A Tough Audience for Nelson

For a moonlighting stand-up comedian who has played nightclubs from California to Ohio, he sure is looking serious here today, only 45 minutes from Broadway. Practice is running smoothly and so is he, ever mindful that basketball is no laughing matter to his coach, Bob Huggins, a man who is in no mood today for one of his funny forward’s comedy jams.

Perspiration is pouring from the face of Terry Nelson, the Cincinnati kidder who prides himself on being a perfectionist on defense and doesn’t give a hoot if he gets to shoot the ball even once in tonight’s NCAA East Regional game against Virginia. All this character cares about is pleasing his wild and crazy coach, the man he calls “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Huggins.”

Huggins is a heckler.

“Come on! Come on!” the coach calls out at Thursday’s practice as Nelson runs by. “Pick up your feet!”

Already feeling as though he has run halfway to his childhood home back in Long Beach, the exhausted Nelson runs on. As ever, he does what his coach says, obeys his commands, responds to his bark. In his heart of hearts, Nelson knows what it means to be pushed so hard, what it means to put in this much work. It means that Cincinnati is one mean team on defense.

Toweling himself, Nelson asks: “You know what we’re like?”

He has his audience.

“We’re like the Marines,” he says. “We do more by 9 a.m. than most teams do all season.”

The basketball service hitch of Terry Nelson is nearing an end, and the comedy store is calling, now that his collegiate career as a Bearcat is building to what he hopes will be a socko finish. By now, this 6-foot-6 233-pounder understands that the ambitions he once had to become a professional athlete have no basis in reality, few NBA clubs being in the market for a starting forward who averages 3.4 points and 3.9 rebounds a game.

Everything he has done for Cincinnati during his two seasons since leaving junior college ball in Long Beach has been a great part of the program’s success, but even Huggins, who adores him, cannot deny the truth about Terry Nelson--that “he has lousy hands, he can’t catch, he’s not a particularly good passer and he is one of the worst shooters on the team.”

So why is he so good?

“Because he’s got the most heart of any player I’ve ever coached,” Huggins explains.

Away from the court, they joke together. The player calls the coach “Bob,” and is one of the loudest voices on the bus when the entire Bearcat team launches into an impromptu rap that ranks on every passenger from the assistant equipment manager to the head man himself. Before practice, however, Nelson is respectful, saying Thursday: “He’s Bob now, but 20 minutes from now he’ll be Mr. Huggins.”

To the coach, the player is the ultimate good guy to have around. Nelson is unselfish and then some. Never this season has he attempted more than six shots in a game. Against New Mexico State in the most recent NCAA tournament game, Nelson spent 20 minutes on the court and did not shoot the ball. He has the slowest trigger finger in the business.

“I have a different dream,” Nelson says. “Most guys, they cry if they don’t score in a game. I don’t have those pressures.”

Yet, it is his personality that makes him, if not the most valuable player, then easily the most valued player. Nelson has no idea why he gravitated toward comedy, and wonders self-mockingly if maybe he is nothing more than a class clown who never grew up, but Huggins has a boundless appreciation for someone with “a great disposition on life,” and says the thing about Terry is, he has a positive effect on everyone around him. He’s what Hollywood would call the feel-good story of the season.

Also, Nelson wants to make one thing perfectly clear: “I take comedy very seriously.”

He writes his own material, works on it every day. He tries to work basketball into his act, looks for a hook. Rodney Dangerfield had the no-respect thing. Richard Pryor did one thing, Eddie Murphy another. “You get one solid routine,” Nelson says, “you can travel the whole world with that.”

It also is easier on the human body. In this one season of basketball, Nelson has had shin splints on both legs, bruised kidneys, twisted ankles and jammed thumbs, and he also missed the Indiana game because of a slight heart murmur. And his teammates need their feel-good forward feeling fit, because Cincinnati’s record is 19-1 this season in games that Nelson has started.

“If we go to the Final Four,” Huggins offers after practice, “I’ll shave my head.”

Nelson breaks up and says: “Now that would really be funny.”