SO BRANDON JESSIE has made it. For a while there, you had to wonder if he would. For a while there, he had more troubles than Enid and Joe. He was a walking tabloid story waiting to happen. Film at 11.
Talk about your busy summer. When he wasn't answering to a shoplifting charge and enduring an NCAA investigation and being punished for both, he was at the hospital urging his sick baby daughter to live.Jessie was a made-for-TV movie waiting to happen.
But these days the summer of '95 is mostly a bad memory. Here he is in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament ready to face mighty Kentucky Thursday night in Minneapolis. Jessie says he's feeling good, but then, anything is an improvement compared to last summer. Things could only get better, right? You could remove his nails with a pair of plyers, and he'd tell you that things are looking up.
So you can imagine how he feels being in the NCAA Tournament, having played a major (if not always a starring) role in getting the Utes this far. All-American teammate Keith Van Horn gets star billing; Jessie is Best Supporting Actor. Jessie is Dennis Hopper to Van Horn's Jack Nicholson. His name is second in the credits. He plays a major background role.
Van Horn fills the basket; Jessie does everything else. Fans love Van Horn; coaches and purists love Jessie. Which might explain why Jessie is the teacher's pet. After a game, Coach Rick Majerus praises his players sparingly, as if every word was coming out of his wallet, but he is verbose in his praise of Jessie. Van Horn will score 25 points and Majerus barely mentions his name. He prefers instead to discuss the finer points of Jessie's play.
Like many coaches, Majerus views scoring as only a necessary evil; he likes screens and timely offensive rebounds and taking charges and passes and diving for loose balls and defense, all of which Jessie does in abundance.
Take last Saturday's NCAA tournament game against Iowa State. Mike Doleac had 23 points and 12 rebounds, while Jessie had 7 points on 3-of-10 shooting. Majerus gave the game ball to Jessie because he set a screen to spring Mark Rydalch, grabbed a couple of key rebounds and held Iowa's powerful Kenny Pratt to a 3-of-11, 10-point game.
You have to be a coach to really appreciate the things Brandon does, Majerus says.
It's not that Jessie couldn't be a big scorer - he has been Utah's second leading scorer the past two seasons and, with Van Horn out of action with the flu, he scored 23 points in 25 minutes in Utah's first NCAA game. But with Van Horn on the court, he's willing to do what Majerus calls "the dirty work."
Many observers think Jessie plays better without Van Horn on the court, but that's because he assumes a more obvious role as a scorer at such times.
The Utes are just happy to have both Jessie and Van Horn on the court at the same time, which hasn't always been the case this season, thanks to Jessie's long, troubled summer.
In a matter of weeks, almost anything that could go wrong for Jessie did just that. In June, he and teammate Andre Miller were arrested for shoplifting at Cottonwood Mall, but only after Jessie, ever the Runnin' Ute, made a fastbreak for it and swam a creek before giving himself up. If that wasn't enough, two weeks later his girlfriend gave birth to their child, who came into the world with Downs Syndrome and a rare case of meningitis.
Jessie spent long hours at a California hospital alongside the mother and child. With the baby deathly ill, he was required to return to Utah in July for sentencing in the shoplifting case. It was two days of agony, waiting for his court appearance and wondering if his baby would survive while he was gone.
After sentencing (a $250 fine and probation), he hoped for a quick return to L.A., but this just wasn't his day, or his summer, for that matter. His plane was delayed three hours, and his father had two flat tires while driving to pick him up at LAX. Jessie finally arrived at the hospital at 11 p.m., but at least there was a happy ending: After some tense moments, the baby survived.
If all this wasn't enough, a few weeks later the NCAA began investigating Jessie's connection to an agent, and in November suspended him for Utah's first seven games.
Not only had Jessie been able to play basketball only sparingly throughout the summer, but now he was forced to miss one-fourth of his senior season.
Jessie says he's learned from the mistakes and trials of the summer - he just wants to move on, he says. If he still must pay for those mistakes and still make some difficult decisions, at least he has salvaged something of the basketball season and the academic year.
Against Kentucky, he'll likely handle a tough defensive assignment and the other dirty work, which won't be easy against the nation's top team. But after the events of last summer, nothing looks terribly difficult these days.