By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — It wasn’t midnight, but it was madness.
Basketball returned Morgantown Friday night with the annual Mountaineer Madness, and it was a spectacular evening of fashion and frolic, topped off when John Flowers edged Devin Ebanks.
With the crowd hopping in front of top 20 recruit Adreian Payne from Dayton, Ohio, a 6-10 center who has narrowed his choice to Kentucky and West Virginia, the past met the future as a number of greats and near greats from years past took part in the activity.
There was a return of Kevin Pittsnogle to the basketball floor at the Coliseum to take part in a free-throw-shooting contest that also included the likes of Brent Solheim, Lester Rowe, Josh Yeager, Brian Lewin, Dave Ligouri and Jarrod West.
In one of the hidden moments of the night there was a handshake between West and WVU men’s coach Bob Huggins, one that was in part warm and in part icy, for it was West’s long 3-point shot that sent the Mountaineers to the Sweet 16 in 1998 at the expense of Huggins’ Cincinnati team.
But, if anything, this night was something of a transitory time when the Mountaineer program adopted a touch of what Huggins’ Cincinnati program was all about.
Midway through the event, seniors Da’Sean Butler and Wellington Smith were called to center court, stripped their sweatsuits and revealed the team’s new uniforms.
It was met with applause, but not exactly an ovation for the uniforms were black, just as Cincinnati used to wear.
But black is one of Cincinnati’s team colors. WVU’s tradition is old gold and blue and, to be honest, you can be just as “bad” dressed in old gold and blue as you can in black.
Hugs, though, is Hugs, and he has his reputation to keep up.
Smith and Butler had a nice time posing in the new unis, displaying not only the color tie in to the Mountaineers but bigger and stronger bodies, as most of the Mountaineers displayed.
“I think our bodies are a little better,” Huggins said to the crowd. “We’re no longer the guys who get sand kicked in their face. We’re going to kick some sand.”
That brought down the house.
The truth is that this is a bigger, stronger team. Ebanks has added 20 pounds and Kevin Jones 35, and none of it is the kind of weight you gain in retirement.
Butler and Smith are particularly interesting cases, for they came in under John Beilein, who had a different philosophy about the way the game is to be played and he didn’t believe in bulking up.
“We came in and it was funny, but we were all about the same height and weight. We were a bunch of skinny guys,” Butler said.
The men and women’s teams were introduced and scrimmaged, but the highlight – if you accept that broadcaster Jay Jacobs in drag during the free-throw-shooting contest was anything but a highlight – came in the slam dunk contest.
Two days earlier, Ebanks had predicted that freshman Dan Jennings, himself something of a specimen at 6-foot-8 and 260 pounds, would win the contest, but Jennings could not get a second dunk to go in the 60 seconds allotted and failed to reach the finals.
So it was the finals came down to Flowers, who had been putting on a wonderful show from the moment he was introduced and came out wearing a blown-out Afro wig and sliding across the floor, against Ebanks.
Flowers’ first dunk saw him bring a student out of the Maniacs and go over his head one a one-hand dunk to get to the finals while Ebanks was his usual smooth and powerful self, one off the shot clock and put back with one hand.
In the final, Flowers brought the house down as he brought three students onto the floor, lined them up and went over all three of them with one hand, then put down a reverse dunk, putting all kinds of pressure on Ebanks.
Ebanks came out and hit a monster dunk right away, then had freshman Casey Mitchell trying to feed him off the overhanging scoreboard. Mitchell could not get the ball to bounce right, however, even missing the mammoth scoreboard completely once, turning the title over to Flowers.
In celebration, Flowers leaped onto the scoring table and held his fists in the air in a Rocky Balboa pose.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
