By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — If Joe Mazzulla were an animal one suspects he would be best suited as one of those bighorn rams you see high up in the Rockies. If you’ve watched the Animal Planet or Discovery Channel you’ve seen how they react when challenged — just put their heads down and go head-first into their challenger, creating a loud “THWACK!’ that reverberates from mountain top to mountain top.
If he were an inanimate object, one suspects Mazzulla would be cast as a wrecking ball that is swung time after time at a building until he beats it into submission.
But Mazzulla is neither a bighorn ram nor a wrecking ball, but there are times, as they say in the commercial, where he plays one on TV.
This is especially true when it comes to his sideline as a West Virginia student, which is that of playing for the school’s basketball team.
Already in possession of his degree, just three and a half years after entering college, Mazzulla takes on basketball as he took on education — head first. If anything gets in his way, he just lowers his head and goes right at it.
It’s a great trait, if you happen to live above the tree line like a bighorn ram, but there are times when it can be a bit punishing if you happen to be doing it on the basketball court.
Mazzulla missed most of last year because of the punishing style with which he approaches a game where something as harmless hand-check can result in a foul. He tore his shoulder apart in one of those moments of reckless abandon that define his play last year against Mississippi and even now, more than a year later, it remains a sometimes painful distraction.
The result of this is that much of the afternoon when the Mountaineers are playing, Mazzulla is building up energy on the bench. His ability to perform at his best is limited by the shoulder, but it’s sort of like one of those head-butting rams.
He isn’t going to back away from a challenge because of a headache.
Mazzulla, since coming out of rather modest surroundings in Rhode Island, has redefined what it means for a basketball player to be “on the floor.”
That normally is taken as a player who is playing in the game, not on the bench but “on the floor.”
With Mazzulla, however, it’s more a literal term. When he’s in the game he’s on the floor as much as he on his feet.
Only the wax they use to give the court its shine is on the floor more than Mazzulla, who believes if the ball is loose, it belongs to him and no one else is going to get it.
Most coaches have a player with a similar role to Mazzulla’s, than being to change the flow of the game, to provide energy, but it usually is an offensive player, someone who can come in and hit a shot or two quickly to give the team a boost that is visible on the scoreboard.
Mazzulla’s role is quite different. He comes in to make sure points are not put on the board. His job is to intimidate a hot scorer on the other team with his in-your-shirt defense. He sticks to them better than their roll-on deodorant.
He bangs; he grabs; he swats away the ball. He makes them work so hard to get the ball that by the time they get it they are too tired to shoot it.
This is exactly what he did on Wednesday when South Florida’s Dominique Jones was eating West Virginia’s lunch. At halftime he had 19 points; the rest of the USF team had 11.
Mazzulla came in and put a stop to that. Oh, Huggins would note that the rest of the defense helped on Jones, but only because they could. He wasn’t running free in transition. He wasn’t going wherever he wanted to go on the court, doing whatever he wanted to do.
Each point came with a bruise.
By the end of the game, Jones was completely spent. His 19 points had become “only” 28. He was through, South Florida was through.
“We played harder,” Mazzulla said. “It was dragging them down. They were exhausted, I think, toward the end of the game and we had a lot more left in us. We chipped away, little by little, and it worked out over time.”
That would be over a period of time and not a period of overtime, as the Mountaineers pulled away and won easily.
The stage, therefore, was set for what well could be the highlight of the home season this Saturday at noon when Syracuse brings its 15-1 record and No. 5 national ranking into the Coliseum to take on the No. 9/10 Mountaineers.
Syracuse comes in averaging 85.2 points a game.
Let’s see what happens when the Orange butts heads with Mazzulla.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
