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1. Auburn With 11 players back from a No. 1-seeded team, the Tigers have the troops to win it all
Well, Fatou, your fears are well-founded, for there are many things testing the humility of Auburn's basketball players these days. Season tickets for home games at Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum are history for the first time in history. Membership in the Cliff Dwellers, the student cheering section named in honor of coach Cliff Ellis, has more than doubled, to 500. Midnight Madness, the practice-opening ritual that Ellis in his previous 27 years of coaching at four schools had never seen fit to schedule, drew 8,000 maniacs on Oct. 15. Preseason magazines spread strategically on the coffee table in Ellis's office -- "We just happen to leave them around when the recruits come in," says Ellis -- bear the photo of N'diaye's teammate, senior Chris Porter, and bannered stories about the SEC regular-season champs. Now Ellis can lay out one more magazine on his creaking table because SI's choice for the No. 1 team in the land is Auburn. We like the Tigers for many reasons (including, Fatou, the improvement made over the summer by your son) but none so much as the fact that, by today's standards, they're practically ancient. Imagine: four seniors, four returning starters, 11 returning lettermen. It's one thing if a bad team boasts this many familiar faces, quite another when a very good team, which went 29-4 and made it to the Sweet 16, has no defectors to the NBA. "I've been blessed," says Ellis. There's no position at which the Tigers are wanting, including a new one -- power 'froward. Both Porter and sophomore David Hamilton sport 1970s-style 'dos. (Porter's is fairly subtle; Hamilton's soars toward the Chia Pet proportions made famous by ABA immortal Darnell Hillman.) Porter plays all over the court -- out on the break, coming off screens in Auburn's motion offense, posting up on set plays, leaping like a madman to distract the inbounds passer in one of Ellis's countless trapping defenses. Ellis insists that had the 6'7" Porter been projected as a top 15 pick in the 1999 NBA draft, instead of someone in the 23-to-28 range, where Ellis's sources put him, he would have counseled Porter to leave. Porter is equally adamant that he would not have gone no matter what. "It took me too long to get here," he says. "I'm not leaving without my degree [in criminal justice]. I'm on target to get it. I will get it." Don't bet against this former nonqualifier who spent two seasons at Chipola Junior College in Marianna, Fla., before arriving last season and tearing up the SEC with 16.0 points and 8.6 rebounds a game. "Chris has become a serious guy and a great, great person," says his friend, Daymeon Fishback, the Tigers' likely starter at small forward. "You could walk from one end of this campus to the other and not find one person who doesn't like CP." Ellis and his staff like Porter even more for adhering to their off-season program of attempting at least 350 outside shots every day to, as Porter puts it, "move my game out." If he moves it out too far he'll run into mop-topped shooting guard Scott Pohlman. Warning to journalists: Though he's far too polite to get in your face about it, the 6'2", 172-pound Pohlman is weary of being compared to a certain television son of a certain sheriff of a certain rural North Carolina town. He has put on about 10 pounds of muscle -- he bench-presses a not-so-wimpy 240 -- and has the endurance of a long-distance runner, which is why Fishback calls him "our little Energizer Bunny" and Ellis calls him "our Jeff Hornacek." Here's a richer vein to mine when questioning Pohlman: Find out exactly how he gets into the coliseum on solitary midnight shooting missions that sometimes last until 1:30 a.m. In addition to the outside shooting prowess of Pohlman and Porter, Fishback, who was Kentucky's Mr. Basketball in 1996, is a threat to score from the perimeter, as is sophomore Mack McGadney, who has never met a shot he didn't like. There's one more outside gunner, too. "Yes, I have been practicing that shot, and I can make it," says the 7-foot N'diaye, whose full name is pronounced MAMA-do EN-jai and who's known by his teammates as 'Dou. When he speaks of his long-distance shooting, N'diaye refers to a 15- to 17-foot jumper, not a three-pointer, but the fact that he's even talking about taking something outside the paint is a departure from his no-O show of years past. (In three seasons at Auburn he has attempted only 4.7 shots per game.) N'diaye made great strides as the top find at Pete Newell's Big Man Camp in Hawaii over the summer; Newell compared N'diaye's footwork with that of Hakeem Olajuwon, who, like N'diaye, was a soccer player before taking up basketball. The 24-year-old N'diaye says that he never picked up a basketball until he was 18. "I would hear my friends talking about this Michael Jordan, and I thought nothing of it," he says. Eventually, his curiosity got the best of him, and he ventured to the playground with a basketball at night so no one would see him. "You will not believe this," he says, "but I could not even touch the rim at first. [He was only about 6'9" in those days.] I still have much to learn. When you start playing a game late, you miss so many of the technical things." And when you start playing it early, you sometimes have the technical precision of point guard Julius Robinson, a.k.a. Doc. Robinson said he was only four when he began playing the point for a team of 11- and 12-year-olds coached by his father, Randolph, a legendary Alabama high school player. "When you're that age and the ball's bigger than you are," says Doc, "you've got to give it up. I never wanted to play anything but point guard, couldn't care less about doing anything except setting up my teammates." Robinson and two other senior starters have a spot in a poster that's in the planning stages at Auburn. It will be called 3-D and will feature Doc, 'Dou and Da Man (Porter). It's sure to be a big seller in Tiger Town, but just make sure Fatou doesn't get one. Issue date: November 15, 1999
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