Wildcats Respond When Buttons Pushed

You thought Kentucky would blow the doors off, and instead, the NCAA title game came down to a lunging deflection, a fight to the front of the rim and 40 minutes of tense, gasping moments.

You thought Syracuse would fall away some time, any time--isn’t it about time?--but Monday night the Wildcats weren’t up for a runaway, and the night was full of land mines:

If the Wildcats were going to win their first national title since 1978, they were going to do it shooting woefully (making 38.4% to win a national title?), sticking to a seven-man rotation, pressing unsuccessfully and generally scraping victory out of the leftovers, which is how everybody else usually has to do it.

Rick Pitino swears he learns more about his galloping Wildcat team when it loses, and, against an Orangeman team that didn’t exactly play perfectly itself, he almost learned a whole bunch Monday night.

Afterward, Pitino called it a “bump-and-grind” victory, and, for a team and a nation used to Wildcat walkovers, it was.

“Everybody said we’d have to play a perfect game,” Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim said. “And I didn’t think that. We didn’t have to play a perfect game. But we had to play a little better than we did.”

Or Kentucky had to play just a little worse.

Tony Delk, of course, was the bright and shining exception to the Kentucky night of misfires, and he deserved the award for most valuable player handed to him after Kentucky finished its 76-67 national title triumph.

But, despite Delk, the Wildcats had to sweat for this one. They had to hit the floor and pray for their freshman forward Ron Mercer to do something and throw elbows and knock Lazarus Sims to the floor--where he stayed, grabbing at his hand--and be happy about it.

“What we wanted to do more than anything else is cut off the head and the body will fall,” Pitino said. “We had to get to Sims, make him tired, get him exhausted and get him working.”

Pitino compared it to Kentucky’s tight victory over Massachusetts in the semifinals, and acknowledged that these triumphs were far from the traditional explosive Kentucky onslaught.

“We had two games that are very untypical of the Kentucky style,” Pitino said. “But we practice it, the bump-and-grind kind of game. And that’s what we had to do to win it tonight.”

Orangeman star and surly man John Wallace shook his head in a news conference, and said he thought, if but for a few borderline calls and many, many Orangeman turnovers, Syracuse should have, could have won. Actually, he said, in his mind, Syracuse did win, but he can take that up with the NCAA on his own.

The truth is, Kentucky might have lost this supposedly lopsided game if, with the Wildcat lead only two, 64-62, with 4:46 left to play, a series of tiny efforts by Kentucky didn’t add up to 12-5 run to close the game.

At the 4:30 mark, forward Walter McCarty wrestled his way to the offensive glass, then leaped toward the sky to tip one missed Delk shot in--only his second basket of an otherwise silent offensive night--and turned another offensive rebound into a zip pass to Mark Pope for a huge midrange jumper, which made it 71-64.

The most crucial sequence of all came with 66 seconds left, and the lead still only five, 72-67. Pope threw his body in front of a Sims pass to Wallace, then was fouled by Wallace--his fifth--as he pushed the ball down the court.

Pope’s two free throws--”I just thank God they went in,” he said--made the score 74-67.

“That was a big play,” Boeheim said. “We needed to make a play right there, and Lazarus thought he could. We had a chance right there, but that was the game play.”

Late Monday night, Pitino smiled a wrinkled smile and said his team should be nicknamed “The Untouchables” for its scintillating defense.

But, really, on Monday Syracuse laid a hand on Kentucky, shoved the Wildcats around plenty and was still around in the final minutes for one last push.

The difference was, the glamorous, athletic Wildcats finally pushed back.