A Heavyweight Rumble

MEMPHIS – The last time I came to Memphis for a heavyweight title bout it turned out to be the dud most everyone figured it would be. It was 2002 and Lennox Lewis battered and befuddled Mike Tyson for eight rounds in The Pyramid before Tyson toppled over and could not get up.

This time, Sunday afternoon in FedEx Forum, I expect to see a more competitive match: 6-foot-10, 255-pound Blake Griffin v. 6-9, 250-pound Tyler Hansbrough.

If there was one thing the men's NCAA tournament selection committee did right to spice up this March Madness, it was putting this season's undisputed player of the year, Oklahoma's Griffin, on a collision course with last season's disputed player of the year, North Carolina's Hansbrough, to get to the Final Four. Friday night made that possibility a reality, after Griffin and his Sooners crushed the Syracuse Orange and Hansbrough and his Tar Heels raced by Gonzaga.

(I interrupt this column for those in Tar Heels blue fuming at the word "disputed" to describe Hansbrough's accomplishment last season, when he swept the many player of the year awards. I must remind them that Kansas State's Michael Beasley averaged more points, rebounds, assists and blocked shots than Hansbrough and had more double-doubles. Hansbrough averaged more steals and shot a little better and played on a much better team. As Jay Bilas, one of Hansbrough's biggest fans, said last year: "Michael Beasley is the best player in the country and an unstoppable man among men. But, Tyler Hansbrough is my choice as national player of the year." That was a common illogical explanation.)

Sunday afternoon will not, of course, settle anything that seems unsettled from a season ago. Beasley is hooping for dollars after being forced to labor for NCAA basketball for one season. He'll have to wait for Hansbrough to join him next season in the NBA to settle any score the rest of us would prefer him to have with Hansbrough, or prefer Hansbrough to have with him.

Griffin is just the next best thing, maybe better.

Griffin has more double-doubles than Beasley put up. He averages more rebounds and makes almost 65 percent of his shots because he plays around and above the rim so much.

Unfortunately, Griffin sounded Friday night as if he is the product of a household that taught humility. He refused to engage in the me-against-him tenor of what we'd like to think of as a titanic tussle with Psycho T, as Hansbrough is known.

"It's another team," Griffin said of his next game after dropping 30 and 14 on Syracuse. "I'm not going to get into a personal battle with Tyler Hansbrough. I have no beef with him.

"They're a good team. This game...it's not going to be me against him. It's going to be Oklahoma versus North Carolina, and that's how we plan to attack them."

Hansbrough, sadly, took the same tact.

"For me...I just have to play my part within this team, not, like I said, not try to force anything, let the game come to me," Hansbrough said following his 24 and 10 outing against Gonzaga "I'm not looking at it [Sunday] as a matchup between me and Griffin or something like that. I'm looking at it as North Carolina is playing Oklahoma."

So, it is up to the rest of us to blow their impending match up out of proportion and call it the biggest meeting of big men in the NCAA tournament since the 1984 Final Four. That was when Georgetown's Patrick Ewing took on and slayed Kentucky's two-headed dragon of Sam Bowie and Melvin Turpin before knocking out Houston's Hakeem Olajuwon. There was no trash talking then, either, except for the ferocity with which Ewing played.

Griffin isn't at the disadvantage Beasley was at last year in comparison to Hansbrough. His Sooners are a lot better than Beasley's Wildcats were and better commanded by Jeff Capel. If Oklahoma plays Sunday as it did Friday, with Tony Crocker leading its three-guard offensive attack to 9-for-21 shooting from beyond the 3-point stripe, Oklahoma will be as good a team as North Carolina usually puts on the floor. The Sooners don't generally get that kind of production from their three guards, though, particularly Crocker, who had a career game scoring 28.

Hansbrough's Tar Heels, however, are better than they were a season ago. They are more experienced and deeper and point guard Ty Lawson, if healthy, is even more explosive, all of which has helped depress Hansbrough's numbers a little. Other guys around him are doing more.

It isn't fair, of course, to heap so much expectation on two young men or to draw from whatever they do a grand conclusion. This really won't be Memphis's Tyson-Lewis II. Basketball is a team sport.



But both these guys are the centers of their teams, literally and figuratively, and both will soon be carrying much of the same hardware – Wooden, Naismith, etc. They play the game a little bit differently; Griffin's game is defined by power and Hansbrough's game is defined by energy. If Griffin's game inspires oohs and ahhs, Hansbrough's brings forth attaboys.

Chances are, this will be one of those games where the player with best numbers loses the game and the one who walks away a winner winds up with the accolades.

Kevin B. Blackistone is a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, and a frequent sports opinionist on other outlets. A former award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News, he currently lives in Silver Spring, Md.