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A player to remember Bennett by
It's a cold, I thought. It's Wisconsin. It's after Thanksgiving. Your immune system would be suppressed, too, if you were coaching a team with expectations elevated by the fresh memory of the least likely of Final Four appearances. And maybe Dick Bennett's sniffles, apparent from my seat in the press room of Milwaukee's Bradley Center following Wisconsin's 78-75 overtime defeat of Maryland on Wednesday night, really were the post-nasal tailings of a pre-conference schedule. Weren't they, in any case, the leaky emotions of a man who knew what few else yet knew, least of all his players -- that he had just coached his last game? After he and his players said their postgame peace to the press, Bennett gathered his team in the locker room and shut the door. It was the public, not them, that had ground him down, he told his Badgers. The requests for appearances, the demands of the media -- for 35 seasons, at Wisconsin high schools, at Stevens Point, at Green Bay, even in Madison, all he'd done was coach. Why was this 36th so different? There'd been that moment in Knoxville a week ago, against Tennessee, when he'd jumped on his guys for running the wrong play. But it was his own fault, he later realized. He'd drawn up the wrong play. Bennett held himself to the same high standards he set for his players. That's why his teams played so precisely. And if he was slipping, he owed it to them to step down. His players bussed back to Madison. Bennett and his wife drove to Appleton, where they'd attend the funeral of the father of Wisconsin-Green Bay coach Mike Heideman, who had been Bennett's assistant at the same school. The state would hang crepe of its own the next day. Flying back home, unaware that Bennett was just then divulging his decision to the world, I mulled over what had been his final turn on the sideline. But it wasn't the Badgers' coach who occupied my thoughts. It was Mike Kelley, the point guard and defensive master whose balance rests in the number on his jersey, 22. Kelley is the poster child for all that Bennett believes. If Dominique was the "Human Highlight Film," Kelley is the "Human Instructional Video," a guy who loops every Five-Star station drill over and over in the course of a game. Whichever Maryland player Kelley guarded -- Juan Dixon, Drew Nicholas, the mongoose Byron Mouton -- struggled until Bennett deployed his floorleader on someone else. At one point Kelley simply grabbed the ball and wrenched it from the hands of some hapless Terrapin, an utterly clean but cold-blooded heist in this season of hair-trigger whistles. When Maryland switched to a zone, there was Kelley at the outer membrane, issuing the crispest ball fakes I've ever seen, using every bit of guile to get that Terps shell to crack. I'd watch a cable channel that featured nothing but Mike Kelley ball-faking against a zone. We who live the Hoop Life develop a thing for lines. We become amateur numerologists, able to divine imaginary video clips from strings of numbers the way cryptologists in Langley, Va., read volumes from code. And Kelley's was a line to fire the imagination: Twelve assists, six rebounds, three steals, two blocks, five points, one turnover in 45 minutes. When I touched down in New York and finally learned of Bennett's decision, I asked myself: How could a coach pass up a chance to see a player like that through the end of his eligibility? Then it hit me. Of course. Dick Bennett looks at Mike Kelley and says, "Ah, but my work is done." Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of the forthcoming
Called for Traveling: A Year in the Country of Basketball. He can be
reached at awolff@si.timeinc.com.
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