A HITCH . . . : IN THEIR GIDDY UP : Wyoming’s Cowboys on a Rough Ride, Hoss

Tonight was supposed to be one of those-stick-it-in-your-face games for the Wyoming basketball team.

It was to be the night the Cowboys ran up against Jim Brandenburg for the first time and showed their old coach that he made a mistake leaving the biting prairie winds of Wyoming for the temperate ocean breezes of San Diego.

It was to be the night the high-powered, high-flying, high-ranked Wyoming Cowboys blew into the San Diego Sports Arena during Super Bowl week and thrashed Brandenburg’s struggling San Diego State Aztecs in front of a national cable television audience.

How things change.

Wyoming still will tip off against the Aztecs at 8:35 tonight, but its hoped-for revenge might not be so sweet. Games for last place never are.

The Cowboys, once the darling media cover boys, have lost four of their past six games after an 11-0 start and this week dropped out of the top 20 for the first time this season. Their 2-4 record in the Western Athletic Conference leaves them a game ahead of SDSU and Hawaii, which are tied for last at 1-5.

“We’re not playing like the Wyoming Cowboys can play,” said Fennis (The Electric Man) Dembo, Wyoming’s preseason All-American forward. “I’m not playing well. I have to prove myself all over again. I’ve gotten away from my game. I don’t know what it is, the intensity is gone.”

The Electric Man does not glow as brightly these days.

Just a few weeks ago, in those easy, heady days of December, the time of blowout victories and thunderous slam dunks, Dembo’s on-court show epitomized Wyoming basketball.

Basketball showmanship had no better practitioner than Dembo--with his pumping fists, slapping palms and taunting of opponents--and no better guardian than Benny Dees, the Cowboys’ first-year coach.

Dees, a native of Mount Vernon, Ga., and a Cowboy baseball and basketball player in 1957-58, brought to Wyoming a mixture of good-natured Southern humor and down-homeyness that quickly endeared him to the residents of this large but least-populated state. His wit was the perfect foil to Dembo’s braggadocio.

Dembo did the jiving, and Dees did the joking. It was a combination that had the state of Wyoming and much of college basketball bragging and joking right along with those galloping Cowboys.

Only these days, fewer are laughing with Dembo and Dees.

“After those losses,” Dees said, “the jokes you tell aren’t as funny to other people. I’m not as quick to tell a joke when we’re sitting (13-4) as when we were 11-0.”

Although courtside winks to the cameras from Dembo or snappy one-liners from Dees once set the tone for Wyoming’s brash march to a top-five ranking, it is a much different public show of emotion that symbolizes the Cowboys’ plight this days. Witness the profane critique Dembo gave after his performance in an 85-72 loss at New Mexico Jan. 9, or the simmering frustration of Eric Leckner.

Leckner, the Cowboys’ 6-foot 11-inch, 265-pound senior center, has found himself out of place at times in Dees’ up-tempo offense and restricted by collapsing defenses designed to keep him from getting the ball inside. Leckner has kept these troubles to himself, but when his disappointment breaks through, as it did in a 54-49 loss at Colorado State Saturday, there is no doubting its intensity.

The Cowboys’ latest loss ended with Leckner catching the final inbounds pass, allowing the last two seconds to drain uselessly from the clock and then heaving the basketball down two-thirds of the court against the backboard. The ball smacked harmlessly off the fiberglass, the sound of its thud drowned out in the celebration of the Cowboys’ fourth loss in 16 days.

“The Wyoming basketball program has hit rock bottom,” Dees said that night, “and it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”

If Brandenburg is gloating over Wyoming’s troubles or looking for signs that his nine-season tenure of 176 wins and 97 losses, three WAC championships and three NCAA tournament appearances is now thoroughly appreciated, he keeps it well hidden.

It might partly be that he has enough trouble of his own rebuilding the Aztecs, who have lost five of their past six games and dropped to 7-10 overall. But much of Brandenburg’s ambivalence comes from his affinity for the Wyoming program. What else could be expected from someone who still hustles back after practice to listen to broadcasts of Wyoming games on a Casper radio station?

“I find myself still rooting for them,” Brandenburg said. “I still have a lot of fond memories of Wyoming and the players. I always will. That will never change. I spent too many good years there to feel any differently.”

Calculating the wind-chill factor is an unnecessary measure of discomfort this time of year in Laramie. When the noontime temperature is minus-3, you don’t need to consider how hard the wind is blowing to know that it’s cold.

At SDSU, officials worry that a mild rainstorm will affect basketball attendance. Saturday, a couple of thousand Wyoming fans waited out high winds and blowing snow that temporarily closed the road from Laramie to Fort Collins, Colo., to attend the Cowboys’ game at Colorado State.

In a state whose population of 470,000 is even smaller than Alaska’s, it seems that almost everyone is a fan of Cowboy basketball.

The Cowboys are off to a record attendance start, averaging 12,620 per game in the 15,028-seat on-campus Arena-Auditorium. When 15,087 showed up for an 83-67 loss to Brigham Young Jan. 15, the six-year-old arena became, for a night, the sixth-largest city in the state. The school is the only four-year university in Wyoming and, when the nights grow long and cold, basketball is the focus of attention.

“We have fans who drive six hours-- one way-- to see our games,” Dees said. “Unless, of course, the roads are closed.”

Then they listen on the Cowboys’ 24-station statewide radio network. Go out to eat in Laramie, and the dinnertime crowd can be heard conversing about Wyoming basketball. One table was split--two for Dees, two against and two undecided--and that was before the Colorado State loss.

This is what makes the job of Wyoming basketball coach one of the toughest in the country. Dees understood that when he accepted it after leading New Orleans to a first-round NCAA victory over BYU in his second season with the Privateers. But nothing serves to reinforce that better than the slap of four quick losses.

“That goes with the territory,” Dees said. “Every Cowboy in this state, the only thing he has to hang his hat on is this university. Some of them are very unrealistic. Some of them living between here and Meeteetse (population 512) thought we’d go 28-0, and there was no way you could convince them we’re not. And they’re having trouble handling that.”

The discontent began to show in Wyoming’s home game against Hawaii last Thursday. The Cowboys trailed by four points at the half before winning, 81-61, amid boos from a crowd that usually is loyal almost to a fault.

The criticism is beginning to filter back to Dees, who has done his best to deflect it with his taxed but still strong sense of humor. It’s no time to panic and sell the home, Dees can joke; it’s rented.

“The phone rings a lot more around here that it has in the past,” Dees said. “But it’s still running 20-1 in my favor. Every once in a while, I get someone saying to catch the next train out of town. When the calls get 50-50, I’m gone.”

Dees can’t help himself from laughing. He knows his position is not that precarious. But he realizes the pressures have changed him. Although less than three months ago his joke-filled monologue was the highlight of the WAC basketball preseason media day, leaving both the audience and his fellow coaches roaring with laughter, his greeting to a visitor last week was subdued.

Dees is worried about appearing flippant when his basketball team is sinking.

“I’ve been a little more uptight,” Dees said. “The kids notice that. The day after the BYU loss, I wasn’t even going to come out. I just wanted to watch TV all day, just watch basketball from like 10 in the morning. About 4 o’clock, I get a call from Fennis. Just checking on me, you know.

“I really can’t lie and say this isn’t bothering me. I just hope I don’t become paranoid about it. I don’t want people to think I’m not concerned about the way things are going. On the other end of things, I get calls saying, ‘Hey, look, Benny, it’s your personality to smile and be yourself. If you don’t do that, then people will really think something is wrong.’ It works both ways. But I don’t want to be the village joker when things are not going well. This team is my responsibility.”

The Cowboys’ problems began at Texas El Paso in their WAC opener Jan. 8. They lost, 68-62, and then lost at New Mexico the next night. It was then, for the first time this season, that Dees said he squarely faced his team’s shortcomings. Neither team paid much attention to guarding Sean Dent, the Cowboys’ poor-shooting point guard, preferring to double up against Leckner. When Dees substituted with Reggie Fox, he gained offensively but lost his best ballhandler. The result was four consecutive turnovers.

The experiences of that first WAC road trip surprised Dees and sent him back to Laramie looking for solutions.

“It caught me a little bit left-handed, it sure did,” Dees said. “I suspected they wouldn’t guard Dent, but I didn’t get ready for it.

“What you have got to have on the road in this league, and it took me a trip to realize this, is an offense that when the other team goes 8-0 on you, you better not put up a wild shot or it’s fixin’ to be 16-0 in a hurry. You’ve got to have a continuity offense that you can just grind it metal-to-metal until you get a bucket and get the crowd out of it, or you’re not going to win.”

Under traditional circumstances, Dees might not have to worry about the SDSU crowd at the Sports Arena. But tonight could be different. More than 7,000 tickets have been sold in advance for the game, and university officials said a crowd of nearly 10,000 could attend, making it one of the largest in school history.

Even if a bit of the glow is off the Wyoming basketball team, and the Aztecs are coming off three consecutive losses, there is something intriguing about the matchup of Brandenburg and his former players.

Brandenburg built this senior-dominated team and led it to the final 16 of the NCAA tournament before leaving a few days later to accept the job at SDSU in March.

“I’m not sure how I’ll feel playing those those guys,” he said. “There is always a certain uneasiness because of the unknown. I feel very close to those players. But my immediate responsibility is with this program and my players here.”

Brandenburg has done his best to keep his distance from Wyoming. Except for a player-initiated telephone call over the summer, Brandenburg said he has not talked to his former players.

“It’s not fair to them,” Brandenburg said, “and I don’t think it’s fair to the present coaching staff if they had an old coach that kept checking up on them and giving them negative reinforcement or anything that might be in conflict with what the current staff wants to do.”

Brandenburg said this was how his predecessor at Wyoming, Tennessee’s Don DeVoe, handled his departure.

“It would have been easy for Don to say, ‘He’s doing well with my players. I set this up, and that’s why he’s successful.’ But he was very kind and never took any shots,” Brandenburg said. “I really appreciated that. So I felt maybe the best way to repay Don DeVoe was to the same thing for the next guy.”

That does not mean Brandenburg’s departure has not been without acrimony. He remains hounded by questions of why he left a top program for one that had finished 5-25 last season.

Even Dees was asking and speculating last week why Brandenburg left.

“I suspect maybe he realized this team had some weaknesses,” Dees said.

Brandenburg’s answer is diplomatic and optimistic. He saw great potential at SDSU and the opportunity to build a program with a metropolitan recruiting base. When the opening was there, he could not gamble on another position presenting itself after this season.

His desire to move on had been no secret within the team. It was the timing that surprised his players.

“We thought the coach was going to get a bigger job sometime,” Dent said. “During the season, we’d take guesses as to when he was going to leave. But we figured it would be after this year.”

His coaching success aside, the losses of the past few weeks have not changed the players’ views on the move. They have not been mourning his loss. Brandenburg’s style is much more authoritarian than Dees’, and although the players acknowledge Brandenburg’s role in their development, they have not hesitated to say they welcomed the switch to Dees’ more open and less-restrictive style.

“This was a change for the better,” Dembo said. “And everyone knows it.”

Said Dent: “It would have been a lot more difficult with Coach Brandenburg after we lost two games. I don’t miss him hollering at me.”

And Leckner: “It’s not that he left, it’s that he went from one of the best teams (in the WAC) to one of the worst. That’s what we’ll remember. Not that he left, but where he went.”

Brandenburg has heard reports of the criticism from his former players. He said he accepts it as a natural backlash from a team that might feel he left them at an inappropriate time. But that does not mean the words do not hurt.

“It does sting,” he said. “That’s kind of why we’re alive . . . (those things) sting now and then.

“We’ll ultimately work through those little superficial things. I’m sure I will build a lifetime relationship with those players. It’s just that it might take some time.”