Keefe Is a Pivotal Factor : Stanford: Sophomore plays basketball like an old-timer and volleyball like Karch Kiraly.

When Adam Keefe phoned Stanford Coach Mike Montgomery to tell him that he planned to play for the Cardinal, the news was greeted by silence at the other end of the line.

Had Montgomery fainted?

Stanford, its exemplary academic reputation notwithstanding, doesn’t often win recruiting battles against North Carolina for blue-chip basketball players.

So, when Montgomery realized his coup, it took him a few seconds to collect his thoughts.

“What do you say?” he asked, recalling his moment of silence. “You don’t want to understate it, but you don’t want to be an idiot and jump through the phone.”

Not that he wasn’t tempted.

At Woodbridge High School in Irvine, Keefe was not just a great prospect with the grades and board scores to get into Stanford, he was a great prospect, period.

And as a sophomore this season, the 6-foot-9, 220-pound Keefe has shown why Montgomery considers Keefe to be the most important addition in the coach’s 3 1/2 seasons on the Farm.

Despite routinely facing unorthodox defenses concocted specifically to deny him the ball, Keefe is the No. 4 scorer in the Pacific 10 and leads the conference in rebounding and field-goal percentage.

Arizona’s Lute Olson and USC’s George Raveling are among the coaches who have described the Cardinal’s redhead as the best pivotman on the West Coast.

“He’s the most fundamentally sound postman in the conference since Bill Walton,” Raveling said.

Efficient and well schooled in the peculiarities of the pivot, Keefe is “a throwback to the old days,” Raveling said. “I haven’t seen a guy in a long, long time who knows how to play in the post like Adam Keefe. He could have played back in the days of (Bob) Cousy and (Bill) Sharman.”

This is not to suggest that Keefe’s bruising, economical style has fallen out of fashion.

To the contrary, Montgomery said: “Everybody liked Adam. You couldn’t watch Adam and not like the way that he played. You might not think he was the best player in the country, or the best power forward, but you couldn’t not like the way that he played.”

And how’s that?

“If I come out of a game and I’m not dripping and my shirt’s not clinging to my back, I feel like I’ve let myself down,” Keefe said.

Stanford’s academic reputation played a major role in luring Keefe to Palo Alto. He plans to live in Southern California and, he said, “a degree from Stanford means a lot more in Orange County than a degree from North Carolina.”

As much as anything, though, Keefe didn’t want to give up volleyball, which is not played on an intercollegiate level at North Carolina. Keefe has the potential, his coaches say, to be a world-class volleyball player.

It has been said that Keefe dominated at the high school level like nobody since Karch Kiraly, a two-time Olympian who was widely regarded as the best player in the world before he retired from the U.S. team last summer.

His coach at Stanford, Fred Sturm, said that if Keefe played volleyball full time, “He would become one of the very best players this country has ever had--and he might become the best.”

Last spring, after helping Stanford reach the NCAA basketball tournament for the first time in 47 years, Keefe joined the Cardinal volleyball team as a reserve middle blocker almost five months into a six-month season and helped the Cardinal reach the NCAA final.

Coach Bill Neville of the U.S. team has extended Keefe an open invitation to train with the national team. Last summer, Keefe was asked to play in an international tournament in Moscow.

“We consider him a part of our program, and that avenue is open to him,” Neville said. “Unfortunately for us, a lot of other avenues are going to be open to him that are more financially lucrative.”

By that, of course, he meant that Keefe probably has a future in the NBA. Keefe turned down the volleyball trip to Moscow so that he could try out for the U.S. basketball team that played in the World University Games.

A toe injury, however, limited his effectiveness and he was cut.

“I feel like I should enjoy basketball more because I’ve been playing it longer, I’ve put more hours in, I’ve worked harder for a longer period of time,” Keefe said. “I almost feel an obligation to the sport because it’s the one paying the bills.

“On the other hand, volleyball allows me to take a step back and maybe have a little bit more fun; maybe have 200 people in the gym instead of 7,500; be able to smile a little more. It just seems like the pressure’s not there, the TV’s not there. My parents aren’t going to call and say, ‘Why’d you argue that call? You looked like a fool.’ ”

And in volleyball, Keefe won’t be surrounded and suffocated by rival defenses, as he has been in basketball this season.

Last season, as the new kid on the block of a senior-dominated team, Keefe didn’t draw much attention as Stanford’s sixth man. He averaged 8.4 points and 5.4 rebounds a game, averaging less than 20 minutes but making 63.3% of his shots. And toward the end of the season, he showed flashes of what lay ahead.

In the Pac-10 tournament, he scored 17 points against USC. He scored 22 points and took 11 rebounds against UCLA. Then, against Siena in the first round of the NCAA tournament, he scored 22 again.

Relying more on physical strength than finesse, Keefe has significantly increased his productivity this season, averaging 19.1 points and 9.3 rebounds while making 65.8% of his shots.

“He just rolls up his sleeves and comes out of the fray with (impressive) numbers,” Montgomery said. “He’s less concerned about the periphery than some. He just really enjoys competition. And he takes challenges personally.”

Keefe has faced more than his share this season.

Almost nobody has played a straight man-to-man defense against Keefe since he scored 18 points in the first half last month against UCLA, making all five of his shots and eight of nine free throws. The Bruins switched to a box-and-one in the second half, holding Keefe to five points.

Last Sunday, Washington surrounded Keefe with three players, assigning two others to guards John Patrick and Kenny Ammann and all but ignoring forwards Deshon Wingate and Andrew Vlahov. Bothered by a sprained ankle, Keefe scored only nine points, making two of eight shots.

“I think the theory in the league now is, ‘If we’re going to lose, we’re going to lose to the other four guys,’ ” Raveling said.

So, against UCLA, guards Patrick and Ammann combined for 39 points. Against Washington, Wingate scored a career-high 22 points and grabbed 14 rebounds. Stanford won both games.

“It gets frustrating,” Keefe said of the attention focused on him, “but I just have to realize that maybe I’m freeing up other people for their shots and helping somebody else get a rebound.”

Said Montgomery: “It’s been very difficult for him, but his presence has made our other players better. That’s what separates the great players. They can make the players around them better.”

Last summer, a reporter wrote that Keefe “wouldn’t know how to spell finesse if you handed him a Funk & Wagnalls,” but Montgomery disputes that notion.

“He’s not given much of an opportunity to be a finesse player because people are attacking him,” the coach said. “If he were soft or weak-hearted, he’d be getting dominated.”

The youngest son of a retired Marine officer, Keefe “started with a willingness to get dirty, a tough, play-as-hard-as-you-have-to attitude,” Montgomery said.

But, he added, it wouldn’t be accurate to call Keefe a brute.

“He’s got good touch,” Montgomery said. “He’s a very good shooter. He doesn’t miss very often, and he can make those shots while being bumped. It’s not fair to say finesse is not part of his game. He’s not a bully, but he just seems to be around other people a lot.”

One of them is Montgomery, who is grateful for the privilege.