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player ready...Other than a couple of sore knees from being piled upon by huge and happy friends, Florida’s Mike Miller reported that he would be fine for Sunday’s Illinois game and the reunion with the school’s former and not always fondly remembered basketball coach, Lon Kruger.
From the bottom of the pile of squirming delirium on the hardwood of the interminably named Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Miller screamed in part joy and part agony.
“I was telling them I loved those guys,” Miller said. “But I was always yelling for them to get off.”
Ain’t it the way, though? Illinois gets rid of an ersatz Michael Jordan from Penn and now the Illini have to face a hero named Miller, though not Reggie, never mind how dramatic was Miller’s overtime, buzzer-beating shot for Florida on Friday.
It wouldn’t be March Madness without such deeds, of course, and Miller’s was the first in this edition of hoops nuttiness, the kind of jaw-dropping climax over Butler that made Illinois’ plodding efficiency against Penn seem like bricklaying, and all four teams did a bit of that.
It is just that the story line should have been so simple:
Kruger and Florida reunited after unpleasant split. Gators want to get even. Kruger can’t figure out for what.
“It’s your guys’ [the media’s] job to stir that stuff up, I guess,” said Illinois forward Damir Krupalija. “But don’t expect us to help.”
It isn’t that the Gators who can remember when Kruger was around are unhappy with how things have turned out, but there is the sense Kruger wimped on the job for an easier life at Illinois.
“There is only one player there I recruited [senior Kenyan Weaks] and I didn’t coach him,” Kruger said. “There has been a clear break, length of time-wise.”
Yet if Florida had done the proper business of a No. 5 seed over a No. 12 seed and waxed Butler as easily as Illinois beat Penn, we could have been comparing life after Kruger in both places, the short version being that he made each one better, one by leaving and one by arriving.
Kruger’s replacement at Florida, Billy Donovan, who was hijacked from Marshall just as Illinois meddled to get Kruger, seems to get less out of his talent than does Kruger from his. McDonald’s All-American per McDonald’s All-American, Florida is much more blessed, leading 4-0.
So what Florida people still are wondering is how Donovan can get better players than Kruger could when Kruger left Gainesville believing that it would be impossible to get top basketball talent there and to ever compete with the overlord of all Florida athletics, Steve Spurrier.
Unlike Kruger, Donovan uses Spurrier to help recruiting, taking recruits to Florida football games and letting them touch the great man’s visor.
Donovan has made basketball such a student hot ticket that they sleep out in the street overnight to get the 2,000 free ones.
There are those left at Florida who bristle in recalling Kruger’s classification of Florida as a “transient state” and are itching for the Gators to prove something for them, exactly what is unclear, other than, see, it just takes a better man to make it work.
In one of those strange coincidences, Kruger and DePaul’s Pat Kennedy both might be now where they are because of Vince Carter, the incipient savior of the NBA.
When Carter, out of Daytona Beach, turned down both Florida and Florida State for North Carolina, both coaches needed no more prompting that basketball in Florida would always be a tough sell.
“I have good memories and lots of good friends there,” Kruger insisted. “My daughter went to school there.”
Carping on such adult pettiness seems even more trivial now when one mad dash by Miller with the clock eating itself toward zero can identify what all of this really means to those who actually do it.
“I’ll remember this until I am 65 years old,” said Weaks of Miller’s winning basket. “This is the greatest shot I have ever seen. This is the greatest moment of my life.”
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As for Miller, one of those aforementioned high school All-Americans Kruger knew he never would be able to pry out of Mitchell, S.D., the basket was rife with ramifications.
“This may just bring us all together for what we have to do,” he said. “When we know everybody has everybody else’s back, maybe we can reach the mountaintop.”
And there was Illinois finding some needed adhesion of its own in a career game from freshman point guard Frank Williams and a game of redemption from center Marcus Griffin, again his old bruising self.
Suddenly, sometimes and for all time, it’s just basketball.