NCAA BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT : Seikaly Helps Orangemen Squeeze Past Tar Heels, 79-75

Some of the relatives and friends of Syracuse University’s players did not have to travel far to see Saturday’s championship game at the NCAA basketball tournament’s East Regional, where the Orangemen shocked the socks off North Carolina’s favored Tar Heels, 79-75, to qualify for the Final Four at New Orleans.

It only takes about five hours to drive from upstate New York to the Meadowlands of New Jersey, where the regional was played.

But the loved ones of Syracuse’s tournament hero, 6-foot 10-inch junior center Rony Seikaly, would have had to come a long way to see the game in person.

His father spent the day doing shipping business in Greece, where Rony spent part of his adolescence. His brother and one of his uncles watched the game on a special TV hookup at an Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia.

Another uncle’s whereabouts were uncertain Saturday. But at least someone in the Seikaly family did know, if necessary, where this particular relative could be found. On the weekend of Feb. 7-8, when Rony was busily involved in Big East Conference games against Pittsburgh and Connecticut, his uncle, a businessman, was kidnapped in Rony’s birthplace, Beirut.

Eventually his uncle was released, unharmed, Seikaly said.

“Who kidnapped him?” he was asked.

“You tell me,” he said.

At the time, Rony had enough on his mind trying to figure out the game of basketball, as he had been trying so hard to do at Syracuse for three years. Size and desire he had, but his play was so ragged, so raw, that an exasperated Coach Jim Boeheim couldn’t even bear to work with him any more. He let an assistant coach do that.

Furthermore, Boeheim never passed up an opportunity to make an affectionate dig at his player in public or private. As recently as Friday, one day after Seikaly’s career-high 33 points helped Syracuse eliminate Florida, Boeheim was still talking about how when Rony first arrived at the university, “He couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. This year he finally learned to do that. “

That, and more. Seikaly contributed 26 points and 11 rebounds to the Orangemen, left North Carolina’s fabulous freshman, J.R. Reid, feeling freshly squeezed and was voted outstanding player of the tournament as Syracuse (30-6) reached the Final Four for the first time since 1975.

It will be Boeheim’s first trip to the Final Four, too, at least as a head coach. Of course, that didn’t keep him from needling Seikaly once again, long after both the Tar Heels (32-4) and the nets had been cut down to size.

Boeheim first teased Seikaly about the occasional difficulty the player has with the English language. Then, asked at what point this season Seikaly finally started getting his game in gear, Boeheim couldn’t resist another shot. “I usually can tell you more easily about the bad games he’s played,” the coach deadpanned. “He has so many.”

Seikaly, seated next to him, looked up with kind of a hangdog expression and said: “Smile, coach. We didn’t lose, did we?”

No, indeed. The Orangemen peeled out to an 8-0 start, led during the first half by as many as 11 points, and never once were behind or even caught in the entire game. It was an upset of major proportion, as was Big East brother Providence’s victory over Georgetown earlier in the day.

The two conference rivals will meet in Saturday’s quarterfinals at the Superdome, and Syracuse probably will be favored by virtue of already having defeated the Friars twice, 89-85 and 90-81.

Boeheim was not yet ready to declare the Big East as the superpower of college conferences, however. “There might be two Big Ten teams there with us,” he said of the Final Four, referring to Indiana and Iowa. “Next year, it might be two Big Ten teams or two ACC teams, whatever. It doesn’t signify anything special.”

Nor does this long-overdue victory in a big game mean anything to Boeheim reputation-wise, he maintains. “I don’t think I’m any better coach today than I was yesterday,” he said. “If they (the Tar Heels) had hit a last-second three-pointer and gone on to beat us today, I would have felt just as proud of the way we played. Unfortunately, the only thing that matters in this world, it seems, is winning.”

North Carolina guard Kenny Smith, who scored 25 points in his final collegiate game, sank one three-pointer that cut Syracuse’s lead to 76-73 with 2:01 to play. He let loose another from the corner that missed with 1:07 left, or the game would have gone into the final minute even-steven.

What happened instead was this: Another of North Carolina’s Smiths, a substitute guard whose first name is Ranzino and who is no relation either to Kenny Smith or Coach Dean Smith, got a chance to be a hero with 26 seconds remaining. He already was 4 for 4 from the floor. But this time, instead of going for a game-tying home run, Ranzino tried a two-point shot from the lane and missed. North Carolina had to foul, trailing 76-73.

Greg Monroe made two free throws to seal it for Syracuse. Kenny Smith did answer with a layup, but Syracuse’s Sherman Douglas dropped one free throw with 10 seconds remaining for a 79-75 advantage--and the game.

Four-point shots are rare, after all.

That notwithstanding, Monroe made the mistake of bumping Kenny Smith on the latter’s last-gasp three-pointer. Two things saved Monroe from committing one of the most embarrassing fouls in NCAA history--the official didn’t call it, and Smith missed the shot.

The North Carolina senior was certainly sportsmanlike about it. “At that point in the game, the way they’d played, it was almost like they were deserving to win anyway,” Smith conceded.

Syracuse, a notoriously lazy rebounding team, hit the boards as it never had before, amazing even its coach in the process. In the first half alone, not only were the Tar Heels outrebounded by a 29-12 count, but the strapping 6-9 Reid did not get even one. Reid’s man on defense, 6-9 freshman Derrick Coleman, already had 10 rebounds for the Orangemen by then, and finished the game with 14.

It was Seikaly, though, who made the difference for Syracuse in both the game and the tournament. In his last two regional games, he scored 59 points, cleared 20 rebounds, walked and chewed gum.

“When we got here the other day, everybody started making the big hype between me and that other player,” Seikaly said, referring to advance buildup before Thursday’s matchup against Florida’s 7-2 Dwayne Schintzius. “That was the first time I had ever experienced something like that, where people made it out to be a personal thing, a personal battle between me and him.

“As for today, I never felt so excited for a game before. I guess the more excited you get for these games, the more you start playing better.”

Coleman, the freshman, could not have been much more excited. The same went for his teammates. “Last night, we were making noise in the hotel, running down the halls, banging on the walls,” Coleman said.

The big thrill for him Saturday came when it was time for the winners to cut down the nets after the game.

“Come on! Come on! Gimme them scissors!” Coleman kept hollering, top of his lungs.

After his turn, he was asked why he was so worked up about it.

“I never got to cut down a net before,” he said.

Back in Detroit, his schools had never won any championships. And as for the local playgrounds, he said: “By the time I got there, the nets were all long gone.”

Another Syracuse freshman, reserve guard Stephen Thompson, got a different sort of thrill at Saturday’s game. His came beforehand, not after.

“When I was a little kid,” said Thompson, the former Crenshaw High School star, “it seems like almost every game I watched on TV, North Carolina was playing. When I heard that band of theirs strike up that song today, I knew I was in a big game.”

Syracuse’s bench against Florida had contributed next to nothing. This time, though, Thompson replaced the foul-troubled Monroe in the first half, connected on all three of his shots and made several big plays when the Tar Heels were threatening a comeback.

Thompson only played three minutes of the second half, but he didn’t mind. This was what he had come to Syracuse for--to play for a good team, and to have a shot at a national championship.

“It was either Syracuse or Duke,” he said. “I wanted to pick a place that was far away from home, someplace where I could see life from the other side. Syracuse was a good choice.”

Rony Seikaly thinks the same way, and look how far he had to come.

In fact, that is exactly what people were saying about him after the game, his coach included:

Look at how far this kid has come.