By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Wellington Smith didn’t know much about this Pitt-West Virginia thing when he left Summit, N.J., to come here to play basketball for the Mountaineers.
“I didn’t expect much,” he said on Tuesday, the day before he would play in his final Backyard Brawl at the Coliseum. “Now I see what it’s like and it’s like nothing you could imagine. You just can’t put yourself in those shoes, going against DaJuan Blair, Sam Young or Gary McGhee.”
Bob Huggins, on the other hand, has known as long as he can remember what the rivalry was like.
He was born in Morgantown, played at WVU.
“It might have been worse when I played,” he said before putting the finishing touches on his game plan, his team having climbed to No. 6 in the nation. “You probably won’t have Tiger Paul and Junior Taylor get into a fight.”
Not hardly.
Tiger Paul is long gone now, but he was a tuxedo-clad Pitt nut and Junior Taylor was the ultimate Mountaineer fan of the day, so it was inevitable they would clash.
“And I don’t think the students will be dragging a Tony Dorsett banner around Fitzgerald Field House,” Huggins said, referring to another WVU student stunt during Huggins’ time as WVU player.
Things have toned down some since then, perhaps because the Big East is so competitive that every game is like a rivalry game.
“Today there’s six TV cameras watching you with everything you do,” Huggins noted. “It’s more national.”
In those days, you could do your brawling in relative privacy.
But still, this Pitt-West Virginia thing is a step above the normal.
And it is growing.
In recent years, there’s been a lot to play for, both in the national limelight, both contenders in the Big East.
Smith knows. He still can recall leaving his man, Ronald Ramon, to cover Keith Benjamin, only to have Benjamin pass to the open Ramon, who buried a game-winning 3-point shot as the clock expired on the 2007 game at Pitt.
It still haunts him to some degree, as does the battles he would have down low with the wide-bodied Blair.
When Blair was there, Pitt was known for being the more physical team, although the pendulum has swung back West Virginia’s way.
In fact, after losing to South Florida, the talk at Pitt was that it had to get back to its old physical ways, but when it comes into the Coliseum at 7 p.m. tonight is going to find a WVU team that is able to dish it back at them.
On this night, 6-9, 270-pound Deniz Kilicli becomes eligible and will be able to do some banging underneath with the Pitt players.
That’s just fine with Smith, who has been battling him daily in practice while Kilicli sat out a 20-game suspension handed down by the NCAA for playing on a team with a professional in his native Turkey.
“After dealing with him every day, I can’t wait for him to start playing. Now he can bully somebody else,” Smith said.
In a way, Kilicli has already paid the Mountaineers dividends, for it has turned Smith into a better player, hitting from the outside like he never has before.
It goes back to Smith being fully aware that Kilicli was going to become eligible at some point in the season and when he did he well could be cutting into his playing time. Smith had produced one of the best games of his career against Ole Miss with 19 points, then had gone into a shell.
His playing time dropped to 14 minutes in a couple of games and his shooting was far off the mark.
It reached the point that one night he came into the Coliseum alone at about 8 or 9 p.m. to work on his shot, finding a cure by adding height.
All of a sudden he was making 3s like he had not done his whole career, enough that he offered an alternative to Huggins when Kilicli is in the game, a chance to leave him in and sit Kevin Jones for a rest.
“I can play more now,” Smith said. “He may not be taking my minutes.”
Certainly when Kilicli is in the game, WVU will have a different look, an inside presence, a rebounder and scorer on the inside.
You might even say he will give WVU what Blair gave Pitt, and that will allow Jones and Smith to expand their games.
And it all begins tonight, this new look for the Mountaineers, a look that may just put them over the top.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
