Cheaney Hoping He Can Elude the Curse of Past Indiana Stars

“You’re scaring me,” Calbert Cheaney says. He is hearing how Indiana players have fared lately in the NBA, the litany of names in all its macabre glory. Steve Downing. Steve Green. Ray Tolbert. All-somethings at Indiana, highly publicized national stars, early draft picks--and, for one reason or another, NBA flops. Steve Alford. Keith Smart. Who could have known?

Cheaney is an Indiana native and a longtime Hoosiers fan, but he never thought to look at what happens beyond Bloomington. “I had no idea,” he says.

The NBA doesn’t, either.

Every year some team drafts an Indiana player simply because he has mastered basketball’s fundamentals, having endured and eventually flourished under Coach Bob Knight. A minimum level of competency is as certain as a college degree, and there won’t be drug problems or bad attitudes. What could be better?

Just about anything, it turns out. Of the 21 Hoosiers who have been drafted in the first or second round during Knight’s tenure, which began in the 1971-72 season, only one has played in an NBA All-Star Game. That was Isiah Thomas, who stopped in at college for two seasons on his way to professional stardom and high-profile sneaker endorsements. Other than that you have three or four sizable but unremarkable pro careers, maybe eight drifters who assembled a formidable collection of team logo luggage and then disappeared, and a surprising number who barely passed through the league at all. Kent Benson. Wayne Radford. Uwe Blab. Hey, you’d be scared, too.

Now there is Cheaney, college basketball’s finest senior and a possible player of the year. In 12 games against ranked opponents he is averaging close to 26 points a game. If he takes the Hoosiers to another national championship, nobody would be too surprised. Intelligent, articulate and disciplined, Cheaney is the prototypical Indiana star. And yet he seems a different type of Indiana player than has come before: more athletic, creative with the ball, a lanky 6-foot-7 forward with a deft shooting touch and rebounding savvy, talents that dare scouts to tell him they won’t get fooled again.

“Of all the best players I’ve seen in the Big Ten, and we’ve had some terrific players, he has a style all his own,” says Iowa Coach Tom Davis, who watched Cheaney hit 12 of 15 shots Feb. 6 in leading Indiana to a 73-66 victory. “He can hurt you in a zone, but he can hurt you man-to-man, too, and he’s tough off the dribble. He’s obviously going to do well in the NBA.”

Iowa’s Kenyon Murray, who actually had to guard Cheaney for much of that night, rested a head on his shoulder and shrugged, his postgame frustration turning slowly to resignation. “He goes inside, outside, posts up, shoots the trey,” Murray says. “He just does so many different things that it’s almost impossible to defense him.”

Perhaps many of the Indiana players didn’t succeed in the NBA because they simply weren’t that good. Knight recruits exactly the type of prospects he needs to perpetuate Indiana’s winning tradition, and they do exactly that. They’re fine shooters, these rural Midwestern kids, having spent all those hours alone with a ball and a hoop. Give them room and they’ll hit 20-footers until the dinner bell rings, but that doesn’t make them NBA players. The necessary attributes to play for Indiana and to play in the NBA do not naturally align. Playing in Knight’s system demands a level of discipline that probably will not be matched in a player’s life unless he opts for a military career. And playing for Knight demands a commitment to academics, which is something NBA players don’t have to worry about. Nobody has ever flunked their way off the San Antonio Spurs.

Such requirements usually don’t leave room for the best athletes, those sure-fire pro players you can spot back in high school. And though it is true that character and all those intangibles can mean the difference between success and failure in the NBA, the athletic ability has to be a given. Too often with Indiana players, it isn’t.

“The guys you see at Indiana, you’re probably seeing as good as they’re going to get,” says Quinn Buckner, a starting guard on Indiana’s 1976 championship team and, after that, a consistent NBA player over a decade.. “They max out there in terms of effort and commitment--they’re never going to play harder--and the system makes them look their best. With other schools, you can extrapolate how good a player is going to be. With Indiana, you’re seeing it.

“However, it does seem like they’re getting better players there the last few years. Calbert is definitely one of those better players.”

Many of these Indiana draft picks wouldn’t have been chosen had they gone to school anywhere else. Even Cheaney, slowly warming to the debate, realizes this. “Remember Joe Hillman?” he says, mentioning a reserve on IU’s ’87 NCAA championship team. “Now, he was a guy you might not even pick for your team if you saw him playing around at the Y. But he was a good player at Indiana because when he played there he was so fundamentally strong. It just goes to show how good Coach Knight is and how well his system works.”

Knight’s offensive system, the same scheme that maximized Hillman’s skills, also might be part of the problem because Indiana players rarely learn to create their own shots. This system has as its poster boy Steve Alford, college basketball’s consummate off-the-pick shooter. He scored 2,438 points in his Indiana career--a school record Cheaney (2,339 points through Sunday) will break by season’s end--and we would be willing to bet that at least 2,000 of those points came off screens in the Hoosiers’ passing offense or at the foul line, where he shot 89.8%. There were those who called him the best pure shooter in major-college history, and he may well have been. Provided nobody was guarding him.

The problem is nobody gets those shots in the NBA, other than in the All-Star Game and selected Nike ads. “Once you get to the NBA, you have to know how to be creative,” says James Worthy of the Los Angeles Lakers. “You just don’t get picks, or very rarely. You have to know how to do it on your own or you’ll find you won’t be scoring at all.”

There’s also the idea that Indiana players can’t handle the blase NBA. Several Hoosiers have grumbled through the years about what amounts to an existential emptiness once they leave idyllic Bloomington and start playing basketball for money. There is nothing in the NBA that rivals the intensity of the Indiana experience, with the possible exception of playing for former Minnesota Timberwolves Coach Bill Musselman--and look what happened to him.

“I remember my first NBA season, the toughest adjustment was trying to take 82 games to heart,” Buckner says. “The real challenge in this league is trying to make it through the season, with the travel, sleep deprivation, all of that. Bobby Knight puts you through some mental gymnastics that teach you to keep your intensity up no matter what, but no college coach can duplicate the debilitating grind of the NBA. Not even Knight.”

Cheaney didn’t take any of this into consideration when he was choosing which college to attend. For one thing, he is from Indiana, and just about everyone who grows up with any basketball skill in that state dreams of playing for Knight. For another, he wasn’t even thinking about the NBA; major-college ball was achievement enough. Highly regarded after his junior year at Evansville’s Harrison High, he broke a foot as a senior and was forgotten. He considered staying at home and playing for Evansville and had a brief flirtation with Purdue, but there was never any real doubt. If Indiana would have him, he was ready.

“People were telling me I didn’t have the ability to play for Coach Knight,” he says. “I just wanted to prove them wrong. Not to necessarily be a star, just to contribute to the team. I never had any idea I’d be the leading scorer for four years, that I’d be in the situation I’m in now. I had no idea at all.”

The epiphany came last season when it hit him that the NBA was a realistic goal. Since then he has watched professional games with a purposeful eye. Pro scouts like him as a shooting guard--and a lottery pick. “Of the seniors he is in the top two,” San Antonio Spurs Vice President Bob Bass says. “It depends who comes out, but God yes he is right up there. He would fit in nicely anywhere.”