Sometimes you want to put Illinois’ basketball team over your knee and give it a good spanking, but this probably isn’t a good time to throw a corporal-punishment controversy on top of the Chief Illiniwek controversy.
Just when the future seemed to be shakiest Sunday for a team that often practices group catatonia, along comes the Amazing Reappearing Frank Williams. Now you don’t see him, now you do. And now you can’t take your eyes off him because now he’s pouring 20 second-half points down a funnel and drowning Creighton, a team with more heart and ambition than talent.
“People are so hung up on statistics,” Illinois coach Bill Self said.
Yeah, people were so hung up on Williams’ first-half statistics they couldn’t breathe. He had no points and two assists before taking stock and realizing that, by golly, he did have something to offer, what with being an All-American and all.
How Williams could go from being a speck on the horizon to larger than life is so Frank. In one of the biggest games of his life, he’s half there.
But with this team, you learn to think good thoughts. This was a half-full Frank, not a half-empty Frank. The 72-60 victory in the second round of the NCAA tournament came about because Williams got religion. It was Sunday, after all.
It’s hard to picture the Illini getting very far with No. 1 seed Kansas on Friday with this sort of inconsistency. But who knows? Do you discount them in the Sweet Sixteen because of it? I don’t. Not against a Kansas program with a tradition of being as soft as a bath towel. Not with a point guard who can act like driftwood for a half and get away with it.
It’s hard to stay mad at the Illini. Exasperated, yes. Temporarily piqued, sure. The smart thing to do is to stay disengaged emotionally from them, not because you’re concerned about getting hurt but because it can’t be good for the arteries. The smart thing is not always the easy thing, though.
Illinois jumped ahead of Creighton early, but if there was a feeling of inevitability to it, it had to do with the notion that the Bluejays surely would come back. What had been a 12-point Illini lead was five at halftime.
“Coach kind of jumped me in the locker room,” Williams said.
Williams didn’t mean that Self physically jumped on him, but no one would have blamed the coach if he had. A couple of noogies were in order, at least. What Self said, if I have this correctly, is that even though statistics don’t mean much, Frank, you took just two shots in the first half and would you please get more involved, you know, if you’re not too busy doing nothing?
“I talk to Frank the way I think he probably wants to be coached,” Self said. “I’m more demanding of him than I am of any player in our program. Certainly I think there are times when he needs to be challenged, and halftime [Sunday] was probably one of those times.”
I’m not sure I saw a fire in Williams’ eyes, as Self did in the second half, but there certainly were flames coming from his right hand. He had 14 of Illinois’ first 21 points in the half, including four three-pointers. When Williams is hitting from outside, opponents can get a head start thinking about the ride home. They’re forced to step up on him, and when they do, he uses his quickness to get to the basket.
Why Williams has to be reminded to play a whole game is hard to answer, another chapter in the strange story of a talented player who becomes as plain as his name for long stretches of ballgames. You’ll spend more fruitful time wondering why the human body comes with an appendix.
Part of this was Creighton’s doing, of course. This was a good team that didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to be this deep in the tournament. But it didn’t have enough good shooters, and when Williams woke up from his deep slumber, with a full beard and a leisure suit, it was over.
There’s something about a team that can turn it on and off like this, something very unnerving and something very entertaining too. It’s a movie you know you have to watch all the way through, even if you know you’ll be watching it through the spaces between your fingers at times.
But it also seems so unnecessary. It doesn’t have to be this way. It had better not be this way against Kansas.
During Sunday’s game, CBS periodically showed the mother of Illinois’ Lucas Johnson sitting in the United Center stands, her hands over her head, every part of speech in her body language saying she couldn’t bear to watch. It’s the official Illini pose.
