MORGANTOWN — As a nation, we live our lives with stars in our eyes.
We have been Madonna-ized, Clooney-ated and Lady Gaga-ed to death.
If we see our own little portion of the world as nothing but a mundane, 9-to-5 existence, we get our kicks through Tiger Woods’ indiscretions, thorough the rehabilitation of Kobe Bryant’s image or simply through the pure joy of watching LeBron James do his thing.
We look as voyeurs upon their lives, gazing through the looking glass of fame and enjoying the beautiful people, the clothes they wear, the cars they drive and food they eat.
Yet every so often it is brought back home that the little people have a whole lot to offer, too.
That is what brought us to Cam Payne on West Virginia University’s Senior Night.
Certainly, the night was supposed to belong to Da’Sean Butler and rightfully so. Few have come through the school with the tools he possessed, not only on the basketball court, but off it, where he lived up to his own expectations.
Asked how he would like to be remembered, Butler thought for only a moment before saying:
“He delivered. He worked hard and, most of all, he was a nice guy, not a jerk.”
Yes, the night belonged to him, shared with Wellington Smith, another guy who was less skilled as a player but no less skilled as a person.
Deep into the game, though, we were reminded that there was another senior lurking in the shadows of the bench, one who was graduating early, one who was there not because he was thinking of the NBA, not because his books, tuition and meals were being paid by scholarship.
Cam Payne was there because he was doing what he loved to do.
He was to Butler what a Pip was to Gladys Knight, a nameless, faceless backup singer who was asked to do little more than repeat over and over “He’s leaving” while Knight would sing out “on that midnight train to Georgia.”
Oh, he ran with the team, lifted with the team, took the taunts and stares that no one can throw out like Bob Huggins.
And you sometimes wonder why someone would do that and get in return maybe a minute on the court of a game long since decided.
“Because,” Cam Payne said, “it’s a great experience, just being around the guys. It’s almost like a fraternity. Being part of a team is something most people never experience. I could not have lived with myself if I hadn’t tried.”
You learn and you learn, the more you hang around this business of sports, that it isn’t only the guys at the top who are worth learning about. Indeed, quite often the best stories come from those on the edges, the guys who have to work the hardest to get the least and who enjoy it the most.
It is that way with Cam Payne, whose father, Drew, is a longtime friend of Huggins.
Indeed, Payne recalls his first thoughts of Huggins. He and his father had gone to Cincinnati to see the Bearcats play Wake Forest.
“My desire always was to play at WVU, not for Bob Huggins,” Payne recalled. “Fast forward six years. He comes to West Virginia, just to coach me.”
Payne laughs when he says that, just as he laughs when someone mentions that Huggins scouted Payne while he was playing at George Washington.
“Right,” he says. “It was just coincidence that we were playing Huntington with Patrick Patterson.”
OK, so he didn’t get Patterson, but Payne became a delightful consolation prize.
Huggins really was close with the family. He recalls the year he was out of coaching, after he and Nancy Zimpher got their rather messy celebrity divorce at Cincinnati, that he was looking for things to do.
“It’s not a bad thing to wake up and say, ‘Hmm, what am I going to do today?’” Huggins said.
He didn’t want to get on airplanes and travel, having already logged 2.4 million miles on Delta alone, estimating he had totaled more than 3 million miles in the air.
So it was that he spent some time in Charleston, visiting the family.
That was just about the time Payne was selecting his college. When Huggins showed up at WVU, it was a no-brainer.
And so he came out for basketball, a popular teammate and a hard practice player who suddenly found himself the third wheel on Senior Night, sitting on the bench until the student section began urging Huggins to put him into a game that now was over.
Payne had handled the early part of the evening, walking down the carpet for the last time, being presented a framed uniform jersey, although it was his freshman No. 25 shirt and not the No. 20 he wears now, the school not having enough of those on hand to spare it.
He had resigned himself not to cry like he did when Darris Nichols walked two years ago and Alex Ruoff did last year, and he did pretty well on his own introduction but admitted to tearing up when Butler came out.
“He,” said Payne, “is an all-time great guy.”
But then, when the students called for him, when Huggins sent him onto the floor, well …
“It’s something I’ll remember the rest of my life,” he said.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
