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Sporting News, The, March 25, 1996 by Michael Knisley

Astranger walks up to Bob Huggins after a speech at the YMCA in downtown Cincinnati a few years back. Here's his ice-breaker to the Cincinnati coach: "You've got Larry Bird eyes. You've got crazy eyes."

Huggins, thus disarmed, didn't have a chance. He couldn't resist an opening like that. Couldn't, even if he wanted to. "We started BS-ing from there," Huggins says.

You can't fight off a conversation with Dave Guidugli any more than you can fight off a sneeze. You just let it come, because it's inevitable. Guidugli is a salesman, with the attendant communication skills of a shotgun blast. When he isn't selling himself, which he seems to feel obligated to do to me, he sells bodies. And once the trigger is pulled on the hard-sell of a conversation with Guidugli, it's fruitless to try to duck the staccato pellets of non-sequiturs.

"They call me the `Guru of Fitness,"' Guidugli says before I can find cover. "That's my nickname. I'm about 6-3 and weigh about 225 pounds. I won that `World's Toughest Man' thing, that boxing thing, back in '82. I've been working a lot with Danny on getting him better feet. And working on his vertical jump and his lateral quickness and what I like to call body-snap explosion. I did that in the confines of a boxing gym. I grew up with Dave Cowens, you know. He and I are real close. Danny swears by me now. Says he's staying with me for the long haul. He says, `I want you for the whole deal. I go pro, the whole way.' He says he's going to buy me a gym. You know, boxing gyms ain't the nicest places in town. I've been having to use these places like in the ghetto. We'd go down there and work out because they closed down the one place I had. I got a new place now. Hey, how 'bout if I send you some brochures? What's your address?"

There is no such thing as a short conversation with Guidugli, I find out. Too late.

"I could've told you that," says the Danny of the rich pro future in Guidugli's filibuster. "You should've asked me."

That would be Danny Fortson, to whom Guidugli sold a body and, apparently, a long-term relationship. At 6-7, 260 pounds, Fortson, who turns 20 March 27, has the best basketball body in the college game.

Not the best body in college basketball. There's a difference. The best body in college basketball may belong to one of Fortson's teammates, Rodrick Monroe, a 6-4 small forward off the Cincinnati bench. Monroe's body rips where Fortson's doesn't. Fortson's body, broad through the shoulders and thick from the waist to the thighs, is sculpted for the heavy-lifting post work in the paint, where the pushing and shoving make special demands of the lower body. It's similar to the body Corliss Williamson parlayed into an All-American stint at Arkansas last season. Fortson has the same sort of marvelous college basketball body.

"I wouldn't trade it for anybody else's body, anyway," Fortson says.

It isn't a body entirely by Guidugli, although that's difficult to discern from Guidugli's high, hard sales pitch. ("Dave's a little wacky, but he's a good guy," says Huggins.) Fortson, blessed from birth with a frame that had his mother, Deloris, predicting an NBA career for him when he was still only 5 years old, makes full use of what Cincinnati strength and conditioning coach Mickey Marotti offers him, too.

But last summer's buffing and polishing by Guidugli seems to have turned a reasonably strong freshman player on a reasonably strong team into a monster of a sophomore power forward on a monster of an NCAA Tournament team. Fortson's metamorphosis from the slow-footed pivot of 1994-95 to a sleek-footed explosion in '95-96 is the most conspicuous reason that Cincinnati looms over the tournament's Southeast Regional in Lexington this weekend as the Team No One Wants To Meet.

Georgia Tech is next up, Friday night in the regional semifinals. Anything can happen in tournament play, but the smart money says a Tech team that goes only six or seven players deep and is especially thin in the interior will have a lot of trouble trying to match muscle with Fortson and his mates.

Temple couldn't do it, and the Owls' William Cunningham (6-11, 250) and Marc Jackson (6-10, 270) don't get dragooned by just your average bodies. Fortson browbeat them inside for 18 points and 11 rebounds in Cincinnati's 78-65 second-round victory last Sunday in Orlando.

"When I saw the bracket, I looked at them and I wished we were in another regional," says Temple Coach John Chaney, who has now lost five of his six games against Cincinnati since 1992-93.

The Bearcats bring the best balance of power and finesse, of inside strength and perimeter play, to the tournament this side of Georgetown's Othella Harrington, Jerome Williams, Jahidi White, Allen Iverson and Victor Page. Fortson works in various combinations with Art Long (6-8, 250), Jackson Julson (6-9, 230), Bobby Brannen (6-7, 230), Keith Gregor (6-5, 218) and Monroe in the interior, which affords a bottomless pit of fouls to give in Cincinnati's power game.

On the perimeter, Huggins' program has reached a seven-year shooting zenith in sixth man Darnell Burton and starting off-guard Damon Flint. The evolution in marksmanship that began with Nick Van Exel--when the Bearcats reached the 1992 Final Four (they lost to Michigan by four points in the national semifinals)--and progressed to LaZelle Durden a year ago takes the next step with Burton, who, if you believe Huggins, is a better pure shooter than either Van Exel or Durden. Against Temple, Burton hit five 3-point shots, three coming in a minute and-a-half stretch midway through the second half as Cincinnati pulled away from the Owls.