Kansas big man Cole Aldrich hungry to bring home second title

LAWRENCE, Kan. -- It's a fine late-October afternoon on Massachusetts Street, sunny and just south of 60 degrees, and I'm eating fried dill pickles at Jefferson's Restaurant with a very tall man who's missing his left front tooth. This is my first fried-pickle experience. It is not his. "You have to get them at the Minnesota State Fair," he told me on the way in, in a thick Minnesota Norwegian accent. "They have fried everything there. Fried candy bars on a stick, fried mac and cheese on a stick, fried pickles -- it's disgusting how much fried stuff they have." An appetizer of Jefferson's pickles, ordered at his recommendation, is $5.50, comes with a side of ranch sauce, and is far from disgusting.

Most of the patrons looked up at us when we came in, and they are occasionally stealing glances at our table. The pickles are not the spectacle; it's just that the tall man is Cole Aldrich, the Jayhawks' 6-foot-11 center from Bloomington, Minn., and probably one of the three most famous people in Lawrence along with coach Bill Self and point guard Sherron Collins. No one bothers Aldrich for the entire meal, and I'm not sure if it's because this is a polite Midwestern town, or because he's intimidating. That missing tooth is giving him the look of a ruthless hockey enforcer from the Northwoods.

The tooth was chipped in a collision with either Kansas State's Luis Colon or Ron Anderson in February -- Aldrich isn't sure who -- and then knocked out for good in a practice a few days later. It was supposed to be fixed this offseason, but an infection stalled the process; all Aldrich has now is a clip-in prosthetic, which he frequently keeps in his pocket rather than his mouth. His roommate of three years, KU shooting guard Tyrel Reed, suspects that Aldrich has been leaving it out on purpose, for effect. "He's probably the goofiest guy I know," says Reed. "Big white people tend to breathe a different air."

In one of the framed photos on Jefferson's wall, maybe 10 feet over his right shoulder, Aldrich is just a speck, standing in the back of a red sports car making its way through a sea of people. It's an aerial shot of the Jayhawks' motorcade passing this very block during the victory parade for their 2008 national championship, when a crowd of 80,000 flooded the streets of Lawrence. Aldrich was a freshman who had averaged 2.8 points and 3.0 rebounds in 8.3 minutes per game, playing in a rotation behind Darrell Arthur and Darnell Jackson, who both went on to the NBA, as well as Russian-born sixth man Sasha Kaun, who signed a lucrative deal with CSKA Moscow. Although Aldrich had an impact on the NCAA tournament -- he outplayed Tyler Hansbrough in the Final Four rout of North Carolina -- he said he still felt like he was "on the sidelines, rooting for the other guys, because we were so talented."

This would be the season for Aldrich to win a title that's decidedly his own. He and Collins are both preseason All-America candidates, and the team, despite the on-campus fighting incidents that sullied their image in September, should be a near-unanimous No. 1 in every preseason poll. That's something that not even the '08 title club could claim. They started in line behind North Carolina, UCLA and Memphis in various polls, partly because of the talent those teams had, and partly because Kansas had acquired a reputation of choking in the first two weekends of the NCAA tournament. Following the '08 championship, and last season's surprise Big 12 regular-season title and run to the Sweet 16, that rep is all but gone.

Jefferson's primary decorating scheme -- more than the photos -- is dollar bills, personalized by diners and taped to nearly every open inch of wall space. KU's basketball sports information director, Chris Theisen, who deals in plenty of statistics, asks the waitress how much cash is on display, and she says, "Somewhere between 12 and 15 thousand." It seems like a good a place as any to ask Aldrich about passing on the NBA draft: No matter where he turns in this restaurant, quite a bit of money is staring him in the face.

Aldrich had been told that, after a sophomore season in which he averaged 14.9 points and 11.1 rebounds, he could've been drafted somewhere between No. 6 and No. 12 pick this past June. "And who knows," he says, "I could have had a good workout against [UConn's Hasheem Thabeet" -- the center taken No. 2 overall -- "and moved up even higher." But there was no real deliberation on the matter, not even with his father, Walt, struggling to find work after being laid off from his sheet-metal job in the Twin Cities. He had his parents' blessing to make his own choice. "I knew I wanted to come back even before the season ended," Cole says. "I was having too much fun in college."

Aldrich first came to KU's campus as a ninth grader. His AAU coach, Steve Heinen, took Aldrich and a few friends on a roadtrip from Bloomington to Lawrence to see Bill Self's first game as a head coach, a 90-76 win over Tennessee-Chattanooga on Nov. 21, 2003. Minnesota had been recruiting Aldrich since the eighth grade, and he wasn't even on the Jayhawks' recruiting radar at that point, but he fell in love with Allen Fieldhouse, eventually caught Self's eye, and committed by his junior year. In Aldrich's de facto homecoming to the Twin Cities, for the opening rounds of this past NCAA tournament at the Metrodome, he put on a show for the locals (including his parents), recording the first triple-double in Kansas history with 13 points, 20 rebounds and 10 blocks to help beat Dayton for a trip to the Sweet 16.

His celebrity in Minnesota has its limits, though: When the PGA Championship came to Hazeltine National in Chaska, Minn., this summer, a friend invited Aldrich to take in the first day of practice rounds.

There, a fellow spectator walked up and said, "Hey, are you Joel Przybilla?"