A Tough Man In A Scramble

Ruland was one of the prizes in a 1977 high school graduating class that included the likes of Magic Johnson, Danny Ainge, Darnell Valentine, Herb Williams, Albert King, Gene Banks and Kelly Tripucka, all of whom wound up at major colleges and are now in the pros. Ruland played well in all the high school all-star games and even won a national one-on-one competition at the Kentucky Derby Festival, but after visiting Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana and Notre Dame, he selected Iona College, enrollment 5,500. "I got fed a bunch of bull and I believed it," Ruland says of the recruiting job then Iona Coach Jim Valvano did on him. "I wanted to go to a school that hadn't won anything and win a championship."

Iona is in New Rochelle, N.Y., just 25 minutes from New York City on the New Haven line. New Rochelle had achieved a measure of fame as the home of Rob and Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, but Ruland and Valvano made the locals forget all about Rob and Laura as Iona became an Eastern basketball power. Then the trouble began.

The recruiting of a star athlete is very much like a flirtation between consenting adults if it's done right, the bespoiling of an innocent if it's not. Valvano courted Ruland ardently, and he won more than just Ruland's body and mind; he also won Ruland's heart, which, like the rest of him, is huge. There are very few coaches who have had as close a relationship with their star player as Valvano had with Ruland. After practice, Ruland often went to the coach's home and shot baskets in the backyard with Valvano's daughter, 7-year-old Nicole. Anita says Valvano "was like a father" to his players, and now Ruland, who had never experienced a strong paternal influence, had someone who seemed to fill the father role. It wasn't uncommon for Ruland and some of his teammates to ride around at night and run into Valvano and Assistant Coach Pat Kennedy at one college hangout or another. Ruland enjoyed the ride for the first two years. "It was great," he says. "There was no other school like it. Where else could you go out after a game and get bombed with your coach?" Iona was improving steadily—making the NCAA tournament in 1978-79, Ruland's sophomore season—and Valvano and Ruland seemed to be friends for life. "He really worshipped Valvano," Anita says. "That's why he felt so betrayed later."

By the start of his junior season Ruland had grown restive about Iona's lack of national recognition and, for reasons he won't discuss, signed—in contravention of NCAA rules—a contract with Paul Corvino, an agent from Scarsdale, N.Y. Ruland was also in the habit of accepting occasional cash donations from Corvino, money he says he needed "so I could do my laundry." NCAA regulations, of course, prohibit all such financial dealings. "If I'd gone to a school for the money," Ruland says, "I'd have gone to another school from which I'd still be getting deferred money." When Iona beat Louisville by 17 points in Madison Square Garden in 1980 and still didn't get national recognition, Ruland became further disillusioned. "That was the year Louisville won the national championship," Ruland says, "and we didn't just beat them, we kicked their asses. That week we were ranked 19th in one of the polls, and even though we didn't lose a game, the next week we were gone. So it turned out it was all for nothing."

On March 26, 1980, Valvano, without telling his players first, accepted the coaching job at North Carolina State. Ruland was stunned. A few days later, word leaked out—probably from Corvino, who had been pressuring Ruland to forgo his final year of school and turn pro—that Ruland had signed a contract and accepted money from an agent. The timing made it appear to many people, Ruland among them, that Valvano had known about Corvino's secret arrangement with Ruland all along ("I didn't break any laws," Corvino says. "I don't belong to the NCAA"). Valvano denies this, but Ruland hasn't spoken to Valvano since the spring of '80. "A lot of things happened that I had nothing to do with," Ruland says, "but I got the bad end of the stick. He saw the boom was about to come down, and so he jumped ship." Valvano carries a certain amount of guilt for what happened to Ruland. "I wouldn't be where I am today without the efforts of that young man," Valvano says.

In his first college season Ruland led the nation's star-studded freshman class in scoring, rebounding and field-goal percentage, and in his sophomore and junior seasons he made honorable mention All-America. But Ruland, who decided to turn pro when it became apparent he'd be ineligible for his senior year, wasn't picked until the second round of the 1980 NBA draft. Larry Fleisher, who doubles as an agent and general counsel of the NBA Players Association, had agreed to represent Ruland. But shortly before the draft he called and told Ruland that because of the Iona "scandal"—there were rumors of misused monies, game fixing, an NCAA investigation and an FBI probe, although Iona was never officially accused of having done anything wrong—he couldn't represent him. Ruland says Fleisher never explained himself, and that he just hung up.

Throughout the first round of the draft Ruland was passed over in favor of big men like Joe Barry Carroll, Kevin McHale, Mike Gminski, Kiki Vandeweghe and Rickey Brown. "To this day I don't know what happened," he says. "I know I'm better than every guy who got picked before me. I'm still very bitter about that." Many teams had failed to scout Ruland because no one expected him to leave school early, and then there was the matter of those short arms. When Golden State made him the 25th pick of the draft, in the second round, it was all part of a prearranged deal between the Warriors and the Bullets, who obtained Ruland for a second-round draft choice, which became Sam Williams. But the Bullets still had big men Wes Unseld, Elvin Hayes and Mitch Kupchak, and when a team in Barcelona, Spain matched the Bullet offer, Ruland fled.

"I wasn't happy at all to be going over," Ruland says. "I was going there to kick somebody's butt and get it over with. All I thought about was coming back and proving everybody wrong." While he was in Barcelona, his new agent, George Kalafatis, flew over from New York to settle a contract dispute. The team gave Kalafatis $8,000 in pesetas, and when he tried to take the money out of the country, it was confiscated. The money is still impounded by the Spanish court, and Ruland claims he has never seen his $8,000.

"It was very tough," he says. "I came pretty close to going off the deep end." To help preserve his sanity, Jeff and Maureen, who had been married in 1980, celebrated Thanksgiving by getting a Doberman pinscher puppy instead of a turkey. The dog, whose name is King, still gets high strung when he sees cranberries and stuffing. To calm him, Ruland will split a can of beer with King, often drinking from the same glass.

The Bullets finally signed Ruland before the 1981-82 season, but it took him a while to win over all the skeptics. The Bullets last season were a collection of misfits and no-names, which naturally made Ruland feel right at home. After several false starts, he proved himself to his teammates and then to the NBA. Bullets Point Guard John Lucas, himself something of a wayward traveler, recalls his doubts about Ruland. "I said, 'This guy's arms are too short; he can't play,' " Lucas says. "But then he started knocking people around, and I knew I was wrong. There are only two blue-collar workers in the NBA—Moses Malone and Ruland. Jeff is our Moses."