Patrick Reusse: Racial stereotypes persist in college basketball

SAN ANTONIO — John Thompson had his Georgetown team in the national championship game three times in four years. The Hoyas lost to North Carolina (and Michael Jordan) in 1982, defeated Houston in 1984 and were upset by Villanova in 1985.

Thompson's appearances in the Final Four invariably included lectures on the stereotypes that the nation's sports media did nothing to dissuade when it came to big-time college teams dominated by black kids from the inner city.

One thing that drove Big John crazy were the television analysts who so often told their audiences that a white kid was hard-working and smart, while a black player was always athletic.

This cliché was repeated so often by Billy Packer, Dick Vitale and the like that someone eventually invented a word to cover it: athleticism.

Big John tried his dangdest to get the media to change its way, but a quarter-century later, the stereotypes still exist with Jay Bilas and this second generation of made-by-ESPN stars.

Bilas could see by February that his beloved Dukies were going nowhere, so he turned to fawning over North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough to a point that was sickening.

Then, 10 days ago, as Carolina was turning back Louisville, noble veteran Dick Enberg was raving so incessantly over Hansbrough that you wanted someone to splash him with cold water and cool him down.

It could have been 1982 all over again. Hansbrough, the most prominent white player in the country, was doing amazing things because of "effort" like no one had ever seen before on a basketball floor.

Athletic ability? It hardly received a mention as North Carolina and the 6-9 junior made their way to the Final Four.

Media groups and every other organization fell over themselves to honor Hansbrough. He's had a clean sweep of the player of the year awards -- the Rupp, the Naismith, the Robertson, the Associated Press and a few others. He still has not been summoned to accept the Wooden Award, but that undoubtedly will occur.

Admittedly, he's a pretty good player. But there's no way he dominated the college game so completely that players such as Kansas State's Michael Beasley and Davidson's Stephen Curry should go without a plaque.

And we do know this about Hansbrough: For 13 minutes Saturday, he wasn't as good as Kansas' Cole Aldrich, the 6-11 freshman who played at Bloomington Jefferson.

Following the Kansas victory, Aldrich was among three Jayhawks brought to the mass interview session. The annoyance that some reporters have felt over Hansbrough's ESPN/CBS-created mystique came out when Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com offered this preamble to a question aimed at Aldrich:

"Cole, you were playing against someone who apparently plays the game harder than anyone in college basketball history ..."

This drew a laugh from the assembled journalists, although who knows how many in the large room had joined the Hansbrough landslide with votes for the various player of the year awards?

There was another comical moment a few minutes earlier. The four locker rooms for Saturday's participants were located in the same long hallway. The media was being held back until Kansas concluded CBS' postgame interview and made its way to the locker room.

There was a small TV monitor sitting on a chair at the front of the hallway. The Kansas players happily turned the corner, at the moment CBS was showing Hansbrough's father crying in the stands.

One of the Jayhawks stopped, pointed at the screen, yelped, "Boo hoo," and then continued down the hallway.

The team that came to this tournament facing the cliché against which John Thompson was railing so long ago -- black city kids means athletic but helter-skelter -- was Memphis.

And then the Tigers went out and put on one of the great displays of disciplined basketball in Final Four history while destroying UCLA 78-63.

It was great because Memphis managed to run a well-designed offense while playing at an incredibly fast pace. Forget all that nonsense about a team such as Wisconsin being the model of discipline because it makes a half-dozen passes before taking a shot.

Discipline to be admired comes from a team that runs at every opportunity, attacks constantly in its half-court offense and scores 38 points with three turnovers in the first half against a team with UCLA's defensive reputation.

For sure, Derrick Rose, the Memphis freshman from Chicago, was much more disciplined -- and more energetic -- than Hansbrough or any of his Carolina teammates were in Saturday's second game.

On Sunday, Chris Douglas-Roberts, a junior from Detroit, was asked what he saw as the biggest misconception about his Memphis team?

"It really doesn't have anything to do with basketball," CDR said. "The biggest misconception is us as people -- I mean, off the court. I feel people judge us [negatively] and they don't really know us.

"They don't really know us and they tend to judge based on how we look, how many tattoos or whatever.

"They don't see the real people. They don't see how great a teammate Joey [Dorsey] is, how great Robert [Dozier] is."

Patrick Reusse can be heard weekdays on AM-1500 KSTP at 6:45 and 7:45 a.m. and 4:40 p.m. preusse@startribune.com