Waves Face Rated Kansas in Opener of Tournament

Pepperdine’s basketball team, seeking greater national recognition, will play Kansas, a consensus top-10 choice, in the opening round of the first preseason Big Apple National Invitation Tournament tonight at Denver’s McNichols Arena.

Texas El Paso will play Washington in the other game at Denver, and the winners will meet Sunday for the right to go on to the semifinals Nov. 29 and possibly to the final Dec. 1 at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Aside from the disparity in the national rankings--Pepperdine has been ranked 29th by Basketball Weekly, 34th by The Sporting News--their are some common threads.

Kansas Coach Larry Brown and Pepperdine’s Jim Harrick are hardly strangers. Brown took the coaching job at UCLA after Jim Harrick, then a UCLA assistant, had left to become head coach of the Waves. And Harrick said that he once ran a couple of Brown’s summer camps in Denver. The coaches say they respect one another and welcome the chance to open the season against a quality opponent.

The Jayhawks finished last season with a 26-8 record--second to Oklahoma in the Big Eight Conference at 11-3--and were eliminated from the NCAA playoffs in the second round by Auburn. Pepperdine won the West Coast Athletic Conference title with an 11-1 mark, was 23-9 overall and was eliminated in the first round of the tournament by Duke.

Each team has all its starters back. Jayhawk starters include 6-foot 11-inch sophomore Danny Manning, who can play every position and was named the nation’s top freshman last season by NBC television, as well as 7-1, 240-pound senior center Greg Dreiling, who was considered one of the nation’s three best big men with Patrick Ewing and Stuart Gray when they were all high school seniors.

The small forward for the Jayhawks is 6-5 senior forward Ron Kellogg, who led the team in scoring with an average of 17.6 points a game, while Manning was averaging 14.6 points and 7.6 rebounds, and Dreiling, 13.1 points and 6.9 rebounds. The guards are 6-6 senior Calvin Thompson, averaging 13.7 points, and 6-0 junior Cedric Hunter, averaging 6.7. Hunter hurt his ankle recently but Brown hopes he will play Friday.

The Waves had five scorers averaging in double figures, led by the 15.7-point average of 6-5 senior guard Dwayne Polee, the WCAC player of the year last season. Harrick said: “Every basketball junkie in the United States knows about Dwayne.”

Harrick’s forwards are 6-8 junior Eric White and 6-7 senior Anthony Frederick, both all-conference selections, and his center is 6-7 sophomore Levy Middlebrooks, the conference freshman of the year.

Polee’s backcourt mate is 5-11 senior Jon Korfas. Grant Gondrezick, a 6-5 senior back after a redshirt year because of knee surgery, was the Waves’ top scorer in 1983-84 with a 13.2-point average and can fill in at either guard or forward.