Monday, March 30, 1998
The University Daily Kansan
Utah looking for Kentucky payback
The Associated Press
SAN ANTONIO — For Utah, payback time has arrived against Kentucky in the national championship game. The Wildcats plan: ending the Utes' season with a loss for the third straight year.
Utah and Kentucky have played each other in the NCAA tournament the past two seasons, with the Wildcats winning both times. The stakes have grown each year, and on Monday night they will be as big as they get in college basketball.
The championship pits a Utah team that pulled off two of the tournament's biggest upsets against a Kentucky team that used two thrilling comebacks to advance to the title game for the third straight year, this time under new
coach Tubby Smith.
Two years ago, Kentucky crushed Utah 101-70 in the second round on the way to its sixth national championship. Last season, the Wildcats beat the Utes 72-59 in the regional semifinal and went on to lose in the title game to Arizona.
"The main thing I remember about those two games is that we lost. That's about all you need to know," Michael Doleac, Utah senior center, said of the recent postseason history with Kentucky. "Sophomore year it was more like we were just watching Kentucky play instead of being in the game. Last year it was a lot different. We could play with those guys, and we did play with them until they had that spurt at the end when we fouled.
"It's always a bad memory getting knocked out of the tournament. This year we are a different team and a lot better defensively and a great rebounding team."
Utah's 65-59 upset of top-ranked North Carolina on Saturday may have been an even bigger surprise than its 25-point laugher over No. 1 seed Arizona in the West Regional final a week before. But the common thread was excellent defense; the Utes lead the nation in field goal percentage allowed at 38 percent.
"We look to go out and keep teams under 60 points, and if we can do that we have a great chance of winning the game," said Andre Miller, Utah junior guard.
Even though this is Kentucky's third
straight championship game — the first team to do that since Duke from 1990-92 — the Wildcats (34-4) may have changed more than the Utes (30-3).
Gone to the NBA are Antoine Walker, Ron Mercer, Tony Delk and Derek Anderson. Even with the loss of All-American Keith Vorn Horn, the Utah roster with Doleac, Miller and sophomore forward Hanno Mottola may have more future NBA players than Kentucky. And the Wildcats, who beat Stanford 86-85 in overtime Saturday, have a new coach in Smith, a former assistant to Rick Pitino.
Nazr Mohammed, Kentucky junior center, said there was no doubt in his mind that they would go back to the Final Four because the team worked hard.
Big coach leads team with small names
Majerus coaches with his own style, humor
The Associated Press
SAN ANTONIO — In the business of college basketball, Rick Majerus has taken a mostly anonymous Utah team into the NCAA championship game Monday night.
This is a team that lost the highest scorer in school history and went further than it ever did when Keith Van Horn was around. It is a team composed of smart guys — a Rhodes Scholar candidate surrounded by academic All-Americans. And it is led by point guard who started his academic career as a Proposition 48 student.
Andre Miller makes the Utes go, and he is Majerus' creation, recruited by him when few others were interested. When Miller's SAT scores came up short, the coach massaged his psyche telling him, "If this is the worst thing that happens to you in life, you will have a wonderful life."
And Miller became a wonderful point guard.
Majerus coaches around his Mormon players' missionary obligations, and he has found a way to prosper.
So how does he do it? With a few one-
liners, a tongue in his cheek and a firm
commitment to his players and his
sport.
"Nothing works unless the players are good," Majerus said. "Andre is a very good guard and these guys are very smart at deployment. They have committed errors of commission rather than omission."
So what can Kentucky expect tonight? I don't know right now what look we
are going to start out with," Majerus said. "If Kentucky guesses right, that doesn't make much difference because we will change every time anyway."
Some people wondered if this was the right fit, a jovial coach bringing all those one-liners to Mormon country. Majerus shrugged that off.
"You are talking about it as if it is a Stepford Wives community," he said. "It's a big city with a small-town environment. It's Green Bay, Wisconsin in the Rocky Mountains is what it is."
With Love Anderson coaching the basketball team.
Utah head coach Rick Majerus watches his team play from the sidelines. Majerus will coach the Utes in his first NCAA Championship game at 7:30 tonight. Photo by Steve Puppe/KANSAN
Kentucky coach Tubby Smith meets championship expectations
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — As a 14-year-old African-American farm boy during the civil-rights movement, Tubby Smith saw something unique and wonderful on television: a team with all Black starters beating all-White Kentucky in the NCAA Championship.
Though Smith lived in Maryland and grew up a fan of the Terrapins and their first black player, Billy Jones, he couldn't help but be inspired by that 1966 championship team from Texas Western (later Texas-El Paso) upsetting Kentucky.
Black, but seeing the underdog win the way they did," Smith said. "It gives all underdogs some hope.
"Not so much that they were
That's what it did for me."
An underdog no longer, Smith is the head coach of a Kentucky team that plays for the school's seventh national title tonight against Utah.
He remembers those all-White Kentucky teams of the Adolph Rupp era and the memories are not
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fond ones.
"I would have to say most Blacks in America had some real problems with Kentucky at the time," Smith said. "It was the time of the civil-rights movement and our ideas were shaped by that. My perception of Kentucky was no different than it was for any school that didn't offer opportunities to minorities."
When Smith took the Kentucky job last May, there were concerns that as the Wildcats' first African-American basketball coach he would be treated especially hard if the team didn't measure up to Rick Pitino's national championship
team of 1996 and runner-up team of last year.
Well, it didn't turn out that way. Smith surely took some criticism when his Wildcats lost to Louisville, Florida and Ole Miss at home, but he knew that was to be expected from Kentucky's rabid fans.
"I wanted to call my own call-in show and say, 'Hey, you bum,'" Smith said.
But through it all, he said, he didn't feel any racism and didn't get any hate mail.
"The people of Kentucky are very passionate about basketball," he
said. "They wanted to make sure the program was in good hands."
Perhaps few other coaches were as suited to the Kentucky job as the soft-spoken Smith. During a game, he may scream and pop up and down and wave his arms like a traffic cop in rush hour, but for the most part, he projects a relaxed, gentlemanly manner.
A man with Southern roots, a man of the soil, a man from a big family. Smith is more like Kentucky fans than his transplanted New York predecessor.
The inspiration Smith drew from Texas Western as a teen, the
lessons he learned as one of Guffrie and Parthenia Smith's 17 children and working in the fields of rural Maryland served him well this season and throughout his career.
"I grew up working in the tobacco fields, tomato fields, plowing fields," he said. "You learn patience, discipline."
Though he is living every coach's dream, perhaps more important to him Sunday were these words from senior Jeff Sheppard:
"He really does a good job of teaching us the game of basketball, but even a better job of teaching us how to be men."
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