Hopefully this will be okay to post.
By Brian Hamilton
CHICAGO — As if Tim Miles could resist. He ran along the sideline again, happy like a thief and screaming like a maniac. Again. He raised his left arm and extended his first two fingers, signifying the number of games Nebraska had won in the Big Ten tournament and, arguably, the odds out of a million that this would happen. He kept the pace and delivered a few high fives as he hit the turn toward the tunnel entrance at the United Center. Without breaking stride, he leapt over the now-uncarpeted spot where he tripped and fell and barrel-rolled on the floor after doing the same stuff the night before. It was hammy and gratuitous and he looked a little like a court jester in a shirt and tie.
But, what, you expected Tim Miles to walk?
The Cornhuskers coach was still outside the locker room a few minutes later, still silly-eyed and breathing hard, waiting for his point guard to finish a television interview. In an alternate universe, 13th-seeded Nebraska doesn’t beat Rutgers on Wednesday and doesn’t even get a chance to beat Maryland on Thursday and Miles is possibly unemployed. But here everyone was, waiting on a celebration. Miles kept shifting his feet as Pat Chambers, the Penn State coach, walked by on his way to the floor for pregame warmups. Chambers extended his right hand, palm up. Miles hit it about as hard as he could.
“****, I’m ready!” Miles said.
“Enjoy that ****ing beer tonight,” Chambers replied as he passed, smiling the smile of a guy who knows.
Glynn Watson, Nebraska’s aforementioned tardy floor general, made his way down the hall shortly thereafter, released from the clutches of the Big Ten Network. “Let’s go!” Miles barked. He then delivered a hard backslap to Watson, then an equally aggressive slap to the senior’s posterior, and the two of them disappeared behind closed doors. The closing of said doors did not insulate the hallway from the sounds of more screaming and hollering and dancing and bottles of water being shaken and splashed over everyone in delight. Rinse and repeat, Tim Miles told his team. You win, I dance, you douse. And they could do it all over again on Friday, in a Big Ten quarterfinal against Wisconsin.
Inside the locker room, small puddles shimmered on folding chairs and half-emptied water bottles blanketed the floor and no one had a real firm grasp of what in the world was going on. They did seem to realize these burlesque days at the Big Ten tournament might be the last, wild ride for Tim Miles and this era of Nebrasketball. And in that case, just hold on as long as possible. “I know some of the noise around us pertains to me,” Miles said, standing in the hall a few minutes later. “But the other noise, about where we fit in, in the NCAA or NIT, I don’t know, and I’m not interested in it. I just know if we can win enough, they can’t stop us from playing.”
On the morning of Jan. 15, Nebraska was 11-3 and had won as many Big Ten games (three) as it had lost. It had just beaten a then-ranked Indiana team on the road. This was fine. Not necessarily ideal for a program with designs on an NCAA Tournament bid. Not the emphatic statement anyone had hoped for after a Selection Sunday snub the previous spring, when 13 league victories wasn’t enough to overcome the fact that it was 13 victories in a bad league. But, still, it was fine. All things were possible.
On the night of March 13, Nebraska started warmups for its Big Ten tournament opener with 15 losses, six healthy scholarship players and a subatomic measure of hope. Basically, nothing was fine. Isaac Copeland, a linchpin senior and the team’s second-leading scorer and rebounder, had been out after tearing his ACL in late January. So, too, was sophomore guard Thomas Allen, whose injured ankle portended a long absence. And a refreshing win over Iowa just a few days earlier was tempered by the news that freshman Amir Harris tore his meniscus in the process. “You’re sitting there and it seems like you’re the Black Knight in Monty Python,” Miles said on Thursday afternoon. “Lose an arm, lose a leg, pretty soon it’s, ‘Come back here, you coward’ and you’re just hemorrhaging.”
Given all that, and one unholy stretch of 11 losses in 13 games to torpedo damn near everything, the program seemed assured to miss the NCAA Tournament for the sixth time in Miles’ seven seasons. Which strongly suggested he might not be around for an eighth.
“Never would I have thought this is how it would’ve played out,” junior forward Isaiah Roby said. “But I don’t feel bad for us. Nobody in this locker room feels bad for us. We’re going to go out there and play as hard as we can. Whatever cards we’re dealt, that’s what we’re going to play with.”
The hand was pretty bad. Entering the Big Ten tournament with a coach’s future in the balance is suboptimal enough. Doing so with walk-ons in the rotation is suicidal. In the hours leading up to tipoff against Rutgers, though, it would seem there might have been no better coach for Nebraska than the 52-year-old Miles. The overtime win against Iowa on Sunday was desperately needed in general, yes, but most critically it may have opened the door for Miles to play to his strengths instead of scrambling to stop all the bleeding. He is, infamously at times, self-effacing and goofy. At other times he’s curse-like-a-sailor demanding. This strange brew of gallows humor and dire urgency might have put the Cornhuskers’ minds in precisely the right place to do what no one imagined they would.
During Tuesday’s workout, for example, Miles began defining his team’s assignments for the next day against Rutgers. All Roby had to do, he said, was outscore and outrebound the Scarlet Knights’ Eugene Omoruyi and Myles Johnson, which effectively meant Roby was on the hook for a double-double and then some. Miles informed Watson and leading scorer James Palmer Jr. that he needed about 50 points, combined, from both players, at least, and they couldn’t wait as long as they did against Iowa to get on that task. His deadpan delivery of these somewhat ostentatious requests had everyone laughing. Then senior center Tanner Borchardt chimed in, speaking on behalf of himself, little-used sophomore Thor Thorbjarnarson and even-more-little-used senior walk-on Johnny Trueblood.
“Me, Thor and Johnny,” Borchardt said, “we can get you eight.”
“Perfect!” Miles replied. “We’re fine.”
In a completely ludicrous way befitting the Cornhuskers’ predicament, they kind of were. Just about everyone would have to do ridiculous things, things that no one wanted to do originally or ever expected to do, or the season would be over and their coach might be looking for somewhere else to coach. They’d already felt this particular drag and dealt with it accordingly. The win over Iowa was, in this exact way, a rehearsal. Absolutely no one in a Nebraska uniform lied to themselves about their coach’s plight, and the time came to deal with reality in the most forthright way. “Senior Day was really special, because we knew what was on the line,” Borchardt said. “It was our Senior Day, but he’s on the hot seat. That could’ve been his last game at (Pinnacle Bank Arena). That game wasn’t just for us seniors. That was for him too.”
So, after all of this, why not delude yourself into believing you can do these ridiculous things? What the hell is the downside?
When it came time to play Rutgers, Miles first issued a more practical message. Control the controllables, he told his team. Be in a good stance. Block out instead of watching the shot. Play with energy. And that would have to be enough. Of course, he then also told his team to never for a moment use its circumstances as an excuse. He told them to man up. Miles told his team, flatly, that it had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
In the huddle, a kid from Omaha listened closely and took heed. He’d be, two games hence, the emblem of the wonder and absurdity in what would happen at the United Center.
This was how the Legend of Johnny Trueblood began.
Trueblood is having a Big Ten tournament to remember. (David Banks/USA Today)
Actually, it began during a card game in the summer of 2015. Trueblood had come to Nebraska as a preferred walk-on after finishing as the all-time leading scorer at Elkhart South High School in Omaha, once tallying a school-record 42 points in a game. He’d committed to Miles and the Cornhuskers before his senior season, intent on playing for the program down the road in Lincoln instead of exploring other avenues outside the Big Ten. He was set to live this dream with the beginning of practice before a preseason trip to Spain when he started feeling lightheaded while playing cards with Watson and another teammate. A headache set in. With that all-important workout set for the next day, he went to bed.
It didn’t help. “I woke up the next morning,” Trueblood says, “and I could barely move.” He dragged himself to class and barely paid attention before seeking out athletic trainer R.J. Pietig. Trueblood explained his predicament and told Pietig he had to skip practice, that he needed to go to his grandmother’s house in Lincoln and lay down. He left campus, made it to the house and took another four-hour nap. He woke up and immediately called his mother. Johnny said she should probably take him to the hospital.
Varicella meningitis is a form of the virus that, by all available accounts, is extremely rare in healthy populations. In other words, people in the United States don’t get varicella meningitis. Somehow, Trueblood had contracted varicella meningitis. Don’t ask him how, because he asked, and even the doctors couldn’t figure it out. One of the indelible memories of Trueblood’s week-long stay at Omaha Children’s Hospital — he wound up there after first going to a hospital in Lincoln — is the ubiquitousness of curious people in lab coats visiting his room. “It’s like shingles on the brain,” he said, sitting in the Nebraska locker room on Thursday. “It’s wild. Like, the doctors want to do a case study on me. They’ve never seen it in a person before.”
He’d recover enough to leave after that week, but his energy had vanished. It took Trueblood months to return to normal, and he became exhausted as he tried to press through his freshman campaign. He decided to leave the basketball program before his sophomore season. But pickup ball didn’t slake his thirst. Midway through the season, Trueblood reached out to Anton Gill, his friend and then a guard with the Cornhuskers, and asked if Gill thought Miles would be amenable to his return. Miles was. Under certain conditions. “I kind of wanted to see how serious Johnny was,” the coach said on Thursday. ” ‘Come in and see me once a month and just check in, and maybe we’ll do it after the year.’ And Johnny was committed to being back on the team. That said a lot to me. I had no problem bringing him back. But I wanted to test him a little bit too.”
Until recently, the 6-foot-3, 194-pound senior was but a scout-team stalwart, the hustling, charge-taking underdog straight out of central casting. “He does all the little things,” Watson says. Mostly he’s deployed to deny Watson or Palmer the ball in accordance with however the opponent plans to limit Nebraska’s best players. But he’ll also take on all positions, 1 through 5, due to the general lack of available size on the scout squad. “If I ever get matched up on Tanner,” Trueblood says of his 6-8, 250-pound classmate, “he’s pretty tough to guard.”
Beyond that, his final season mostly served as an internship. Trueblood’s goal is to be a college coach. So Miles shared insights and documents and whatever he could to facilitate the early stages of those aspirations. On the floor? Through Feb. 5, Trueblood logged all of 37 minutes. Then the injuries worthy of a Python farce piled up. So he played 26 minutes against Iowa, grabbing six rebounds and dishing out four assists. Then he played another 26 minutes against Rutgers in the Big Ten tournament opener, grabbing another four rebounds, dishing out another three assists and this time snagging four steals, including a late pilfer that helped put the game out of reach.
And then there was the Maryland game, and there was Trueblood, standing in the corner in front of the Terrapins bench in the first half, draining a 3-pointer and then turning around to talk shit as he ran back up the floor.
“I was just happy I hit the shot,” he said afterward.
In the end, Johnny Trueblood, walk-on from Omaha, scored five points and grabbed four rebounds in the 69-61 win. Bruno Fernando, the Terrapins’ 6-10 all-league behemoth, finished with three points.
Johnny Trueblood, in a Big Ten tournament game, outscored Bruno Fernando. This was a thing that happened.
“When he got his chance,” Watson said, “you see what he’s doing.”
It was a March fable, told in real time. Trueblood even earned himself a brush with fame: Hannah Huston, a native of Grand Island, Neb., who finished third in season 10 of “The Voice,” tweeted at him. He wasn’t exactly sure — it’s all such a blur, after all — but he thinks she tweeted something encouraging during the Rutgers game, at which point Roby tweeted something, which Trueblood then retweeted, after which Huston followed them both and then sent some laughing emojis in response to another of Roby’s tweets. “I was pretty pumped about that,” Trueblood said.
He was not entirely sure how to give proper context to all of this, to the burgeoning spectacle he was becoming, from the chants of “John-NY! John-NY!” that rang out three times in the final minute of the Rutgers game to talking smack to Maryland’s bench to Nebraska senior associate communications director Shamus McKnight informing Trueblood that he’d been requested for a postgame phone interview. After a Big Ten tournament game. That Nebraska won, thanks to his contributions. The world-at-large was coming to know the Legend of Johnny Trueblood, and when asked late on Thursday afternoon how much this matched up with whatever he’d imagined for himself at Nebraska, the man himself hesitated. He said he’d think about it later. He noted the story wasn’t done yet.
At the United Center, the Big Ten reserved seats along press row for each school’s athletic director. The man who will determine Tim Miles’ fate, Nebraska athletics director Bill Moos, elected not to sit in that seat. In fact, Moos elected not to be in Chicago at all on Thursday, to miss a mind-bending uprising from his men’s basketball program in the league’s championship event in favor of watching his son play in Cal’s spring football game. Which is scheduled for Saturday.
We’ll leave ample space here for family considerations and any other extenuating circumstances. There may be a more than a viable explanation for the itinerary. We’ll also note that the Big Ten tournament takes place in Chicago, and Cal is near San Francisco, and airplanes fly between those two cities on Fridays. Frequently, in fact. “He’s got his son’s spring game, and you know what, I’d want to be at my son’s spring game too,” Miles said on Thursday, when asked whether he thought he boss would attend this event. “He can catch us on TV. I’m fine with that. Bill’s a good dude, good guy. He’s told me before, listen, I’m going to make a decision at the end of the year. It’ll be a difficult decision, but retention is an option. And I’m just trying to coach and get these guys to get the most out of this experience. It’s a big-boy business. And whatever will be, will be.”
What it has been, for two days and counting, is anything but the enervating slog that Nebraska basketball had been for the previous two months. It was Tim Miles at his impish best, imploring Rutgers coach Steve Pikiell to stop working the refs right after the refs asked Steve Pikiell to stop working the refs, which drew a laugh from Pikiell and a prompted a fist-bump between the coaches. It was Miles making fun of Maryland’s gear when Terrapins coach Mark Turgeon argued the ball went out of bounds off of a Nebraska player’s foot — “We can see the crappy Under Armour shoe!” Miles cracked — and then reaching into that gallows-humor well in the second half, when Borchardt picked up a fourth foul on a 50-50 call near the rim.
“How do you call his fourth foul on that?” Miles asked referee Steve McJunkins, who it should be noted didn’t make the call. “I’ve got six ****ing players.”
Miles was fighting for his team and himself, fighting all the way, to prolong whatever this was for however long he could. And maybe the big decision on him was made before he started this particular fight. The reflection of the coach on to the United Center floor, in a way no one expected, was what the Nebraska players wanted everyone to pay attention to. “You can just look at our play,” Roby said. “I mean, if he wasn’t the guy, I think we would’ve given up on him. And I don’t think anybody has given up on him. Everybody in this locker room, we’re playing hard for him and we’re still accepting his challenges. We only got eight guys, and he’s challenging us to win all five games.”
At the end on Thursday, with Maryland finally giving in to what had seemed like a bad dream, Watson dribbled the clock out near midcourt. Miles crouched down to smile and catch Watson’s eye.
“What’d I tell you!” he asked and exclaimed all at once.
Miles had told Watson a lot of things, actually. He’d told his senior guard that the Big Ten tournament represented a new season. He told him that anything could happen. He told him that making anything happen would be tough, but that he knew the team could do it. And, most important, Miles told him to pack enough clothes to last until Sunday.
CHICAGO — As if Tim Miles could resist. He ran along the sideline again, happy like a thief and screaming like a maniac. Again. He raised his left arm and extended his first two fingers, signifying the number of games Nebraska had won in the Big Ten tournament and, arguably, the odds out of a million that this would happen. He kept the pace and delivered a few high fives as he hit the turn toward the tunnel entrance at the United Center. Without breaking stride, he leapt over the now-uncarpeted spot where he tripped and fell and barrel-rolled on the floor after doing the same stuff the night before. It was hammy and gratuitous and he looked a little like a court jester in a shirt and tie.
But, what, you expected Tim Miles to walk?
The Cornhuskers coach was still outside the locker room a few minutes later, still silly-eyed and breathing hard, waiting for his point guard to finish a television interview. In an alternate universe, 13th-seeded Nebraska doesn’t beat Rutgers on Wednesday and doesn’t even get a chance to beat Maryland on Thursday and Miles is possibly unemployed. But here everyone was, waiting on a celebration. Miles kept shifting his feet as Pat Chambers, the Penn State coach, walked by on his way to the floor for pregame warmups. Chambers extended his right hand, palm up. Miles hit it about as hard as he could.
“****, I’m ready!” Miles said.
“Enjoy that ****ing beer tonight,” Chambers replied as he passed, smiling the smile of a guy who knows.
Glynn Watson, Nebraska’s aforementioned tardy floor general, made his way down the hall shortly thereafter, released from the clutches of the Big Ten Network. “Let’s go!” Miles barked. He then delivered a hard backslap to Watson, then an equally aggressive slap to the senior’s posterior, and the two of them disappeared behind closed doors. The closing of said doors did not insulate the hallway from the sounds of more screaming and hollering and dancing and bottles of water being shaken and splashed over everyone in delight. Rinse and repeat, Tim Miles told his team. You win, I dance, you douse. And they could do it all over again on Friday, in a Big Ten quarterfinal against Wisconsin.
Inside the locker room, small puddles shimmered on folding chairs and half-emptied water bottles blanketed the floor and no one had a real firm grasp of what in the world was going on. They did seem to realize these burlesque days at the Big Ten tournament might be the last, wild ride for Tim Miles and this era of Nebrasketball. And in that case, just hold on as long as possible. “I know some of the noise around us pertains to me,” Miles said, standing in the hall a few minutes later. “But the other noise, about where we fit in, in the NCAA or NIT, I don’t know, and I’m not interested in it. I just know if we can win enough, they can’t stop us from playing.”
On the morning of Jan. 15, Nebraska was 11-3 and had won as many Big Ten games (three) as it had lost. It had just beaten a then-ranked Indiana team on the road. This was fine. Not necessarily ideal for a program with designs on an NCAA Tournament bid. Not the emphatic statement anyone had hoped for after a Selection Sunday snub the previous spring, when 13 league victories wasn’t enough to overcome the fact that it was 13 victories in a bad league. But, still, it was fine. All things were possible.
On the night of March 13, Nebraska started warmups for its Big Ten tournament opener with 15 losses, six healthy scholarship players and a subatomic measure of hope. Basically, nothing was fine. Isaac Copeland, a linchpin senior and the team’s second-leading scorer and rebounder, had been out after tearing his ACL in late January. So, too, was sophomore guard Thomas Allen, whose injured ankle portended a long absence. And a refreshing win over Iowa just a few days earlier was tempered by the news that freshman Amir Harris tore his meniscus in the process. “You’re sitting there and it seems like you’re the Black Knight in Monty Python,” Miles said on Thursday afternoon. “Lose an arm, lose a leg, pretty soon it’s, ‘Come back here, you coward’ and you’re just hemorrhaging.”
Given all that, and one unholy stretch of 11 losses in 13 games to torpedo damn near everything, the program seemed assured to miss the NCAA Tournament for the sixth time in Miles’ seven seasons. Which strongly suggested he might not be around for an eighth.
“Never would I have thought this is how it would’ve played out,” junior forward Isaiah Roby said. “But I don’t feel bad for us. Nobody in this locker room feels bad for us. We’re going to go out there and play as hard as we can. Whatever cards we’re dealt, that’s what we’re going to play with.”
The hand was pretty bad. Entering the Big Ten tournament with a coach’s future in the balance is suboptimal enough. Doing so with walk-ons in the rotation is suicidal. In the hours leading up to tipoff against Rutgers, though, it would seem there might have been no better coach for Nebraska than the 52-year-old Miles. The overtime win against Iowa on Sunday was desperately needed in general, yes, but most critically it may have opened the door for Miles to play to his strengths instead of scrambling to stop all the bleeding. He is, infamously at times, self-effacing and goofy. At other times he’s curse-like-a-sailor demanding. This strange brew of gallows humor and dire urgency might have put the Cornhuskers’ minds in precisely the right place to do what no one imagined they would.
During Tuesday’s workout, for example, Miles began defining his team’s assignments for the next day against Rutgers. All Roby had to do, he said, was outscore and outrebound the Scarlet Knights’ Eugene Omoruyi and Myles Johnson, which effectively meant Roby was on the hook for a double-double and then some. Miles informed Watson and leading scorer James Palmer Jr. that he needed about 50 points, combined, from both players, at least, and they couldn’t wait as long as they did against Iowa to get on that task. His deadpan delivery of these somewhat ostentatious requests had everyone laughing. Then senior center Tanner Borchardt chimed in, speaking on behalf of himself, little-used sophomore Thor Thorbjarnarson and even-more-little-used senior walk-on Johnny Trueblood.
“Me, Thor and Johnny,” Borchardt said, “we can get you eight.”
“Perfect!” Miles replied. “We’re fine.”
In a completely ludicrous way befitting the Cornhuskers’ predicament, they kind of were. Just about everyone would have to do ridiculous things, things that no one wanted to do originally or ever expected to do, or the season would be over and their coach might be looking for somewhere else to coach. They’d already felt this particular drag and dealt with it accordingly. The win over Iowa was, in this exact way, a rehearsal. Absolutely no one in a Nebraska uniform lied to themselves about their coach’s plight, and the time came to deal with reality in the most forthright way. “Senior Day was really special, because we knew what was on the line,” Borchardt said. “It was our Senior Day, but he’s on the hot seat. That could’ve been his last game at (Pinnacle Bank Arena). That game wasn’t just for us seniors. That was for him too.”
So, after all of this, why not delude yourself into believing you can do these ridiculous things? What the hell is the downside?
When it came time to play Rutgers, Miles first issued a more practical message. Control the controllables, he told his team. Be in a good stance. Block out instead of watching the shot. Play with energy. And that would have to be enough. Of course, he then also told his team to never for a moment use its circumstances as an excuse. He told them to man up. Miles told his team, flatly, that it had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
In the huddle, a kid from Omaha listened closely and took heed. He’d be, two games hence, the emblem of the wonder and absurdity in what would happen at the United Center.
This was how the Legend of Johnny Trueblood began.
Trueblood is having a Big Ten tournament to remember. (David Banks/USA Today)
Actually, it began during a card game in the summer of 2015. Trueblood had come to Nebraska as a preferred walk-on after finishing as the all-time leading scorer at Elkhart South High School in Omaha, once tallying a school-record 42 points in a game. He’d committed to Miles and the Cornhuskers before his senior season, intent on playing for the program down the road in Lincoln instead of exploring other avenues outside the Big Ten. He was set to live this dream with the beginning of practice before a preseason trip to Spain when he started feeling lightheaded while playing cards with Watson and another teammate. A headache set in. With that all-important workout set for the next day, he went to bed.
It didn’t help. “I woke up the next morning,” Trueblood says, “and I could barely move.” He dragged himself to class and barely paid attention before seeking out athletic trainer R.J. Pietig. Trueblood explained his predicament and told Pietig he had to skip practice, that he needed to go to his grandmother’s house in Lincoln and lay down. He left campus, made it to the house and took another four-hour nap. He woke up and immediately called his mother. Johnny said she should probably take him to the hospital.
Varicella meningitis is a form of the virus that, by all available accounts, is extremely rare in healthy populations. In other words, people in the United States don’t get varicella meningitis. Somehow, Trueblood had contracted varicella meningitis. Don’t ask him how, because he asked, and even the doctors couldn’t figure it out. One of the indelible memories of Trueblood’s week-long stay at Omaha Children’s Hospital — he wound up there after first going to a hospital in Lincoln — is the ubiquitousness of curious people in lab coats visiting his room. “It’s like shingles on the brain,” he said, sitting in the Nebraska locker room on Thursday. “It’s wild. Like, the doctors want to do a case study on me. They’ve never seen it in a person before.”
He’d recover enough to leave after that week, but his energy had vanished. It took Trueblood months to return to normal, and he became exhausted as he tried to press through his freshman campaign. He decided to leave the basketball program before his sophomore season. But pickup ball didn’t slake his thirst. Midway through the season, Trueblood reached out to Anton Gill, his friend and then a guard with the Cornhuskers, and asked if Gill thought Miles would be amenable to his return. Miles was. Under certain conditions. “I kind of wanted to see how serious Johnny was,” the coach said on Thursday. ” ‘Come in and see me once a month and just check in, and maybe we’ll do it after the year.’ And Johnny was committed to being back on the team. That said a lot to me. I had no problem bringing him back. But I wanted to test him a little bit too.”
Until recently, the 6-foot-3, 194-pound senior was but a scout-team stalwart, the hustling, charge-taking underdog straight out of central casting. “He does all the little things,” Watson says. Mostly he’s deployed to deny Watson or Palmer the ball in accordance with however the opponent plans to limit Nebraska’s best players. But he’ll also take on all positions, 1 through 5, due to the general lack of available size on the scout squad. “If I ever get matched up on Tanner,” Trueblood says of his 6-8, 250-pound classmate, “he’s pretty tough to guard.”
Beyond that, his final season mostly served as an internship. Trueblood’s goal is to be a college coach. So Miles shared insights and documents and whatever he could to facilitate the early stages of those aspirations. On the floor? Through Feb. 5, Trueblood logged all of 37 minutes. Then the injuries worthy of a Python farce piled up. So he played 26 minutes against Iowa, grabbing six rebounds and dishing out four assists. Then he played another 26 minutes against Rutgers in the Big Ten tournament opener, grabbing another four rebounds, dishing out another three assists and this time snagging four steals, including a late pilfer that helped put the game out of reach.
And then there was the Maryland game, and there was Trueblood, standing in the corner in front of the Terrapins bench in the first half, draining a 3-pointer and then turning around to talk shit as he ran back up the floor.
“I was just happy I hit the shot,” he said afterward.
In the end, Johnny Trueblood, walk-on from Omaha, scored five points and grabbed four rebounds in the 69-61 win. Bruno Fernando, the Terrapins’ 6-10 all-league behemoth, finished with three points.
Johnny Trueblood, in a Big Ten tournament game, outscored Bruno Fernando. This was a thing that happened.
“When he got his chance,” Watson said, “you see what he’s doing.”
It was a March fable, told in real time. Trueblood even earned himself a brush with fame: Hannah Huston, a native of Grand Island, Neb., who finished third in season 10 of “The Voice,” tweeted at him. He wasn’t exactly sure — it’s all such a blur, after all — but he thinks she tweeted something encouraging during the Rutgers game, at which point Roby tweeted something, which Trueblood then retweeted, after which Huston followed them both and then sent some laughing emojis in response to another of Roby’s tweets. “I was pretty pumped about that,” Trueblood said.
He was not entirely sure how to give proper context to all of this, to the burgeoning spectacle he was becoming, from the chants of “John-NY! John-NY!” that rang out three times in the final minute of the Rutgers game to talking smack to Maryland’s bench to Nebraska senior associate communications director Shamus McKnight informing Trueblood that he’d been requested for a postgame phone interview. After a Big Ten tournament game. That Nebraska won, thanks to his contributions. The world-at-large was coming to know the Legend of Johnny Trueblood, and when asked late on Thursday afternoon how much this matched up with whatever he’d imagined for himself at Nebraska, the man himself hesitated. He said he’d think about it later. He noted the story wasn’t done yet.
At the United Center, the Big Ten reserved seats along press row for each school’s athletic director. The man who will determine Tim Miles’ fate, Nebraska athletics director Bill Moos, elected not to sit in that seat. In fact, Moos elected not to be in Chicago at all on Thursday, to miss a mind-bending uprising from his men’s basketball program in the league’s championship event in favor of watching his son play in Cal’s spring football game. Which is scheduled for Saturday.
We’ll leave ample space here for family considerations and any other extenuating circumstances. There may be a more than a viable explanation for the itinerary. We’ll also note that the Big Ten tournament takes place in Chicago, and Cal is near San Francisco, and airplanes fly between those two cities on Fridays. Frequently, in fact. “He’s got his son’s spring game, and you know what, I’d want to be at my son’s spring game too,” Miles said on Thursday, when asked whether he thought he boss would attend this event. “He can catch us on TV. I’m fine with that. Bill’s a good dude, good guy. He’s told me before, listen, I’m going to make a decision at the end of the year. It’ll be a difficult decision, but retention is an option. And I’m just trying to coach and get these guys to get the most out of this experience. It’s a big-boy business. And whatever will be, will be.”
What it has been, for two days and counting, is anything but the enervating slog that Nebraska basketball had been for the previous two months. It was Tim Miles at his impish best, imploring Rutgers coach Steve Pikiell to stop working the refs right after the refs asked Steve Pikiell to stop working the refs, which drew a laugh from Pikiell and a prompted a fist-bump between the coaches. It was Miles making fun of Maryland’s gear when Terrapins coach Mark Turgeon argued the ball went out of bounds off of a Nebraska player’s foot — “We can see the crappy Under Armour shoe!” Miles cracked — and then reaching into that gallows-humor well in the second half, when Borchardt picked up a fourth foul on a 50-50 call near the rim.
“How do you call his fourth foul on that?” Miles asked referee Steve McJunkins, who it should be noted didn’t make the call. “I’ve got six ****ing players.”
Miles was fighting for his team and himself, fighting all the way, to prolong whatever this was for however long he could. And maybe the big decision on him was made before he started this particular fight. The reflection of the coach on to the United Center floor, in a way no one expected, was what the Nebraska players wanted everyone to pay attention to. “You can just look at our play,” Roby said. “I mean, if he wasn’t the guy, I think we would’ve given up on him. And I don’t think anybody has given up on him. Everybody in this locker room, we’re playing hard for him and we’re still accepting his challenges. We only got eight guys, and he’s challenging us to win all five games.”
At the end on Thursday, with Maryland finally giving in to what had seemed like a bad dream, Watson dribbled the clock out near midcourt. Miles crouched down to smile and catch Watson’s eye.
“What’d I tell you!” he asked and exclaimed all at once.
Miles had told Watson a lot of things, actually. He’d told his senior guard that the Big Ten tournament represented a new season. He told him that anything could happen. He told him that making anything happen would be tough, but that he knew the team could do it. And, most important, Miles told him to pack enough clothes to last until Sunday.
