Larry Brown lives for thrill of game

Charlotte center Nazr Mohammed played for Larry Brown in Detroit. I ask him how he’d describe Brown to somebody who had never met him and he says, "I have an example."

It’s this.

One day before a Detroit practice, Brown stopped Mohammed and asked if he had seen Kentucky play the night before night.

Of course Mohammed had watched the Wildcats. He played for the Wildcats. He is a Wildcat for life.

Brown began to talk excitedly about a play Kentucky ran and the more he talked the more excited he became. Here’s a guy who has been coaching so long he used to wear leisure suits to basketball games, and he still gets thrilled when he sees a new twist.

So at practice that day he taught his professional players the college play he had seen on TV. And when the Pistons played, they used it.

Did it work?

"Of course," said Mohammed. "It was Kentucky."

Comments

[David McKnight]

I encountered one of my best Final Four Fan lines when Larry Brown was coaching at Kansas. Thanks to Tom Talks, I can finally use it twenty years later.

Oklahoma and Kansas advanced to the title game of the 1988 Final Four in Kansas City. Duke had made it to the semifinals, which is one reason I was traveling out that way. I was "driving around" in Oklahoma and Kansas looking for some good sidebar pieces on fan reaction to that neighborly geographic matchup in Kansas City. (I used to go out West on vacations and "drive around" looking for interesting stuff to write about.) So I wound up on the Kansas-Oklahoma line and made stops in Coffeyville, Kan., and South Coffeyville, Okla., to chat with local hoops fans about the title game. I thought that Coffeyville and South Coffeyville reaction would be geographically poetic or at least in the humorous tradition of the Old West that Will Rogers always enjoyed talking about.

And thus s an Oklahoma enthusiast, in predicting a Sooners victory over Larry Brown's Jayhawks, who provided a vivid if philosophically "flavored" assessment of basketball and life across the line in Kansas.

The Sooner backer asserted: "Ain't nothing over there but scalawags and sunflowers."

Of course, Brown and the Jayhawks won that NCAA title game. And naturally, neither my free-lance story nor the choice quote from South Coffeyville, Okla., ever saw the light of day back in North Carolina because I had violated the first rule of UNC Tar Heel journalism:

Never say anything unpleasant about the state of Kansas.

Now some of us are trying to convince the UNC journalism community that it should not be an ethics violation to say something nice about the Show-Me State of Missouri. After all, Frank McGuire, Larry Brown and Roy Williams all won NCAA title coaching victories there. And if that isn't enough, don't forget that Tyler Hansbrough and Ed Williams are from there too.