Buddy Hield has two games to join some legendary company
HOUSTON -- In the beginning, he was really, really good.
Buddy Hield was coming back to Oklahoma for his senior season with pretty big expectations. He was the reigning Big 12 player of the year. He was a first-team preseason All-American for every publication that matters. He had returned to Norman because he knew this Oklahoma team had Final Four potential, but he had also returned because NBA folks told him there were holes in his game that meant he wasn't necessarily a first-round pick: He wasn't good enough of a ballhandler, he couldn't create his own shot.
Last summer was really the beginning to Buddy's senior season, and it was then when his teammate, Jordan Woodard, saw it in his eyes: Buddy came back motivated. His work ethic was already legendary in Norman. That's the only way a player can go from shooting 23.8 percent from three his freshman year to 46.2 percent from three his senior year. But Buddy started working even harder, fitting in two full unofficial workouts before the team's unofficial afternoon practice.
"He just gradually worked himself into a great player," Woodard said. "It wasn't an overnight type of thing."
Buddy Hield, his teammates could tell, was working himself into a superstar.
And by the middle, he did become a superstar.
The middle came on Jan. 4, the first Big Monday game of the season, on a sub-freezing night in Lawrence, Kan. In one of the greatest regular-season college basketball games there has ever been, Buddy's team lost to Kansas in a triple-overtime thriller, but the fact the Sooners lost almost did not matter.
This was Buddy Hield's national coming-out party in a season where his scoring average jumped from 17.4 points per game his junior year to a second-in-the-nation 25.4 points per game his senior year. He scored a ridiculously efficient 46 points -- one of 12 30-point games this season -- on only 23 shots. Afterward, Kansas fans rose to give Buddy a standing ovation.
Kansas head coach Bill Self said he thought his team defended Buddy well despite those 46 points; he easily could have scored 60 that night, Self said. Before that game, DraftExpress.com, the most respected mock draft web site, had Hield going early in the second round. After that game, Hield's stock skyrocketed.
And now it is the end, the final weekend of his college career, and Buddy Hield is aiming for something even bigger.
Buddy Hield is no longer just a really good college basketball player. He is no longer just a superstar.
Buddy Hield is now shooting for history: not just for a top-three slot in June's NBA Draft but for a chance at becoming one of those college basketball icons whose name still resonates decades from today.
Consider: Going into this weekend's Final Four, Buddy is 67 points away from tying Glen Rice's record 184 points in one NCAA tournament, set in 1989. He'll need to average 33.5 points over two games to tie the record; he's scored more than that three times in the past three weeks. Buddy is 18 points from equaling Doug McDermott's senior season at Creighton; if he scores 50 points during the Final Four, he'll move into third place for the highest single-season scoring total since 1994-95, passing college icons like Allen Iverson, J.J. Redick and Kemba Walker.
"He had a helluva year, but it's the way he plays the game that makes him an icon," said Villanova associate head coach Baker Dunleavy, whose team will be tasked with ending Buddy Hield's college career one game early in Saturday's national semifinal. "The way Steph Curry is doing it at Golden State -- there's definitely some overlap there, in terms of his range, of the types of shots he takes and makes. It's exciting! You combine that with his personality and character -- all those things combine to make him an icon, to make him a college basketball legend."
His path from growing up in poverty in the Bahamas to now on the cusp of becoming a collegiate icon and an NBA multi-millionaire is littered with details that make Hollywood froth at the mouth. He grew up in a crammed house: His single mother, his aunties, his cousins, his six brothers and sisters. He had to creep over sleeping siblings when he climbed into his shared bed at night. He made his own basketball courts when he was growing up, crafting a perfectly sized backboard out of a slab of plywood and then shooting into a crate. The only times he could watch college basketball in the Bahamas was during the NCAA tournament, so every March he would sneak out of school to catch first-round games on television.
The stories he tells of growing up only add to his legend. His mother was a notoriously tough lady, Buddy told a gaggle of reporters Thursday in Oklahoma's locker room at Houston's NRG Stadium. He used to sneak out at night to go to the playground to play ball. One night, his mother went to church, and Buddy sneaked out against mother's orders. Around 9:30 p.m., Buddy heard her van come squeaking down the road. He sprinted home through a shortcut home, jumped into the shower and pretended to be asleep when she got home. But mother always knows, and that night, she whooped him good.
The quotes that the 22-year-old gives reporters smack of an authentic innocence in this time ruled by narcissistic athletes and cliched utterances. On Thursday, the player nicknamed Buddy Love was asked about how the cavernous stadium dimensions at NRG Stadium could hurt shooters during the Final Four. His reply: "I've been shooting on crate courts all my life, where it's open, with palm trees and pine cone trees. It shouldn't affect me. If you're a shooter, you're a shooter. There's no excuse."
Later, he was asked about his mother, who has lived with him in Norman since Jan. 29. She cooks Bahamian food for Buddy for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which has helped him put on some weight. She cleans his place and keeps the distractions out of his mind. She reminds him to thank God for where he is today. "She's my wife, you know what I mean?" Buddy joked.
And where does his mother sleep?
"My mom, she sleeps in my bed," Buddy said. "Sometimes I sleep with her. Sometimes I don't. I sleep on the couch or the floor."
For another athlete, this detail about his mother's sleeping arrangements might seem, well, weird. For Buddy, though, it's endearing and it's charming, just like everything about this player who seems to take more joy in playing basketball than anyone out there.
Imagine, if you will, the best college basketball player on earth -- and perhaps soon a fine NBA player -- coming home to his college apartment at midnight after a late-night shooting session and finding himself locked out, again, by his mother.
It's charming, right?
And it's stories like that that take the story of Buddy Hield -- that rare college basketball player who stayed for his senior year and made a massive jump into an elite player -- and turn it into The Legend of Buddy Love.
"Buddy is at the core of everything we do," Oklahoma head coach Lon Kruger said. "Buddy's going to get that target on his back."
The target will be squarely on Buddy's back this weekend. He is the single superstar player of this Final Four. And in the final game (or two) of this remarkable and unexpected four-year college career, Buddy Hield might have 80 minutes to prove he is something else entirely: Not just a great player, not just a superstar, but that rare type of college athlete that people will be talking about a long time after he's gone.
Follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave or email him at ReidForgrave@gmail.com.
