Tempest At Mizzou

I guess first thing you want to know," Missouri basketball coach Norm Stewart was saying at a tournament banquet last December, "'is what am I doing up here making an ass out of myself?"

Funny, that question has come up a number of times since. Oh, Stewart's frightfully deep Tigers, by going 21-4 and settling into the aeries of the national polls, have done their best to divert attention from their coach. And Stewart earned some sympathy last week when he was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers as allegations of NCAA violations in the Mizzou basketball program came to light. But still the question persists.

What Stewart did at that early-season banquet was stand on a dais in Charlotte, N.C., wearing a woman's wig. Indeed, what was he doing making an ass of himself? It seems that The Charlotte Observer had run four photographs alongside a story previewing the Tournament of Champions, in which Missouri was taking part. There were Temple coach John Chaney, Arizona coach Lute Olson, North Carolina coach Dean Smith—and some dark-haired society belle where Stewart's likeness should have been. Stewart, who's keen on accuracy in journalism, was playing the gaffe for all it was worth.

And it was great. Stewart can be warm and funny, and he has a fine basketball mind. But the man who has presided over Missouri hoops for 22 seasons has made an ass of himself one too many times. His donkeying around is threatening to eclipse his team, his sense of humor and his own well-being. Consider:

•Before a Dec. 7 game at Tulsa, Stewart, seeing that a local cable station had stuck a camera into his timeout huddle, cursed for the TV audience's benefit.

•After that game, Stewart picked up a tape recorder belonging to Susan Harman, who covers the Tigers for the Columbia Missourian, and dictated into it, "It's kind of like Susan Harman, who reports for the Missourian. Kind of a little bowlegged gal. Too goddam small to play. Shouldn't even be covering the goddam team."

•On Jan. 7, at Colorado, he performed a lewd, onanistic pantomime, which was caught by TV cameras, after Tiger center Gary Leonard missed a late free throw.

•After the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published several stories in December about Missouri's recruiting practices, Stewart allegedly told Jim Thomas, the newspaper's beat writer, "Listen, are you trying to hurt me? I know some people who can take care of your one-year-old." Stewart denies making the remark to Thomas, the father of an infant boy, and university chancellor Haskell Monroe is investigating the allegation.

•On Jan. 28, Stewart wheeled around at the Nebraska fans behind his bench late in the Tigers' 89-72 win in Lincoln and yelled, "When your bush-league coach [Danny Nee] gets his——act together, then we'll stop pounding on you!" No one recalls there having been any bad blood between the two men before this.

Profane, petty, paranoid—call these episodes what you will. But, clearly, something has been eating at the Show-Me coach with the Show-Them chip on his shoulder. And as the Tigers made their way to Norman last Thursday for a nationally televised meeting with Oklahoma, the little critters inside him finally gnawed their way through.