ORLANDO, Fla. — There are a lot of reasons to like Russ Smith. He is a fun player; start there. He’s tough, and he’s quick, and he can shoot lights out, and even on night when he can’t find sand in a desert he’ll probably do something to help the Louisville Cardinals win a basketball game.
He’s local. That helps. He will go down as the last great player ever ceded to the world by the late, great Jack Curran at Archbishop Molloy, averaging 24 points as a junior and 29 as a senior, and his game embodies everything we have ever believed about quintessential New York guards: the swagger, the style, and most of all a willingness to do anything to win.
This might be the most essential thing, though: You know him. You’ve heard his name. Thursday, when the Cardinals try to play the no-fun spoilers to Manhattan’s Cinderella ride, they will embark on a journey they hope will yield a third straight Final Four. Smith was there two years ago in New Orleans. He was there last year in Atlanta, and cut down the nets.
And he is still here. You’ve heard his name for four years. The way college sports are today, in its upside-down paradigm that usually means there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with Smith. Not if you like winning basketball, anyway.
“A sheer joy,” is the way Curran once described him.
“He has made it so enjoyable for me for four years in coaching him; he’s brought such laughter into my life,” is how his present coach, Rick Pitino, puts it. “He’s just been so enjoyable to coach. I could leave tomorrow and say, boy, I just had so many great experiences coaching one person.”
It’s funny. The nature of college basketball in 2014 is that people like Pitino — or Florida’s Billy Donovan, or even upstarts like Manhattan’s Steve Masiello (who recruited Smith to Louisville when he worked there) — are the stars because they are the constants, they are the names that remain in place from year to year in a sport that has become rife with transience.
College sports was always like that to a degree, even before the advent of the old hardship rule, the newer one-and-done, maybe the future two-and-out. For years, players had only three years of varsity eligibility; they were sophomores and then they were seniors and then they were out, while Adolph Rupp or Bobby Knight or Digger Phelps stayed on the job for decades.
Never more than now, though, when it’s hard to get too attached to any given team because that given team could look awfully different a year from now. That’s not to say the trend is right or wrong; that’s a whole other argument, a whole other column. Still, it’s good to see kids like Russ Smith hang around long enough for people to recognize them, to remember when it wasn’t a stigma for Patrick Ewing or Ralph Sampson or Chris Mullin or Tim Duncan to stay in college four years.
“This time of year, it’s never quite the same [for seniors],” Pitino said. “It never means as much to you because it’s one game, you’re out and it ends. It’s a cruel ending for all of us who don’t move on so it’s really, really special.”
Said Smith: “My senior year? It’s been everything I could have asked for.”
And when it ends for him — Thursday, this weekend, in Dallas — we’ll actually feel something again when he says goodbye. Because for a change, we’ve gotten to know him.