HOUSTON — Amid all the euphoria and excitement of his first Final Four, a babe only a year removed from Norcross (Ga.) High School and ready for a semifinal showdown against Kentucky that brings April Madness into America’s living room, Jeremy Lamb yawned.
“I wasn’t yawning at the question, [just] so you know,” Lamb said sheepishly and politely to his inquisitor during his interview session yesterday inside Reliant Stadium, and everyone laughed out loud.
No one connected with the Connecticut program should have been surprised, because the skinny, silky sleepy-eyed freshman has yawned in the face of so many big games, so many crunchtime moments during the Huskies’ improbable run to daylight, that Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun and Kemba Walker now consider him a lion. The difference is Walker is the raging lion whoroars. Lamb is the stoic lion who wears his sleeves on his emotions.
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“I show emotion sometimes,” Lamb said. “But I don’t show emotion more than I do show emotion.”
Walker feeds him for a game-changing open 3 on the left wing, swish. Yawn. Lamb makes an anticipatory steal at midcourt with the game on the line and jams. Yawn.
“That’s my personality,” Lamb said.
He was a late bloomer who caught the eyes of Calhoun and Kentucky coach John Calipari at the Peach Jam tournament (an offseason invitational). He is a different player now than he was at the beginning of the year, because he has become Robin to Walker’s Batman.
“This game’s about confidence, and early in the year I didn’t have that much confidence,” Lamb said. “As time went on I had more confidence, and my coaches really believed in me and my teammates kept believing in me and looking to get me the ball.”
Lamb, whose favorite player is Dwayne Wade, with Derrick Rose next, is a 6-foot-5, 185-pound swingman who is averaging 18.3 points per game on 59 percent shooting during the NCAA tournament. During the season, he averaged just 11.1 ppg on .483 shooting.
“Early in the season, we tried to get him to be more aggressive and now he has come to realize that role,” Walker said.
“He, in the last month of the season, has been phenomenal, because you play Kemba, and you forget about him,” Calipari said, “and then Jim starts running that guy off baseline screens, and all of a sudden, he’s curling, stepping through. . . . Or, you play the pick-and-roll too much, they throw it over the top to him and he’s making 3s.
“He’s making all those plays, so you’re gonna have to score A1 and score B1, and that’s what they’ve been doing,” Calipari added. “He’s been terrific. He’s long. He’s active. . . . He’s coming up with steals at the exact time they need it. He’s making a run-through and a dunk, I’ve seen it on tape over and over and over. We recruited him. I really liked him as a player in high school.”
It’s Lamb’s 7-foot-4 wingspan that helps make him a special defensive player.
“I think late in the game lately they’ve just been telegraphing the pass, so I’ve been able to get in the passing lanes and get steals,” Lamb said. “I have long arms so people . . . sometimes they’ll throw it, and some people can’t get it but I can. . . . [My] long arms [are] able to get in the passing lanes quick.”
By now, everyone knows he’s the son of Rolando Lamb, who hit the last-second shot that that beat Calhoun’s Northeastern team in the second round of the 1984 NCAA tournament in Newark.
Calhoun at first had no idea he was his tormentor’s son.
“I just knew he was a tall, lanky kid and reminded me some of Rip [Richard] Hamilton. When I first saw Rip, he reminded me of — God rest his soul — Reggie Lewis, he reminded me of those guys that are strong with the basketball even though their weight or body doesn’t look like it could lift up a basketball.”
Lamb played his father, who will be here tomorrow, one-on-one all the time.
“He won when I was younger,” Lamb said. “Then as I got older I started winning. All the time.”
And how did he take that?
“Well, he stopped playing,” Lamb said.
Asked about the Final Four hoopla, Lamb said: “Every now and then I think, ‘Man, I can’t believe we’re in the Final Four.’ . . . I probably won’t realize like how big this is until it’s all over.”
Yawn.