WASHINGTON — Days like today seemed impossible just five years ago at Baylor. For this ravaged basketball program, grieving the murder of Patrick Dennehy by a teammate, saddled with probation brought on by their disgraced coach, the NCAA tournament wasn’t even a dream.
But that dream was realized on Selection Sunday, when Baylor became the last team to scroll across the TV screen as the 11th seed in the West. And that dream will become a sweet reality when the Bears (21-10) open against sixth-seeded Purdue (24-8) at the Verizon Center (2:50 p.m. CBS).
“I was, like anybody, shocked and I didn’t really know what was going on,” said Aaron Bruce, a senior guard from Australia. “But this is the very reason that I think everybody up here wanted to come to Baylor: It was a chance to play in an NCAA tournament.
“The turnaround is so much bigger than the team and bigger than the university. Sometime in the future you’ll look back and be real proud of it. We’ve just got to capture the moment, capture the opportunity and enjoy it.”
The Bears’ turnaround has helped a campus and Waco, Texas, community that was grieving in June 2003 after one of the sports’ biggest tragedies, when Dennehy was killed by teammate Carlton Dotson. Dennehy’s body was discovered six weeks after he was reported missing; Dotson pled guilty and is serving 35 years, never saying why he murdered his teammate.
Still suffering, the school not only discovered that coach David Bliss had improperly paid $40,000 in tuition for Dennehy and another player while soliciting $87,000 from boosters, but — most ghoulish of all — Bliss threatened to fire an assistant coach if he didn’t portray Dennehy as a drug dealer in an attempt to cover up the payments.
This is the mess coach Scott Drew walked into. His father’s advice when he took the job at the world’s largest Baptist affiliated university was to read the story of Job; and that patience has paid off. Starting with five scholarship players in an 8-21 debut season filled in with walk-ons, the rebuilding job brought junior starters Curtis Jerrells, Kevin Rogers and Henry Dugat, double-figure scorers all.
“The great thing is when you have so much work to do, you don’t really have time to think about everything else,” Drew said . “Every day we knew the harder we worked the sooner we’d be able to reach our goals and accomplish what we wanted to accomplish.”