MINNEAPOLIS—It didn’t take long for the congratulatory messages to pour in to Virginia guard Kyle Guy after he drained those three consecutive free throws to lift Virginia to the NCAA championship game with a 63-62 victory over Auburn here Saturday night at U.S. Bank Stadium.
Pictures of the wild scene on the Charlottesville, Va. campus, a message from the soccer team and a special mention from football player Charles Snowden, who said he was going to name his daughter after Kyle.
“Guess I’m going to be a god father,’’ he said.
After the euphoria died down on the court, Virginia coach Tony Bennett gathered the team in the locker room. “We’re not done yet,’’ he said. “We have one game left.’’
Virginia, the dominant program in the storied ACC over the past three years, must still get by tenacious Texas Tech to earn the first national championship in school history. The Red Raiders may not be one of the sport’s blue bloods, but they are a threshing machine defensively, who has chewed up all five of their opponents in this tournament. limiting them to 20 points below their average.
If Virginia wins, Guy can finally take down the avatar he has posted on his Twitter account and a screen shot on his I-phone that shows him slumped to his knees after a stunning 20-point loss to UMBC in a 1 vs. 16 game in last year’s tournament while UMBC players celebrate in the background.
A 6-2, 175-pound junior with the Doug Collins build, Guy has lived with that disappointment for a year, but he is not afraid to talk about it. It has served as a motivation for both him and the rest of the team as they have gone through his journey.
“I think we started believing in ourselves since the loss last year,’’ he said. “In a way, that’s different than any other team I’ve been involved with. Obviously last year we thought we could win it all. We were 31-3, best team in the country, and we had a chance. I don’t know if that was hope, or belief. I know this year that there was a belief, as soon as the buzzer sounded last year, that we were going to do something special this year.’’.
Guy has been one of the one shining stars on this team. Growing up in Indianapolis, he was a scrawny kid who was a basketball junkie and a self-made player. His father Joe played football and Guy wanted to follow in his footsteps, but an eighth-grade injury forced him out of the contact sport. He also had a serious interest in basketball.
He first learned how to shoot in sixth grade. “I used to shoot two handed,’’ he said. “I learned how to play from my sixth-grade guidance counselor Leon Lark, who played football at Purdue and was coaching a high school girl’s AAU team. He took me over to work out with them in sixth grade. We got into a scrimmage and the first play, I drove baseline and scored on a girl who would later play volleyball at Butler. The coach was all over her. The next time I tried them, she slammed me to the floor. I learned a lot from that session.’’
Guy learned enough to become a dominant high school player at Lawrence Central High. He won Mr. Basketball in Indiana, made the McDonald’s All-American team and played in the high school state championship game. He was driven, but the pressure he placed on himself to succeed also created a level of anxiety that has lingered throughout college and required medication.
Guy, who received his first scholarship offer from the University of Indianapolis at age 14, thought about staying local and attending Butler, but he fell in love with Bennett when he visited Virginia and became the team’s best thee point shooter by his sophomore year.
Guy interestingly spent a large portion of this tournament in an uncharacteristic shooting slump. Going into the second half of the Cavs’ 80-75 overtime victory against Purdue in the Elite Eight game at Louisville, he had missed 26 of his first 29 three- point attempts. He broke out of it by shooting 5 for 9 from beyond the arc in the second half and overtime, then made a huge three- point jumper with just nine seconds to play against Auburn that pulled the Cavs within 62-60 before he became the hero of an unexpected victory in front of his 40 friends and family at the game and the 72,000 fans in the stands. “I think all my life has led to this,’’ Guy said. “Everything I’ve been through made it a lot easier to hone in and try to knock down the free throws. I said I was terrified. It was a good terrified, a good nervousness in my stomach, like ‘This is my chance.’ type of thing. I don’t know where that comes from. I know my family’s always been behind me and I got to look at them before I shot the free throws.”
