By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — There come times when an athlete has to look himself in the face, even though there isn’t a mirror in sight.
West Virginia University’s Alex Ruoff reached such a moment early in Saturday afternoon’s 62-59 victory over South Florida at the Coliseum.
“A terrible start,” Ruoff admitted. “I start off with two turnovers and an air ball.”
And that failed to mention that South Florida’s Dominique Jones, who would finish with 35 points, the most since Georgetown’s Mike Sweeney scored 35 against the Mountaineers in 2003, drove by him twice for layups.
In some sports, you have time to gather yourself when you get off to a slow start. In baseball, you spend a lot of time within your own mind as you stand around on defense or sit in the dugout. In football, there is time in huddles or when the other unit — be it offense or defense — is on the field.
But in basketball, there isn’t a whole lot of down time to be introspective, and so it was that when the first TV timeout came at 15:11, Ruoff looked into the mystical reflection of himself and had a little chat.
“You can either keep going down that path or forget about it and move on,” he said to himself.
Ruoff opted to move on.
While neither he nor any of his teammates could put shackles on Jones, Ruoff rescued his own game in ways that you have seldom seen from him before. He decided to take the ball to the hoop rather than standing and popping from the outside, and he began hitting the backboards.
When it was over, Ruoff had 19 points and had turned off the turnover spout that he had opened at the start of the game, recording only one more turnover the rest of the game.
It was a tribute to the growth Ruoff has had since he came to West Virginia as a John Beilein 3-point shooter, the man who was supposed to fill in the role young Pat Beilein played on those NCAA Tournament teams.
“I was talking to South Florida people the day before the game and to some other people, and the general consensus was that he’s a better basketball player today than he ever was,” said WVU coach Bob Huggins.
The emphasis was on the term basketball player.
Once upon a time Ruoff was a shooter and a passer.
“He now has more ways to score on you,” Huggins said. “He’s more versatile.”
Hitting 3s still remains Ruoff’s specialty, and he leads the team with 43, but to be honest his 37.4 percent shooting from 3-point range is down from the 41 percent he shot last year. But his newfound ability to go to the basket has allowed him to increase his scoring output for the fourth straight year, this time by almost three points a game over last year.
He leads the Mountaineers at 16.5 points a game, barely ahead of Da’Sean Butler’s 16.4 points a game.
It’s not normally easy to change one’s basketball persona in mid-career.
A shooter is normally a shooter for life. It comes more from one’s psychological makeup than from one’s physical abilities.
For example, Joe Mazzulla will always be a player who thinks of driving to the basket rather than taking an outside shot, while Ruoff is the other way.
But by adding the ability to go past the defender, there is a new aspect to Ruoff’s game that must be respected, and it helped him get unwound in this game.
“In transition, every time I came down the court I saw (Jesus) Verdejo looking right at me,” Ruoff said.
Scouting reports get around, and the report on Ruoff was that he would pull up and shoot the 3 in transition, so opponents are now crowding him. If, however, it stops him shooting the 3, it doesn’t keep him from shooting by them and going to the basket.
Along with this addition to his game, Ruoff has worked hard on his rebounding. At 6-6, he’s capable of grabbing a handful of rebounds a game and, just as important, of boxing out so that others can grab rebounds.
“He kept the ball alive for us during that flurry on the basket,” Huggins said, referring to one moment when the Mountaineers had five consecutive shots on the basket before Kevin Jones finally scored.
Not that that was important, West Virginia was only leading by one point at the time, 51-50.
“Alex has grown up a lot since I got here,” Huggins said. “And I’m sure he’s grown even more since he first got here. Think about Alex as a freshman in the situation he was in at the start of the game. He probably would not have responded as well.”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
