Kansas Turns Out a Finnish Product

Talk about versatile.

Kansas forward Drew Gooden scores, rebounds, runs the floor with ease. He combines elusive post moves with a feathery jump shot.

And he is as comfortable on his grandfather’s farm in Finland as he is in Lawrence, Kan., or his family’s Bay Area home in Richmond.

Gooden’s mother’s family still lives in Finland, decades after their daughter, Ulla, met an American named Andrew Gooden. He was playing professional basketball overseas and she married him.

Andrew and Ulla have divorced, and she lives with her second husband in Arkansas. But those summer days of Gooden’s youth spent by a Finnish lake have their charms.

You fish.

“Pike, mostly,” Gooden said.

And you soak.

“You go in the sauna, scrub yourself, wash your body off, then you hop in the lake,” he said.

“You know, the lake’s cold. The lakes don’t warm up in the summertime. But it’s like a ritual that the Finns do.”

Andrew Gooden, a high school standout in the San Francisco area, played college ball at Central Washington.

He was knocking around, hoping to extend his career when a scout suggested Finland.

Andrew Gooden didn’t even know where it was.

“That scout, he’s the reason for my success right now,” Drew Gooden said with a laugh. “One of my dad’s friends kind of hooked him up to play in Finland. He says, ‘You know, if it wasn’t for me, Drew here wouldn’t have been born.’”

Andrew Gooden is 6 feet 3; on his Finnish team, that meant he played center.

When he and Ulla--a 5-9 blond who is now a nine-handicap golfer--welcomed their first son, a doctor told them their 9-pound baby would grow to be 7 feet tall.

“His mother may have had other plans, but me, as an ex-warrior, I wanted to get him into sports, especially basketball,” Andrew Gooden said as he watched Kansas practice at the Georgia Dome on Friday.

“So I put a basketball in his crib. It was maybe about three years before he could finally shoot with the ball.... “

Drew was a bit of a late bloomer, first preferring baseball and football before he sprouted upward.

He didn’t even play basketball his freshman year in high school. His father wouldn’t allow it after Gooden got an F in physical education, mostly for refusing to wear the required uniform.

After his sophomore year, he grew four inches, and by his senior season at El Cerrito High, he was a star.

Gooden never reached 7 feet, but at 6-10, he is a big man with a small man’s skills. He averages 20 points and 111/2 rebounds a game, and he thrives in the Kansas running game in a way former Jayhawk big man Eric Chenowith never could have.

Not that Gooden fit in immediately at Kansas.

Coach Roy Williams nicknamed him “Hurricane Drew” for his undisciplined play.

When Gooden found himself sitting on the bench his freshman year, he called home.

“He said, ‘Dad, I really don’t like playing here,’” Andrew Gooden said.

Gooden’s father had a talk with Williams.

“I told him, ‘Roy, don’t start him because he called, start him only when you think he deserves to,’” Andrew Gooden said.

Slowly, Drew came around. When he was a sophomore, Gooden’s defensive lapses once upset Williams so much, the coach threw his sport coat into the stands.

But Gooden went from averaging 11 points as a freshman to 16 as a sophomore to 20 in this, his junior--and quite possibly last--college season.

More important, he now understands how to play Kansas’ structured and disciplined style.

“That whole first year for me was a learning experience,” Gooden said. “I knew nothing about Xs and O’s, knew nothing about team defense and team defensive principles.

“It was a big adjustment for me, where for Nick [Collison] and Kirk [Hinrich, both coaches’ sons], they already had that teaching, that upbringing as far as basketball knowledge. They had a head start on me.

“My whole first year, I was trying to catch up with them, the mental part of the basketball game. I think that was the biggest part--the mental part and Coach’s coaching philosophy.”

From those early struggles, a contender for national player of the year was born.

“I chose to wear the number zero because I came from nothing, and because I’m unpredictable,” Gooden said. “If they made X, I’d wear that jersey.”

Jason Williams of Duke was named Associated Press player of the year Friday, but he and Gooden shared the National Assn. of Basketball Coaches’ award, and the Wooden Award--for which voting ended well after Williams’ missed free throw in Duke’s Sweet 16 loss--will be awarded April 7.

“I think Drew had a fantastic year. I think Jason Williams had a fantastic year also,” Roy Williams said. “The NCAA tournament is one game and you are out. Tiger Woods played in a match-play tournament several weeks ago, and he’s the best golfer in the world and he played No. 64 and he lost. But I think Drew, throughout the course of the season, the first day to the last day, has played exceptionally well.

“At the start of the season, I think Jason was clearly going to be the college player of the year, if he had a good year. Drew wasn’t really on the radar.

“I think he’s just come so, so far and played so, so well that he’s probably made a lot of those contests a lot closer than people expected them to be.”

Gooden is thankful for the way things have worked out in Lawrence, a place once so foreign to him that people wonder why a Bay Area kid chose to go to school there.

“I don’t know. I ask myself that every day,” Gooden said, to laughter. “But you know, everything turned out great for me....

“Kansas plays a very traditional type of basketball, very fundamentally sound, team-oriented. I think it took me time to adjust to that.... I finally adjusted probably a couple of months ago.”

Just in time to leave? Gooden has asked people to let that wait until later.

For now, he’s enjoying where he is. “Everybody wants to follow the footsteps of their father,” he said. “I was lucky and fortunate to have my father around in my life. I just wanted to be him, whatever he was.

“He was a construction worker. I felt that I wanted to be a construction worker when I got older. He played basketball; I wanted to play basketball. He showed me clippings of him in college. I wanted to show my son clippings of me in college.”

He played in Finland....

Enough’s enough. Drew Gooden will play in the NBA.