MADISON, WIS. ? Drew Gooden sat at a circular table, fiddling with, then peeling and eating a banana as media-types grilled him for nearly half an hour.

Welcome to the Elite Eight, Drew.

Media pressure intensifies the closer a basketball team comes to the NCAA Final Four and Gooden, as most Kansas fans know, handles sports writers and broadcasters with a roguish aplomb that does nothing to diminish his All-America status.

Gooden is the horse Kansas rode to this point in its marvelous 32-3 season. KU has never had to prove it could win without Gooden because he has been knock-on-wood durable and blessedly foul-trouble free.

“He’s a pro and he’s been a pro all year long,” Oregon coach Ernie Kent said Saturday as he talked about today’s NCAA Midwest Regional final against the Jayhawks.

Maybe Kent knows something we don’t know, but Gooden isn’t a pro yet  although Gooden declaring for the NBA after this season is as inevitable as death, taxes and Wisconsin cheese.

Gooden is as, uh, good a big man as Kansas has ever had. He may not be as strong as Wilt Chamberlain, but who was? And he may not have the ball-handling skills of Danny Manning, but how many big men do?

If the lithe and athletic Gooden has a weakness, it’s his ball-handling. In fact, he has just one fewer turnover than point guard Aaron Miles who handles the ball much more than he does.

Still, you should have seen the 6-foot-10 Californian as a freshman when he looked like he had never even read a book about basketball. In fact, Gooden remembered coming to KU at the same time as frontcourt mate Nick Collison and quickly realizing he didn’t know squat.

“Nick was a country guy from Iowa and I was the city slicker from the Bay Area,” Gooden said, grinning then taking a bite from his banana. “Nick knew the Kansas system during the first two weeks of practice. Me, it took three years.”

Gooden at times felt like he was working on a road gang instead of going to college and playing basketball. Gooden soon learned the man who had lured him to Kansas wasn’t about to coddle him. Roy Williams gave him the treatment instead of a treat.

“He doesn’t kiss up to you,” Gooden said of Williams. “You have to earn every stripe. My freshman year it was tough to deal with until I bought into his philosophy and worked hard at it.”

First, though, Gooden almost bought a plane ticket back to Richmond, Calif.

“It’s tough coming in and you’re not the man,” Gooden continued. “Me and coach had a talk because I was thinking about transferring. Me and Kirk (Hinrich) would be sitting on the bench thinking, ‘I gotta get out of here,’ but that would have been the stupidest thing we could have ever done in our lives.”

Gooden does not talk about turning pro and he won’t until after the season, but he must chuckle when he sees an NBA team draft a player out of high school. No one knows more than Gooden that high school players are about as ready for the NBA as kindergarteners are for geometry.

That first year after high school is a real eye-opener.

“My freshman year I thought the national championship was going to fall in our laps,” Gooden said, now fiddling with the banana peel. “Then I found out practice was hard and I was exhausted. I thought it was Indiana and that’s a program I didn’t think I wanted any part of. It was a rough road, but it’s starting to smooth out now.”

Something else Gooden has learned: You don’t have to believe everything you read in the papers if you don’t read the papers.

“I don’t read newspapers. I just look at the pictures,” Gooden quipped, eliciting laughs from the media sitting and standing around the table with him.

Soon the allotted time was up and Gooden departed with the other four KU starters who had been subjected to the same media scrutiny.

“I wish we could play right now,” Gooden said before he left. “It’s nail-biting sitting around the hotel knowing you’re one game away from the Final Four.”

With Gooden in harness, the Final Four is no pipedream.