KNOWN BY HEART

At 6-feet-1, 165 pounds, Hollis Price doesn’t look the part of “tough-guy team leader.” Rather, the Oklahoma junior shooting guard looks as though he should walk around with rocks in his pockets, lest he be picked up by a sudden gust of wind.

“He’s a little guy that weighs about 25 pounds with pointy ears,” Sooner teammate Ebi Ere said with an admiring smile.

But appearances are deceiving.

Price may look like the tallest kid in middle school, but he is a baby-faced assassin on the court and has led Oklahoma to its first Final Four since the Sooners lost the 1988 title game to Kansas.

“Every team needs a pulse,” Coach Kelvin Sampson said. “Every team needs a heartbeat. Hollis is our heartbeat. It’s a strong heartbeat because it’s a strong team.”

And Price, who endured three surgeries in the off-season to repair a muscle tear in his right arm, his shooting arm, is the one leading Oklahoma (31-4) on a 12-game winning streak.

In four NCAA tournament games, Price is averaging 18.3 points, second on the team, and making 48% (12 of 25) of his three-point shots.

For the season, he is averaging a team-high 16.8 points with 58 steals.

His statistics may stand out, but his resolve has the Sooners swooning.

“He’s the hardest worker on the floor when he’s out there,” Ere said. “He’s the hardest worker in practice and he’s the hardest worker in everything we do.”

Said senior forward Daryan Selvy, “Without Hollis, we’d be missing something. He’s our leader out there and every good team needs a good leader. Without Hollis we’re incomplete.”

Price was reared by his academics-conscious maternal grandparents, George Carraby and Ann Dennis, and credits their influence for his strong character and leadership skills.

“My grandparents are stressing the books,” Price said. “That was always the most important thing. They really don’t care much about basketball. I had to finish my homework before I could play.”

Price grew up in the Desire housing project in New Orleans, one of the Big Easy’s more depressed neighborhoods, and lived in his grandparents’ small house with his brother, three aunts and their children. A couch was his bed and when he was 10, he saw an 18-year-old cousin die after a drive-by shooting. He has had little contact with his father and only recently began sharing holidays with his mother, Cheryl, who had been in and out of jail the last 20 years on drug charges.

“I’m proud of her,” he said. “She has a new job and she’s in treatment every day.”

After leading his 17-and-under AAU team to a national championship and New Orleans St. Augustine High to the Class 5A state title as a senior, Price had his pick of colleges.

He could have stayed home and gone to Louisiana State. He also had Oregon, Oklahoma State, Texas and Xavier beating down his grandparents’ door.

But Price chose Oklahoma because he liked Sampson’s program.

Plus, Price’s grandparents liked what Oklahoma had to offer academically.

“He treats his players like people, not basketball players,” Price said of Sampson. “He told me that Oklahoma was a family and I wanted to be a part of it.”

Price also liked the idea of playing alongside forward Eduardo Najera, who is now in the NBA but whose pain tolerance is legendary in Norman.

“That’s where I learned toughness from,” Price said, “from his ability to deal with and play through injuries.”

It was a lesson he has had to apply this year.

Price severed his triceps tendon in a collision with Indiana State’s Kelyn Block late in the Sooners’ 70-68 overtime loss in the first round of the NCAA tournament last year.

After the three surgeries, the first of which was to remove a portion of one of Block’s teeth from his arm, Price was limited to using his left arm for two months over the summer. He thinks he became a more complete basketball player because of it.

“I thought I knew the meaning of playing hard,” said Price, who wears a black rubber elbow guard during games and said the arm often stiffens up at halftime. “You’ve got your meaning of playing hard and Coach Sampson’s meaning of playing hard. His meaning of playing hard is 10 times more than yours.”

Price, though, measures up.

“You’ve got to expect big things from guys of his caliber,” said Sooner point guard Quannas White, a junior college transfer who played high school ball with Price and is now his roommate.

“He’s a tough kid and our coaching staff depends on him to lead our team.”

Last week in San Jose, where the Sooners were wrapping up the West Regional by beating Arizona, 88-67, and Big 12 Conference rival Missouri, 81-75, Sampson gushed about what a great person Price is.

Sampson talked about how happy he’d be if his daughter were to bring home a young man such as Price, how proud he is of him because he wants to give back to his community.

Price is a sociology major because he wants to work with children.

“I want to help little kids that are going through the same things I went through growing up,” he said.

With his hard-knock life as a background, Price will have plenty of inspirational stories to tell. And he’ll never run out of yarns to spin when it comes to reliving his playing days.

He can tell them about his pregame superstition and ritual of washing his hands after warmups, but before tipoff, if he doesn’t have a good feel for the ball and is shooting poorly.

“I needed a new set of hands,” he’d say.

He can also talk about how Sampson gave him a newspaper article in which an opposing player downplayed Price’s significance and how Price neatly folded the article and put it in his shoe for the game.

They might not believe, though, that he did both against Arizona last week before lighting up Wildcat freshman guard Salim Stoudamire, who’d wondered aloud why Price was being revered, for 22 points and six three-pointers ... in the first half.

“Teams have to honor his quickness,” said Sampson, who is going to his first Final Four in his 19th year of coaching.

“There’s a lot of guys who are quick but they can’t shoot. Hollis can take it to the rim on you. But if you step back, he becomes a cold-blooded killer and he’ll shoot the [three-pointer] right in your face.”