Island demeanor

PULLMAN — The freshman point guard from Hawaii, perhaps unintentionally, does his best impression of the head coach from Wisconsin and for a moment two cultures merge.

Derrick Low’s nose crinkles, his lips purse and his hands ball up in frustration, forcing their way downward through the air. The look is a dead ringer for the one so often worn by Dick Bennett.

Then the pupil continues speaking about the toughness his coach desires from him, and the similarities end.

“He did have to call me out in a couple of practices to tell me that I’m too nonchalant and that I have to look … that I look too laid-back while I’m playing,” Low says, describing the relationship between him and his head coach with his usual sing-song voice. “Things are just going how it should be. Things are getting really comfortable now.”

Says the head coach: “He’s a very soft-spoken, nice young man, almost to the point where he would always defer to his older teammates. It’s not something I do.”

Regardless of the personality differences, Bennett knew immediately what he was getting in the 6-foot-1 point guard. Low is a legend in Hawaii, having been named the state’s Mr. Basketball in each of the last three seasons. His high school team, Iolani, won the last 72 games against in-state competition while Low was running the show.

So it registered as somewhat of a surprise that he ended up at Washington State, a school not known to be much like Honolulu. But with a thin roster, there was an opportunity to be the starting point guard immediately. Bennett had anointed him the team’s top choice to run the point well before the start of the season, but those plans crumbled when Low broke his foot in just the third practice of the year.

As a result, the point guard missed the first five games of the season and ended up playing catch-up for quite a while thereafter. Still, he’s started in the team’s last 14 games and will make it 15 today at Oregon State. Low has proven himself to be one of the team’s better shooters and in Saturday’s win over USC had a career-best eight assists.

But now that he’s on the floor so much, there’s a not-so-subtle tug of war between coaches, who want Low to shed part of the easy-going nature, and the point guard, who doesn’t know any other way.

“He’s an Island Boy,” associate head coach Tony Bennett says. “At times it’s his greatest asset and strength and at times it hurts him. Because he’s just such a nice, unassuming guy that he’s very poised and relaxed. Down the stretch he doesn’t get too flustered.

“But as a point guard playing a lot of minutes, maybe from missing some of the early stuff, he has to be more assertive and more aggressive. Not being someone he’s not, but pushing the envelope.”

Maybe to help bridge the cultural gap, Low couldn’t help but bring at least a little bit of home with him to the Palouse. The 18-year-old has a number of DVDs of an island comedy team called Da Braddahs, and roommate/power forward Chris Henry, himself an Orange County native, admits he doesn’t even get most of the humor.

“It’s a lot of island jokes, so I’m not really accustomed to it,” Henry says, offering a shrug of the shoulders. “I don’t really understand, but he’s on the bed laughing hysterically. I guess you have to be from Hawaii to understand it.”

Low says his roommate doesn’t get it because most of the jokes are about “people from the mainland,” as he calls them. When it was suggested that after four years he himself could become a mainlander himself, the Hawaiian paused briefly to consider.

“Can. Can become,” he says, ready to unleash a little joke of his own. “But always will be … Island Boy.”