Coach Gut rewarded for staying course
By Pat Forde
Special to ESPN.com
The stoic 62-year-old Kansan spent a good deal of this cold, cruel
winter refusing to flinch. He pointed no fingers. He took the hits. He
didn't bother trying to hit back. Facing the most serious Gut check of
his young/old career, he checked out mighty strong.
|  | | Never one to yell at his players, Bill Guthridge has rallied the Tar Heels to the Final Four. |
His standard answer as the defeats and dismay mounted: "It's my
responsibility."
Today, then, this wholly unexpected North Carolina Final Four berth
should also be considered the responsibility of one Bill Guthridge, one
of the more wrinkled comeback kids in college basketball history. This
is the one time he'll sidestep the responsibility, of course, because
moments like this are when you deflect all credit to the players. But if
he endured the rips for getting the Carolina locomotive seriously off
track, give him a hand for somehow getting in back on course in the nick
of time.
There is no better time for a team's first four-game winning streak of
the season than the NCAA Tournament.
Now, Tar Heels fans are left sheepishly creeping back onto a bandwagon
they were jumping off in droves as Carolina staggered through an 18-13
season. This can happen at the Cadillac programs, where losses of any
kind -- in any month -- are treated like stock market crashes. Kentucky
fans were stewing over Tubby Smith in February 1998 -- just before his
team went on a tear to win the national title. This year, UCLA fans had
Steve Lavin all but fired and were moving on to potential successors --
Rick Pitino was a popular choice -- before the Bruins suddenly wound up
in the Sweet 16.
So it was with Guthridge, who history will remember as the most
criticized coach ever to make two Final Fours in his first three seasons
on the job. When mentor and legendary predecessor Dean Smith reminded
him that he had been hanged in effigy in Chapel Hill early in his
career, Guthridge responded with typical droll humor: "Being hanged in
effigy would be fine. Just as long as they don't hang me for real."
The hanging now turned into hugging, it is time to try and figure out
how this turnaround came to pass.
Senior point guard Ed Cota puts it in the most unscientific way
imaginable: "We just became a team," he said. Nothing you can diagram
with a telestrator, but probably as good an explanation as anything
else.
But perhaps there are other reasons. Perhaps it has taken
long-long-longtime assistant Guthridge this amount of time to settle
into his role calling the shots. Perhaps he is just now figuring out how
to bring a team together on an upward path at the right moment. Perhaps
this is the first team he can take legitimate ownership of, as more
players arrive in the Post-Dean Era.
Or perhaps he's gotten damn lucky. He still needn't apologize for that.
| |
“ |
Being hanged in
effigy would be fine. Just as long as they don't hang me for real.
” |
|
|
—
Bill Guthridge, on the possibility of being hanged in effigy
|
His first Final Four, in 1998, could be viewed as something of an
autopilot season: You take over at the 11th hour, make the brilliant
decision to get the ball to Antawn Jamison and Vince Carter, then watch
the victories mount. That was a Dean-in-absentia team dripping with
talent.
Last season, after Jamison and Carter both jumped to the NBA, was a
reality check. Three crushing losses to Duke and a first-round NCAA exit
against Weber State got the water boiling for this, Year Three, with
only Cota among the primary holdovers from the '98 Final Four.
Guthridge has said over and over that he "pushed the wrong buttons" with
this team, which entered the season in everyone's Top 10, and the
evidence supports him. He wanted to play pressure defense, but blowout
losses to Indiana and Louisville showed that to be an unviable strategy.
Freshman Joseph Forte's immediate emergence as a go-to guy seemed to
leave others unsure of their place, and created problems when he had his
inevitable cooling off. And whippings from Michigan State and Cincinnati
revealed a team fainthearted in the middle -- more an indictment of big
men Brendan Haywood and Kris Lang than of the coach.
"They don't scratch and claw like the North Carolina teams I faced," a
former ACC player told the Washington Post earlier this month, a small
eternity ago. "The only reason you know that's a Carolina team is by the
uniforms. They don't play with any intensity."
But an interesting metamorphosis has occurred here at do-or-die time.
Senior point guard Ed Cota has handled the rock reliably. Haywood has
played tougher -- and benefited from the blossoming of two-sport tough
guy Julius Peppers as a backup. Jason Capel has actually shown up on a
consistent basis. And Forte has been as dazzling as he was in November.
Along the way, the team defense has improved dramatically. Carolina's
second-half zone was all over the place against Tulsa, closing out on
shooters and collapsing to swipe the ball when it went in the paint. The
Heels have also reclaimed a staple of Dean Smith teams, allowing the
ball into the hands of the opponent's worst shooters and inviting them
to take low-percentage shots. (You'd be surprised how many times they
do.) Without relying on pressure, Carolina has regained its ability to
defend.
In terms of intangibles, credit the reserved Guthridge with learning how
to raise his voice on occasion. I'm guessing that during Guthridge's
formative years -- not to mention all the years sitting next to the
relatively sedate Smith -- coaches did not often snarl and yelp like pit
bulls on choke chains. Today you can hardly find one capable of sitting
down for two minutes at a time. This might have been a generation gap
Guthridge had to cross with a team full of youngsters accustomed to
Pitino wannabes.
"He's a lot more vocal in the tournament than he was in the regular
season," Peppers said. "When something needs to be said, he'll get in
your face."
Said Guthridge: "A coach handles each team differently. I've probably
been more vocal with this team."
Whether Guthridge's passion has brought out the pride and tenacity in
this team, who knows? Guthridge probably isn't terribly concerned about
the answer to the big riddle. He just wants to keep winning, and keep
deflecting the credit to his players.
Pat Forde of the Louisville Courier-Journal is a regular contributor to ESPN.com |
