Dime 32 (April ‘07)

This week Kevin Durant ended the speculation about whether or not he’d be playing college or pro next year, announcing that he was entering the ‘07 NBA Draft. And when you think about it, that it was even a question seems silly now. As his postseason Player of the Year sweep and ridiculous 25 ppg and 11 rpg averages attest, KD is a special talent, unlike any freshman to hit the NCAA scene in a long time. There’s a reason why pro teams are being accused left and right of tanking in this last stretch of the regular season to improve their Lottery chances; and it’s not just because of Greg Oden. Whoever lands Kevin Durant has a potential Hall of Famer, someone who could easily be dropping 25 a night in the pros before long. We put Durant on the cover of Dime #32 (on newsstands now) after traveling to Austin, Texas, to talk with the 18-year-old who put college hoops back on the map this year. Here’s an excerpt from that story…

* * * *

There’s a hill in a quiet suburb of Washington, D.C., that guards secrets.

“Hunt’s Hill,” as it is known in these parts, is tree-lined and house-dotted, and those who live here go about their everyday business without ever really giving it much thought. During the summer, the blacktop of Hunt’s Hill bakes, cooks hot to the touch in the midday sun. In the winter, the rain, snow and slush freeze over its entire perilous length, making it a nightmare to traverse for those in a car, let alone on foot.

At night, Hunt’s Hill rises dark and silent, a 75-foot black wall reaching to the moon. This is when the secrets were made, between a child and The Hill. For years, Kevin Durant would sprint up the face of Hunt’s Hill. He’d chug to the summit, take a breath and backpedal back down to the base. Over and over again, night after night, he’d push himself to the brink. Some nights it was 25 times up and back. Some nights he’d run The Hill 50 times. In the winter, occasionally Kevin’s mother would come along and sit in the car at the foot of The Hill to stay warm, reading a book or magazine to pass the time while her son did what he felt he needed to do.

Only The Hill knows what Kevin shared with it on those nights – while everyone else his age was probably home watching TV, playing video games or asleep in bed. Why he was pushing himself like this even after he’d scored 30, 40, 50 points in the game that night, and still planned on being up at 5 a.m. the next morning to be in the gym, shooting before school. Only The Hill knew. And now, so do we.

* * * *

In more than five years of publishing, we have never put a college athlete on the cover of this magazine. We’ve had high school players (Dwight Howard, O.J. Mayo and Tyreke Evans), we’ve had streetball players (Hot Sauce and Skywalker); hell, we’ve even had a rap artist (Fat Joe). But never a player from the N-C-two-A.

Sure, we’ve debated putting plenty of NCAA athletes on the cover in the past – Greg Oden or Jokim Noah at the start of this past season, J.J. Redick and/or Adam Morrison last season, even Carmelo Anthony a few years back when he was running roughshod over teams in his lone amateur campaign. We never pulled the trigger though. Why? Because there was always another player out there who seemed to make more sense at the time, and because traditionally at least, college basketball doesn’t “sell.”

Then along came Kevin Durant, and there wasn’t even a question. In a few short months, he did more for college basketball than any single player in recent history. Prior to the season, the most-hyped story in college ball was Greg Oden’s freshman campaign at Ohio State. Durant, while widely recognized as one of the best high school players in the country at Montrose Christian Academy (Md.), tooled in the long shadow cast by Oden’s high school dominance. But within the first few weeks of the college season, The Kevin Durant Show had officially eclipsed anything the seven-foot Oden and his Top-5 ranked Buckeyes were doing on the court (despite the fact that Oden put up solid numbers and routinely dominated games with one hand due to offseason wrist surgery). It very quickly became a two-horse race for the right to be the first freshman to ever win the John R. Wooden or James Naismith NCAA Player of the Year award, and as of February, it didn’t appear to be much of a race at all.

“I don’t think Greg and I ever wanted to be in a competition with each other,” Durant says. “Obviously, I want to be the best and want to be thought of as the best, but I didn’t set out to make it a contest. I have respect for his game and I just hope he has respect for mine.”

Durant’s 25 points and 11.3 rebounds per game as a freshman at the University of Texas, both Big XII Conference bests, don’t even begin to tell the story. As of press time, he’d cracked the 30-point barrier seven times. In January, Colorado caught 37 points and 16 rebounds. A few nights later, Missouri took 34 and 13. The week after that, Oklahoma State got 37 and 12, then Baylor got 34 and nine, Kansas State 32 and seven and then Oklahoma got it again, to the tune of 32 and 10. And sandwiched in between those games were not only a slew of high-20-point totals, but also the mother of all stats lines – Kevin’s obscene 37-point, 23-rebound demolition of Texas Tech on Jan. 31 that had the announcers screaming that it was the greatest performance in Big XII history with seven or eight minutes still to go in the game.

The guys in the Dime office, collectively, have been in the basketball industry a long time. We’ve seen a million games and a million players and we all watch some form of ball almost every day of our lives. It takes a lot to shake us. But when Durant was busting up Texas Tech? We were all calling each other, blowing up BlackBerrys, pounding out e-mails making sure we were all tuned in, because it was like nothing any of us had ever seen. Durant, 6-9 and a spindly thin 225 pounds that’s all arms and legs, flicking in treys from beyond NBA range on Hunt’s Hill-built pistons, taking and shaking guys off the bounce for pull-ups and floaters in the paint, back-to-the-basket drop steps, put-back boards in traffic and fast break dunks – it was a freak show.

*You can read the rest of Kevin’s story in Dime #32, on newsstands now and also available at Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Borders, Barnes & Noble and 7-Eleven stores nationwide.*

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