PEPPERDINE’S ODD COUPLE : Although They May Not Look Like It, Polee and Korfas Make Quite a Team
Judged by appearances only, Pepperdine basketball guards Dwayne Polee and Jon Korfas would seem as unlikely a combination as Watts and the tower, apple and computer, eggs and Benedict.
When the tall (6-5), skinny (190, maybe) Polee steps out on the court for player introductions, he looks slight enough that a trumpet blast from the pep band might blow him away.
When he joins the short (5-10, maybe), slightly pudgy (165) Korfas, they could be auditioning for theater roles, one as the scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz,” the other as the Pillsbury doughboy.
Pepperdine Coach Jim Harrick would like Polee--and most of his other players--to hit the weight room often and add the muscle necessary to play NCAA Division I basketball. “The only ones on the team not trying to gain weight are me and Jon Korfas,” he said.
Yet Pepperdine, which has no seniors and was considered an also-ran before the season, has carried its weight, and most of the burden has been riding on the uneven shoulders of Polee and Korfas, both redshirt juniors and the team’s co-captains.
With three games left to play in the West Coast Athletic Conference, the Waves, picked by one magazine to finish last in the league, are 20-8 overall and lead the WCAC by 1 1/2 games with an 8-1 mark. They will play second-place Santa Clara at Pepperdine tonight.
Harrick said: “I really like our backcourt. They’re kind of the glue and the strength of the team. They’ve been the most consistent parts, game in and game out.”
The Waves have had double-figure scoring from all of their starters, and all but Polee of the first five are shooting better than 50% from the field. Polee, who is making about 48% of his shots, is the leading scorer with a 16-point average, and Korfas is fourth with an average of 11.8.
Korfas is the team’s top free-throw shooter, making nearly 85% of his shots from the line, and Polee is second at better than 80%.
Korfas leads the team in assists and steals, and Polee is second in assists and third in steals.
If Polee has an off game, Korfas usually has a good one, and vice versa. If Polee can’t go inside--and he had a hard time doing that against DePaul in a 90-65 loss--Korfas puts it up from outside, usually with a high degree of success.
Yet consistency is not what you might expect from either of them--again if you judge them only by appearances. Polee, whose hang time on jump shots seems as long as that of one of Ray Guy’s punts, sometimes zigs when he should zag. Korfas, who looks as if he is putting up a bowling ball when he shoots from outside, has the vertical leap of a pet rock--and probably not as many moves.
Both made what they consider false starts in college basketball, Polee after having also done so in high school.
Korfas, the white kid from Santa Barbara who was named All-Southern Section three times at San Marcos High School, began playing college ball for Stan Morrison at USC.
Polee, the black kid from South Central Los Angeles who was named the 1981 Los Angeles City 4-A Player of the Year after leading Manual Arts to a City championship, made an oral commitment to USC, then switched to Nevada Las Vegas. In high school, he had played his freshman year at Verbum Dei, then transferred to Manual Arts.
Korfas said that he didn’t expect to play much as a freshman at USC, but when he wasn’t used at all in one game, he began wondering why. He said he was told that he would have had difficulty playing USC’s trapping defense.
“That was the first time I felt limited because of my size,” he said. “It was the first time I every really thought about myself as being disadvantaged. In high school, I could drive pretty much when I wanted to and either draw a foul or throw something up.”
He said that in high school he had played in half-court trap and full-court press defenses without feeling handicapped. “There were times when they tried to post me in high school, but a 5- to 10-foot turnaround jump shot is not as high a percentage shot in high school as in college because college players are a lot more skilled.”
After his first season at USC, however, Korfas said he didn’t see a great future there. “Coach Morrison stressed defense and getting the ball inside to the big men,” he said.
So he decided to leave, and Morrison, after trying to persuade him to stay, called Harrick and recommended that Pepperdine pick Korfas up.
Harrick is glad he has him. “He’s one of the smartest ballplayers I’ve ever had,” he said. “People who think that Jon is too small defensively and that they’ll come down and shoot over him all the time are usually fooled. They may find that they can dunk inside, but I don’t think that beats you. Jon might give up one or two baskets a game, but opponents score that off our best defender.”
The best defender is Polee, who usually takes an opponent’s best scorer and makes him come out second best. Last year, when he was being tried at an unfamiliar forward position, he tied up such high-scoring players as Leon Wood of Cal State Fullerton, now with the Philadelphia 76ers, and Gonzaga’s John Stockton, who is playing for the Utah Jazz.
Polee got to Pepperdine by a more indirect route than Korfas.
“I wanted to get all the pressure off me,” he said of his early commitment to USC in 1981. About 100 colleges had offered him scholarships. He said he changed his mind when Rudy Washington, then a USC assistant, told him he intended to take the head coaching job at Compton College the following year. Washington had been at Verbum Dei when Polee was there.
“At the time, I was real close to Rudy, so I decided to take a recruiting trip to see if there was something better,” Polee said.
The something better turned out to be Nevada Las Vegas, but not for very long. Polee, who was the second man off the bench as a freshman for Coach Jerry Tarkanian, said he felt lost at the school because his classes were so big. There were 30 students in most classes, he said, and some had as many as 60.
He said he also felt uncomfortable with “the attitude at Vegas that, if you lose a game, you lose the world.”
Polee didn’t feel lost when he returned to the cozy world of Los Angeles summer basketball. While playing in a summer league at Trade Tech, he ran into three players who were then at Pepperdine--Dane Suttle, Mark Wilson and Carmel Stevens.
Said Harrick: “Dwayne is an L.A. guy, but he couldn’t go to Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Long Beach or UC Irvine because they’re in the same conference (Pacific Coast Athletic Assn.) with Nevada Las Vegas, and he would have lost a year of eligibility. UCLA doesn’t take transfers, and Morrison wouldn’t take him back.
“Suttle, Wilson and Stevens came and told me that Polee was available and that I should pick him up. But they were the ones who recruited him.”
Harrick picked him up, then let him down a little when, faced with a surfeit of guards, he decided to use Polee at forward last year.
“When Dwayne came here, I envisioned him as a miniature Michael Jordan (star of the Chicago Bulls) and he wasn’t,” Harrick said. “I should have known that a guy that skinny is going to get tattooed up front.”
Polee played more like a miscast Michael Caine--not badly but rather stiffly.
“I really didn’t know what my role was and whether I would be accepted,” he said. “It was very crowded in there with 6-8 and 6-9 guys, and hard to move. I was so relieved when I was told I could play guard this year.
“I always wanted to play guard because I knew I wasn’t going to get any taller and that my future in college was at guard.”
Korfas said of Pepperdine’s back court: “I think we have come together really well and the chemistry between us is really good. After we started fall practice, I thought we’d be pretty good--once the league started and after a month and a half together on the road.”
Said Polee of Korfas: “I know what Jon can do. If I see him out on the break and, if there’s not a big man on him, I’ll definitely get him the ball because 9 out of 10 times he’s gonna make that outside shot.”
Said Korfas of Polee: “Either I see him in the open court and know he’s gonna drive and make his shot or pull up and shoot a jumper--and no one is gonna stop his jump shot.”