No Missing Wink

It was Kevin O’Neill’s first summer as head coach at Northwestern and he was sure his first mistake had been signing his first recruit, Sean Wink, a three-point specialist from Brea Olinda High.

As it turns out, he was just about to make his first mistake.

“I had taken Sean sight unseen . . . well, I’d seen one tape,” O’Neill said. “We were at that point where one player was better than no players, so we signed him out of desperation. But when he got here, I didn’t think he was into it enough. He didn’t seem to want to be playing or want to work hard, so I told him to go home and play in junior college.

“OK, I had a bad read on the kid.”

O’Neill’s reading problem stemmed from not understanding Wink’s body language. The kid was just a little homesick.

“I came out here the summer after my senior year because I had to take a class, so I had no vacation,” Wink said from the Evanston, Ill., campus. “I didn’t know anyone and NCAA rules don’t allow you to go out with any of the other players until the first day of fall classes, so I sat around the dorm all day and there were like five other people on my whole floor.

“Coach O’Neill wasn’t even around much, he was mostly out recruiting. He was just judging me on hearsay, but he’d call me on the phone in my dorm and yell at me. I’d never experienced anything like that and when he told me to go home to junior college, it blew me away.”

The idea of joining his buddies on the beach was tempting, but after several long conversations with his parents, Wink decided he wouldn’t blink. If this was a test of wills, he was preparing for battle.

“My parents kept saying, ‘We know what kind of person you are and he doesn’t yet. Stick with it.’ They kept pushing me and pushing me. So I figured, screw it, I’m coming even if he doesn’t want me.”

Wink didn’t go home and instead set out to make the rest of the Big 10 wish he had. He started 26 of 27 games as a freshman last season, missing one start because of an ankle injury. (He came off the bench and hit six three-point baskets.)

He scored 20 or more points four times, set a Northwestern record for threes in a season with 86 and finished 18th in the nation in three-pointers (3.19 a game) and 20th in three-point field-goal percentage (.457).

Wink made four three-pointers during the 9-3 Wildcats’ victory over 16th-ranked Minnesota Jan. 6, their first victory in Minnesota’s Williams Arena in 13 years.

“Like I said, he’s been a joy to have around,” O’Neill deadpanned.

Just ask Evan Eschmeyer, Northwestern’s 6-11 senior center who’s averaging 20.3 points and shooting a Big 10-leading .621 from the floor this season. With Wink camped just beyond the three-point arc across from him, Eschmeyer always has the option of passing back out when opponents collapse on him in the low post.

“Sean’s the best young shooter in the Big 10 and without him, there’s no way I’d be able to accomplish what I have on the inside,” Eschmeyer said. “He stretches defenses as well as any player I’ve played with.”

Lately, Wink has been making any attempt to double down on Eschmeyer a costly defensive gamble. After a slow start this season, he has made 30 of 61 threes in the last 10 games, a nice little .492 clip. To put that into perspective, a player would have to shoot nearly 75% from two-point range to score as many points in only 61 field-goal attempts.

And Wink is second on the team in minutes played to Eschmeyer.

“From the beginning, we thought we had a shooter, not this good of one, but a shooter, and not much else,” O’Neill said. “And to be honest, last year, he didn’t do much else. But he’s worked hard, he’s become a better defender and he’s playing a lot smarter this year.”

Wink spent much of the off-season in the weight room because “I couldn’t keep people in front of me defensively last season.”

“I worked really hard to get stronger and gained some weight,” said Wink, 6 feet 2 and now 176 pounds. “I also worked a lot on my ballhandling.”

Gene Lloyd, Wink’s coach at Brea, watched Northwestern’s victory over Minnesota on TV and saw a different player than the set shooter who set a Brea record with 99 three-pointers as a senior. But he wasn’t surprised at the transformation.

“He was a solid high school player, but he hasn’t rested on those laurels or he’d be sitting on the bench somewhere, at best,” he said. “He’s much bigger in his upper body and obviously stronger.

“He’s always been a dedicated, hard worker. He always went to all the camps and the all-star tournaments and did all the extra work.”

As first impressions go, Lloyd’s take on Wink was poles apart from O’Neill’s. Lloyd, who retired in 1998 after 17 years and a 334-134 record as coach at Brea, recognized the potential when he first saw Wink firing away from outside as a fifth-grader in a recreational league.

“That’s always been sort of a gift I have, to see early in a kid what potential he would have, given normal growth,” Lloyd said. “There was no way of predicting he’d have this kind of success, but I saw potential.”

A couple years later, Lloyd discovered that Wink seemed to have the right stuff on the inside as well as an athletic body. A fellow teacher at Brea Junior High showed Lloyd a composition Wink had written in her English class.

“He basically said he was going to play basketball at Duke one day and he was putting his life in my hands to help him make his dream come true,” Lloyd said. “He didn’t end up at the Duke, the Harvard of the South, but he made it to the Harvard of the Midwest.”

A two-time Orange League MVP at Brea and a four-year scholar athlete, Wink averaged 23 points as a senior. Brea won 20 games in a row that season (1996-97) and finished 26-4, losing to Compton in the Southern Section Division II-AA semifinals.

“You can’t teach a guy to shoot like that,” Lloyd said, “but I do think I helped his confidence. I always told him he couldn’t start shooting until we were out of the dressing room.”

O’Neill was telling him much the same thing earlier this season, when Wink couldn’t seem to find his rhythm.

“Why not?” O’Neill said “That’s his role.”

A role few--certainly O’Neill among them--would have predicted 1 1/2 years ago.

“I don’t think anybody thought he would be a Big 10 player of impact then,” O’Neill said.

Wink isn’t the only one who’s gained a bit of respect, though. The feeling is mutual.

“He’s been like a second father to me,” Wink said. “He’s always there to talk to.”

O’Neill seldom screams these days. And he never mentions junior college.