Wally World

Students at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, can be a restive lot. Last May they overturned cars and threw bottles and rocks at cops to protest a proposed town ordinance that would have moved up closing time at local bars by one hour, to 1 a.m. But on the day before the beginning of this semester, an August afternoon stifling enough to incite a full riot, two dozen students stand in a checkout line at the campus bookstore, docile as sheep, while advancing at a glacial pace. Most contented of all is a 6'8" senior with beetle brows and a winsome, lose-few smile.

Wally (World) Szczerbiak isn't beaming quite as brightly as he did a few hours earlier while running back downcourt after tap-dunking the muffed layup of a Miami teammate during a pickup game. Or grinning quite as broadly as he did at lunch, when another RedHawks' player noted the sesame pellets sprinkled over Szczerbiak's lettuce and asked, "What, a rabbit take a dump on your salad?" Or glowing as brilliantly as he had a little while earlier while recounting how, at freshman orientation three years ago, he had met Shannon Ward, the Ohio farm girl and part-time model whose company he has kept ever since. But considering that he's lugging a crateful of books with titles such as Principles of Operations Management and getting nowhere, Szczerbiak, whom NBA scouting director Marty Blake calls "the best shooter in America," is in what, for anyone else, would pass as megawatt mode. The others in line stay in line. For if World can wait, they can, too.

"You'll be studying so much you won't have a chance to play basketball!" says the cashier when, nearly an hour later, she finally rings him up.

"Oh, I'll find time," Szczerbiak says with a...well, you know the rest.

To better understand what unalloyed joy has to do with being not only the nation's top shooter but also SI's choice as the best all-around collegiate player in the land, it's worth making the schlepp across campus to the office of the man who nicknamed Szczerbiak after the amusement park in National Lampoon's Vacation. Miami coach Charlie Coles knows a little bit about savoring life's every moment. He describes himself as "a guy who's already used up his redshirt year" and then yanks down the neckline of his polo shirt to reveal what looks like the outline of a pack of Camels just below the skin of his left breast. It's a defibrillator, installed after Coles went into cardiac arrest during the first round of last season's MidAmerican Conference tournament.

"Now, I don't want Wally thinking the game's a carnival," Coles says, "but I always tell him that he plays better when he's in a great mood, when he's got that smile on his face. I've seen some players, they get mad, they play better. Not Wally."

Like that cinematic fun park, Wally World promises thrills at every turn. He posts up and throws down. He jumps center and blocks shots, rebounds and leads the break. He can snap a defender's ankles with a crossover or curl around a screen for a splay-legged three. From that playful first name to his unspellable last—"Ukrainian name, Polish spelling," says his dad, Walt, a former player in the ABA and Europe—from that arcade's worth of skills to an off-season jones for boogie boarding, there's an aspect of whimsy to Szczerbiak, who figures to follow Ron Harper and Dan Majerle as the next MAC nugget in the NBA.

Coles fires up the VCR. There's Szczerbiak in the second overtime of a game against Dayton last season, flicking in three straight threes and blocking a shot. There's an SEC-quality slam in transition at Tennessee that, like almost all of the RedHawks' action, went untelevised. Coles loads another tape, this one from a game against Ohio. From the right corner Szczerbiak jabs left and then sails along the baseline, Statue-of-Libertying the ball in his right hand before flushing it down. "He may not be from New York City itself," Coles says, "but he's from New York."

Though Szczerbiak averaged 36.6 points a game as a high school senior, recruiting services underrated him because he came from namby-pamby Cold Spring Harbor High on the tony north shore of Long Island. He arrived in Oxford as an unheralded afterthought and then grabbed everyone's attention by hitting all nine of his shots in his first home game. Since then he has made more than half of his shots from the field, including 47.6% of his threes.

Szczerbiak did himself no bigger favor than to spend last summer playing for the U.S. Goodwill Games team, which included Duke's Elton Brand, Connecticut's Khalid El-Amin and Utah's Andre Miller. At the trials in Colorado Springs, Szczerbiak sprang for 43 points in one scrimmage, sinking nine of 11 three-pointers. "There was a junior USA Basketball team of recent high school grads and high school seniors-to-be, all highly touted, training out there," says St. Joseph's coach Phil Martelli, who assisted Clem Haskins of Minnesota with the Goodwill Games team. "It was invaluable for them to watch this guy who they'd never heard of kick everybody's ass."