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Sports Illustrated: Flying Tigers
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.c...2487/index.htm
 | March 02, 2009
Flying Tigers
Thanks to its Hell-raising coach and a tough, frenetic style that has recaptured the hearts of its disaffected fans, Missouri has overcome scandal and apathy to become a contender once again
TIM LAYDEN
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THE BUILDING of modern Missouri basketball took more than 30 years, the demolition less than a decade. Not long ago Mizzou was a reliable power, with 20 NCAA tournament appearances—and three Elite Eight finishes—in 28 years under longtime coach Norm Stewart and his successor, Quin Snyder. For Missourians the Tigers were a source of state and university pride built on principles that matched their own. "Here they like a team that works hard, plays defense and protects the home court," says Jon Sundvold, a two-time all-conference guard who played at Missouri from 1980 through '83 and still lives in Columbia. "They like tough teams." ¶ But tradition can prove fragile if not given proper care. Missouri has not reached the NCAA tournament since 2003, and in that time has left behind the customary detritus of college sports collapse: a deposed coach, NCAA sanctions, off-the-court embarrassments, falling attendance and, most damning, defeats and anonymity. From one home in Columbia and another in Palm Desert, Calif., Stewart, 74, watched and agonized. "It took a lot of young men a lot of time and effort to get to the point that we reached," says Stewart. "It was tough to see it dismantled."
Yet just as the Tigers lapsed into irrelevance, now comes an unexpected rebirth. After a 66--53 win over Colorado in Boulder last Saturday, Missouri improved to 23--4 overall and 10--2 in the Big 12, and at No. 11 in the nation this week is surely NCAA tournament bound. And in a four-day stretch beginning Sunday, the Tigers are scheduled to play at Kansas and host Oklahoma at Mizzou Arena in Columbia on March 4, games that will command the sport's attention and help configure postseason play. "Three years ago students would ask me if we were ever going to win more games than the football team," says senior guard Matt Lawrence. "Now they're asking me what seed we're going to be in the tournament."
Missouri has returned to college basketball's consciousness behind third-year coach Mike Anderson, who has melded an unlikely mix that includes two battle-scarred seniors, two transfers and seven first-year players and embraces the 40 Minutes of Hell style that Anderson learned in 17 years as an assistant to Nolan Richardson at Arkansas during the heyday of the full-court-pressing Hogs. The Tigers, who beat border rival Kansas 62--60 on Feb. 9 for the first time in three years, have not lost at home this season. They are alive again, both as a cautionary tale about the perils of taking success for granted and a parable of revival.
THEIR STORY begins somewhere en route to the bottom, during a bus ride to an airport in Waco, Texas, on Feb. 7, 2006. Missouri lost 90--64 to Baylor that night, the Tigers' sixth consecutive defeat, to fall to 10--11 for the season. Snyder walked to the middle of the bus and offered up a brief speech. "He said, 'There's more to life than basketball,'" recalls Lawrence. "And I remember thinking, Man, that was weird. I wonder what that was all about."
It was all about the end of Snyder's brief, tumultuous tenure in Columbia. He was hired in 1999 to replace Stewart, a state institution who had starred as an All-America guard at Missouri from 1952 through '56 and went on to win 634 games in 32 years as the Tigers' coach—though the program had brushes with the NCAA police in his time too. Snyder was 32, the top assistant under Mike Krzyzewski at Duke and one of the hottest names in the profession, a comer with a great mind and even better hair. "We had to recruit him just to get him here, because so many other people wanted him," says Missouri athletic director Mike Alden.
Snyder won 62 games in his first three seasons and went to the NCAA tournament each year. He also presided over the recruitment of controversial guard Ricky Clemons, who was arrested in a domestic battery case in January 2003, plead guilty to reduced charges and was jailed that July. While incarcerated, Clemons made allegations about cash payments and improper academic aid to players, which ultimately led to the resignation of two assistant coaches and a major NCAA investigation that landed Missouri on three years' probation in the fall of '04. Snyder's '04--05 and '05--06 teams won only 16 and 10 games, respectively, and worse, seemed to be losing that connection to their loyal populace. "Things just unraveled," says Sundvold.
Two days after the Baylor loss Snyder walked into the locker room before practice wearing jeans and a dress shirt and told the team that he was resigning. His top assistant, Melvin Watkins, was named interim coach, and Missouri finished the regular season with two wins in its final six games and a loss to Nebraska in the first round of the Big 12 tournament. "A whirlwind," says Lawrence of that period.
"It was pretty disheartening around here."
It was also terrifying for the university. The spectacular $75 million, 15,061-seat on-campus Mizzou Arena had been completed during Snyder's last year, built on the goodwill from Stewart's tenure and the buzz of Snyder's hot start.
Now it was half empty for home games. (Mizzou's average attendance had fallen from an average of 12,281 in the smaller Hearnes Center in 2004 to 8,369—10th in the Big 12—in Snyder's final season.)
"You can say that the program was in disarray," says Alden.
"Our brand had been damaged significantly. Looking back, we were trying to do too much too quickly—build an arena, have great success on court, recruit nationally. We should have slowed down. Quin worked his tail off. All of us could have done a better job."
ON MARCH 26, 2006, Anderson, then 47, was hired to restore the program. He had finally gotten his chance to be a head coach when Alabama-Birmingham hired him in '02, and in four seasons with the Blazers his teams had gone 89--41 and made three trips to the NCAA tournament. But Anderson credits Richardson for his good fortunes. He got his start playing for Richardson at Tulsa for two seasons in the early 1980s. "He was one of the toughest guards I ever coached," says Richardson. "He would take a charge on a Mack Truck."
That toughness was hatched in Anderson's youth. He grew up in Birmingham as the sixth of 10 children born to Willie Lee and Lucy (Peaches) Anderson. They lived in a three-room shotgun house, and Anderson spent countless hours at the rec center. If there was a game, he played it. If there was a race, he ran—or swam—in it. When his high school started a soccer team, Anderson was the goalie.
He brought that same passion for competing to Missouri, running his holdover players through a de facto tryout in the spring of 2006. "There is a reason the job was open," says Anderson. "They had some issues here, ain't no question about that. I needed to see what I had."
The first year his team was a surprisingly solid 18--12 despite more off-the-court issues. Reserve guard Mike Anderson Jr., the coach's son, was suspended from the team after a drunk-driving arrest in February 2007 but was later reinstated. Returning starter Kalen Grimes was dismissed from the team in July '07 after he was charged with second-degree felony assault for hitting a man with the butt of a shotgun. (Grimes never went to jail and ended up graduating from Mizzou in '08.) Later that month forward DeMarre Carroll was shot in the ankle outside a Columbia nightclub while trying to break up a fight. In late January five Missouri players were suspended following a bar brawl; leading scorer Stefhon Hannah was dismissed from the team. "Those were things that made the school look real bad," says Leo Lyons, a senior who was among the five suspended players simply because he was at the club that night, even though he did not take part in the brawl. On Jan. 30, 2008, the Tigers played with just six scholarship players and two walk-ons at Nebraska and nearly beat the Huskers. Three days later, with two of the five suspended players back in uniform, they beat Kansas State and were enthusiastically rooted on by the Mizzou Arena crowd. From embarrassment, Anderson had planted the first seeds of respect.
He had also begun assembling a team that could play the frenetic style he wanted. The Tigers have 12 players who average at least six minutes per game, a relatively undersized collection that attacks passing lanes in ways that must warm Richardson's heart. (Richardson is a frequent visitor to Columbia, where Mizzou players call him the Grandfather.) Missouri is third in the nation in steals (averaging 10.3) and second in turnover margin (+6.6).
The team is a disparate collection of players. From his own family tree, Anderson found Carroll, a 6'8" 225-pounder who every summer attended the Arkansas camp in Fayetteville but chose Vanderbilt over UAB when Anderson recruited him out of high school. "He wanted to play [at a bigger program], and that's O.K.," says Anderson. But Carroll chafed at Vandy's Princeton offense and jumped at the chance to transfer into his uncle's system, where, after sitting out the 2006--07 season, he averaged 13.0 points in '07--08 and 17.0 so far this year, while often playing at the top of the Tigers' press. "He's got the freedom to go out and make plays," says Nebraska coach Doc Sadler. "That's a big part of Missouri's success."
From Snyder's roster Anderson already had Lawrence and Lyons. The 6'7", 203-pound Lawrence was told that he wouldn't be able to play in Anderson's frenetic system. "I'm a taller guard and a white guy," says Lawrence, who averages almost 20 minutes and 8.7 points per game. "People warned me. But I'm a Tiger." Lyons (14.3 points, 6.0 rebounds) is a dangerous scorer whose 6'9", 244-pound frame presents outside matchup problems.
Guard J.T. Tiller, a relentless defender, was part of Anderson's last recruiting class at UA and transferred to Missouri to follow his coach. Zaire Taylor, another transfer (from Delaware), has made two game-winning shots this season and is such a basketball junkie that he spent all of New Year's Day in the gym working on his shooting. He celebrates the sport in the poetry he writes and performs at campus open mike nights:
When you entered my life, nothing was wrong
Couldn't go left, everything was right
At a prep school in Fitchburg, Mass., Anderson found Kim English, a 6'6" guard so dedicated to practicing that during last summer he often slept on a recliner in the Mizzou locker room so that he could shoot late at night and lift weights early in the morning without having to go back to his dorm in between. He continued the routine once the season started, returning to the gym to shoot predawn jump shots after road losses to Illinois on Dec. 23 and Kansas State on Jan. 28.
Together, this crew has recaptured the fan base in much the same way that Stewart's teams first engaged it—with relentless, energetic play. "I'm in complete support," says Stormin' Norman, whose name is painted on the Mizzou Arena floor. "They're playing the game the way good teams do, with energy. enthusiasm and intensity."
The balance sheet looks better too. The last three home games have been sellouts, and the final two are expected to be as well. "[During] the Kansas game I could feel the floor shaking," says Carroll. "I've never heard it like that."
Lyons recalled the moment and the win. "With everything that's happened here," he says, "it's like a movie."
Like every team in America, the Tigers' vision is trained on March. But for Missouri, this group's legacy is something grander. A state's confidence has been restored. A program's course has been righted. "For the older guys," says Lawrence, "it was a side goal of ours to turn this program back around. I came to games on this campus when I was a kid. I knew what it could be like. We wanted to make the school believe in the basketball team again."
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02-25-2009, 07:03 PM
Sports Illustrated: Flying Tigers
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