Close game? Alabama has been there, done that

SEATTLE – When Antoine Pettway buried his game-winning running shot in the lane Thursday, it was just another day for Alabama.

Pettway, a 6-foot senior guard who looks more like a 5-9 eighth-grader, turned back Southern Illinois 65-64 in the first round of the NCAA Tournament at KeyArena with a 5-footer with five seconds to play.

It was the fourth time in the last five games that a Crimson Tide game came down to the last shot. SIU’s Darren Brooks missed a jumper at the buzzer.

Brooks put the Salukis ahead 64-63 with a perimeter jumper with 13 second remaining before Pettway’s game-winner.

“We’ve been in this type of situation before,” Pettway said. “I pump-faked and shot it on the run and it went in. We knew that we had to hold them to a stop. We knew how much that last stop meant.”

They knew because it was familiar territory. Twice, against Mississippi State and Florida, the Tide (18-12) lost by one in overtime on a buzzer shot. They beat Arkansas the same way.

Pettway isn’t ‘Bama’s leading scorer. Nor is he its best player.

But no one has his teammates’ respect more than Pettway.

“I don’t know if we’ve got any other player on the team that could have taken that shot at the end,” Tide forward Earnest Shelton said. “He stepped it up at the end. Down there at the end, you don’t want anyone else taking it but him.”

Alabama, whose coach, Mark Gottfried has accused his team of giving him gray hair, blew a 10-point lead early in the second half. In the last 1:50, the lead changed hands four times.

But Pettway, who scored all six of his points in the second half, ended it. A 4.0 student in Wilcox Central High School in Alberta, Ala., Pettway came to Alabama on an academic scholarship. He was awarded an athletic scholarship in July 2001 after averaging 2.9 points a game as a freshman. That season, he scored a then-career-high 19 points at Mississippi on 8-for-12 shooting.

This season, Pettway had a game-winning 3-pointer at Georgia, nailed a 3-pointer to send a game at Arkansas into overtime (a game Alabama eventually won), scored 25 points on Ole Miss and somehow gathered 10 rebounds against powerful Kentucky.

“I don’t know how to describe Antoine, what he means to our program and what kind of a person he is,” Gottfried said. “He’s just a wonderful, wonderful person and he made a big shot for us today.”

The Tide faces top-seed Stanford on Saturday.

Hiss, boo, raspberry: The KeyArena crowd made it obvious early that it doesn’t have much use for Stanford.

It goes beyond the fact that the Cardinal is the region’s top seed and that it was playing a five-touchdown underdog in 16th-seeded Texas-San Antonio.

Much of the booing of Stanford came from University of Washington fans who didn’t follow the Huskies to Columbus, Ohio, for their first-round matchup against Alabama-Birmingham. A little of the same came from UTSA fans and from Alabama fans, who had dreams of avoiding the Cardinal in the second round.

When center LeRoy Hurd put the Roadrunners up 2-0 in the opening seconds, the throng erupted. The decibel level went up again when UTSA closed to 44-38 with 11 minutes left.

Finally, however, Stanford pulled away to a 71-45 victory, the last five minutes of which much of the crowd didn’t see, in favor of a late lunch before the next session.

“You’ve gotta love the Pac-10 fans, rooting against us,” Stanford forward Matt Haryasz said. “They had some momentum and the crowd got into it and they cut it to six. But we kept our poise the whole way.”

Speaking of Stanford: Cardinal coach Mike Montgomery was anything but pleased with his team’s showing on the boards. The usually-physical Cardinal gave up 22 offensive rebounds to the smaller, less-physical Roadrunners.

“We were dead in the water there for a while,” Montgomery said. “We have to play better than this if we expect to win from here on out. We’re capable of doing that. Our energy level was bad.”

Best name/hometown combo of the tournament: Give the award to Texas-San Antonio freshman guard Kurt Attaway, from Flower Mound, Texas. Runner-up: Roadrunners guard David President from Temple, Texas.

Everett connection: Everett AquaSox fans will remember Justin Ockerman, a 6-9, 245-pound reserve center for Michigan State.

The Seattle Mariners picked Ockerman, a right-handed pitcher, in the sixth round of the 2001 Free Agent draft. He played little in 2002 when he experienced arm trouble. Last summer in Everett, he was 1-2 with an ERA of 4.88, appearing in 22 games as a relief pitcher.

Ockerman has played sparingly for the Spartans, scoring six points all season in 15 games.

Penders’ picks: Ex-college coach Tom Penders, the color commentator for Westwood One radio, ranks Stanford’s Mike Montgomery among the top four coaches in Division I basketball. His other picks: Mike Krzyewski of Duke, Bob Knight of Texas Tech and Gary Williams of Maryland.

“I’m talking about guys who get the most out of their talent,” Penders said. “It’s not so much how many championship rings they have or how many guys they put in the NBA. These guys consistently get their teams to play at a very high level. They all have different styles, too.”

Another coach he’s impressed with is Mark Few of Gonzaga, who has taken the Bulldogs to the NCAA Tournament in each of his five years. Few replaced Dan Monson, who went 52-17 in two years with one NCAA appearance.

“My deal was rebuilding (bad) programs,” said Penders, who compiled a 527-361 record at Texas, Rhode Island and George Washington. “It’s hard to follow a guy like Monson and do as well if not better. And he (Few) has continued on and that’s hard.

“I would much prefer to come in and be the architect and build. It’s so hard when you come in and everybody compares you to the guy that you follow and he was successful and you get, ‘Charlie did things this way and won. Why would you want to change this, whether it’s your sports information director, your academic advisor or whatever?’ It’s very difficult to do what Mark has done.”

Romar admirer: A few years ago, Penders was in a tournament in Honolulu and got to observe Lorenzo Romar, then the head coach at Saint Louis and now the head man at Washington. “I was very impressed with the fundamentals of his team, how hard they played and how smart they were,” Penders said. “He’s a very positive guy, a very classy guy.”

Next stop – NBA? Penders, who just turned 58, would like to coach again and says his next stop might be in the NBA, as an assistant. “I’ve kind of verbally committed to a couple of guys if they go back in (as NBA head coaches),” he said. “I’ve never held a clipboard. I’ve smashed a few of them.”

Globe trotters: Valparaiso boasts the most international team in the Seattle field, with players hailing from Angola, Mali, Puerto Rico (2) and Senegal.

Tri(per)fecto: Darren Brooks of Southern Illinois shot 30.8 percent from 3-point range this season. So what’s he do in his first postseason game? He was 5-for-5. He could have used one more: Alabama beat his Salukis 65-64 in the first round Thursday.

Coach cries foul: After a timeout early in the second half of his game against Alabama, SIU coach Matt Painter shouted at a referee, “You called one foul (against ‘Bama) in the first half. That’s an NCAA record.”

Painter, incidentally, is the youngest coach in the field. He’s 33, and this was his first season as a head coach.