It’s moments before tip-off and Miles Simon is smiling. Broadly.
You wouldn’t know that his Arizona team, supposedly burdened with the pressure of defending its NCAA championship, is about to play mighty Duke in the finals of the Maui Invitational. From the way Simon looks, you’d think his team had a 30-point lead late in the game against Midget State.
Simon can’t help but look that way. His confidence is natural. And plentiful.
“He’s terrific,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said after a 25-point performance by Simon. “He has a spirit that goes through that whole team.”
When fourth-ranked Arizona takes on second-rated Kansas Tuesday night in the Great Eight, it will be more than a rematch of last season’s Sweet 16 battle. It will be another chance for Simon to show that he is college basketball’s best player.
That notion seemed absurd until late last season, when Simon battled back from academic ineligibility, back spasms and pneumonia to fuel Arizona’s unlikely run to the national championship, earning the Most Outstanding Player award at the Final Four.
And to think: For most of high school, Simon’s father, Walt, expected his son to become a college tennis player. Arizona coach Lute Olson, in fact, was one of the few major-college coaches who believed Simon, a skinny, 6-foot-5-inch guard from outside Los Angeles, would blossom.
“There’s his body language,” Olson has said. “Guys on his team can see how confident he is, and it makes them relax.”
Simon is confident enough to have gone head-to-head against the best player–and perhaps the best trash-talker–in NBA history, Michael Jordan.
In August, Simon was a counselor at a kids camp Jordan held at Cal-Santa Barbara. Every evening they would play five-on-five pickup ball, with Jordan demanding to guard the Final Four’s top player. Jordan wanted to show who was boss, but only when the time was right.
“In front of the kids, Mike keeps up his good image,” Simon recalled. “But after they left to go to sleep, (Jordan’s) mouth opened wide up. He was talking all the time. And I was talking right back at him.”
At one point Jordan, the ultra-proud Tar Heels alum, yapped about North Carolina guard Vince Carter being “the real deal.”
Simon responded by reminding His Airness that Arizona had beaten North Carolina twice last season.
“It was fun,” Simon said.
Simon’s teammates reflect his cool, unrattled persona. Like Simon, they know they’re good.
Arizona returns its top eight players from last year’s team, which beat college basketball’s three all-time winningest programs–Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky–during its run to NCAA glory.
Simon and his backcourt mate, sophomore Mike Bibby, were named first-team preseason All-Americans. And forward Michael Dickerson, a 20-points-per-game scorer before bombing out at the Final Four with a 2-for-18 shooting performance, is back to his old form.
Olson has the guns, to be sure, and he’s treating his team like a rich man socking his stash away in the money market.
“I don’t feel there’s anything (special) I have to do,” he said.
Olson took a slightly different tone in May, when his team was in the midst of a 24-day tour of Australia that Arizona players likened to a 24-month stay in Leavenworth.
“It was horrible,” Simon said. “The same monotonous stuff every day.”
In fairness, Arizona had completed its long season just six weeks earlier. And some players had to leave campus for the 14-hour trip on the same day they took a final exam.
On Day 10, Dickerson had to return to the States to be with his ailing grandmother. Dickerson’s teammates were jealous.
They begged Olson to cut the nine-game tour short, but the coach refused. Finally, to quiet the nagging, Olson decided to play “Let’s Make a Deal.”
In return for his players’ patience, Olson agreed to let Arizona hold its first Midnight Madness. He also allowed the players to select championship rings with more diamonds. What a guy.
Arizona’s globetrotting this season already has taken the team to Maui, where it was overwhelmed by Duke in a 95-87 stunner. The Blue Devils led by as many as 24 points and kept Bibby scoreless throughout the first half.
Some coaches would say it’s healthy for a team to discover in November that it’s not invincible. Olson isn’t one of them.
“I’m not a believer that you learn from losing,” he said.
It all seems to go back to confidence. The Wildcats don’t believe they needed a wakeup call. And they also don’t want pep talks or closed-door meetings with psychologists.
“We believe in each other and we know what it takes to get there,” Dickerson said. “So we don’t have that much pressure.”
“There’s no pressure,” Bibby insisted.
Olson, despite three other Final Four appearances–1980 at Iowa and ’88 and ’94 at Arizona–was better known as the coach who consistently stubbed his toe in first-round NCAA Tournament games (see East Tennessee State, Santa Clara and Miami of Ohio). He appreciates the way his team handles the supposed pressures of success.
“The guys are not concerned with other people’s expectations,” he said. “If you watch practice, you can tell they enjoy playing together. There’s not a worried bone in their body.”
That spirit starts with Simon, but it clearly has become contagious.
Bibby was asked recently about winning the NCAA tournament.
“It was fun the first time,” he said. “And it will be even better the second time around.”
