Between The Madness

“Boy, I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad we don’t have practice this week or next week.” 

I’ve never seen a coach so openly defeated after a loss. There’s no stoicism here, no talk about being proud of his players, no looking forward to next year. There’s no energy left for that. Here is the great Jerry Tarkanian, a coach I’m used to seeing emanate such intensity that he has to bite on a towel during games, and boy, he’s just glad it’s over.

It’s one of the final scenes from Between The Madness, the 1998 documentary following the Fresno State men’s basketball team over the entirety of their disastrous season that year. A baby faced Andy Katz is standing with Tarkanian, looking in this moment more like a friend lending an ear than a sports reporter for the Fresno Bee. The two are in the bowels of Madison Square Garden after Tarkanian’s team lost a heartbreaker in the NIT. It feels like a private moment between the two, but there’s an unseen third party holding the camera, peering at Tark’s exhausted looking face from around Katz’s shoulder. Whoever holds that camera spent the better part of their year watching from close distance as the team broke apart in headline grabbing fashion. As I watch this scene I wonder if that person is glad it’s over, too.

Fresno State entered that season with a loaded roster predicted to make the Elite 8 by Sports Illustrated. Tarkanian assembled an unprecedented amount of talent for a Western Athletic Conference team with four players that would go on to play in the NBA, and more that had the potential to. Despite their talent the team never found consistency due to player suspensions for violations as trivial as smoking weed, as serious as domestic assault, and as unbelievable as threatening with a samurai sword. So much s**t hit the fan in Fresno that Mike Wallace brought his 60 Minutes crew to campus to file an expose on the program. I have to link to Wallace’s GOTCHYA segment on the program here, not because it’s good, but because it’s a chance to hear Mike Wallace muster up all his 60 Minutes gravitas to say the phrase “White (blanking) honkey b***h.”

Between The Madness first aired on Fox Sports One on Thanksgiving, 1998. The film’s producers agreed not to show NCAA violations (Fresno State would later vacate wins for the following season and the two after that), but otherwise had creative control and unprecedented access to the team for the duration of their season. The resulting raw behind the scenes feel was jarring to me as a modern viewer accustomed to careful brand curation that has a firm grasp on modern sports media. Before watching this film I didn’t realize how thoroughly conditioned my expectations have become by our era of Players’ Tribune, sportswriters guaranteeing brand-friendly coverage in exchange for access, broadcasters employed by the team, and player produced documentaries.

There are some similarities to The Last Dance, the docuseries that drew millions of viewers when it aired on ESPN earlier this year and now lives as a binge friendly hit on Netflix. Both make use of beyond the norm access to tell the inside story of a season, and incidentally both had cameras rolling in the same time of the same year. The differences are more interesting. While Dance uses interviews taking place in our time to look back, in Madness the viewer is trapped in the moment with no faces from the future guaranteeing a happy ending. Dance, being a product of our time, also required sign-off from it’s billionaire star subject so predictably avoids venturing far from corporate interests. Dance may make you feel like you’re finally getting the real story, but ultimately it’s the same story you’ve gotten all along, the tried and true one that has been told in two minute commercials for decades. The crew behind Madness had license to tell whatever story they felt was most worth telling, and the result feels a lot more human and interesting. While Jordan and Phil were masterminding their final triumphant season in Chicago, in Fresno there was a group of young players caught in bad situations made worse by draconian NCAA policy, while the national media shook their collective finger at them for having it too good for too long. If The Last Dance shows us the system working perfectly to reward talent and effort, Between The Madness suggests that’s more an exception than rule.

I’m hyping this film up knowing you can’t watch for yourself and disagree, because some years ago Between The Madness disappeared. Internet searches bring back only a few clips and some old message board posts written by fans trying to track down a copy for themselves. It can’t be found in any great online warehouses or auctions or pirate sites. The film is unavailable, but just because something is unavailable doesn’t mean that it’s entirely gone. 

I first heard of Between The Madness in a bar in Austin, Texas in 2016. I was there performing in my first ever comedy festival, which was being held during South by Southwest but was not an official part of that indie rock fest turned thinkfluencer/tech/media/music/whatever/free stuff bonanza that is modern South By. The fest I flew in for was an independent venture put on by the local alt-comedy club opportunistically timed to siphon off some SXSW asses for their seats and attract sponsor dollars from players too small to buy-in to the main event. Getting suckered into paying your own way to a bad festival is a stock comedian story, and this one turned out to be mine. The day of the festival I learned my involvement consisted of one ten minute set, to be performed in the lobby of the club, in the early afternoon, standing alongside sponsor booths as they handed out free samples. I’d had rough sets before but this was the first time I’d been upstaged by organic soybean chips.

The chips were not good but they were my compensation, so I finished my set and stuffed my bag full of them before heading back out into broad daylight to find a drink. Walking through the towering corporate absurdity of SXSW was a welcome distraction. I remember AMC promoting a new show about a Preacher teaming up with a vampire by constructing a massive upside down church. USA Network set up an entire carnival to promote Mr. Robot in all it’s corporate approved anti-corporate splendor. I saw handsome Canadian basketball legend Rick Fox for the second time in my life. My bleak festival debut was forced into the backseat.

I was staying on the couch of my friend, the hoops writer Ananth Pandian, and I met up with Ananth and his friend Luke Bonner at a bar. Luke starting talking about Between The Madness. I had never heard of it. He told us he saw the film only once in his life, when he was heading into his freshman season at West Virginia, and called it one of the biggest learning experiences of his time in college. Sitting there in summer class, before his freshman season had even started, Madness gave Luke what he felt  was his first real look at the world he was entering as a college basketball player. Line cast and hook set, he reeled me in: He’d never been able to find the film again. He’d been trying for years, he said, and it didn’t seem to exist anymore.

Learning that an obscure and noteworthy documentary existed, and that was difficult (impossible?) to find was like a designer drug created specifically for the part of me I’ll describe as Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons but for basketball. I had to find it. I would find it. Then I would judge it. When I got back to Portland I started searching online and two things kept happening: I would not find the film, and I would learn a more about that team’s notoriety that made me want the film even more.

As my obsession grew and online searches failed I decided to start reaching out to anyone I could who was associated with the film over social media. I told them I was creating a podcast about my search for the film and that I’d like to talk and, oh yeah, do you happen to have a copy? That podcast never got off the ground as I imagined it but now, three years later and thanks to a pandemic putting stand-up in a choke hold, I had time to go back and re-listen to the interviews from 2017 and share them, finally.

I eventually watched the film courtesy of Paul Doyle, the Director, who I tracked down using LinkedIn. By that time Paul was living a different professional life running a business that helped seniors find various services. Along the way I also talked with Terrance Roberson, a star on the team and one of the main subjects of the documentary. Terrance is the first player interviewed in the film, as a sophomore sitting alone in the locker room he tells the story of his mother dying in front of him after suffering a heart attack in church, and the tone is set. Terrance was the only member of that team to play four seasons at Fresno State and talked about his standout career there,  regrets, and current life as a mentor to basketball talent and a mental health technician in his hometown of Saginaw, Michigan.

My first break, though, was talking with a member of the film’s crew named Stephen Mintz. I came across Stephen’s name on an old Fresno State message board where someone mentioned he made the film and had since become a stand-up comedian in Fresno. I found his comedian page on facebook and soon we were talking via Skype about his experience chasing around the team with a camera on his shoulder for six months. Mintz developed an attachment with the team that would strain after filming. After the season, still wanting to be close to the team, Mintz took a job as statistician and academic advisor. In the latter role he gained notoriety when he told a newspaper that he wrote papers for players in exchange for money, part of a scandal that got his name everywhere from the Fresno Bee to the New York Times and made him persona non grata to the program. He talked about all of it. Later I’d meet Mintz in person when he got me up on a stand-up show in Fresno and get to talk comedy-shop, basketball, and about his gig at the local Haunted House.

Paul, Terrance, and Stephen all spoke with reverence about Tark and shared stories of their time with him. They talked about the emotional toll of that season, the mixed feelings they have, and the impact the film had on their lives nearly twenty years later. And, of course, I got their inside perspectives on the samurai sword incident for the record. I forwarded the film to Luke Bonner, now retired from basketball, who finally got to see the film that hit him so hard as a teenager. Luke thinks the film is still great, and I agree. Since there are no plans to re-release the film these interviews are as close as anyone can get to the experience. I like to imagine another basketball obsessive will come across them while conducting their own search for the film.

Now with time to reflect I’ve been able to feel gratitude for how much better it was that I couldn’t simply order Between The Madness from Amazon. It’s unavailability gave me a quest and conversations with people I’ll never forget. Despite how bad that comedy festival was I’m glad I decided to use my “emergencies only” credit card to pay my own way. F**k all soybean chips forever, though.