Santangelo’S Ride Grows Ever Crazier
Here in the Golden Age of Gonzaga University basketball, Matt Santangelo drills into a new motherlode almost daily.
Take his workouts this summer in Portland, where one of his partners has been Mike Dunleavy Jr. - son of the Trail Blazers coach and soon to be a freshman at Duke.
That would be Duke as in duck, which - depending on how elastic you want to make the truth - is what the Blue Devils did to Gonzaga during some recent fencing over the 1999-2000 basketball schedule. ESPN thought it might be good TV to put the Zags and Dookies together, but it never came to pass due to Duke’s reluctance.
“I’ve been telling him they were scared,” Santangelo reported. “If nothing else, it gave me some good trash-talking material.”
Does it get any better than this?
Bagging on Duke.
Doing room service on Playboy’s tab.
Visualizing a gold medal around his neck.
If he and his Gonzaga teammates never really bought into the Cinderella shtick during the madness of March, Santangelo could certainly get used to life as Prince Charmed.
This morning, he leaves for Dayton and the second round of tryouts for USA Basketball’s World University Games team. The coaching staff - which includes GU’s Dan Monson - has already trimmed the original list of 29 to 16, and in a week they’ll settle on the 12 who will travel to Palma de Mallorca, Spain, for the WUG next month.
Not to spoil the drama, but Santangelo would do well to bone up on his Spanish.
Between training camps, he jetted to Chicago for assorted pampering and posing as a member of Playboy magazine’s latest All-America team which will be revealed - along with plenty more - in the December issue.
He even found himself featured in the Inside College Basketball section of last week’s Sports Illustrated - though if you’re a subscriber in Spokane, you didn’t see it because SI insists on shoving 40 pages of golf down your throat instead.
“It’s kind of wild - the whole ride keeps getting faster and faster,” said Santangelo, who had assumed it was going to slow to a crawl once the Bulldogs were stopped one victory short of the Final Four last spring. “Sometimes I look in the mirror and say, `What is going on?’ I really don’t have a grasp of it yet, but every day right now is a thrill for me.”
Whether the still-glowing Gonzaga fan can grasp it, that wasn’t the case in the days after UConn ended Gonzaga’s tournament run.
Santangelo enjoyed the celebrity as much as he could, but he also couldn’t shake - and still can’t - the memory of his 1-for-9 afternoon against the Huskies in the NCAA West Regional final.
“I’m a gym rat - I love being around the game,” he said, “so I went in the gym about Thursday after we got back just to shoot around and see people. But when I touched the ball and took a couple of shots - and missed a couple - I could feel myself completely going back to game day. I was mentally trying to fix my jumper and thinking, `This is what happens when Khalid switches out on me.’
“I just put the ball back in the locker room. I wasn’t ready to be back yet.”
Now, not only is he ready, he’s still riled by how it ended.
“It gnaws at you,” he admitted, “because if you have just an average (shooting) night, you beat them by six. Being a leader on that team and someone who expects a lot from himself, that was a tough performance to swallow. I don’t think I ever will or want to. I want a piece of that performance with me, to continue to motivate me.”
It already has.
In the first round of WUG trials, Santangelo shot 44 percent from 3-point range and in four games had just five turnovers playing both guard spots - making higher-profile guards like Jaraan Cornell of Purdue and Ed Cota of North Carolina expendable.
“So many of these guys are superstars at their own schools that you need some guys who aren’t afraid to be part of a team,” Santangelo said. “That’s what I think I bring and one of the great lessons I learned through this last year at Gonzaga - really understanding what it is to be a team.
“I felt like even if I hadn’t made the first cut, I would have gone home happy. I put my best foot forward and if they thought that wasn’t enough, I would have been OK with that.”
Besides, he would have had a consolation prize - the Playboy trip.
If you’re going to make one All-America team, make the one picked by our foremost skin mag. Hef may not give a hoot about hoops himself, but he knows how to treat a star.
Dinner on Navy Pier. A night on Rush Street. The obligatory photo shoot. A banquet at the House of Blues.
“Everywhere you went, you went in a limo,” Santangelo said. “I’m a guy of simple pleasures. Where I come from, we’d be lucky to have all 10 of us in the same tent camping, let alone room service at the Omni.”
He was well-fed on all levels. Hanging with the likes of Scoonie Penn, Mateen Cleaves and A.J. Guyton, Santangelo discovered that the NCAA Tournament run had indeed put Gonzaga on the college basketball map. Players whose teams had bombed out before the Elite Eight admitted to having rooted for the Zags to go all the way.
“Until you get to be a part of things like this, you just kind of accept that your role in college basketball at a school like Gonzaga is going to be small,” Santangelo said. “Right now, I’m competing with the best players out there and getting opportunities that, really, you don’t ever visualize.
“The NCAA Tournament was easier. This stuff is crazy.”