As hesitant as I am to admit it, I’m starting to believe in Ty Walker. That’s because, as hesitant as he has been to do so, he’s starting to believe in himself. At least that’s the new look I see in his eyes.
Almost all players have a lot of growing up to do when they arrive at college. Walker had more than most. His biggest enemy has always been himself. Not since Loren Woods, another 7-footer with a lot of growing up to do when he got to Wake, have I seen a player quicker to pound himself into submission for a mistake. It was brutal to see the damage he could inflict on himself.
Coach Jeff Bzdelik has been relentless in his attempts to get Walker to forget the last play and move on to the next. I remember vividly coach Dave Odom talking about the difficulty of coaching Woods, and how he had to keep bucking him up and telling him the roof of Joel Coliseum wasn’t going to fall in the next time he didn’t box out an opponent and allowed a dunk.
“I can’t coach my team,’’ Odom would say. “I’m too busy coaching one player, telling him everything’s going to be OK.’‘
Walker, from what I’ve observed, is a pretty smart individual. Too sensitive for his own good, maybe, but he’s not lacking for bytes on the old hard-drive. And it appears that, at long last, all the admonitions of Bzdelik—and before him Dino Gaudio—are starting to sink in. Walker is still not the most confident player on the team, and never will be. But he does appear to believe in himself more than ever before, more than I thought I would ever see.
And we’ve seen in this last spate of games what a force a Ty Walker who believes in himself can be. He was the dominant player on the floor against BC. Not the best, but the one who had the most impact on the game.
Coach Steve Donahue of the Eagles was asked in Monday’s teleconference if he saw the same impact from Walker’s six blocks and numerous other altered shots that others did.
“No doubt—no doubt,’’ Donahue said. “In my 25 years you rarely come across a kid like him defensively, so it’s hard to understand it. He’s a hard guy to referee too. That’s the thing. Like we got two goal tends, and I’m sitting over there and I’m thinking `I never see these kind of blocks shots and I assume to referees don’t either. It’s a mental thing that gets into a guy’s head around the rim.
“I thought Ty did a great job of really doing a solid job on that end of the floor, and then on the offensive end I thought he moved well. I thought he made the right passes. He made a shot when he had to.
“I think they’ve got a lot of pieces to that team. I think they have a heck of a scorer in (Travis) McKie. Their guard play has really gotten more solid since last year and into this year with (C.J.) Harris and (Tony) Chennault. And then you throw in a kid like Walker who comes in there and really adds a piece on the defensive end—I think if they play the way they played here they’re going to be very successful.’‘
I talked with Bzdelik about Walker yesterday and he said plenty of work remains. Walker still has to learn when to go for the block and when not to. A bad decision there usually leads to an offensive rebound and a dunk. But progress is being made, and it’s gratifying for all to see.
“Well he does a great job of protecting the rim,’’ Bzdelik said during his portion of the weekly teleconference. “He’s very long. Again, if you look at his career, he’s had very little experience to draw upon, even though he’s a senior. He virtually never played, to be honest with you.
“He’s really starting to get comfortable and confident out there. But yeah, he affects the game in a positive way around the rim. Coupled with the fact that he’s been able to help us a little bit offensively. Both he and Carson (Desrosiers) have really given us some quality effective minutes there at the center position.
“Last game against Boston College they combined for 19 rebounds and seven blocks. So we’ve had some games where they’ve given us a double-double over the last several games. That’s been a position that’s been strong for us.
“Again, Ty is someone who has a lot of potential, a lot of ability with his athleticism and length, and his ability to block shots. We’re going to need that if we continue through the ACC season.’‘
In a few hours I’m headed over the Joel Coliseum to watch Wake play Florida State. The Seminoles will present a tough test for Walker. As I wrote in this morning’s advance Deacons to Take on Rugged Seminoles they’re the oldest, most experienced, most physically mature, most grizzled team in the conference. And I still remember how Bernard James, the 26-year-old Air Force veteran, had his way in both games against the Deacons a year ago.
Chances are Walker will struggle, but, given his newfound confidence, he might do better than anyone expects. And even if he does have a game he’d rather forget, then he should forget it. There’s another game against Clemson Saturday, and one against North Carolina after that on Tuesday. As long as he continues to play like there’s always going to be another game, then he’ll have another game to play long after he’s through at Wake.
Someone who would know told me last Thursday that Mike Krzyzewski still has a drawer full of letters questioning much about him and urging his removal as head coach at Duke. I’m not surprised. He’s a proud, hard-driven and hard-driving man who, like most coaches—or most humans, for that matter—doesn’t take kindly to criticism. And I remember just how heated and rancorous and vitriolic the criticism got in his early days at Duke, before he got the program up and rolling and became the best coach in the game today. When all is said and done, he may be remembered as the best ever. He’s already won more games than anyone in the men’s game, and give him another national title or two and it would be hard to rank anyone above him.
Yet on Jan. 5, 1983, he didn’t have many in his corner. What he did have was a posse on his trail.
Duke was coming off a 24-9 season, and only three years removed from a trip to the NCAA championship game, when Tom Butters, Duke’s AD, hired the largely unknown Krzyzewski from Army before the 1980-81 season. Krzyzewski was 33 at the time, and his record at West Point was decidedly mixed. Yes, he had gone 20-8 and 19-9 his second and third seasons, culminating the third season with a trip to the NIT. But the Black Knights then slid to 14-11 his fourth season. And in his fifth season, with the players he recruited in place, Army stumbled home at 9-17. So he was 73-59 overall when Butters handed him the reins of one of college basketball’s most storied programs.
His first team at Duke won 17 and lost 13, which couldn’t have satisfied many. Even with seniors Gene Banks and Kenny Dennard and junior Vince Taylor, the Blue Devils tied for fifth in the ACC at 6-8. I can still hear the howls.
His second team hit rock bottom, going 10-17 overall and 4-10 in conference play. So the pressure was really intensifying by his third season, when the Blue Devils, their talent level replenished by the arrival of freshmen Johnny Dawkins, Mark Alarie, David Henderson and Jay Bilas, started out with five wins in their first nine games.
But if rock bottom has a trap door, Krzyzewski fell through it on Jan. 5, 1983. That’s the date that mighty Wagner, a 2-7 team with a first-year coach (Neil Kennett) still licking its wounds from a 50-point blowout against Nevada-Las Vegas, waltzed into Cameron Indoor Stadium and made off with a 84-77 victory. In the piece by Cormac Gordon from silive.com linked here Coach K’s Hard Lesson you can read how the Seahawks, starved from a lighter than light pregame meal, played only six players—with three playing buzzer to buzzer.
The attendance was given at 5,500, but I doubt half that many were still around to see the Seahawks lift Kennett on their shoulders after the game and carry him to the visitor’s locker room.
“We could have played them another 40 minutes and we still would have lost,” Krzyzewski said afterward, “We couldn’t handle number 10.”
No. 10 was Bob Mahala, a guard who torched the Blue Devils for 25.
Jay Price, covering the game for the Staten Island Advance, remembered the treatment Krzyzewski got from the local media.
“They really grilled him,” Price recalled. “As far as they were concerned, this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.”
And if the media got in his face, it’s pretty easy to imagine some of the sentiments contained in the cards and letters Krzyzewski got from boosters and fans, the ones that are still tucked away in his drawer.
There are many reading this who have been strongly urging the removal of Jeff Bzdelik as Wake’s head coach. Some are even clamoring for the removal of the man who hired Bzdelik, AD Ron Wellman. The criticism of both has been, at times, heated, rancorous and vitriolic.
Bzdelik is in the second season of a rebuilding effort that is going to take at least another season, and maybe more than that, to reach fruition. And there’s a possibility that Bzdelik will never return Wake to ACC contention. Not all coaches succeed. Sidney Lowe didn’t at State. Bob Wade didn’t at Maryland. Bob Staak never did at Wake.
But if Wellman had cut his losses after the setback to Wofford, or the 36-point undressing by N.C. State, then we would never know if Bzdelik could have gotten it done at Wake. There are those among you who are convinced you do know that he can’t, just as there were those at Duke absolutely certain beyond a shadow of the doubt that Butters had ruined a proud program by hiring Krzyzewski. Butters, by the way, has to be one of college basketball’s great heroes for giving Kryzewski time to show what he could do. I’ll always wonder if he could have stayed the course in today’s internet age.
There are also those among you who wonder how dare I compare Bzdelik to the best coach in college basketball. Well I’m not. I’m comparing his current situation to that of Krzyzewski, back when he was 32-34 at Duke and 105-93 overall, back before he became the giant we know today.
Bzdelik says he doesn’t read the message boards and doesn’t go out of his way to see what people are writing about him. I told he’s smart for that. I see no way it could help him in his efforts to turn Wake around. Instead of a drawer, he could easily fill a hard-drive with the electronic missives he’s received in his 51 games as the Deacons’ head coach.
What Tom Butters knew, and what Mike Krzyzewski proved to be so, was that some things take time. Ron Wellman, I’m sure, will give Jeff Bzdelik that time. And he should.
Otherwise, we’ll never know. You might say you do, just like those who wrote the letters still in Mike Krzyzewski’s drawer.
Aberration—the act of departing from the right, normal or usual course.
Watch out for aberrations. They skew what we think we know.
The Wake team that had its way with BC in snowy Boston today in Jeff Bzdelik’s first road ACC win with the Deacons is the one everyone here hoped they would see coming into the season. Travis McKie was a beast, the best player on the court. C.J. Harris, playing with the patience and calmness of a 12-year NBA veteran, provided the steady hand. Tony Chennault, whose fearlessness and drive can, on his good days, make up for his limitations, never stopped attacking the goal.
And the two-headed monster in the middle, Ty Walker and Carson Desrosiers, made a bad day much worse for BC’s fledgling big men. As Bzdelik made mention afterward, their combined stat-line of eight points, 19 rebounds and seven blocks was the stuff of an All-ACC center. Walker was especially imposing, making Dennis Clifford look like the raw freshman that he is. Walker, who sat out the first semester for disciplinary reasons, has easily been my biggest surprise so far.
My takeaway from the 71-56 victory is that it’s making last week’s meltdown against N.C. State look more and more like an aberration. I’m talking the 36-point spread, not the fact the Pack won. Pretty much all teams have aberrations over the course of a season. If you don’t believe it, ask North Carolina. And I would imagine the more tenuous and fragile the team, the more likely they are to occur.
And the Deacons, for as good as they looked today, remain tenuous and fragile and probably will at least until the cavalry arrives next season.
But other than the no-show against the Wolfpack, the Deacons’ performance thus far in ACC play has been nothing to sneeze at. They already have more conference wins than they got all last year, and even in the losses at Maryland and Duke showed some resolve and cohesion. They’re a better team than they were last year, mainly, as I’ve written a couple of times before, because they are a team. They’re playing for each other and at least trying to do what the coach tells them to do.
Many arduous, uphill miles still have to be covered before Bzdelik gets the program back to where Wake fans feel it belongs. And it has yet to be determined that he’s the man to get it there. He did have a good day today. He got the mismatches he needed to get the most from McKie and when BC sprang its zone trap, the Deacons drove a stake in its heart with drives to the basket. Wake had practiced against the trap Friday. It was ready.
I’ll have a better feel about the Deacons chances against Florida State Saturday after I watch the Seminoles play Duke here at 4 p.m. Here’s hoping Wake can make a good day all the better by getting airborne in Boston to make it home by dinner time.
Wake and Duke had played for 3 1/2 minutes tonight at Cameron Indoor Stadium when coach Mike Krzyzewski of the Blue Devils, not seeing what he wanted on the floor, sent in three substitutes—Austin Rivers, Ryan Kelly and Tyler Thornton.
It’s not even the first media timeout and Krzyzewski has already sent more into the fray than would play for Wake in the first half.
What struck me in watching the Blue Devils cuff Wake 91-73 was that the Deacons are a far better defined team at this still early juncture than Duke. Bzdelik, by now, seems to know pretty much what he has and what he doesn’t. Krzyzewski is still pulling levers and pushing buttons and as likely to start a new lineup the next game as not. He’s come off as a bit touchy on the subject, saying tonight he doesn’t like the term bench player. That, I have to think, comes from his aversion to having labels, or worse yet, limits put on his players. I understand that. I also understand that who starts and who doesn’t can be one of the most overrated and at times even harmful distinctions that can befell a basketball team. My heroes growing up were the Red Auerbach Celtics, with Tommy Heinsohn and later John Havlicek playing the role of catalyst off the bench. And if they didn’t teach us the value of an indispensable sixth man, then Billy Cunningham and Bobby Jones did.
But the point is that Krzyzewski has any number of options from which to choose, all promising. Bzdelik has C.J. Harris and Travis McKie and six others who, at least at this stage in their careers, would not get on the floor for Duke. Put another way, what if Bzdelik got to play with whomever Krzyzewski didn’t start? Do you think Austin Rivers could help Wake? How about Ryan Kelly, or even Tyler Thornton? With Rivers or Kelly, the Deacons really could be dangerous.
So when Bzdelik shows up for his first game as a head college coach at Cameron Indoor Stadium, he finds himself in the proverbial gun fight without even a knife. He’s got a letter opener. A blunt one at that, with not much of an edge. The talent level has to be replenished for Wake to again become relevant in ACC basketball. I could see that even last week against N.C. State, though I’m not about to excuse the way the Deacons seized up on offense and let themselves get run out of their own gym. They’ll also have no such excuse Saturday at Boston College.
All the same, next year’s recruiting class can’t get here fast enough and who knows, some of the others might grow into front-line ACC players. Kyle Visser did, and so did Ish Smith. But they were more the exception than the rule, in that a coach usually has an idea of what he can get from a player at least by midway through his sophomore season.
By Graham on my ride back I got to wondering how many times this year’s Wake team would have to go to Cameron Indoor Stadium to get a win—even against a team that, for all it has accomplished against a meat-grinder of a schedule, has more questions than any Duke team I’ve seen in years. I imagine the Deacons could make dozens of trips to Duke before they pulled off an upset. Tonight they actually played pretty well, at least offensively, and they never had a chance.
I keep hearing the cavalry is coming. It had better be riding tanks. Letter openers won’t get it done.
Bringing Jonathan Himebauch aboard the Wake football staff appears to be a great move. WFU to Hire Assistant Coach Himebauch has impressive credentials, most earned with his time spent in the Canadian Football League. He was offensive line coach for the Montreal Alouettes for three years and had just been hired as offensive coordinator of the Toronto Argonauts after Scott Milanovich—the former Maryland quarterback who coached with Himebauch in Montreal—was hired as the Argonauts head coach.
Himebauch was starting center and captain for the USC Trojans in 1996 and 1997. Two bits in his bio caught my eye. He was recruited by his father Jack Himebauch, who at the time was the school’s recruiting coordinator. And he majored in English and Creative Writing. Can’t wait to ask him what he’s read lately.
And oh yeah, his brother Chris Himebauch was a swimmer at North Carolina.
The way these things work is once Jim Grobe settles on an assistant, he has to be approved by the Human Resources Department, like any other new employee at Wake. It’s been known to take a while, sometimes around a week. No one at Wake is denying the reports from Canada that Himebauch is joining the staff, but they’re not confirming it either, and won’t until the process is completed.
When Grobe is in a position to comment, I plan to get up with him and ask him about both new hires and what responsibilities they will have. Looking forward to that opportunity.
It was a good day, spent interviewing and writing a piece on Nikita Mescheriakov that’s scheduled to run in tomorrow’s Journal. Hope you check it out.
I knew his brother Yegor, 12 years his senior, was a really good player for Mike Jarvis at George Washington, and I happened across this Yegor Mescheriakov Profile in George Washington Today, the school’s alumni magazine that catches up with one of the school’s favorite sons.
Later we had a little fun before practice at Joel Coliseum. In case you’re wondering what language Nikita is speaking, it’s Russian.
Jerry Wainwright, the former assistant at Wake who went on to head his own programs at UNC Wilmington, Richmond and DePaul, liked to joke that the only two places worth recruiting are orphanages and prisons—orphanages because they have no parents, prisons because there’s no alumni.
Wainwright is a funny, funny man.
Actually my experiences with parents have been for the most part very pleasurable. Having gotten to know the player, it’s almost always a charge to see where they came from. Of course I’m not a coach responsible for doling out playing time.
One parent I go back a ways with his N’Earl Godwin, who along with his wife Robin are to thank for Brooks Godwin, the senior walk-on who is well-regarded enough among his teammates to have been named a captain on this year’s team. N’Earl and I coached baseball at Northwest Forsyth Little League when Nate and their older son, Trey, were coming along. We’ve kept up over the years, and I’ve always enjoyed running into him at Deacon Tower or Joel Coliseum.
So I knew to take the email he sent Sunday in the spirit in which it was intended. N’Earl dropped a line to note that it was actually Brooks who scored the final basket of Wake’s 76-40 loss to N.C. State Saturday instead of Daniel Green, to whom I had credited field goal in my game story. My defense is two-fold. By then I couldn’t watch any longer, and the actual play-by-play credited Green.
Brooks Godwin works too hard in practice not to get the props he deserves in a game. I’m glad to set the record straight, and thanks to a proud father for setting me straight. If someone had credited someone else with the timpani part Nate played with the Dallas Wind Symphony, I’d have something to say as well.
With North Carolina playing down in Tallahassee yesterday and Duke off until today’s game at Clemson, the press room at the Joel Coliseum was more packed than usual for yesterday’s game against N.C. State. So I had the great, good pleasure to see more of my old time friends than usual.
Getting to know and work with the sportswriters who cover the ACC is probably the best part about my job. I tell myself when I win the lottery I won’t go to many games. I’ve seen a few. But I would have to drop by from time to time just to catch up on so many buddies I’ve been through so much with over these past three decades.
One who is always a huge delight to see is Barry Jacobs, who you surely know as one of the preeminent authorities on ACC basketball. Jacobs would be a legend if for nothing else than the incomparable Fan’s Guide to ACC Basketball he produced in the 1990s and early 2000s. He taught us all new and compelling ways to look at a sport we’d been watching for years. But, luckily enough for us, he’s also churned out enough books, magazine and newspaper articles and website observations to keep ACC fans as informed as any you’ll find in the college basketball world.
Jacobs was good enough to chat with me before the game about what he has seen in the first week or so of the ACC regular season. Keep in mind our conversation took place before N.C. State ran Wake out of its own building and Florida State did to North Carolina what no one, Barry, I or anybody, thought we’d see done.
One week to the day after Jeff Bzdelik met with us media types to discuss what appeared to be a breakthrough 58-55 victory over Virginia Tech, he was back in the same seat yesterday to do what he could to explain a 76-40 meltdown against N.C. State.
There really wasn’t much to say, but he said it anyway.
From my seat at the scorer’s table, right next to where the officials huddle to review the monitor, I could see that Karl Hess and Bryan Kersey didn’t want to make a call that ejected Travis McKie from today’s game against N.C. State. I could see it in their eyes. As for the game, it was all over but the shouting by that time. And McKie is not a troublemaker. But they looked at the play once, and they looked at it again, and felt they had no choice.
So they called the Flagrant II technical that sent McKie to the locker room with 11 1/2 minutes remaining.
Later Brian Morrison, the ACC’s assistant commissioner for media relations, arranged that Lenox Rawlings and I could see the play as well. What many people don’t realize is that sportswriters, sitting courtside, are often at the mercy of fans at home watching a game and all its replays.
What I saw was McKie drive to his left, get stripped by Lorenzo Brown as he’s taking the ball up and, with his arms flying above his head, driving his elbow into Wood’s mouth. I saw what Hess and Kersey saw and I can’t argue with their call.
The savings grace is that because the foul did not involve fisticuffs, McKie’s penalty was over when the game ended. He’ll be eligible for Thursday’s game at Duke.
When coach Jeff Bzdelik had finished his post-game address, I made a bee-line to McKie and asked him about the play.
What happened?
“I was in the post,’’ McKie said. “I had the ball. I went up for a layup. I got stripped. The next thing I knew it was an offensive foul and I got ejected. And I can’t argue it. I didn’t intentionally try to hurt Scott. I think Scott knows that. I know that. We talked afterwards. I just had to respect the call and to leap forward.’‘
Did you recognize that you elbowed him?
“Not at all,’’ McKie said. “I thought they called a charge and he just fell and it was over with. I saw he got hit in the mouth and I told him `Are you all right?’ And he said `yeah,’
“They said I elbowed him in the mouth and I had to get thrown out. So I had to respect it.’‘
How much frustration was involved?
“When people look up to you to lead this team and carry the load of this team and you don’t do it and on top of that you get ejected it’s so sad,’’ McKie said. “So this is probably the worst game of my college career. This is a bad loss for us but I think this is a turning point for me individually. I think I need to do a lot more things off the court and on the court to help myself and my team get better. So I have to change.’‘
It’s to the great credit of Steve Shutt and Scott Wortman of the Wake media relations department that they made McKie available. It’s always been my contention that if a player is available when when he scores 25 at Maryland, then he needs to be available when he scores two and is ejected. But not everybody sees it that way.
Both McKie and Bzdelik said that they talked with Wood later and that Wood acknowledged the elbow was not intentional. I’ll have to take their word for it because N.C. State, as it so happened, only made two players available and Wood wasn’t one.
