By John Feinstein
Monday, April 7, 2008

SAN ANTONIO

Monday night's national championship game between Kansas and Memphis will be broken down about a million different ways before the game tips off, but to many the matchup is really simple: the kids from one of basketball's Valhallas vs. the kids from one of its outhouses.

That might sound harsh, but that's the perception John Calipari and his talented and tough-minded players encounter despite now being just 40 minutes from quieting their myriad doubters by winning a national championship and setting the record for victories in a college basketball season.

"We've heard the negativity all year, and it just bounces off us at this point," said Chris Douglas-Roberts, who is both the Tigers' top scorer and team leader. "We've been hearing it all year. We're just playing and you know what? We're playing really well."

The negativity goes way beyond all the questions about Memphis's free throw shooting or the weak league it played in. It has more to do with the school's past and with the coach's past. And most of all, it has to do with flawed perceptions about schools considered hoops royalty and programs that are supposed to be relegated to the servants' quarters this time of year.

North Carolina Coach Roy Williams talks about how he has the best kids; Calipari talks about how he has tough kids. There's an unspoken code here: Walk the streets here and coaches will stop you to tell you how shocked you would be if you could see the transcripts of the players from Memphis (never mind that many of those same coaches tried unsuccessfully to recruit those same players to their "elite" programs). One of the jokes making the rounds all week has been that the NCAA is already making up Final Four T-shirts for this year that will say: North Carolina-Kansas-UCLA-Vacated.

It's certainly true that Calipari's Massachusetts team was forced to vacate its 1996 Final Four appearance because of NCAA rules violations. It is just as true that Memphis went on NCAA probation shortly after its 1985 appearance in the Final Four. And yet, no one talks much about the fact that Dean Smith took over a North Carolina program in 1961 that had just been put on probation or that Larry Brown coached a UCLA team that had vacated its1980 Final Four appearance and left Kansas in 1988 after winning a national championship and helping the Jayhawks to land on probation during Williams's first year there as coach.

So let's not get carried away with the notion of Memphis as the "renegade program" threatening the dominance of the squeaky clean establishment.

Let's also not be naive about where some of this sentiment originates, either: All of Calipari's players are African Americans, a number of them from so-called "tough" backgrounds. Like virtually every top-level college basketball team, UCLA, North Carolina and Kansas are dominated by African American players, but each also gets significant contributions from white players.

That shouldn't matter even a little -- and thankfully it matters less now than it did 20 years ago when John Thompson was labeled a racist in many quarters for not having any white players at Georgetown -- but ask yourself this: If Memphis had flown out to a 40-12 lead only to let its opponent get back to 54-50 -- as Kansas did against North Carolina because it "kept taking stupid shots out there," as Brandon Rush put it -- would the Tigers have been portrayed as kids whose enthusiasm got the best of them or as an out-of-control group with more athleticism than basketball sense?

And that's just not fair. If you spend five minutes with Douglas-Roberts, it will become apparent that he's as bright and mature as any college basketball player you are likely to meet. Joey Dorsey is clever and funny, and Derrick Rose is clearly everyone's little brother, someone who has learned as he has gone this season.

Still, the sentiment lingers that a team made up of black kids who play up-tempo basketball can't possibly play the game the "right" way and can't possibly be the beloved "student-athletes" the NCAA won't stop trumpeting. In other words, they can't possibly be the "best" kids.

So Kansas enters Monday night carrying the banner of the basketball establishment. And make no mistake: The Jayhawks have, in Bill Self, someone who looks and sounds like he just came from a screen test to play the role of a good guy basketball coach. And they have pedigree.

Kansas won the national championship in 1952 when a bench-warmer named Dean Smith was assigned to try to scalp his teammates' tickets. ("I couldn't get anything for them," he said. "No one was really that interested in college basketball in Portland, Oregon.") The Jayhawks were involved in one of the greatest games in tournament history: the triple-overtime 1957 championship game against North Carolina. (For the record, their star player in that game, Wilt Chamberlain, left college after his sophomore year.) The 1988 Jayhawks -- the Danny and the Miracles team led by current KU assistant coach Danny Manning -- won the title in one of college basketball's best feel-good stories. Kansas plays its games at (Phog) Allen Fieldhouse, which is located on (James) Naismith Drive.

This is the seventh Final Four for Kansas since Memphis last made it in 1985. Dana Kirk, the last Memphis coach to take the Tigers to the Final Four, did jail time. The only other time Memphis was in the championship game it became the answer to a trivia question: Who was UCLA's opponent when Bill Walton hit 21 of 22 shots in the title game?

Calipari is as slick and clever as Self is polished and polite. No one will ever confuse him with Dean Smith or Roy Williams. But here's a fact: He took over a U-Mass. program that was coming off 10 straight losing seasons and built a national power. He took over a Memphis program that was foundering and has won more than 30 games three straight years and has his team one game from a national title.

You can make all the jokes you want about transcripts and history -- name a major program that doesn't have some serious skeletons in its basketball closet -- but in the end there's really only one thing Calipari and Self have in common: Both can really coach.

It doesn't matter where any of the players on the court Monday night came from. It matters where they are right now: in the national championship game. The best team will win and cut down the nets.

The past -- whether it be that of the schools, the coaches or the players -- doesn't matter. Both teams deserve to be here. To imply that one is somehow more worthy than the other is short-sighted, unfair and, quite simply, wrong.