SEATTLE — Rick Pitino sounded more like a giddy fan than one of the most accomplished coaches in college basketball as he described Georgia State’s stunning comeback win over Baylor.
That game took place in Jacksonville, Florida, a long, long way from KeyArena, where Pitino’s Louisville Cardinals are preparing for their NCAA Tournament opener Friday, but he was as excited about R.J. Hunter’s long-range game winner as anyone watching anywhere in the country.
Like the rest of us, Pitino couldn’t believe when Hunter’s 30-footer fell to give the 14th-seeded Panthers a one-point win over Baylor, a victory that caused Panthers coach/R.J.’s dad Ron Hunter to fall off his stool. And in case you were wondering, Hunter was sitting on a stool because he tore his Achilles tendon celebrating the Sun Belt Conference tournament championship that sent Georgia State to the NCAA tournament.
Seriously, how can you not love this stuff?
“I’m not sure what I just witnessed. … It’s amazing,” Pitino said. “March Madness is the greatest time in all sports. Because even the Super Bowl, which is, I think, the second greatest, it’s two teams, and it’s not as much drama as this. … It’s just such a great time of year. I’m really excited to be part of it.”
Yes, even Pitino, a coach who has won two national titles, and been to seven final fours, who coaches a program rich in tradition; even he loves a good underdog story. Of course, on Friday he hopes to avoid being a participant in a Cinderella story when his fourth-seeded Cardinals host U.C. Irvine, the No. 13 seed in the East Region, and a team that is playing in its first NCAA tournament.
But while Pitino has to stop pulling for the feel-good underdog story starting at 4:10 p.m. Friday, the rest of you, at least those who aren’t Louisville, Gonzaga or University of Northern Iowa fans, can watch Friday’s games at KeyArena and appreciate three very likable underdogs who will try to continue the madness into Day 2 of the tournament.
Larry Nance Jr., despite having the same name as his three-time NBA All-Star father, flew under the radar enough in high school that he ended up at Wyoming. Watch Nance Jr. now, the version of him that helped lead the Cowboys to the NCAA Tournament, where they’ll face Northern Iowa, and you’ll see a big, athletic basketball player who very much looks like the son of an NBA player, and like someone who should have been a big-time recruit out of high school. But Nance Jr. took longer than most to blossom as a player, thanks largely to him having Crohn’s Disease, which went undiagnosed until he was in high school.
“At that point I never really thought I would be sitting here with these guys,” he said. “But after going through all that and what we have been through together these past three, four years in college, I wouldn’t trade, I wouldn’t take any of that back. This is an awesome feeling, and I’m happy to be here.”
Nance Jr. is leading the 12th-seeded Cowboys, who needed a Mountain West Conference tournament championship to get to the big dance — their coach Larry Shyatt, had the team practice cutting down nets prior to the starting of their conference tournament — against UNI in large part because he wasn’t much of a basketball player until doctors came up with the Crohn’s diagnosis midway through his high school career.
Once he was diagnosed and began treatment, which includes two-hour infusions of a drug called Remicade every seven weeks, Nance Jr.’s growth took off, his energy came back, and he suddenly started looking and playing like someone with NBA bloodlines. Even healthy and playing well, Nance was ignored by bigger programs because he was such a late bloomer, which allowed Wyoming to pounce.
“Well, Larry was a late bloomer,” Shyatt said. “I met Senior when I was the head coach at Clemson, I brought back a lot of our lottery picks one weekend. We had a great Hall of Fame weekend with Sharone Wright, Dale Davis, Elden Campbell, Tree Rollins, to name a few. So I had met him, and my college roommate, Tim Babb, actually called me and said, ‘Hey, Nance’s kid is going to be pretty good. He’s not being overly recruited.’”
Shyatt went to the Nance home for a visit, managed to sell the family on his program as well as Laramie, Wyoming, and now Nance Jr. is the best player on an NCAA Tournament team and dreaming of an NBA future not long after he was a backup on his high school’s junior varsity squad.
And here’s the crazy thing, Nance Jr. doesn’t even have the best individual story among the players in Seattle in this weekend. That honor goes to U.C. Irvine’s Mamadou Ndiaye, who at 7-foot-6 is the tallest player in Division I college basketball, but whose story is so much more interesting than his unusual height.
Not long after moving to the United States from Senegal, a tumor was discovered on his pituitary gland, which he said contributed to his unusual height, leading to multiple surgeries. A nurse at the Newport Beach hospital where Ndiaye had his surgeries ended up adopting him, which led to Ndiaye living in Huntington Beach, just a few miles west of the U.C. Irvine campus, where he would sometimes play in open-gym sessions as a high schooler.
Anteaters coach Russell Turner — yes, U.C. Irvine’s mascot is an Anteater, how great is that? — began recruiting Ndiaye while also helping him work towards college eligibility, something Ndiaye initially didn’t believe was possible. And by the time bigger programs came calling, Ndiaye felt at home at U.C. Irvine and signed on to play for a school that had never been to an NCAA Tournament.
“I think, in the end, that was the thing that made the biggest difference in recruiting,” Turner said. “We became trusted with them over a course of a long period of time, so when some of the bigger schools came —and they came late —they couldn’t overcome us.”
And if individual stories of overcoming hardship to reach college basketball’s biggest stage aren’t your thing, then may I present the case for jumping on the bandwagon of North Dakota State, the biggest underdog of all in Friday’s games. Of course Friday’s nightcap will feature a very pro-Gonzaga crowd, but it would be hard for a neutral fan not to love the Bison.
Cheering for a 15 seed against a No. 2 seed is easy enough in any circumstances, but the Bison are really easy to pull for when you throw in the fact that, thanks to a renovation of their arena, they practice in an old warehouse, lift weights in what used to be a grocery store — signs advertising fresh produce and meat still hang on the walls, NDSU coach Dave Richman said — and the coaches’ offices are in an industrial park.
NDSU’s home games this year were played at Scheels Arena, the 5,000-seat home of the Fargo Force, a junior hockey team. In order to keep with the theme of this season, the Bison turned down a chartered plane ride to Seattle in favor of a long drive in a beat up old school bus. OK, that last part is made up, but it didn’t sound any less likely that the rest of it, did it?
“I don’t know if there’s another team in the country that can say they lift in a grocery store and work out and do basketball stuff in a warehouse,” freshman guard/forward A.J. Jacobson said.
There isn’t A.J. There can’t possibly be.
Stories like North Dakota State lifting in a grocery store and practicing in a 140-foot long warehouse with 20-foot ceilings, stories like Nance’s and Ndiaye’s, they’re what make the madness so fun. They’re the stories that should make it easy for everyone, except for Gonzaga, Louisville and Northern Iowa fans, to root for more madness when games kick off at KeyArena. Though if Ndiaye’s Anteaters pull off an upset tomorrow, don’t expect Pitino to be quite so excited about the madness of March.
Herald Columnist John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com
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