By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — We live in a world where being good often isn’t good enough.
Think about it for a moment. We can’t just have an NFL Championship Game. We need to have a Super Bowl. And it isn’t enough to play for the American Championship in baseball, we have to play for the world championship in the World Series even though no other country is involved.
In this atmosphere, we in the sports writing and announcing businesses tend to do a bit of exaggerating, just as the schools and teams do in publicizing their athletes.
They don’t just run fast, they fly. They don’t jump high, they soar into the rafters. Being a star isn’t enough. They must be superstars.
And sometimes it all gets out of hand.
That was the point West Virginia coach Bob Huggins was trying to make on Saturday after his Mountaineers scored a dramatic, pulsating victory over Louisville, 77-74, in the Coliseum.
While Da’Sean Butler was the day’s designated hero with 27 points, including the last four of the game, Devin Ebanks wasn’t far behind. With WVU trailing 72-70 he scored on a driving layup and drew a foul, making the free throw for the lead. Then after Louisville regained the lead with but 45 seconds left to play, he soared into the rafters for an offensive rebound of a missed jump shot by Wellington Smith.
Had Louisville collared that rebound, the Cardinals well may have won the game, but it was Ebanks who got it, leading to a timeout and the out-of-bounds play on which Butler scored the go-ahead basket.
“Huge, absolutely huge,” Coach Bob Huggins said of the offensive rebound.
And then he had some more to say.
He noted Ebanks had scored but nine points, but that he had 11 rebounds and four assists for a pretty good afternoon of basketball.
Huggins now wanted to set the record straight about his relationship with Ebanks.
“Someone made it seem that I was mad at Devin,” Huggins said. “I wasn’t mad at Devin. I take everyone out. I’d take Da’ out if he couldn’t make a shot.
“The truth is Devin hasn’t shot well since he hurt his hand, but he has never been a big scorer. That’s not Devin. He’s a 6-9 guy who can handle the ball, rebound and pass,” Huggins concluded.
There are those, though, who feel Ebanks hasn’t been what they expected, coming in with as high a profile as he had out of prep school. There was talk of him being one of those one and done players, playing a year of college basketball to fine tune his game before going into the professionals.
But here he is in Year 2, doing fine but suffering by being compared to an imaginary picture everyone had of him before he arrived.
That’s just the way it is, especially with New York City players, and Ebanks is not alone.
At Cincinnati, Huggins’ former school, Coach Mick Cronin landed the nation’s most heralded recruit last year in Lance Stephenson, the all-time leading schoolboy scorer in New York City history. By the time he got to Cincinnati they were comparing him to Oscar Robertson, that school’s equivalent to Jerry West.
They neglected to realize that he needed some time to adjust, to grow into being a college player.
He leads the Bearcats in scoring, yes, but only at 12.2 points a game when they expected those figures to be reversed at 22.1 points a game.
“I talked to Lance about not trying to live up to other people’s expectations,” he said on the Big East coaches’ conference call last week. “I told him to work on being as good as he can be.
“He’s had a good year,” Cronin continued. “He might be Freshman of the Year in the Big East. You just can’t live up to ridiculous expectations other people set for you.”
The same is true with Ebanks. He is what he is, a truly talented player whose game is still growing. When he develops an outside shot to compliment his inside game, rebounding and ball handling he will be a star.
No, make that a superstar.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
