Columnist Steve Carp: Arkansas finally wipes slate clean

Steve Carp

Friday, March 12, 1999 | 10:44 a.m.

Steve Carp covers college basketball for the Las Vegas Sun. This column is one in a series on the road to the Final Four.

DENVER -- The last time Nolan Richardson sat in front of the microphone at McNichols Arena, he wasn't a very happy camper.

You wouldn't be, either, if your team had just been through 40 minutes of hell, courtesy of Duke, in the 1990 Final Four.

It was the aftermath of a 97-83 thrashing at the hands of the Blue Devils and Richardson's team was headed home. Duke was moving on to face UNLV for the national championship.

Here was a man who had just delivered his school to its first Final Four in a dozen years. And in less than two hours, it was headed back to Fayetteville.

A man can do a lot of thinking in nine years' time. But to Richardson's credit, he didn't dwell on it much. Just enough to keep the furnace stoked.

Arkansas came back the following year, ranked No. 2 to UNLV most of the season. The Razorbacks lost in the Southeast Regional final to Kansas that year. But two years later, Richardson's team was cutting down the nets at Charlotte, N.C., beating Duke, 76-72, for the national championship.

So Boss Hog erased that demon.

Thursday, he wiped the slate clean of another demon.

That would be the demon of 1990 in the Mile High City. Granted, no one will ever mistake Siena for Duke. But Arkansas didn't draw the Dookies this time. Instead, it was a small Catholic school from upstate New York and it was Arkansas administering the punishment to the tune of 94-80.

From Richardson's perspective, just winning in Denver was good. So here he was again. Same podium. Same microphone. Different demeanor.

"When I heard we were coming here to Denver, I was glad," Richardson said. "I thought we played well against Duke in '90. We just ran out of gas.

"One thing I needed to do was play more guys more minutes. I was trying to make sure I got my bigger kids rested. You just can't play the way we play the entire time in this altitude without resting players. It's difficult to be a street fighter and turn into a boxer."

When the calling of the Hogs came prior to Thursday, there was no problem answering the Whooo, Pig, Sooey. Arkansas was ready for a street fight. And Siena tried to brawl with the Razorbacks.

Didn't work.

The Razorbacks already were holding a double-digit lead midway through the first half. And it would have been crazy for Paul Hewitt's Saints to turn into sinners and try something different.

If a guy's got a knife in his hands and you don't know anything about martial arts, that's not the time to become Chuck Norris.

So Siena fought the only way it knew how -- try and brawl with Arkansas. It got an attaboy from Richardson for the courage and effort, and a trip back to Albany this morning after a 25-6 season.

"They probably haven't played teams like us -- trapping, constant pressure," Richardson said of Siena, which plays in the small-to-mid-major Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference along with the likes of Manhattan, Fairfield, Niagara, St. Peter's and Iona. "I was counting on that."

He also was counting on his scrappy team to deliver the goods. And did it ever. Arkansas shot lights out Thursday, hitting 50 percent from long distance and making the basket look like a moon-sized crater.

Siena's hoop, on the other hand, must have looked like one of those Little Tykes plastic basketball sets for 3-year-olds. Maybe that accounts for the 28-percent shooting from the arc.

Then again, maybe it was Arkansas' relentless pressure.

It's not quite the "40 Minutes of Hell" we were used to seeing through most of the '90s. But this team gets after it pretty good. Of course, it has little choice. For if it doesn't, there's a higher authority to answer to.

The players know it's easier to leave it all on the court rather than face the wrath of Richardson.

"This little team, they just bust their butts," Richardson said admiringly.

So Thursday turned out to be a pretty good day for Arkansas. Ol' Nolan was a smiling, happy guy. He evened the count at McNichols and his feisty band of Hogs gets to fight another day against a bigger, stronger Iowa team Saturday that has its own incentives for winning here -- none having to do with history.

But it never hurts to have a little historical perspective on your side.