As a coach and a salesman, don't sell Rick Pitino short

Sporting News, The, March 17, 1997 by Lonnie Wheeler

Just when Kentucky could have tripped after losing Derek Anderson, The 'Cats step up after buying into the coach's plea for another 20 percent in effort

This is the last in a series of stories in which writer Lonnie Wheeler explores the soul of basketball in Kentucky.

There were times when you didn't even see the other eight people on the floor. Neither did Ron Mercer and Derek Anderson, who had eyes (front and back, evidently) only for each other. Not that they didn't care to share with their other Kentucky teammates--they did that to a fault sometimes--but the two of them spoke a body language with tones beyond the range of normal humans, even those of the basketball-playing variety. Anderson would look one way and lob the other while Mercer would rise above a crowd of more common folk to dunk on their spinning heads. It never seemed to matter how many people were between them.

"It's like he's a brother," said Anderson, the older and more engaging of the two, after the matched pair had amazed a full house with aeronautic prestidigitation at Kentucky's Blue and White scrimmage last November. "If I'm in a room, I know when he's coming around the corner. I can't explain it. It's like e-mail. You just send it and you know, somehow, it's going to get there." People tried to give them nicknames--Thunder and Lightning seemed the most popular--but it didn't work because they were too alike. Which was which? Mercer is two inches taller and not quite as skinny, but they played the same size. They were both small forwards/big guards, depending on whatever. They both scored inside and outside and could run a dusty floor without leaving prints. The springs in their legs were wound to the same tension. It was as if they were joined at the rim.

As this season began, each was in his second season as a Kentucky player, Mercer as a sophomore and Anderson as a transfer from Ohio State. Anderson, the senior, was two years ahead of Mercer in school but aged slower, he was the one who came to Media Day wearing an Afro wig. The biggest differences between them seemed to be that Mercer, coming out of Nashville as the top-rated recruit in the nation, had a bigger profile, and Anderson, a lesser prospect from Louisville, had a bigger smile, turned on this year by the attention and the expectations that went with the territory in which he had suddenly, wonderfully, found himself.

Rick Pitino, Kentucky's fully absorbed coach, let it be known from the outset that if the Wildcats were to approximate last season's NCAA championship, they would have to rely uncommonly on the two dazzling athletes who, he was certain, were at the door of collegiate superstardom. It had been a while since Pitino had been forced to ask so much of so few. The 1996 championship team was superabundantly talented to the extent that four of its members (Antoine Walker, Walter McCarty, Tony Delk and Mark Pope) were summoned by the NBA draft. Another gifted veteran, Jeff Sheppard, decided to sit out this season to enhance his draft status next year.

Any other coach would have been devastated by such a staggering debit, but Pitino remained confident in his program, himself and his leading men. "I think Ron Mercer is ready to bust out and have an incredible year," he said at season's dawn.

"And Derek Anderson is also a terrific talent. Derek is our best player right now. If there's a person more suited to our style of play, I don't know who it would be. I think you'll see Mercer and Anderson playing substantial minutes this year (unlike last year, when Kentucky was so ridiculously deep that almost nobody did). They'll come out when they're having substantial attacks of breathing."

The question at Kentucky this season, like every season, was how far the 'Cats were capable of going in the NCAA Tournament, and Pitino is the rare coach who answers that question candidly. He said he didn't know. What he specifically didn't know was how well his big men would progress. Jamaal Magloire was a 6-10 freshman from Toronto who had played high school ball in a gymnasium, if you will, with dimensions that didn't take his wingspan into account. Nazr Mohammed of Chicago had participated in junior varsity games (and briefly in 16 varsity games) last year as a 310-pound freshman who couldn't dunk. Jared Prickett, a 6-9 senior from West Virginia, was coming off a redshirt season brought about by a knee injury. Scott Padgett, a 6-9 sophomore from Louisville, had missed all of last year and wouldn't be eligible until December because of certain academic complications, such as going to class.

For the first game of the season, against Clemson at Indianapolis, Pitino determined that the young centers were far from ready and turned the position over temporarily to Prickett. The game went into overtime, with Prickett playing 45 minutes, Magloire seven and Mohammed seven fewer. Kentucky lost, badly outrebounded by a bigger, deeper team.

At this point, the choices confronting Pitino included change and panic. He went for both. Later in the long season, when Kentucky was playing for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, the coach would acknowledge that for a few hairy days after the Clemson game he and his assistants, unnerved by what they saw on film and in practice, actually worried whether their team would make the field of 64. Pitino felt all along that the Wildcats would be good enough by tournament time, but the issue was whether they would take too many losses along the way to qualify. Maybe they were about to be sideswiped by an underlying arrogance--Pitino had warned his adoring constituency about this--that said it didn't matter how many players went pro, Kentucky would always be Kentucky.