Tattoo Douglas-Roberts' name on your memory
ROBYN NORWOOD / ON COLLEGE BASKETBALL
If all you see when you look at the Memphis standout are his tattoos, then you aren't seeing the whole picture.
SAN ANTONIO -- Players and coaches at the Final Four wear white hats and black hats. They are painted in broad brush strokes.
Kansas wears the white hat in tonight's NCAA title game, and Memphis wears the black.
Never mind that Kansas recruited Memphis stars Chris Douglas-Roberts and Derrick Rose too.
Or that Kansas guard Brandon Rush went to a prep school in North Carolina, just like a handful of Memphis players.
"I feel people judge us, and don't really know us," Douglas-Roberts said.
"But we've been dealing with it. But the biggest misconception has nothing to do with basketball. It's us as people. They don't really know us and they tend to judge based on how we look, how many tattoos or whatever. They don't see the real people."
Or, as he put it later:
"I'm pretty sure there's a player on Harvard or Yale with a tattoo somewhere."
The Douglas-Roberts of today is a little reminiscent of a well-spoken player for Nevada Las Vegas in 1990 and 1991. Not for his game, but in some of the things he says. That was Greg Anthony, who is at the Final Four working as a broadcaster for CBS College Sports Network this week.
Like Anthony was then, Douglas-Roberts, a 6-foot-7 guard who figures to be part of a key matchup with Rush, a 6-6 Kansas guard, is worth a second look.
For one thing, that tattoo on his neck?
The script "Judy" isn't for a girlfriend.
"That's my mother," he said.
And the one on his arm?
"It is Psalm 37, Verses 1 through 3," Douglas-Roberts said. "It is a lot of words, but basically it says to trust in the Lord and everything will be all right. Every time I shoot a free throw, I tap it three times, and it seems to be working, as you can see from my free-throw percentage."
None of this is to say Douglas-Roberts is a saintly student-athlete, or anything else about the Memphis players, some of whom Douglas-Roberts said have done "stupid things."
The point is, we don't know them well enough to say. But Douglas-Roberts is a find, the sort of player you discover when you're looking for somebody else.
That's what happened to Coach John Calipari when he first saw the junior from Detroit on the recruiting trail.
"I'm watching this game," Calipari said. "I keep seeing this skinny kid running half-speed. He just keeps getting balls in the basket.
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