WAYMAN TISDALE : Star for Oklahoma Recalls an Olympic Baptism by Fire

Sure, Wayman Tisdale took a lifetime’s impression from playing on Bob Knight’s Olympic basketball team. Scars are impressions, aren’t they? And so are the laugh lines that frame Tisdale’s broad smile.

Why, just last Wednesday night he expected to have a nightmare about playing for Knight, not about playing for Oklahoma against Louisiana Tech last Thursday night in the Midwest Regional. Tisdale doesn’t really need to be asleep to have a knightmare.

“It made me a lot better person,” he said, “knowing there’s somebody a lot meaner than the meanest teacher in high school.”

Tisdale was the leading rebounder on the American team that won its eight games at Los Angeles and the gold medal without a serious threat. If they could stand Knight’s practices, the world was easy. “Now it’s almost easy to work hard,” he said with the memory of two months of what he called “lights-out” practices.

“It was like mind-boggling,” he said, touching his fingertips to his temples. That’s Knight’s mannerism; it’s become part of Tisdale’s natural expression. Tisdale does Knight; he did it for his Olympic teammates, but he never would dare show it to the world. It is in the now-it-can-be-told category, and he’s kept it up to date.

“I just need a chair and throw it across the room,” he said. “I do it all.” He put his hands up to his head again and shuffled down the corridor in Knight’s style.

The one thing he heard over and over was: “Get in the game.” Tisdale does that in Knight’s bark, again fingers at his temples.

At halftime of one Olympic game, another rout, Knight was typically displeased with some mistake. He chastised a player while leaving the court, went into a restroom and didn’t come out until the second half. “After a while it got to be fun waiting to see what he’d do,” Tisdale said.

One time he stopped practice, gave Tisdale a pen and paper and made him write: “Today Wayman Tisdale hustled.” Knight signed it. Other times he was less complimentary. He’d be hollering and Tisdale would put his hands on his knees to keep Knight--he hoped--from continuing. “Nope,” Tisdale said, “he leaned down right with me and kept cussing me out.”

Tisdale is 6-9, 250 pounds and his manner makes him practically impervious to insult. Besides, he’d already been such a good player at Oklahoma for two years. So, he thinks Knight got on him that much more. Knight quickly stopped getting on Patrick Ewing.

“Patrick had never been gotten on like that,” Tisdale said. “Knight turned red. I don’t think he got on Pat again; Pat likes to be told, not fussed at.

“He got on me. He told me once he got on me because I took it well. But I was ready to come home.”

Knight maintained a charade of competition throughout the Olympics, making up in practice what the games lacked in demand. “He used to tell us before a game: ‘You guys aren’t ready. Go out and do what you want; I don’t care,’ ” Tisdale said with the intonations that used to break up the inmates. “We knew the next day practice would be tough.”

Tough meant an hour of practice followed by an hour and a half of scrimmage against the NBA professionals in San Diego or at other points on the road to Los Angeles. “You took your jersey off and you could just wring the sweat out of it,” Tisdale said.

All of that was after the most grueling elimination practices on Knight’s home turf in Indiana. “Three-a-day practices; I never heard of three a day,” Tisdale said. “I got off the plane and said I’d be glad when we got two a day out of the way, and there were three. Can you realize what it is just to tape three times a day?”

He didn’t laugh, he said, until it was all over, and in the final interview session said he was going to go home to Tulsa to find the meanest man he knew and hug him. “I hugged that man until he turned blue in the face, then I let him go,” Tisdale said. “Just kidding.”

Of course, but it was a useful figure of speech. He came back to school for his junior year and had another wonderful season, averaging 25.7 points and 10.1 rebounds as Oklahoma has boosted its record to 30-5, best in Big Eight history. Tisdale has created a basketball tradition in a school that had acknowledged only football.

He survived Knight’s trials and the competition with Charles Barkley, now of the Philadelphia 76ers, to make the team. Barkley (“Thank goodness he’s gone”) is the strongest player Tisdale has ever played against, he said, besides Karl Malone of Louisiana Tech. Coach Billy Tubbs matched them up in last Thursday night’s game, which Oklahoma won, 86-84, on a Tisdale shot in overtime.

But how tough could the match-up have been? “I have some things that are going to stick with me the rest of my life,” Tisdale said. “Coach Tubbs was fussing at us, and inside I almost laughed. If they only knew what I’ve been through.”