Just two victories separate Kansas senior Mark Randall from his second NCAA championship ring. This one, unlike the first, he would wear proudly.
And Roy Williams now has a coaching assignment against North Carolina and its guru, Dean Smith. Williams, who once served Smith as an assistant, regards the man as almost godlike.
”I don`t even call him `Dean,` ” said Williams after his Jayhawks made the Final Four. ”I call him `Coach Smith.` Everything I have in basketball I owe to Coach Smith.
”But I`m not going to give him the game,” said Williams of Saturday`s semifinal in Indianapolis. ”If we were playing golf, I wouldn`t deliberately drive it out of bounds, would I?”
Randall, the Jayhawks` 6-foot-9-inch pivotman, was awarded a ring when he was a medical redshirt on Larry Brown`s 1988 NCAA champion squad. Randall underwent jaw surgery and spent the season on the bench and out of uniform.
”I`ve never worn the ring,” said Randall. ”It`s in my mother`s safe-deposit box in Colorado. I don`t think I earned the right to wear it. Let`s say it`s been an incentive.”
Most basketball observers agree that if Randall ever wears an NCAA ring, he`ll have to take it out of his mother`s deposit box. The Jayhawks will be the underdogs to Smith`s Tar Heels.
That`s nothing new to Kansas, however. Some people expected Williams`
team to stumble in its NCAA opener against New Orleans. Kansas wasn`t supposed to have the muscle to cope with Pitt. Kansas then scored stunning upsets over Indiana and Arkansas.
”The biggest difference between the Carolina team we beat a year ago and this Kansas team was that Carolina was a much bigger team,” said Arkansas coach Nolan Richardson after Saturday`s 93-81 loss. ”Kansas is smaller snd quicker. Other than that, they do a lot of the same things, back-door cuts and screens.”
Kansas went to an even smaller lineup in vital second-half stages Saturday when Randall was on the bench with four fouls. Brawny 6-6, 225-pound forward Alonzo Jamison went into the middle against the Hogs` feared press and repeatedly took the ball to the hole against 6-9, 280-pound Oliver Miller.
Jamison scored 26 points and was voted MVP of the Southeast Regional.
”I told Jamison at halftime to keep doing what he`d been doing,” said Williams. ”I told some of the others to start playing the aggressive basketball we`d played all year.”
Trailing by 12 at halftime, 47-35, the Jayhawks answered a lot of knocks against their team by outscoring the Hogs 58-34 after a halftime talk Williams called ”vocal, agitated.”
– Knock No. 1: Kansas cannot shoot free throws. Ranked No. 64 in the NCAA field in foul shooting with a 61 percent team average, Kansas hit 17 of its last 20, 24 of 30 in the second half and 26 of 33 for the game. ”I don`t care about No. 64,” said Williams. ”The only number that counts now is four, Final Four.”
– Knock No. 2: Lacking great leapers, Kansas cannot rebound well enough. Led by Jamison with nine boards, the Jayhawks outrebounded the bigger Hogs 41-38. ”Rebounding,” Randall explained, ”is relentlessness.”
– Knock No. 3: Kansas isn`t deep enough. Steve Woodberry and Sean Tunstall came in when Randall and Terry Brown got into foul trouble. The two subs shared 17 points and went 8 for 8 from the line. ”Kansas is the only team we played that has as many good players as we do,” said Miller.
– Knock No. 4: Kansas doesn`t take care of the ball well enough. Kansas committed only four turnovers in the second half against Arkansas` vaunted pressure defense.
So the ”upset” was highly predictable. And it all goes back to coaching. On the eve of the Kansas-Arkansas game, Randall, Mike Maddox and other Jayhawks freely explained how they expected to win.
”It`s very difficult to deny both the ball and the back-door cut,” said Maddox. ”If their pressure takes away one thing, it ought to leave us something else.”
It`s a long shot that Williams will beat his mentor, and an even longer one that Randall will ever wear his ”own” championship ring. But Kansas has been beating the odds so far.
