Longhorns' Happy Hoofer

By Chris Dufresne

March 24, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

No player in this year’s NCAA tournament knows more about “big dances” than Royal Ivey, Texas’ senior guard.

The Longhorns have qualified for the tournament every year Ivey has been in Austin -- call that a Texas four-step.

Long before the Longhorns, though, Ivey made his most impressive cuts on rugs.

Cardozo High in Queens has produced its share of basketball stars: Rafer Alston (Fresno State, Milwaukee Bucks), Duane Woodward (Boston College) and Duane Causwell (Temple, Miami Heat).

No one expected Ivey to join this chorus line.

In fact, Ivey failed to make the freshman basketball team.

He was at Cardozo, a magnet school, for the school’s dance program.

In terms of toughening up a New York City kid, this was like a dad naming his son Sue.

“Oh, man, people dogged me,” Ivey said. “ ‘You’re a dancer? How can you be a dancer?’ ”

Ivey figured he’d make like Arthur Murray to get into Cardozo, then make a bee-line to basketball.

He figured wrong.

Jennifer, his schoolteacher mother, made Ivey stick with dance all four years.

“Modern jazz, tap, a little bit of ballet, hip-hop -- I did it all,” Ivey said.

Ivey’s troupe played all the big-time venues.

“Nursing homes, junior highs,” he joked.

Ivey even developed a standard line for the neighborhood bullies.

“There’s good perks when you’re a dancer,” he said. “I was in a class with 50 girls and two guys.”

Fast-forward from Cardoza to last weekend’s first-round subregional in Denver.

Texas, expected to wither after point guard T.J. Ford, the 2003 John R. Wooden Award winner, jumped to the NBA after his sophomore season, upended Princeton and North Carolina.

The third-seeded Longhorns, who play seventh-ranked Xavier on Friday in an Atlanta regional semifinal, are 25-7 and have advanced further in this tournament than Stanford and Kentucky.

Ivey, who nailed more sambas in high school than three-point shots, emerged from Denver as the gut-check leader of Texas’ most celebrated senior class.

In two games, rotating between point and shooting guard, the lanky, 6-foot-3 Ivey had 32 points, 13 rebounds, nine assists and only three turnovers while playing 72 of a possible 80 minutes.

This is the same guy Texas Coach Rick Barnes once wanted to ship back to “Dance Fever.”

Barnes took a flier on Ivey only on the advice of an assistant coach, who’d seen Ivey while recruiting another player. Barnes’ early evaluation of Ivey was brutal: The kid could not play.

Dancers are tough, though, and it seemed as if Ivey had been auditioning his whole life.

“I couldn’t be this, I wasn’t any good,” Ivey said. “I just fed off that, turned negative energy into a positive. People try to break you. I thank God they couldn’t break me.”

He played a New York City game, which features shooters and playmakers. Ivey was neither.

“Everyone in New York could score, everybody could handle the ball and pass,” Ivey said. “Everyone wants to be a point guard. So I had to go down a different route to make it. In order for me to get on the court, I had to play defense.”

Ivey eventually made the basketball team at Cardoza and then played a year at prep school. He received lukewarm interest from major colleges and got a shot at Texas only after a player quit, leaving a scholarship to fill.

Ivey joined a freshman class that included Brandon Mouton, James Thomas and Brian Boddicker. Now seniors, they have won more games, 98, than any other four-year class in Texas basketball history.

The players learned to subjugate their egos.

Ivey was the point guard before the diminutive Ford arrived in 2001 and, for two seasons, dominated the game with his cat quickness and pinpoint passes.

Then, quickly as he’d come, Ford was gone, off to the Milwaukee Bucks, leaving Ivey and Co. to regroup.

“They put us in the cellar of the Big 12,” Ivey said. “They said, ‘T.J. Ford was the messiah.’ ... He brought a lot to Texas basketball, but I think this group of guys, we’ve been through a lot, even before T.J. was here.”

Ivey takes pride in what Texas has accomplished without Ford, even though it hasn’t been easy.

The point guard position became a shared role, everyone chipping in for the greater good.

Mouton, a small forward, is Texas’ main scoring threat. Yet, in two tournament games, he outscored Ivey by only three points, 35-32.

Ivey has picked up his scoring, even as he continues playing defense against the opposition’s top player.

Ivey is Texas’ outspoken leader; Mouton more the steadying influence.

“His work ethic, everything he does is for this team,” Mouton said of Ivey. “What he does sort of brushes off on myself and the underclassmen, who look up to Royal and see how hard he works to help this team win.”

Ivey has improved steadily each year and may be saving his best for last.

He says his dancing days are over but concedes that ballet and basketball have a common choreography.

“It helped my agility and my lateral movement,” he said of his dance experience. “All the different kinds of stretches, the different ways you move your body. It helped me a lot.”

Ivey doesn’t know how much more basketball he has left.

He has at least one more game at Texas.

Someday, he wants to become an elementary school teacher -- second or third grade.

“My mom is a teacher; both my grandparents are teachers,” he said. “I come from a generation of teachers.”

First, Ivey wants to take the Longhorns back to the Final Four, possibly to avenge last year’s bitter national semifinal loss to Syracuse.

If it all ends this week, though, Ivey couldn’t have envisioned a better ride.

Tap-dancer from Queens gets lead role in Lone Star hoops extravaganza?

“Not in my wildest dreams,” Ivey said. “It’s worked out pretty well. I can’t be any happier. You never want it to end. But I know it’s going to end. I hope it ends in the best way.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

NCAA Tournament Schedule

Division I men’s regional semifinal games (all times Pacific):

East Rutherford Regional

Thursday, at Continental Airlines Arena

* Oklahoma State (29-3) vs. Pittsburgh (31-4), 4:27 p.m.

* Saint Joseph’s (29-1) vs. Wake Forest (21-9), 30 minutes after first game.

Atlanta Regional

Friday, at The Georgia Dome

* Texas (25-7) vs. Xavier (25-10), 4:27 p.m.

* Duke (29-5) vs. Illinois (26-6), 30 minutes after first game.

St. Louis Regional