Tempest At Mizzou

This season printed volleys have landed all around him. In mid-December the Post-Dispatch ran a series on the Missouri basketball program, which touched off Stewart's alleged threat against Thomas's infant son. The newspaper described how Daly—known in the recruiting subculture as "Doctor Detroit"—has mined Motown's talent-rich church gyms and rec centers for inner-city black players, whom Stewart had been unable to attract to Columbia. The series did not accuse Daly of misconduct, but some of the reporting—the P-D identified one of Daly's recruiting contacts, a Detroit hoops junkie named Vic Adams, and quoted some Midwestern coaches raising questions about the Tigers' sudden success in that city—seemed to imply that something was amiss.

Then last week The Kansas City Times reported that Sundvold had admitted to Missouri officials that, in apparent violation of NCAA rules, he had bought a round-trip airplane ticket for P.J. Mays, a freshman from Cincinnati who has since left school for personal reasons. The Times also printed an excerpt from a phone conversation between Sundvold and Yvonne Mays, the recruit's mother, who had taped the exchange, in which Sundvold repeatedly asked for her help in concealing the violation. The Times also reported that P.J. Mays alleged that Sundvold had broken another rule by giving him and two other players, Mike Wawrzyniak and Jamal Coleman, $100 each last summer—in the presence of Daly. Both Daly and Sundvold deny the allegation.

Stewart has suffered a few more broadsides, including a piece by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Terry Boers, who ripped Stewart's habit of intimidating sportswriters and called him "a poor excuse for a human being."

But Stewart is more complicated than that. The son of a gas station owner from Shelbyville, Mo., he attended Missouri, where he starred in baseball and basketball in the mid '50s and met Virginia Zimmerley, the homecoming queen who would become his wife. Stewart has always warmed to players who remind him of himself—small-town Midwestern kids who would outnasty you. Through the 1970s and '80s, as Missouri football fell apart and 26 other Big Eight basketball coaches came and went, Stewart's power increased.

Like Knight, his methods have been hard-nosed but, so far, beyond the NCAA's reproach. Unlike Knight, Stewart has never been to a Final Four—in fact, Missouri has not won an NCAA tournament game since 1982—and that eats at him. However, few who know him think it eats at his ethics, the current probe notwithstanding.

"He's one of the most competitive people I've ever met, whether it's golf or cards or basketball," says Tom Dore, a center on Stewart's teams during the late '70s who's now a radio sports director in Austin, Texas. "But when I got recruited—and I got all sorts of offers under the table—Norm told me exactly what I would get at Missouri: room, board, books, tuition and fees."

It's ironic that, after losing the brilliant but free-spirited Derrick Chievous to the NBA after last season, Stewart's current team is so delightful and industrious. NBA scouts consider the late-blooming, 7'1" Leonard, a senior, among the best prospects at his position. And three splendid guards—roommates Byron Irvin, Lee Coward and Peeler—provide an almost scary explosiveness. On Jan. 21, Oklahoma State led Missouri by five points midway through the second half, as Leonard and forwards Doug Smith and Mike Sandbothe rode the bench with four fouls each. The In-It-To-Win-It Crew, as Peeler calls the roommate trio, touched off a 42-15 stampede that chased the Cowboys back to Stillwater.

There was irony, too, in Missouri's 93-80 win over Kansas last Saturday, the first time in the Stewart Era that a national network, in this case NBC, had deigned to originate a broadcast from Columbia. Stewart has cultivated such a rabid rivalry with Kansas that he once wondered aloud whether the Jayhawks were tapping his phone. Saturday's game was an event Stewart had worked toward for two decades, and he could hardly savor it from his sickbed.

"This may sound self-righteous,' Stewart said in the hospital on Sunday with Virginia by his side. "But I've basically tried to do things keeping in mine that, if it were all over, I'd not look back with any regrets. I've taken all sorts of criticism and innuendo from writers saying I must change. I'd like to write them a letter and tell them to change." Even from the third floor of Columbia Regional, Stewart was still competing.

"He needs some leisure activity,' mused Irvin last week. "It's too cold to play golf. Maybe I'll get him a Pictionary set."