BUFFALO, N.Y. —
The situation was a tense one, West Virginia clinging to a four-point lead over Missouri with just two minutes and a couple of seconds separating the Mountaineers from a Sweet 16 matchup with Washington.
The Tigers were scratching and clawing as they do, but every time they tried to roar, little more than the meow of pussy cat came forward. Still, there was a tension in the air that comes only in the midst of March Madness.
A West Virginia shot went up at the basket and clanked off the rim, Cam Thoroughman standing in perfect position to pull it in, but doing that would just not be the Cam Thoroughman we have all come to know and love.
You see, if something strange is going to happen on a basketball court, it is certain to happen to Thoroughman this occasion was no different than how many others, the rebound plunking him squarely atop his closely cropped head and bouncing straight into the air, when Kevin Jones could corral it, pass it to Joe Mazzulla, who drove and was fouled as Da’Sean Butler came to Thoroughman and hugged him with a big grin on his face.
Never a dull moment when Thoroughman is in the game, that is for sure.
“Seems like something funny always happens,” Thoroughman said. “I can create some laughter.”
Indeed, it was just a couple of games ago when Thoroughman found himself loose on a breakaway, the only thing that could possibly keep him from making the layup was … himself.
And darned if he didn’t, his leg seeming to give on him just a bit as he went up, throwing him off that the ball never came close to going in.
Then, too, there was tense moment after Thoroughman used his head to get WVU a rebound. This time he found himself at the free throw line, the lead at five and 1:18 left. This time Thoroughman managed to miss a pair of free throws, but fear not, Butler flashed out of nowhere to grab the offensive rebound and put it up and in for what probably was the basket that clinched the game.
“We’re used to Cam missing them,” Coach Bob Huggins joked later in the day. “It may have been a surprise to them. It wasn’t to us.”
Right then, when Thoroughman missed and Butler skied for the rebound and saved the day, a thought wandered into the vacuum that is this mind: If only you could put the two of them together you would have … Clark Kent and Superman.
The mild mannered forward who is everyman on the basketball court, a blue collar worker without extra skills who uses his head and his heart to get the most out of his
talents and a player who refuses to accept such comparisons as this one is to Superman but who probably ought to wear a cap with a big S on his chest.
He is the man who scored 43 points against Villanova last year. He is the man who hit no fewer than six game-winning shots in the final 20 seconds of games this year alone. He is only the third man to score 2,000 points in West Virginia basketball history.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s …
“I don’t want comparisons like that,” Butler said after leaping over the tallest building in Buffalo to score 28 points while pulling eight rebounds, hitting four of West Virginia’s five 3-point field goals, assisting on two baskets, picked up two blocks and a steal.
When asked to describe Thoroughman, Butler took this route:
“He works so hard and does so many things people don’t see. We need a lot of people like that. You can’t win a national championship without players like that.”
What is most wonderful in trying to merge Thoroughman and Butler into a superhero is that each is a personable, intensely likeable person who cares about the right things in life.
If you can forget about what they do, which is play basketball, and concentrate instead on who they are, you come up with a real superhero.
In Butler’s case, this is sometimes hard to do because success often devours a person’s ability to remain a real person.
Perhaps the best way to put it is that when you can fly, it’s hard to stay down to earth, yet Butler does it.
Huggins addressed that after the Morgan State game.
“You can be too nice a guy, be too good a guy,” he said. “I think if Da’Sean has maybe a fault, he may be too nice a guy, too good a guy. But I think, above and beyond that, he really wants to win.”
In the end, if there is anything that ties Butler and Thoroughman together, it is this one thing.
In fact, when asked the difference between beating Duke two years ago and this year’s advancement to the Sweet 16, Thoroughman put it this way.
“This year we have one goal — the National Championship,” he said.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
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