THE FINAL FOUR : It’s a Mix of Two Special Ks, Crum’s 6-7 Thoroughbreds and Bonkers on the Bayou

And then there were the final four, whose basketball coaches were tied in Wednesday by the miracle of modern teleconferencing for some early comments. Everyone stayed in character.

Louisville’s Denny Crum, now emerging as the favorite, was laconic.

Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski told his daily Polish joke.

Kansas’ Larry Brown made fun of his carpetbagger past.

(Question: Does a Final Four berth help recruiting? Brown: “I’ll have to go along with the others. I haven’t really been at one place long enough to tell.”)

LSU’s Dale Brown made several references to his humble beginnings.

Everyone was uniform in his praise of everyone else’s teams and players. Crum, Krzyzewski and Larry Brown spoke warmly of their mentors (John Wooden, Bob Knight and Dean Smith, respectively.) Dale Brown said he would have liked to have had a mentor.

So, if you actually want to learn something about the tournament, which resumes Saturday in Dallas, you have to go elsewhere.

“I like Louisville,” North Carolina State Coach Jim Valvano said from his Raleigh, N.C., office.

“Why? Because we beat them in the regular season. I want them to go all the way. It’d look good for us.”

But seriously, folks. Here’s a look at the finalists, in inverse order, starting with the 8-1 longshot.

LSU A couple of weeks ago, Larry Brown said he thought there were “40 Villanovas out there.” Now there’s one, LSU, seeded 11th in the Mideast regional, now an 8-1 underdog and a 5 1/2-point underdog Saturday to Louisville.

Compared to these guys, Villanova was an overpowering favorite. Dale Brown’s program was thought to be on a down-tick since 1981, the year his team made the Final Four, took a 30-27 halftime lead over Indiana in the semifinals and lost, 67-49. LSU had since lost nine more postseason games in a row, including last season’s 23-point blowout by Navy.

Brown, the it’s-getting-deep-in-here champion of the universe, was running out of things to say. In a given speech, Brown is capable of quoting everyone from Aristotle to Zoroaster. At the Mideast, writers compiled lists of the world figures’ names he dropped: Imelda Marcos, Adolf Hitler (whom he called El Sicko), etc.

The whole thing serves a good defensive purpose: It befuddles everyone and frees Brown from answering questions about his program, which, it has been suggested, represents most of the evils attendant on college basketball. There was the controversy when one of his assistants reported the theft of some $1,500 in cash from a briefcase while on a recruiting trip; the John Williams recruiting controversy, during which Brown announced he’d put $100,000 in a briefcase to see if Williams were interested; the LSU office bugging controversy; the Tito Horford recruiting controversy; the Tito Horford departing controversy.

LSU started 14-0 but fell apart. Center Nikita Wilson became academically ineligible, and Brown railed that LSU had “exploited” him. Brown suggested he might retire.

And then, in the tournament, with little more going other than the fact that they would play their first two games at Baton Rouge, the Tigers took off. They beat Purdue in double overtime and beat Memphis State on Anthony Wilson’s last-second shot. Then came the major upsets--Georgia Tech in its own Omni, followed by Kentucky, which had beaten LSU three times. Even more amazing, all this was accomplished with the team’s best player, John Williams, shooting 35.4% from the floor and averaging 12.5 points.

Everyone else has played great, and Brown has kept opponents off balance with a junk defense.

Crum said: “I don’t know how to describe his defense. It’s a combination of freaks. I don’t mean players, I mean a combination of defenses. It’s part man-to-man, part zone, part match-up.

“I do think we’re a hard team to play trick defenses against. We have such good balance. Anyone on our team is capable of scoring 25 points in a game. At least, I hope it works that way.”

Everyone else expects it to work that way.

Valvano said: “There’s always one Cinderella at the dance, a team everybody says doesn’t have a chance to win it. Past history has shown that’s a good team to be careful of. I’d still feel they’re the longshot. They’re not that big (6-8, 6-6, 6-5 across the front line), they’re not that deep. They’ve got an excellent player in Williams, but they shouldn’t be able to win.”

DUKE If you want to know what Indiana would be like if Bob Knight wasn’t screaming all the time, this is it. Krzyzewski, a Knight disciple, is kind of a Bob who you can take out in public.

Slight, preppy, looking like a displaced student manager, Krzyzewski looks the furthest thing from Knight, who has the build, bearing and temperament of a grizzly.

Krzyzewski (pronounced Shuh-SHEF-ski) makes jokes at his own expense at every opening, usually ethnic in nature. At the East Regional, he became interested in the pronunciation of Navy guard Doug Wojcik’s name.

“How does he pronounce it?” K asked.

“WOE-chick,” someone said.

“It should be VOY-chick,” K said. “I bet if you checked his background, you’d find he has knocked six-seven letters off it. Tell him tomorrow I’ll be Coach Shuh.”

And this was Shuh Tuesday, asked about preparations for Dallas:

“I talked to Coach Knight in detail. I talked to Jim Valvano, too, on how to sell things before and after the Final Four. He made some mistakes two years ago. He wants me to try coming there and selling Italian-Polish signs. He’s getting 85% of everything. . . . He won’t be hard to find in Dallas, not with that nose. Of course there’s my nose, too. One thing we’ve got in the ACC is good noses.”

Don’t be coming into the lane laughing though. This is like one of Knight’s Indiana teams. It’s physical up front (Danny Ferry, Jay Bilas and Mark Alarie weigh 230, 225 and 220, respectively) and very quick at guard. The Blue Devils play great man-to-man defense. If you want to run a clinic on weakside rotation, you would show their film. (For those of you who prefer English, notice how rarely you see anyone shoot an unopposed shot against Duke. If one Blue Devil defender is beaten, someone will step up to help.)

Alarie and Johnny Dawkins are both projected NBA first-rounders. Aside from Dawkins, the Devils are determinedly unspectacular, even plodding.

“When we first started playing against Ralph Sampson, I tried to body him up,” says Bilas, the senior from Rolling Hills High School. “Seemed like every time he turned around to shoot a hook shot, he caught me in the side of the head with an elbow. I felt like I was getting crushed and nobody would call anything.

“I remember one time, I had really muscled him up, kept him outside the lane. He got the ball and turned around and just monster-slammed right in my face. After the game, people are saying, ‘Sampson dunked on your head.’ (Laughing) People I thought were friends of mine. . . . “People talk about the shortcomings of our inside game. Maybe rightfully so. Our guards are so good. A lot of people say we don’t have a lot of size. I’m 6-8. What I lack in height, I make up for in lack of quickness. We just have to go out and do the best we can. We’re not looking for someone to pat us on the back and tell us we’re good boys.”

KANSAS Whatever anyone has ever said about Larry Brown, no one has even suggested he can’t build a program or coach a team.

Who was the last Big Eight team anyone took seriously?

Maybe Kansas with Wilt Chamberlain.

How long did it take Brown to change that?

Three seasons.

His coup was stealing Danny Manning from his North Carolina home and from Brown’s own mentor, Dean Smith. Brown did it by hiring Danny’s father, Ed, a former pro player who was driving a truck, as an assistant coach. There was a furor in Carolina, but a fledgling superstar in Kansas.

Also Brown developed Greg Dreiling, a 7-footer, ranked behind Patrick Ewing and Stuart Gray as a high school senior, whose utility was thought to have diminished to, say, plugging a large hole in a dam. Now he’s being projected for the top half of the NBA’s first round. It makes you wonder how Gray would have turned out had Brown stayed at UCLA.

There is some thought, however, that Kansas may have shot its bolt.

Valvano said: “Remember, they beat Iowa State by a deuce in the conference tournament. Michigan State had ‘em by six with a minute to play. If Michigan State makes free throws, the game’s over. You’ve got to give credit to Kansas--they scored every time they got the ball. Still, if you’re Michigan State and you’re up six with 1:06 to play, and you’ve got the No. 1 foul-shooting team in the country, you’ve got to think you look pretty good.

“Without Dreiling, they’re not very big, and he’s very foul prone. When he’s out of the game, they’re more of a perimeter team. They shot 55% as a team. Manning shot 60%.”

LOUISVILLE A year ago, Crum lost Milt Wagner to injury. His string of 20-victory seasons ended. He wound up in the NIT, lost to UCLA in the semifinals of that and finished 19-18.

When he started this season 11-6, all the people who are now saying that’s just Denny’s way, get some tough games in early, weren’t saying that. Pervis Ellison, the freshman center, was impressive but at 6-9, 195 was thought to be more of a forward. Billy Thompson wasn’t happening and was even booed in Freedom Hall, a first for the program. Wagner was coming back slowly.

Since then, everything has fallen together. Ellison handled Memphis State’s William Bedford in the Metro tourney. Wagner and Thompson rallied. You don’t need to believe everything Billy Packer says about Thompson, however. The guy is still something of a disappointment. The No. 1 player in his high school class, he was supposed to be a great player, he has great player tools, and he’s never quite been a great player. Make of that what you will.

And the unknown forward opposite Thompson, Herbert Crook, another in Crum’s seemingly inexhaustible store of 6-7 athletes, improved dramatically.

Valvano said: “I always view games from a margin of error. Which team can have the most things go wrong and win? I think that’s Louisville.

“They have the most depth, the most interchangeable parts. They have the type of athletes, where one 6-7 goes out and another 6-7 comes in. The coach has been there five times.

“I’ve got time for one more question. I’m writing a column for USA Today and I’m giving you all my stuff.”

Scoopsville.