The only boy who could ever teach me
was the son of a preacher man.
Yes he was, he was, ah yes, he was.
-- Dusty Springfield

OMAHA, NEB. -- Ah yes, he was. And as the Bluejays of Creighton have continued to jabber their way into the national spotlight -- surely you caught them leading off Bracket Buster Saturday, buffeted by The Bilastrator and the Katzometer and all the rest of our multi-powered media machinery -- it's starkly evident that the son (and grandson) of preacher men has taught them not only how to shoot and to score and to win, but how to look.

Snip off the transplanted California beach boy Kyle Korver's wondrous retro shock of semi-bottled blonde locks and affix his hair atop the head of his roommate, forward and former walk-on Michael Lindeman ... or the Northwestern transfer, center Brody Deren ... or the point guard Tyler McKinney (whose father is a prison warden; the 'Jays' dads get you coming and going) ... or freshman sub Nate Funk (who may be the next K-Squared) ... and you'd get a whole bunch of lookalike Kyle Korvers. Not in talent, mind you. Or in his matinee idol swagger and style. But in solid old-school fundamentals, burning desire and a quiet but dangerous us-against-the-universe, need-to-prove-ourselves mind set.

	As teams have found out the hard way, it takes more than one defender to stop Creighton's Kyle Korver.

The latter feeling flies in the face of Creighton's 24 victories, which not only is the most in all the land, but one more than Dana Altman's squad has averaged the last five years -- Florida was an NCAA Tournament first-round victim to the 12 seed last March. The past four seasons have seen Korver developing into the most outrageously quick and deep shooter in captivity.

Fliiiiick! Whoops, you missed it. The 6-foot-7 senior Bluejay from tiny (10,000 proud) Pella, Iowa, just let fly another three from parabola parts unknown with that instantly fluid, catch-and-jump motion that is so sudden, it seems not only that he hasn't jumped but that he hasn't even looked at the basket.

(Another bird used to do it that way, guy by the name of Bird.)

"If a guy gives me room, I won't jump," says Korver, who's averaging 18 points and six rebounds. "I figure the less motion, the less chance to make a mistake. It's almost a set shot. Do I look at the basket? I know where it is. I don't think much about that, it's just instinctive."

Korver drilled nine trifectas against Evansville, eight against Xavier, seven against Notre Dame and seven more here on Saturday (27 total points) as Creighton edged Fresno State, 67-66. That gave him an NCAA-leading 105 on the season and 347 for his career. If Korver can continue at his nearly four triples per game pace, with three regular season games plus a probable three more in the Missouri Valley Conference tournament in St. Louis, he'd enter the NCAA Tournament as the sixth-leading trey-shooter in college history.

If you guessed the top five are Curtis Staples of Virginia (413), Keith Veney of Lamar/Marshall, Doug Day of Radford, Ronnie Schmitz of UMKC and Mark Alberts of Akron, you win an all-expenses paid trip to Pella for "Tulip Time", the May extravaganza in his Dutch-settled hometown where, Korver says, "things get pretty crazy. I've ridden on floats and everything."

Certain voters may prefer David West of Xavier, Josh Howard of Wake Forest, T.J. Ford of Texas or somebody else for national player of the year. But nobody, absolutely nobody, has ridden to a higher plateau or had a better season than Korver.

Of all those triple-trodding specialists, moreover, KK is first all-time among players his height or taller, as well as first all-time in shooting percentage of those who've made at least 335 triples. His beyond-the-arc average has hovered between 45 and 50 percent all season (he was 7 of 15 against Fresno, missing all five attempts from inside the ring) -- fairly ridiculous when it's considered on defense he's employed at the exhausting point of Creighton's full-game, full-court press and at the other end he experiences every conceivable barrier (box-and-ones, full-court face-guarding, bumps-and-blasts) short of teams hiring Johnny Cochran to file a restraining order.

	“	All these young girl fans? ... It'd be really neat if I was still in the eighth grade. ”
		— Kyle Korver, Creighton senior guard

Restraint is something Korver himself holds in abundance; the astounding shooter shoots barely 11 times a game. "Out of high school, all I heard was 'one dimensional,' 'can't do anything but shoot,'" Korver says, "and I'll admit I used to hang my head when I'd have a bad shooting game. But I think I've really improved, all around.

"I see a David West score 47 and, yeah, it'd be cool to put up numbers like that. But I don't need that to make me happy. That's not my game. I'd rather get 10 rebounds than score 30. That shows me I'm unselfish and working hard."

It's not as if it's easy for the long bomber to play bombs away, either. Upon his final college appearance in his home state, Drake decided to platoon everybody but the Iowa presidential primary candidates on his wiry frame. "It seemed they didn't guard anybody else. We'd get three-on-two breakaways, and guys would flare out to guard me! Give us the lay ups. I mean what's with that strategy? I had so many friends from Pella there who'd read about how much I score and stuff, I felt I was letting everybody down."

Of Korver's four shots against Drake, he made one, with eight assists and one turnover, as Creighton won by 20. (Which was a feast compared to a game against Northern Iowa last season in which Korver took NO -- NEIN, NONE, NADA -- shots and Creighton won by 27.)

"Then I see on that ESPN strip that 'Korver's only averaged 12 points the last few games.' I mean, I don't mind when I don't shoot that much ... except then everybody makes a big deal out of it. The thing is, I'm not scoring points because my teammates are wide open. I'm not just a shooter anymore. I'm a player." After losing to Creighton in November, 80-75, Notre Dame coach Mike Brey tagged this particular phenomenon "the Korver Factor," saying "it's a complete insult to refer to (Creighton) as a 'mid-major' program. You have a group of older players who have won together for a couple of years now.

(In fact, the Blue Jays' starting lineup has been intact for 47 straight games, over twice that of any other school.)

"And Korver is a pro who takes and makes good shots," added Brey. "He's patient, doesn't force anything. Just having him on the floor distracts the defense, and he's very comfortable being the decoy for 30 minutes, then lighting you up for the last ten."

Over the weekend, visiting Fresno found out all about that in crunch time, albeit with a reverse spin. Double K had accomplished much of his scoring damage already when he applied some terrific defensive pressure at mid-court, which led to a Bulldog turnover and a Creighton lead of 58-51. And he had scored all of his 27 before the last few minutes when:

A) He set a high-post screen, opening up a play which culminated in reserve Mike Grimes scoring what turned out to be the winning bucket, and ...
B) He grabbed a defensive rebound in heavy traffic to preserve the lead so Creighton could run clock.

"It's frustrating when teams try to take me out," Korver says. "But there's a lot of other ways to win besides shooting. I was determined."

He was, ah yes, he was.

But it's not the determination or the shooting that has turned on Omaha's female population. It's that shaggy-tressed mane which he styles in bangs practically covering his narrow-set raccoon eyes. Or -- as a fawning Omaha World-Herald Living Section profile described the appeal: "The long eyelashes, the blond-streaked hair, the pulled-to-the-kneecap white socks ..." The headline of the article read: "Swish! Swoon! Kyle is Jays' Pin-Up Boy"

On virtual cue in the Civic Auditorium Saturday came a middle-aged mom who -- no doubt reminiscing at a "Fifth Beatle" hairstyle in her midst -- held up a sign which read "Kyle, Will You Marry My Daughter?" with an arrow pointing to (probably) her daughter, who herself was recognizing the double of a different generational rocker, John Rzeznik of The Goo Goo dolls.

"All these young girl fans?" laughs Korver. "It'd be really neat if I was still in the eighth grade."

Yet in that World Herald piece (where Korver owned up to streaking his hair out of the bottle in the winter), two Creighton freshman coeds confessed they stayed late in the campus cafeteria just to watch Korver eat. "Sex symbol? I don't even have a girlfriend. This is kind of hard to talk about," he laughs again, blushing this time -- as any first-born of the senior pastor of the Third Reformed Church in Pella would be wont to do.

"We worry about that (the girls). Who he'll meet, if she'll be special, when he might settle down," says Laine Korver, K-Squared's mom. Having once exploded for 74 points in high school herself, Laine has received more pub combined than husband Kevin and Kyle's two uncles, all of whom played hoops at Central College in Pella; another uncle Kris, who played at Northwestern (Iowa) College and then coached that team to the 2001 NAIA title; and her three younger sons, Klayton (18, who will enter Drake next season), Kaleb (14) and Kirk (12).

Having packed up and departed their Dutch-influenced Iowa town -- widely renowned for it's multitudinous windmills and locally manufactured windows -- the Korvers started their basketball-playing dynasty in suburban Los Angeles where Kevin took up the family ministry. It was only when Kyle was 12, after he learned to shoot lefthanded on the courts by the church parsonage in Paramount, Calif., and to love the beach -- "Hey Korver, your surfboard blow up?" nasty opposing fans now scream at him nightly -- that the family moved back to Pella.

"You think my hair is long now? Back then it would have hung down past my nose if I wore it that way," he says. "But in Pella they didn't go for that. First day, school was canceled because of snow. Then I found out there was no recess. Zero degrees? Farmland? No recess? I hated it. I'm not a cold weather guy." None of Iowa's Division I schools figured he was an Iowa guy, either. The prep stars in the state his senior year were Kirk Hinrich and Nick Collison (Creighton's Lindeman's teammate in Iowa Falls), who both exited to Kansas. And Creighton was virtually the only name school to have any interest. "Kyle didn't even know where Creighton was. His dad actually asked me why in the world was I recruiting him," says Altman.

Then and now: "I guess I've always been in the background, never in the spotlight," the now exclusively right-handed shooting Korver says.

But then came the hair ... the girls ... the NCAA upset over Florida ... all those threes ... then last New Years Eve, the astonishing conclusion of a 75-73 defeat at Xavier. With Creighton behind by 10 points with a little over two minutes left, Korver kept stroking dramatic treys from absurd distances (four of them) to get the game team tied. After the Musketeers' West muscled for the lead basket, practically half of Cincinnati converged on Korver, preventing him from a touch. As he left the court with a career high 32 points, 6 rebounds and 4 assists (West had 28, 11 and 3) -- "It was really something special, I remember nearly trembling," Korver says -- the referee shook his hand, West embraced him saying something about "see you in the NBA" and the Xavier crowd gave Double K a standing ovation.

Now, he's such a big deal in Omaha, even his little brothers are horning in on the act. "The other night I'm signing an autograph after the game and I look down and the kid had gotten my brother Kaleb (who, Kyle admits, beats him in Horse by flinging in 27-footers) to sign the same thing before me. What is that?" As Kaleb could tell him, that's simply how it is to have Kyle Korver for a brother. Oh yeah, and really neat to still be in the eighth grade.

Bounce Passes
Lakers? Blah 1! The latest opportunity to appreciate college ball while laughing at the silliness of the NBA came last week in the midst of Kobe Bryant's 40-point "streak." Said streak would have been long over had not a ridiculous LA hometown foul been called on Houston's Yao Ming near the end of the first overtime in the Lakers' 2OT "victory" over the Rockets.

Houston was ahead with possession when Mark Madsen did one of his patented dances all over Yao while the giant center awaited an in-bounds play. When Yao moved, Madsen sprawled -- and the Wall of China was called for a sixth and disqualifying foul. Kobe went on to score 52 points on 520 shots or something -- and the streak was intact. Give me a break.

And while I'm breaking, for anybody who thinks Bryant is anywhere near the player Michael Jordan has been, call me in 16 years -- when the Kobester is 40 and he scores 43 points in 43 minutes. If the rest home has a loud phone, I might even answer.

Lakers? Blah 2! Long Letter-to-the-Editor Of The Decade -- as sent to the Los Angeles Times by Allen E. Kahn of Playa Del Rey, California:

"Shaquille O'Neal's contention that he should recuperate on company time because he was injured on company time is a valid one. There's no reason that Shaq should be treated different from any other working stiff. Of course, not many people call in sick because their toe hurts, but the same rule should apply to all.

" ... Based upon O'Neal's $88.5 million, three-year contract, this means that the following rules will henceforth apply to every employed man and woman in the nation:

1. They will be paid approximately $360,000 every workday they call in sick.
2. They will have at least four months of vacation every year.
3. On days that they do show up for work, they will be required to put in about five hours, including preparation for the 48 minutes that they actually spend on the job.
4. They will be allowed to hold outside employment, payment for which may approach or exceed the amount of their salaries.
5. They will be permitted to disparage their co-workers while they relax at home on sick days.
6. Should they require medical attention, they may schedule it at their convenience, without regard to the impact it may have on their employer or co-workers.

Most employed persons obviously have the above benefits already, but for a few it will be an improvement over their current conditions. Those parties can thank Shaquille O'Neal for calling attention to the disparity between his terms of employment and theirs. Because he has contributed so much to improving the lot of others, it's impossible to understand how anyone could call him selfish."

Auld Lavin Syne: On his farewell tour of the Pac-10, UCLA's beleaguered Steve Lavin -- who last week fabulously named as his own successor every possible candidate but Mike Tyson's Official Tatooist -- has been grading opposing student bodies on the quality of their razzing. In an upset, Cal-Berkeley gets the highest grade over Stanford, an A-plus. "They were very good," Lavin told Steve Kelley in The Seattle Times. "They had a takeoff on the commercial: 'Hair Gel, $5. Buyout, $1.3 Million.' And one guy had a sign that read: 'Come to UCLA a McDonald's All-American. Leave UCLA a McDonald's Employee.'

To nobody's surprise, Arizona students took the worst grade, a D-minus, because all they did was chant: "Fire Lavin. Fire Lavin."

"I thought that crowd showed a lack of focus, a lack of commitment, creativity and execution," said Lavin, whose Bruins ended a 10-game conference losing streak by upsetting Cal last Thursday but then slipped back down the ladder by falling to Stanford on Saturday.

Left un-graded, not surprisingly, were the fearless fans of another school. UCLA. So here goes, Lavs: PFR -- Pitiful Front Runners.

Curry Kirkpatrick is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at curry.kirkpatrick@espn3.com.