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Mike Grosso
GoGamecocks.com
What if ... Mike Grosso had stayed at USC?
Fight over player’s eligibility led to USC leaving ACC
The 1966-67 USC basketball team. Mike Grosso is No. 20.
MIKE SAFRON
Posted on 03.29.09
LOUISVILLE, Ky. | Mike Grosso was the picture of calm as he navigated his 2005 Saab through the tony Highlands neighborhood of Louisville one day last January. What first seemed like a winter wonderland to the outsider proved otherwise as Grosso drove up curbs and around downed trees and power lines.
The beautiful, old oak tree in Grosso’s back yard on Lakeside Drive leaned against the roof of his house. The Grosso family and his neighbors lived without electricity for more than a week. Yet Grosso seemed unfazed by it all.
Grosso learned early in life how to deal with the unforeseen, how to roll with the great unknown, and how to handle what was out of his control. At age 17 in August of 1965, Grosso arrived in Columbia a wide-eyed youngster bent on being the next in South Carolina coach Frank McGuire’s long line of outstanding basketball players.
Fifteen months later, Grosso departed Columbia never having played a varsity game. That short odyssey in Columbia had a profound impact on Grosso’s life, as well as significant bearing on USC athletics to this day.
Four decades later, Grosso is on his third marriage and long past hundreds of hours of counseling. He has raised a daughter and at one point held custody of three nephews and nieces. After it all, Grosso has found inner peace, helping to push away the rage over what happened at USC.
It has taken nearly the same 40 years for USC athletics to recover from what happened with Grosso. His and USC’s failed fight with the Atlantic Coast Conference over athletic eligibility proved to be the impetus for the school to leave the league in 1971.
By the time Grosso had transferred to Louisville, the ACC had ruled he never could participate in athletics at USC. The NCAA placed USC on two years’ probation for numerous violations across many sports, but the investigation centered on the recruitment and eligibility of Grosso.
Beyond that, the Grosso saga further fueled McGuire’s “us-against-the-world” mentality. Long after Grosso departed, McGuire continued to feud with ACC administrators, league officials, opposing coaches and fans over what he perceived as an injustice done to Grosso, USC and him.
“Did it hurt?” Grosso asks today. “How could it not have? Is it everlasting? Yes. It was an unfortunate, horrible experience. But what can you do?”
What Grosso can do is sit at the one window table at Club Grotto American Bistro in Louisville, gaze out at traffic and recount his whirlwind tour in Columbia. Just down Bardstown Road is St. Francis Assisi Catholic Church, where Grosso listened one Sunday more than a decade ago to the message of a visiting priest from New Jersey.
The message hit home with Grosso. It was about forgiving and getting on with life. For most of three decades, that had not been easy for him. Even though Grosso eventually earned induction into the University of Louisville Athletic Hall of Fame following a stellar career there, his brief NBA career was cut short by a recurring knee injury.
Grosso admits he never was the player McGuire envisioned coming out of Bridgewater-Raritan High School in New Jersey. For most of his adult life, Grosso has struggled with the game of “What if ...” As much as he wanted to pin his shortcomings on injuries, this psychological game of his always circled back to, “What if I had been allowed to play basketball at South Carolina?”
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Mike Grosso, right, and his daughter Michelina Grosso, 13, watch Louisville play Seton Hall in March 2009. (Sam Upshaw Jr., The Courier-Journal)
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The Grosso family lived upstairs at 33 Anderson Ave. on a street lined with two-family row houses in Raritan, N.J., a community of 6,000 located 34 miles west of New York City. The family of Grosso’s uncle was housed downstairs. The neighborhood was lower-middle class and predominantly Italian.
Across the street was St. Ann’s Catholic Church, where neighborhood kids served as altar boys during Sunday Mass and otherwise played stickball in the streets and pickup basketball games wherever a goal stood. There never was a shortage of participants, what with the Grosso family, the Bartiluccis, the Dileos, the DeColas and the Gandolofos in the neighborhood.
By Grosso’s junior year at Bridgewater-Raritan High, his older brother, Joe, was still living at home along with Mike’s set of younger twins, Gene and Lou. Grosso’s father, Patsy, worked the late-night shift at Grosso’s Bar, which was owned by his two brothers, in nearby Somerset. Mike’s mother, Margaret, worked part time at the Raritan public library.
At that time, the only famous people to have come out of Raritan were John Basilone, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his role in the battle of Guadalcanal, and Ben Carnevale, who gained acclaim for his coaching at the Naval Academy and eventually was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Mike Grosso was destined to be the next Raritan star. Carnevale learned of Grosso’s basketball abilities and passed his name along to his longtime friend in the coaching business, Frank McGuire.
Not long after, McGuire arrived unannounced at the Grosso home. McGuire was the first coach to so much as acknowledge Grosso as a prospective college basketball player. McGuire told the Grosso family of how he had won a national championship in 1957 at North Carolina with a pipeline of talent he funneled from the New York area to Chapel Hill. He said he intended to do the same at South Carolina, and Grosso should jump.
Grosso was won over. So, too, were his parents, who liked the idea of their son playing for a legendary coach who was Irish-Catholic and who understood their cultural background. But Grosso had his senior season to play. When he averaged 30 points and 31 rebounds per game, he no longer was a secret.
There were no recruiting services back then, no ranking of high school players as there are today. Even so, it was widely known that Lew Alcindor, a 7-foot-1 center out of New York City’s Power Memorial High, was the best prep prospect in the country. It also was understood that Grosso was the second-best prospect.
By Christmas of his senior season, Grosso’s high school coach and athletics director were bringing sacks of letters to his locker at school. By February, some 150 schools had shown interest in Grosso. Coaches visited Grosso at school almost daily, and following every home game, Grosso and his twin brothers enjoyed dining with that evening’s visiting coach. “We always ate 22-ounce steaks,” Grosso says.
While Grosso did not mind accepting the free meals and enjoyed the attention, he also was up front with every coach. He told them all he intended to play basketball at South Carolina, and nothing a coach said or did would change his mind.
There was one exception: Miami. For whatever reason, Grosso had grown somewhat fond of Miami after attending the 1962 Gotham Bowl football game at Yankee Stadium between Miami and Nebraska. Miami also was the home of his Aunt Annette Salidino.
Miami’s coach was Bruce Hale, one of college basketball’s first promoters and high-energy salesmen. He begged Grosso to visit Miami, and when the teenager stepped off the airplane, he was greeted by TV cameras and fans with placards. Hale had made posters of Grosso and plastered them around the Miami airport.
The Miami beaches were tempting, but not enough to sway Grosso. He returned home after telling Hale he was still headed to USC to play for McGuire. Unhappy with Grosso’s decision, Hale informed ACC and NCAA officials that USC illegally recruited Grosso.
The only item left to cross off the list for USC and McGuire was to get Grosso eligible. The ACC had adopted a rule in July of 1964 that required a minimum score of 800 on the SAT for an athlete to receive a grant-in-aid. At the time, there was every reason to believe the rule was an attempt by the ACC to stem the tide of blacks infiltrating college athletics across the South.
The rule’s unintended target was Grosso, who was typical of a young man from a family that did not place great value on education. Grosso ranked 322nd out of 438 in his senior class. In a desperate attempt to get Grosso to the magic 800 score, USC arranged for him to take the test five times from December 1964 to September 1965. His scores, in order, were 628, 724, 741, 706 and 789.
“That’s as embarrassing as it gets. I didn’t feel like it was what I was all about,” Grosso says today. “I had the attention span of a gnat in the classroom. I would, if I could, rewrite the academic part. Would I want to be a little more of an academic prospect? Absolutely.”
At USC, Grosso struggled in the classroom. He took 30 hours of classes his freshman year and passed 24. His 1.5 grade-point average was barely above the minimum 1.3 required for him to return to school as a sophomore.
Grosso’s USC teammates recognized academics were not high on his list of priorities. Gene Spencer, a teammate of Grosso’s on the 1965-66 USC freshman team, remembers that another teammate, Clyde Lewellen, occasionally wrote term papers for his teammates. Once, a paper written by Lewellen was returned to Grosso with an “F” grade and the professor’s remarks: “You obviously did not write this.” Grosso then instructed Lelwellen to write another one in Grosso’s words. Written in Grosso’s style, the professor returned another “F.”
Grosso’s easy-going manner and likeable personality ingratiated him easily to his teammates. McGuire further eased the process of moving into a different culture by rooming Grosso with Hank Martin of Columbia during his freshman year. Martin’s parents, who owned Villa Tronco Italian Restaurant, welcomed Grosso to their restaurant and to their home as if he was one of their own.
Martin, now a family physician in Lexington, says his family got the biggest kick out of packages Grosso received from home loaded with breads and Italian sausages. The roommates argued over which part of the country produced the better Italian food.
There was no argument on the basketball court about Grosso and his immense skills. Everyone has a story to tell about the first time they saw Grosso play in a pickup game. It usually occurred at the old Carolina Fieldhouse, and it usually involved Grosso grabbing a rebound, making an outlet pass, then filling a lane on the fast break.
“When I saw him play, he was the fastest guy for that size I had seen up to that point,” says Donnie Walsh, an assistant coach at USC then and now the president of the New York Knicks. “He had a great body. He was a great rebounder. He could rebound and he could run the floor. He was a very active player for a guy that big in his time.”
This was before basketball players lifted weights, but Grosso’s 235 pounds were packed on his 6-9 frame. He had enormous hands and agile feet that he tucked into size-16 shoes. More than anything, he was the missing piece on USC varsity teams that first would have included Skip Harlicka, Gary Gregor and Jack Thompson, and later would have included Bobby Cremins, John Roche and Tom Owens.
Freshmen were ineligible for varsity competition then, so the ACC ruled Grosso could play on the freshman squad as long as he was not given a grant-in-aid by the school. Grosso remained intent on attending USC, and his family agreed to pay his expenses that first year.
Grosso’s debut with the freshman team came on Dec. 1, 1965, in USC’s 78-76 victory against Chemstrand at the Fieldhouse. Grosso contributed 23 points, on 11-of-17 shooting, and 23 rebounds. The buzz around campus was that students needed to begin showing up for freshman games to see Grosso perform.
Five days later, the USC varsity stunned third-ranked Duke in the first signature win for McGuire in his second season. Earlier in the evening, Grosso scored 25 points in the freshman team’s victory against North Greenville Junior College. Between games, Grosso accidentally injured his right arm when a dressing-room window shattered. More than 50 stitches were needed to close the wound.
One month later, Grosso returned to action with a cast on his right wrist. He shot free throws left-handed in a victory against Furman, scored 22 points, grabbed 32 rebounds and left with five minutes on the clock to a rousing ovation.
Later in the season, with his father and brother in the stands at Clemson, Grosso and teammates Bob Felter and Charlie Vacca drove through snow and sleet only to arrive eight minutes into the game. Legend has long held that Grosso rallied USC to victory. It did not happen. Despite Grosso’s 14 points and 15 rebounds, the Gamecocks lost by 11.
No one knew it at the time, but Grosso played his final game for USC on Feb. 12, 1966, scoring 30 points to go with 28 rebounds in a victory against Anderson Junior College. He finished the season having played in 10 games with a 22.7 scoring average and 26 rebounds per game.
Then the circus moved to Columbia for the spring of 1966. Both the ACC and the NCAA were snooping around the USC athletics department, looking into alleged violations in football and basketball. At about that time, USC hired Paul Dietzel from Army to be its football coach and athletics director.
Dietzel immediately showed McGuire who was in charge. He removed McGuire’s title of “associate athletics director” and moved the coach’s office from the Roundhouse to a trailer outside the Fieldhouse.
Then, according to documents in the USC Archives, Dietzel went about helping the ACC and the NCAA in their investigations. Dietzel’s stated goal was to clean up and admit to any wrongdoing and move the athletics department beyond the transgressions of the past.
That did not help McGuire’s defense when inquiries from the ACC and the NCAA reached USC. Both organizations had four points of contention concerning Grosso:
• USC illegally administered an excessive number of SAT exams to Grosso;
• USC illegally admitted Grosso to school, against stated ACC rules;
• Grosso’s tuition and fees to attend USC for the 1965-66 school year were not paid for by his family, but rather by a corporate sponsor — Grosso’s Bar in New Jersey;
• Harry Gotkin, a longtime friend of McGuire’s in New York City, illegally recruited Grosso on behalf of USC.
While Dietzel was prepared to admit guilt and accept the punishment, McGuire was ready to fight. In typical fashion, he did not address the issues but rather went to Duke athletics director Eddie Cameron. McGuire claimed the ACC, led by Cameron, was on a “witch hunt” against McGuire and USC, and Grosso was the innocent victim.
McGuire and Cameron had a long-standing feud that dated to McGuire’s days at North Carolina. When McGuire’s UNC program was placed on two years of NCAA probation in 1960 for recruiting violations, Cameron was believed to be the one who turned in McGuire. A year later, McGuire believed Cameron’s basketball coaching staff at Duke stole prize recruit Art Heyman from UNC.
Then, when USC was searching for a basketball coach in the spring of 1964, the widely held belief was that Cameron and UNC athletics director Chuck Erickson strongly urged USC president Thomas Jones not to hire McGuire. Both supposedly told Jones that the ACC no longer wanted to deal with McGuire.
So that was the atmosphere when the ACC and NCAA began looking into McGuire’s practices at USC.
The question about Grosso’s SAT exams was clear-cut. According to administrators of the SAT at the time, no person was permitted to take the exam more than once as given by the same institution. Grosso admitted to taking the test twice at USC, violating SAT and NCAA rules.
ACC rules also stated that a prospective student-athlete only could be admitted under the guidelines of the university as applied to all students. According to USC rules, a student at the time had to score 750 on the SAT or rank in the top one-third of his graduating class. While Grosso reached 750, that score was voided by SAT. Also, Grosso did not rank in the top one-third of his class.
The issue of Grosso’s finances showed the seediness of the ACC investigation. The commissioner and a couple of his associates appeared at the Grosso home in New Jersey one morning without warning. The ACC concluded that, because of the living conditions, it was reasonable to assume the family could not afford to pay their son’s expenses at USC.
The ACC’s report to USC and the NCAA included this paragraph:
“We talked to Mrs. Grosso several minutes before Mr. Grosso arose from his bed. It was apparent that he overheard the conversation and knew the mission of his visitors. He came into the living quarters partially dressed and began his search for articles of clothing strewn about in different places and, also, for something to drink. Mr. Grosso could be characterized as being loud mouthed, uncouth, uneducated and extremely proud of his son’s accomplishments in basketball.”
Beyond the character assassination of Grosso’s father, the ACC asked for and received cancelled checks from USC that showed Mike Grosso’s school expenses were paid by Grosso’s Bar. Had Grosso’s uncles written personal checks, there would not have been a violation. The ACC and the NCAA caught USC on a technicality.
The point in question with Gotkin was a game played in the summer of 1965 at Camp Kittatinny in New Jersey. The ACC and NCAA found that Gotkin picked up recruits Edward Fogler, Bob Doyle and Grosso and transported them to the camp. Receipts also showed Gotkin paid for lodging and meals for the recruits.
It was no secret Gotkin was McGuire’s point man in New York when recruiting players to North Carolina. Gotkin was a clothing salesman in New York City whose passion was scouting high school basketball players. At USC, McGuire claimed he told Gotkin from the get-go he could not represent the school in recruiting.
As part of USC’s answer to the NCAA’s inquiry into Grosso, it included several depositions from recruits. One such signed declaration was from Fogler, a senior in high school and later the basketball coach at USC who lives in Columbia. In the deposition, Fogler said Gotkin did not recruit him to play at USC. He already had committed to UNC.
When told recently of the deposition, Fogler said he did not recall making it. When asked if he believed Gotkin recruited the New York City area for McGuire, Fogler raised his eyebrows, smiled and walked away as if to say, “What do you think?”
The NCAA did not believe McGuire, either.
By the time school began in the fall of 1966, neither the NCAA nor the ACC had ruled on Grosso’s eligibility. So the player went about preparing himself for the season, and McGuire had convinced Grosso that his eligibility would be restored.
In September, McGuire scheduled a doubleheader scrimmage against powerful Davidson at the old Charlotte Coliseum. All reports indicated Grosso dominated both games, and Davidson coach Lefty Driesell reportedly said afterward that USC had the nation’s best player.
By mid-October, USC had not heard a word about Grosso’s eligibility. With the season opener approaching on Dec. 1, McGuire and USC requested the ACC meet and determine Grosso’s fate. On Oct. 29, at a hotel adjacent to the Raleigh airport in North Carolina, the league’s executive committee met in private. It drew the attention of Sports Illustrated, and McGuire drove to Raleigh to hear the decision.
At the meeting’s conclusion, according to Sports Illustrated’s account, McGuire confronted ACC commissioner Jim Weaver as he was departing, McGuire and Weaver got face to face, and McGuire demanded he return to the meeting and tell him the committee’s decision. Upon hearing the ACC’s decision that Grosso was ineligible while his case was under review, McGuire lunged across the table at one of the committee members and had to be restrained.A couple of days later at a luncheon in Charlotte, McGuire said his efforts at USC were being undermined by a “bunch of skunks” in the ACC. He later said, “we’re in a rat race, and the rats are winning.”
McGuire’s remarks, which he denied, were aimed primarily at Duke’s Cameron, although there is little or any paperwork to document that Cameron had any hand in the ACC’s handling of Grosso. Upon hearing of McGuire’s comments, USC president Jones publicly reprimanded McGuire and offered an apology to the ACC on the school’s behalf.
Cameron responded by asking the ACC for permission to cancel basketball games between Duke and USC scheduled for the 1966-67 season because of the existing “ill will” between the schools. If the ACC did not agree to his request, Cameron said Duke might consider withdrawing and joining the Ivy League. The ACC said each member school could cancel games against USC, and Duke did not play the Gamecocks that season.
In December, the NCAA placed USC on two years’ probation and declared Grosso ineligible to play basketball for the Gamecocks. The ACC concurred with the ruling. It would not have mattered for that season, anyway, because Grosso had blown out his knee during a scrimmage against Guilford and the injury required surgery.
Fan reaction to the decision was loud and immediate. A campaign began that called for USC to leave the ACC. Jones was flooded with letters from angry fans who demanded USC’s secession.
One day after the NCAA announcement, McGuire sent assistant coach Walsh to summon Grosso to the head coach’s office. McGuire informed Grosso of the decision and offered to help his star recruit transfer. Grosso first said he would remain at USC and not play basketball, but then relented and eventually landed at Louisville.
“It was a bad memory for me,” Walsh says. “That was heartbreaking. It’s been a long time ago, but I do remember that period, and I remember how bad we felt for Mike. Frank really liked Mike as a kid beyond just the basketball. Everybody did.”
Martin, Grosso’s roommate, was devastated.
“It was a tragic thing when he had to leave,” Martin says. “It was a real heartache. I just remember it being horrible, like a death.”
Before he departed, Grosso made a few comments that he would regret years later, most notably one aimed at UNC coach Dean Smith.
“People had no feeling for me at all,” Grosso said at the time. “They were just interested in protecting their own (butts). The pimps like Dean Smith. I don’t give a (hoot) what anyone says or how much he wins; he’s a pimp, he’s an apple pie, U.S. motherhood pimp.”
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Over the next three seasons, McGuire built USC into a power. The Gamecocks climbed as high as No. 9 in the national rankings during the 1968-69 season. Over the three-year period in which Grosso would have been a member of the varsity team, USC posted a 52-21 record.
Almost without fail following a difficult loss in those three seasons, McGuire commented about the difference Grosso would have made. There are those, McGuire and Walsh among them, who believe the loss of Grosso cost USC a chance at a national championship.
“Frank never got over Grosso,” says Bob Fulton, the former longtime radio voice of the Gamecocks.
USC never got over the ACC and its dealings with Grosso. By 1971, USC had had enough. On March 29, USC said it did not want to be constrained by the ACC’s entrance requirements for athletes and withdrew from the league. On Aug. 7, 1972, the ACC dropped its 800 SAT score as the standard for eligibility.
Playing on one good knee, Grosso made quite an impression in his two seasons at Louisville. His 16.2 scoring average ranks 10th all-time in the program’s history, and his 14.2 rebounding average ranks third. He was inducted into the school’s athletic hall of fame in 1994.
Grosso was selected in the fifth round of the 1970 NBA draft by the Milwaukee Bucks but did not survive the last cut. The brief stint with the Bucks served as a reminder of the different paths players take in their careers — one of his teammates in camp was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, formerly Lew Alcindor.
Grosso bounced around between knee injuries from one training camp to another and eventually played 25 games for the Pittsburgh Condors in the old ABA during the 1971-72 season. He played a couple of seasons overseas, then settled in Louisville for good in 1974.
At first, Grosso went into TV advertising sales, but since 1980 he has been on the radio side of the business, working since 1984 with WHAS news-talk radio.
It took Grosso 20 years to rid himself of anger toward ACC officials. He wrestled for years with what he believed was a failure to live up to expectations. Years of counseling helped him realize there is more to life than being haunted by a past he could not change.
One day several years ago, he wanted to exorcise one last demon from his past. He picked up the telephone and called Dean Smith.
“I know this is crazy, but I want to apologize to you for anything that was written that I said about you,” Grosso says he told Smith.
“Mike, I never heard about any of this stuff,” Grosso recalls Smith saying. “I knew you wouldn’t have realized what was going on.”
A couple of other events changed Grosso’s outlook on life. He married his current wife, Barbara, in 1991, and they have a 13-year-old daughter, Michelina. Not long after their marriage, Barbara’s brother was killed in a car crash, leaving behind his widow and three children.
Over a three-year period, the Grossos gained custody of the three children until their mother could get on better footing. Barbara eventually joined the national Court Appointed Special Advocates group and is now its director.
Mike Grosso learned that his lessons in life could be passed along to others who were victims of unforeseen circumstances.
“It gave me a better perspective, totally, as to how you just can’t deal in that circle of chaos,” Grosso says. “You’ve got to get out of it and move on. I was really able to get a handle on that with myself and move forward with my life.”
Moving forward meant forgetting much of what happened during his 15 months in Columbia and forgiving those he believed had a part in making his life miserable.
As he ran his hand through his brushed-back, salt-and-pepper hair recently at the restaurant in Louisville, Grosso said he would not have changed a thing in his life ... even those 15 months in Columbia.
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