NCAA BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT : Familiar Faces Leave Ball State With Mixed Emotions

For Ball State, the NCAA West Regional at Huntsman Center has turned into a tournament of reunions. One tender and one somewhat tense.

The tender one is with Rick Majerus, the coach who guided Ball State to a 29-3 record and an upset of Pittsburgh in the first round of the NCAA tournament last season. He left to become coach at the University of Utah, whose arena is the site of these regional games.

Majerus, 42, learned late last year that he had serious heart trouble, and missed most of Utah’s season after undergoing seven-bypass heart surgery in December.

“I’m so happy to see him,” said Paris McCurdy, the 6-foot-7 senior who made a free throw with no time left to beat Oregon State in the first round Thursday. He says he gave Majerus a kiss on the cheek afterward. “I thought he looked really well,” McCurdy said.

Majerus says he has lost 40 pounds, is going to lose another 40, and has just run “five miles in 12 minutes,” before correcting himself, “No, no, five 12-minute miles. That would have been some record!”

He has sworn to cut down on late-night pizza. “I used to be the king,” he said, before acknowledging that he had four pieces the night after Ball State’s victory.

The Ball State players still call him “coach,” even though Dick Hunsaker is the coach of this season’s 25-6 team, which will play Louisville (27-7) today in the second round.

The game will pit Louisville’s running game and size inside against a Ball State team that starts only one player as tall as 6-9 but has limited opponents to 39.9% shooting.

Majerus keeps a studied distance from them. But he brings in recruits of his own for visits, still calls Ball State “we,” and attends its NCAA games, as he promised when he left last year.

“It’s anxiety-wrought, every pass, every dribble, every assist,” he said. “I’m a man without a team.”

The tense reunion for Ball State was really nothing more than a passing in a hallway between McCurdy and Arkansas Little Rock Coach Mike Newell, whose team lost to Nevada Las Vegas in the first round.

Four years ago, McCurdy and Ball State teammate Curtis Kidd were teammates on the Arkansas Little Rock team that upset Notre Dame in the first round of the NCAA tournament and took North Carolina State to double overtime before losing. McCurdy and Kidd transferred to Ball State after they were charged with unauthorized use of a credit card and Newell asked them to leave. The charges were eventually dropped.

“Last night I was in the tunnel waiting for (Newell) until he came out of the locker room,” McCurdy said. “I said, ‘Coach Newell.’ He turned and looked me up and down and said, ‘Hello, Paris,’ and kept walking. It’s not my fault he lost. Or maybe he thinks it is . . . I don’t call him Coach anymore. He’s just a regular guy. From now on when I see him, I’ll just call him Mike.”

McCurdy is the self-styled talker on the Ball State team, on the court and off. He is the one who took Gary Payton’s reputation as a personal challenge, and who will have chosen some Louisville player to converse with today.

“Whoever I guard, that’s who I do the talking to, or whoever is supposed to be their dominant player,” McCurdy said. “I try to put them to the test with my talking . . . They get to a point where I know they want to bust me right in the mouth, and I’m still talking to them. I say, ‘Don’t get upset. It’s just a game.’ ”

It will not be so easy to select a Louisville player from a lineup that includes Everick Sullivan, LaBradford Smith and 7-foot center Felton Spencer.

Majerus claims responsibility for Ball State’s second-round loss last year to Illinois, which went on to the Final Four. Majerus said he made major changes in his team’s defense on the eve of the game, and that the defense failed. Ball State lost, 72-60.

This time, he must watch from the stands to see if Ball State can win.

“If you’re telling me I had to bet my mortgage, I’d try to approach it analytically,” Majerus said. “I’m thinking with my heart, not my head. I’m saying we can win. I’m counting on them to win.”

West Regional Notes

Nevada Las Vegas, seeded first in the West and ranked second in the nation, will play Ohio State today. Ohio State (17-12) came back from 12 points down with seven minutes to play to beat Providence in overtime in the first round. Because junior center Perry Carter had fouled out, Ohio State played the overtime with three sophomores and two freshmen, Alex Davis and leading scorer Jimmy Jackson. “During the course of the season, everyone thought that Jimmy Jackson and I were too young to do anything,” said Davis, who scored 24 points. “We’ve proved a whole lot of people wrong.” . . . Ohio State also has a rookie coach in Randy Ayers, 33, a former assistant who replaced Gary Williams when he left for Maryland.