Frosh Durant takes nation by storm, leads POY race

	Many believe that Kevin Durant will be either the first or second player taken in this year's NBA Draft. AP
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Even at the ripe old age of 18 years and four months, Kevin Durant is in little need of a secondary career option. From the second he stepped on the floor at Texas, the freshman has overwhelmed Big 12 competition and opened a debate over whether he, and not Greg Oden, should be the No. 1 pick in the upcoming NBA Draft. Yet the soft-spoken Longhorns star admitted recently that he fancies himself an amateur meteorologist on the side. "I'm a big fan of weather, and whenever there's a storm rolling in, I go online and try to see where it's at, how it formed and where it's coming from," he said. "Ever since I watched the movie Twister with my mom as a kid, I've been interested."

It has only been appropriate, then, that Durant, a 6-foot-9 phenom with a 7-foot-6 wingspan and the ability to play all five positions, has overtaken the national player of the year race with the force of a multiple-vortex Texas Tornado. Averaging 30.1 points and 13 rebounds over the Longhorns' first 11 conference games -- despite playing in a lineup where six of the top eight regulars are rookies -- Durant could soon become the first freshman to ever win any of the major national POY awards (the Associated Press, UPI, Naismith, Wooden or Oscar Robertson) if he beats out the prime senior contenders, Wisconsin's Alando Tucker and Nevada's Nick Fazekas.

Durant's candidacy is a perfect storm that began massing well before he was born in Suitland, Md., in 1988. It started in 1972-73, when the NCAA lifted its freshman ineligibility rule, and gained momentum with strong rookie seasons by the likes of Pervis Ellison, Chris Jackson, Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony that helped erode voters' natural bias against first-year players. It reached its peak when the NBA's age-limit rule was implemented simultaneous to the arrival of one of the greatest freshman classes of all-time, with Durant as the headliner.

"Keb-Keb," as his grandmother, Barbara Davis, still calls him, arrived in Austin this summer worrying that he was the youngest person on campus, seeing that his age (17) was lower than his shoe size (18 in Nike Air Maxes). But by February, with his box-score assaults having become must-see events on ESPN, Durant was already saying, "I don't feel like a freshman anymore."

For a player of Durant's caliber, that is now the expectation. A phenom on the fast track to the NBA is allowed to feel young in August but counted on to act like a senior by March, when his performance will be judged against the gold standard of instant impacts -- 'Melo's national title run with Syracuse in 2003. To find the last college great who truly felt like a freshman, one must go back to before Keb-Keb's storm was even on the radar.

Time of his life

One would expect Bill Walton to file away 1970-71 as the Lost Season of his career, an NCAA-mandated residency in the obscurity of UCLA's freshman team, sandwiched in between his schoolboy-hero days in La Mesa, Calif., and future as a three-time Naismith Award winner. The freshman-ineligibility rule, which was lifted two years later, kept Walton from knowing if he was capable of a clean sweep of Naismiths. Yet when asked if, while watching the jaw-dropping freshman exploits of Durant and Oden this season, he feels he was robbed of a similar opportunity -- he uses his best Walton-as-broadcaster voice to assert that his rookie season was SO MUCH FUN.

Fun, because the red-haired 18-year-old, along with fellow freshmen Keith Wilkes and Greg Lee -- the nucleus of the squad that would go undefeated next two seasons -- ran wild against SoCal jucos and freshman teams, posting a 20-0 record for the Brubabes. "It was such a different world; we were just running up and down the floor, having an incredible time," said Walton, who averaged 18.1 points and 16.1 rebounds. "There was a game against L.A. State where we were tied 85-85 at half, and our coach, Gary Cunningham, was in our faces about us not playing defense. And I said, 'Coach, everybody is playing great right now.'"