Basket Brawl

Football players figured in North Carolina's fitful season. Ronald Curry, the quarterback who was to understudy for senior point guard Ed Cota, ruptured his right Achilles tendon in October and didn't play a minute of basketball. But Cota wound up recruiting a replacement of sorts from summer pickup games in Chapel Hill- defensive end Julius Peppers, who led the Tar Heels in sacks last fall. Cota persuaded coach Bill Guthridge to give Peppers a look, and after a single practice in late November, Guthridge found a uniform for the buff freshman, whose father named him after Dr. J. The forward the Tar Heels call "Pep" is now the first player off the bench, able to fill in at any frontcourt position. "A godsend," Guthridge calls Peppers. "We definitely would not be here without him."

In practice, as the only player capable of guarding the 7-foot, 264-pound Haywood, Peppers gets a lot of credit for the North Carolina center's improvement. In the Tar Heels' defeat of top-seeded Stanford in Round 2, Peppers dogged Cardinal shooter Ryan Mendez on the perimeter, swim-stroking past screeners as if they were offensive linemen. When Haywood fouled out with more than eight minutes to go in the South Regional semifinal against Tennessee, Peppers stepped in to rebound, defend and score six unexpected points. In the final North Carolina's inside strength so preoccupied the Tulsa defense that Joseph Forte, the Tar Heels' freshman guard, ended up scoring 28 points.

The Heels' top scorer may be Forte, but their coach is mezzo piano. Dean Smith's longtime assistant, now in his third season on his own, is known within the Carolina family as both Coach Gut and the Reverend, the latter in reference to a long-ago Christmas Eve when the team was traveling through Europe and Guthridge delivered a Scripture reading about the Nativity in a Spanish church.

He claims not to have heard fans calling for his firing this season and says he doesn't listen to talk shows, but if he takes the local paper he couldn't have missed the headline in the Durham Herald-Sun after the Tar Heels' ACC tournament quarterfinal loss to Wake Forest, the one that read GUT-TER BALL. Even after guiding the Tar Heels to their second Final Four in three seasons, Guthridge will forever be a few losses away from another vituperative headline, for that's part of coaching at Chapel Hill.

After the nadir of the ACC tournament loss barely three weeks ago, the Reverend suddenly loosened his collar. He scheduled extra, fiercer practices. Before North Carolina left campus for the first round in Birmingham, he invited anyone who didn't believe the Tar Heels could win two games to stay home. When Forte short-armed a few shots against Stanford, Guthridge bellowed, "If you're not going to shoot with confidence, don't shoot at all!" After Carolina beat the Cardinal, there was Coach Gut in the locker room, in tears.

None of the Final Four participants chose to win one for the Gipper, but at the request of Florida coach Billy Donovan, every Gator chose someone to whom he would dedicate the East Regional final against Oklahoma State, then inscribed that person's name on tape wrapped around his socks. "You're playing for someone other than yourself," Donovan explained. "It makes you reach down a little bit deeper."

Donovan could be Billy Sunday, with his lacquered coif and motivational gimmickry. During a scrimmage before Florida's first-round game with Butler, he ordered any player who committed a turnover or took a bad shot to assume a defensive stance for 35 seconds, in preparation for the Bulldogs' deliberate half-court offense. Now in his fourth season in Gainesville, he has no time line for winning a tide. To Donovan, "four-year plans" are for socialist finance ministers; he prefers to quote a football coach, Bill Parcells, who always said, "I have no plan but to win every game that I coach."

To that end Donovan has recruited like a revivalist, spreading the Gators' run-and-press gospel to every corner of the country. He went to Mitchell, S.Dak, to find forward Mike Miller; to St. Albans, W.Va., to find guard Brett Nelson; to Concord, N.H., to find forward Matt Bonner. To land Miller, he received an assist from Florida football coach Steve Spurrier. With Miller visiting Gainesville over a football weekend in September 1997, Spurrier looked him in the eye two hours before kickoff against Tennessee and asked if he was willing to join "the Gator family."

Basketball teams don't have the 85 scholarships that football teams do, but it can sometimes seem as if they do when you are playing against the Gators. Florida's talent up front begins with Miller and extends across the baseline to Brent Wright, Donnell Harvey and Udonis Haslem, a.k.a. the U-dominator. With its unrelenting pressure and waves of substitutions, Florida has been able to outscore its four tournament opponents 58-30 in the final five minutes of regulation. To beat Duke in the semifinal, Donovan gave 10 players double-figure minutes, and every one of them scored as the Gators closed out the Blue Devils with a 14-0, two-touchdown run. In the final Oklahoma State fell behind by 17, clawed back to within three with 7:56 to play, then found itself staggered again, down by 10 a minute and a half later.

Florida's semifinal opponent is North Carolina, the empire that produced Donovan's two mortal enemies in coaching, South Carolina's Eddie Fogler and Kansas' Roy Williams, both of whom he has clashed with over recruiting. While he's not known to have a beef with Guthridge, Donovan is a resourceful motivator who sometimes pumps up his players, according to Gators guard Kenyan Weaks, "by telling us how much he hates the other coach." Not that Florida should have much trouble reaching the final. The Gators are fast enough to run past the Tar Heels, strong enough to bang with them and deep enough to wear them down.