onto so many prominent athletes. Preston Pearson, the former Cowboy, has taken charge of the management aspect of his career. “They’re gradually lining me up to do some commercials. You know. Endorsing products. I’ll endorse anything.”

Like Coors Lite?

Tarpley smiles and holds an imaginary canof beer in front of an imaginary TV camera.”Probably not a very good idea,” he decides.”I’d rather be a fashion model.”