ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - We had questions for the Kentucky players about their game today with Duke, but the Kentucky players were not the people to ask. They are from places like Boston and Chicago, the Bronx and Toronto. They talk about ''focus'' and ''intensity'' and ''poise.'' But they do not know.
''What did you do after Laettner hit the shot, Wayne?''
I am on the phone to Mooresville, Ky., population 150, halfway between Bardstown and Springfield, an hour from Lexington, talking to Wayne Washburn and discovering truth.
Sweet 16
SATURDAY'S GAMES
West Regional
Utah 76,
Arizona 51
East Regional
North Carolina 75,
Connecticut 64
TODAY'S GAMES
Midwest Regional
Rhode Island (25-8) vs.
Stanford (29-4), 2:40 p.m.
Duke (32-3) vs.
Kentucky (32-4), 5 p.m.
Men's bracket
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''I laid there on the floor for an hour, staring at the ceiling,'' Wayne said. ''I felt like someone in my family had died.''
''How did it affect you after that?''
''For weeks, I didn't want to do nothing. I lost all my energy. It hit me in the heart.'' Wayne said he didn't recover until the following season began.
It is possible for an entire state to droop, to cringe, to crawl into a hole and wish for a swift, certain end. It doesn't even require a flood or a hurricane or a similar act of God.
All it takes is a jumpshot from the top of the key.
Duke's Christian Laettner took it in the East Region final in '92, in the last seconds of overtime. It went in. Duke won. More importantly, Kentucky lost. The state might as well have drawn a veil over itself.
Wayne Washburn, 24, couldn't sleep or eat or work. ''I didn't know what to do,'' he said. ''I was kind of lost.''
I know him through Lonnie Wheeler, a local author who has written a wonderful book about basketball in the commonwealth. ''Blue Yonder'' it's called. It's a trip into the eye of an obsession. It's a study of blind religion. I asked Lonnie for a UK fan to talk to. He gave me Wayne. In Kentucky, there are half a million Waynes. They've never been to a UK game, never played basketball. Most have never been to Lexington. But when the 'Cats are playing, the rest of the world is vanished. This Duke game today is for him, and them.
Wayne has his obsessions. He has watched and videotaped every UK game since '87. (He still watches the '92 game, but always turns it off right before Laettner's basket.) An hour before every game, he watches the last five minutes of the previous game. Why? Why not? To the players, basketball at UK is a phase, a page, a good, sweet time between childhood and not. To a guy like Wayne Turner, the point guard from Boston, it's a business deal. Turner wants to play in the NBA. The coach that signed him, Rick Pitino, knows how to make that happen. Nothing in there about Big Blue Madness or dreams coming true or making everyone back home proud for the rest of their days.
Of the Duke game, Turner said, ''We beat them, we get back to the Final Four. That's what it means.'' It's a cold-blooded approach.
To Wayne Washburn and everyone like him, UK basketball is an heirloom. When he says ''I'd give my left arm to beat Duke,'' you make sure he's distant from the cutlery.
It's pointless to ask Wayne Turner or Nazr Mohammed or anyone but Lexington native Cameron Mills what it would mean to beat Duke. They'll never get it. And neither will we.
Those of us not born there or raised there or otherwise indoctrinated into the flock can only imagine. Amateur sociologists will read into it what they like. They'll be guessing.
I recall going to Pikeville in the winter of 1986, to do a story on a kid named Todd May. Pikeville is a modest eastern Kentucky coal town. It's like a lot of towns in that part of the state - hilly, hardscrabble, friendly, suspicious - only bigger.
May was a Mr. Basketball who made the treasonous decision to play at Wake Forest. What I recall about the trip was not that May's story took an ironic twist - he left Wake Forest, homesick, and returned to lead Pikeville College to the NAIA playoffs - but that even the tiniest, most pathetic houses had satellite dishes in their backyards.
TV reception was limited in the hollers, and watching the 'Cats was critical.
Wheeler writes of a guy from Williamstown who ate nothing but artificially colored blue food the day Kentucky played Massachusetts in a national semifinal two years ago.
The same guy worked at a supermarket where employees dressed in red aprons. He refused, naturally, red being Louisville's color. The same guy has saved for years a fast-food taco once offered to Pitino. The coach declined it. This guy didn't. He still has it sealed in a plastic bag.
It's strange, sure. But compared to what?
We all have our obsessions.
''It's like this,'' Washburn decided. ''You go to church every Sunday, and you don't miss a basketball game. That's the way it is around here.''
Today, Washburn goes to church at 5. He'll be taping it.
The Game of the Century
'Cats, Devils duke it out
Complete tournament coverage from Associated Press
DAUGHERTY ARCHIVE
