Woodling: Toughness Nick’s knack
New Orleans ? Four years of watching Nick Collison answer the bell for every Kansas University men’s basketball game reminds me of those Terminator movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger portraying an indestructible android.
It’s possible, you know, that Collison, who has never missed a KU game because of an injury, is actually a technologically enhanced machine with sophisticated plastic skin encasing an alloy skeleton.
Not according to KU trainer Mark Cairns, who threw cold water on the preposterous notion.
“We operated on his elbow year before last,” Cairns said, “and we X-rayed, so we know he has bones.”
Collison is mortal, of course, yet he appears to have Lexus skin, Cadillac bones and a threshold of pain in the BMW range. If Collison is hurting, you wouldn’t know it.
Every now and then, Collison suffers some shoulder slippage — nothing like Wayne Simien’s dislocation, but enough damage to cause him pain before it subsides. The 6-foot-9, 255-pound senior also has played with thigh bruises most people didn’t know about because the length of his trunks concealed the protective padding.
“He’ll take an occasional slap on the knee, too,” Cairns said, “but he knows things will heal, and he deals with it.”
Still, when you have a thoroughbred, you treat it differently than a plow horse, so the Kansas stud is monitored closely by the training staff. For instance, the staff tries to make sure Collison undergoes massage therapy at least twice a month. Not that he lives from massage to massage, though.
“I usually have to be the one to remind him about it,” Cairns said.
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Collison named AP All-Americancontinued from page 1c
Collison’s knack for avoiding serious injury has a lot to do with his physical and mental makeup, yet good fortune has to play a role, too.
“I’ve been lucky, I guess,” he said. “I broke a thumb once when I was in high school, but that’s been it. Hopefully, I’ll never have to worry about injuries.”
Collison, who Thursday was named first-team All-America by the Associated Press, was worried about injuries last spring when he had to decide whether to return to school or opt for the NBA Draft. If he happened to suffer a serious injury during his final college season, his stock would plummet.
“It is a risk,” Collison said. “That’s why I considered it (leaving for the NBA) seriously last year.”
During the last couple of decades, the Kansas basketball player most similar to Collison is … Danny Manning. From 1985-88, Manning didn’t miss a game. Manning played in a school-record 147, in fact. Saturday’s Marquette game will be Collison’s 142nd in a KU uniform, tying him for second on the school’s games-played chart with Ryan Robertson.
Collison, Cairns opined, has a lot in common with Manning.
“I got a call once that Danny had rolled an ankle in practice,” Cairns said. “Because he was Danny, I knew he’d be OK the next day. Collison is the same way.”
Like Manning, Collison lacks muscle definition and is very flexible. Often it is the finely sculpted athlete who is most susceptible to injury and neither Manning nor Collison has chiseled arms or legs.
Still, appearances can be deceiving in an athlete like Collison.
“Nick has huge muscles in there,” Cairns said. “You run into Nick Collison and you run into a wall.”
Also blessed with uncommon speed for a man his size, Collison has developed multiple moves around the basket to go with a better-than-average short-range jump shot. No player can maintain the same level of consistency game in and game out, yet Collison has come close.
In the NBA, he will probably be a tweener — too short to play center and a bit short of the strength and skill standards of a prototypical NBA power forward. Nevertheless, he can play.
Maybe Hunter S. Thompson, the famed Gonzo journalist, has provided the most definitive bottom line on the KU senior, who is on a mission to lead Kansas to the NCAA championship this weekend.
“That Collison boy,” Thompson wrote on ESPN’s Web site this week, “is a tall walking bitch of a basketball player.”