The center of it all: UConn's Emeka Okafor (SN Archive — 2004)

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This article, "The center of it all" by Mike DeCourcy, originally appeared in the April 12, 2004 issue of The Sporting News.

It is a beautiful smile, and we have seen so little of it this season. Of all that is impressive about Connecticut center Emeka Okafor — his power, his intelligence, his commitment — his most striking feature is the bright, white smile that radiates from his smooth, steely jaw. And there it is. He is walking onto the court following a timeout. There still are more than 15 minutes remaining, but he knows. Ahead by 21, he knows. It is all over but the accounting.

How many minutes will he need to play to finish off Georgia Tech?

How will his stat line read?

What will be the margin of this decidedly undramatic NCAA championship game?

There is no pain in Okafor's back now. Pain is a memory as remote as the Huskies' intermittent regular-season difficulties. They are champions. It will be official, eventually.

During the wait, Okafor can show off all he has learned in three years of college basketball. That lefthanded jump hook? He didn't have that when he arrived. How about that baseline turnaround jumper, spinning into his right shoulder, a move far too quick and disarming for Tech center Luke Schenscher to react? These are some of the college game's lasting gifts to Okafor. He is paying the debt with one final night of brilliance: 24 points and 15 rebounds and sticking around 38 minutes, just to be safe. The final score, 82-73, does not do justice to the dimensions of UConn's victory.

“I was just kind of savoring the moment, you know?” Okafor says. “I didn't really sweat too bad. I figured that time was on our side, and we were up by so much. The national championship, you get there when you get there. Make it last.”

Okafor wasn't a project when he joined the Huskies back in the fall of 2001. Though he received about as much attention for his scholastic gifts as his game, he defended and rebounded well enough to start immediately for an Elite Eight team. But his offense, all the things he needed to make his team a champion, he learned in Connecticut. Certainly, without the 42 points he scored in two Final Four games under San Antonio's Alamodome, particularly his 18 in the second half of a harrowing semifinal victory over Duke, UConn's 1999 championship banner would be flying solo for at least another season.

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After the game, the Huskies' locker room is more subdued than that of any recent champion. The season hasn't always been comfortable. They began the year as a near-unanimous No. 1 pick and labored under that burden all the way to the close, losing six games before storming through to the Final Four. Back spasms periodically afflicted Okafor, robbing him of his energy and his lift and raising doubt about his ability to have an impact on this tournament. But at the moment, he is feeling fine.

When Emeka Okafor wasn't scoring for the Huskies, it seemed Ben Gordon was— the two had 81 points combined in the Final Four.

“It's a nice ending to a good story,” Okafor says. He is a junior in terms of eligibility, but he will complete his degree requirements this semester and file for early NBA draft entry. “I know I'm going to take a lot of good things with me, a lot of great memories. But I'm going to leave a great place.”

To understand how far Okafor has traveled as a player, the destination he has reached and where he might be heading, it is helpful to return to the Nike Ail-American Camp in July 2002. Okafor recently had completed his freshman season, during which he was an integral component of a Connecticut team that stopped just a few minutes short of the Final Four. He played 23 minutes of that 90-82 loss to Maryland. He scored six points.

Okafor was invited to serve as a counselor at the Nike Camp, a somewhat cushy job that included the fringe benefits of daily workouts with pro scouts and coaches. While the campers were off at lunch on a Monday afternoon, Okafor joined the other counselors in attacking a series of basketball drills. Roughly two dozen of the top young college players were working at the camp, perhaps half of them big men, including Arizona's Channing Frye, Missouri's Arthur Johnson and Cincinnati's Jason Maxiell. Okafor was the poorest offensive player in the group, and the difference between him and the next-worst was as vast as the difference between the current UConn Huskies and the Lehigh Mountain Hawks.

The drills emphasized footwork and low-post scoring skills. It all seemed foreign and uncomfortable to Okafor. “Back then, I had no moves,” he says. “Offense was just like, 'Catch the ball and ... what do I do now?'” What he did was go to work. He returned to campus not embarrassed, but challenged. When classes began at UConn that fall, he began working with new assistant coach Clyde Vaughan, who'd been a prolific inside scorer at Pittsburgh despite standing only 6-4. Okafor drafted team manager Justin Evanovich, now a walk-on guard for the Huskies, to shag balls for him during solo workouts.

“When Coach Calhoun hired me, he said, 'If Emeka doesn't get better, you're fired,' “ Vaughan says, perhaps only half-joking. “So I took him in the gym every day. I said, 'Emeka, please, I have a son; I'm about to get married; I want to keep my job.' The first day in the gym, he was so raw, my son C.J.—who's 9— had more moves.”

The first day they worked together, Vaughan had to start by instructing Okafor on the art of making himself big in the post. It would seem to come naturally to a player who stands 6-10 and weighs 250 pounds. It did not.

“He was making himself 6-0, 190,” Vaughan says.

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Okafor needed to establish a firm base, spread his limbs and challenge defenders to crawl around him and discourage passes to the inside. Then Vaughan moved on to catching the ball, “chesting it” and making a simple post move. Then a counter for that move to account for how a defender would react.

Okafor is a demanding student. He wants to comprehend the intricacies of each lesson. He asks one simple question, over and over: Why? Accustomed to players merely nodding their heads and attempting to mimic the technique demonstrated, Vaughan found himself having to explain himself.

“He's not challenging you. He wants to know why—what he's going to get out of it. I think that's the way he is in the classroom,” Vaughan says. “He'll study until maybe 10 o'clock, and sometimes I hear he's in the gym at midnight.”

Okafor is not new to basketball. Though his name has an unfamiliar sound to it, as if maybe he were a recent immigrant, it is his parents who came from Nigeria to the U.S. Emeka was born in Houston, attended Bellaire High — where Oklahoma State guard John Lucas was a teammate — and became a varsity player during his sophomore season. Playing club basketball in the spring of his junior year at the Spiece Run-N-Slam tournament on the Purdue campus, he made far less of an impression than classmates Chris Thomas, Ousmane Cisse and Dennis Latimore.

Okafor was a serious student, getting straight A's and a big, fat SAT score, but not yet a serious student of basketball. That came gradually during his senior year. He committed himself to gaining strength and prospered because of his size, muscle and natural athleticism. That was enough to punish high school kids for 22 points and 16 rebounds per game, but it was not enough to gain him a serious national reputation.

“People that were rating him below 100 in his class probably weren't that far off,” Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun says. “He didn't have a jump shot — didn't have a lot of different things. But he had feet like a point guard.”

When Okafor arrived at UConn, it turned out he also possessed an uncommon feel for blocking shots against players his own size. He ranked third in the nation as a freshman with 138 blocks. He also gathered in an average of 9.0 rebounds. These two specialties could have made him a valuable college player for as long as he cared to stick around and could have given him a position among the NBA's top draft picks whenever he wished. Getting by, though, never has been enough in his world.

“I wasn't a McDonald's All American or anything like that, but I thought that I could have been — should have been — so I just worked harder,” Okafor says. “I didn't have anybody in my ear, spoiling me, telling me how good I am or how much I didn't need to work. I saw that things were up for grabs, so I went out and tried to go get it.”

Okafor's one advantage in his education as an offensive player is he had no habits — no good habits, but no bad ones, either.

“We were able to take him from Day 1, make him turn and square and actually make legitimate moves to the basket,” Calhoun says. “And he has something brand new for a 6-9 kid. He actually doesn't mind playing inside.”

It might have been Okafor's shot-blocking authority that frightened Duke center Shelden Williams into 19 foul-filled, unfulfilling minutes in the UConn-Duke NCAA semifinal. That did not win the game for the Huskies, though. They won because Okafor scored. He delivered 18 second half points in helping to overcome a deficit that grew as large as 11 points. He contributed seven of 17 points as they erased an 8-point disadvantage in the final 5 minutes. His consecutive baskets carried them from down three points with 2:07 remaining to a lead they did not surrender.

The layup he made with 25 seconds left was an example of Okafor's astonishing will. He seized the ball, spinning away from the defense toward the goal, after teammate Josh Boone tipped it from Duke's Luol Deng. But Okafor's turnaround jumper with 1:18 left presented the indisputable proof of his progress as a scorer. He did not have that shot a year ago. He became an efficient low-post operator as a sophomore, producing 15.9 points and 58.6 percent shooting. The greatest number of his baskets came on jump hooks, foul-line jumpers and putbacks. The baseline turnaround against Duke's Nick Horvath, however, was an NBA-ready move.

“He feels out the defense and is able to go both ways,” Evanovich says. “He feels more comfortable and confident in his moves. Before, he'd have to think about what he was going to do. Now, whatever they give him, he can take. He can shoot a jump shot to either shoulder.

“His offensive game is going to get a lot better because he puts more work into it than 1 can imagine anyone does.”

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There is one aspect to the sport Okafoi has made little progress in mastering. He arrived at UConn as a below-average foul shooter. The more he has practiced it, the worse he has become, from 62.0 percent as a freshman to just 51.7 percent as a junior, entering the Final Four.

So, of course, there he is at the line facing two free throws, having improved his season percentage ever so fractionally by hitting three of his first five against Duke. The Huskies own a 3-point lead that J.J. Redick or Daniel Ewing could rub out in an instant, but Okafor can render them powerless with the simplest act in the game.

This will be the most difficult game his team plays in this tournament. He won't admit that now, not with another 40 minutes coming Monday night, but he also knows the next 3 seconds, the final 3 seconds, will be much more daunting if he fails to land at least one of his two attempts.

This game has not been as he dreamed it, as he planned it. He spent all but 4 minutes of the first half watching from the bench, after the overzealous game officials whistled him for two quick fouls.

“Freshman year, I'd come so close to making the Final Four. Sophomore year, I had a better understanding what the Final Four was,” Okafor says. “Now, this whole year we're supposed to make the Final Four — and I know we can — but we get here and I'm on the bench. It was killing me. 1 wanted to be out there, but I couldn't.

“When 1 got back in, 1 saw the season perhaps coming to a close and 1 thought, that's not the way it's supposed to end. We're supposed to cut the nets, and you don't cut the nets when you lose. A whole lot of stuff was going through my head. Doubt creeps in a little bit, but I know if I let that doubt stay there, that's when we've lost. I put the thoughts out of my head.”

Okafor still is alone with his thoughts as he handles the ball, 15 feet from the basket. But he is chuckling. He has imagined this sort of moment so many times, the way all kids do, and now he is wondering if he should have been more judicious about his wishing. The first shot? “Clank,” he says. The sound on the second is sweeter to all but Duke fans.

As Okafor runs back to the opposite end of the court, for once he is not defending the goal. He is throwing his arms into the air and spinning deliriously in a circle. He does not notice as Duke's Chris Duhon throws in a 3-pointer. He hears the buzzer, though. He is smart enough, certainly, to know what that means.

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