GLENDALE, Ariz. — How can we keep calling them the feisty little Zags if the face of the team is a 300-pound bear?
The name on the back of his Gonzaga jersey reads Karnowski. But you can call him Przem. Yeah, I can’t pronounce it, either. And I’m Polish. My ancestors decided it would be funny to turn the alphabet into an inscrutable puzzle. Humble apologies.
“We’ve had a lot of great players in this program that never got the chance to play in the Final Four. We came here to win the whole thing,” Karnowski said Saturday, after the Zags held off a furious rally by South Carolina to win 77-73. It was their 37th victory of the season. One more victory and Gonzaga will be national champions. Look at America’s underdogs. All grown up.
If Broncos general manager John Elway is still searching for a left tackle on Denver’s offensive line, he could do worse than offer a contract to Karnowski, who sets a screen the way Longs Peak casts a shadow and can be a twinkly-toed ballerina on the pick-and-roll.
The 7-foot-1 center from Torun, Poland, is impossible not to like, and for reasons bigger than a beard so large it could be a nest for five dozen sparrows. A little more than a year ago, Karnowski suffered from such excruciating back pain it took him an hour to get out of bed in the morning, when every torturous day began with a slow, humbling crawl across the floor to grab his crutches.
The broken hulk of a man underwent surgery on New Year’s Eve 2015, and the operation was complicated by a staph infection that made Karnowski fear his athletic career was in grave jeopardy.
“There was a very high probability that he was never going to play basketball again,” Zags coach Mark Few said on the eve of the first Final Four appearance in school history.
For months, the most anybody in the Gonzaga family wished for Karnowski was not a return to the court, but for merely “a normal active life,” Few said. “I mean, he couldn’t even get in or out of a car, or really walk. … I was really worried about depression and things like that. Emotionally, he wasn’t in a great place. So the fact that going from those dark days to right now, it literally is miraculous, and I’m not using that term lightly.”
No fewer than 20 different times during the semifinal game, I glanced at the South Carolina bench, just to make certain coach Frank Martin had not turned into a puddle of liquid hot magma. He owns the scariest scowl in sports. There is a fierce-looking mountain in Iceland that is an angry volcano wrapped in glacier ice named Eyjafjallajokull. If you ask me, it would be easier on everybody’s tongue to rename it Martin.
The Gamecocks played so poorly for such long stretches that it caused thousands of observers in University of Phoenix Stadium to wonder just how they won four times in the NCAA tourney to get here.
Midway through the second half, Gonzaga guard Jordan Matthews splashed a 3-point basket to put the Bulldogs ahead 59-46 and send Martin off the deep end. He turned to every player within earshot and gave each one an earful of tough love.
“You know, what is tough love? Itap either love, or there is no love. Right?” Martin said. “I don’t know what tough love is.”
All the Gamecocks know is not to make coach mad. South Carolina came roaring back with a 21-6 run to take a two-point lead with 7 minutes, 6 seconds remaining in the game. Irony wanted a piece of the action: Could the Zags, long the personification of the little guy at the Big Dance, have the dream of their first appearance in the championship game denied by a Southeastern Conference team that had entered the tourney as a No. 7 seed?
Gonzaga, however, refused to freak out. There was a Bulldog determination to find a way to survive and advance.
“There was no doubt in our minds at all,” said Gonzaga guard Josh Perkins, who learned his basketball as a kid in Colorado. “I looked in everybody’s eyes and everybody looked at me. We all were like, ‘Hey, we’re not losing this game. We’ve gone too far to give it up now.’ ”
The Zags were led by guard Nigel Williams-Gross, who floats like a butterfly when driving the lane and scored 23 against the Gamecocks. Karnowski finished with 13 points and five rebounds. In defeat, Martin expressed his devotion forever to South Carolina players that shredded millions of NCAA brackets across America.
The Beard beat the Scowl.
The Zags are one victory away from never being underdogs again.
