Published: December 21, 2008 02:10 am      

COLUMN: Work brings rewards for Butler, Ruoff

MORGANTOWN — It was about four days ago, or about the time Andy Katz of ESPN put out an upset alert on West Virginia University’s game against Miami of Ohio, talking about how Miami well could pull off the upset on the Mountaineers home court, when Da’Sean Butler found himself in a local tattoo parlor.

The new addition to his exterior decorations was high on his left arm, a piece of work dominated by a huge cross with the words “Hard Work” above it and “Dedication” below it. In the center of the cross are the initials L.N.P.

“My grandmother, Lucille N. Puryear,” Butler said when asked about the initials. “Hard work and dedication, that’s what she always used to say before she died in my sophomore year in high school. She’d tell me I was so hard working and so dedicated.”

While the tattoo was personal in nature, it well could have stood for what coach Bob Huggins has created here in Morgantown, for his is a team that lives on hard work and dedication, led by Butler and Alex Ruoff.

You might remember Alex Ruoff. He’s a senior guard who had missed the past two games suffering from back spasms caused by a displaced rib in the Cleveland State game.

Well, what he did on his return showed just why the Mountaineers were not at their best against Davidson and Duquesne as they turned Katz’s prediction of an upset into one of the season’s biggest jokes, beating Miami, 82-46.

“That’s Andy Katz,” Huggins said. “It’s not like it’s someone who knows what he’s talking about. It’s Andy Katz.”

While Huggins simply shrugged off the Katzenjammer Kid of ESPN, the other Mountaineers’ did get their feathers a bit ruffled about.

“Upset alert,” said Ruoff. “We win by 40. That says something.”

Not as much as what Ruoff said in his return.

His stat line showed what he does physically on the court. He had 15 points, eight assists, four rebounds, two blocks and three steals in 35 minutes of play, but you have to read between the lines to understand what he really means to this team.

Butler understands it. Think he didn’t benefit from Ruoff’s return, scoring a career-high 28 points while hitting five of seven 3s, three of them in a row at the end of the game. The last one gave Butler 1,001 points for his career, making him the 46th player in school history to reach 1,000.

“He opens me up so much,” Butler said of Ruoff.

“They have to guard him,” Huggins explained, referring to the fact that his team had not been knocking down shots with Ruoff out of the lineup. “That opens up so much. It opens driving lanes. It opens up cutting lanes.”

All of a sudden, with Ruoff in there, the offense has so many more options, helped no small amount by the fact that Ruoff is also the team’s best passer.

But all that doesn’t cover the affect Ruoff has when he’s on the floor.

“He was very good on defense,” said Huggins. “If anyone had said he’d be the best perimeter defender we have you’d have thought they were crazy, but he’s an entirely different player than he was at the beginning of last year. He’s become that way because he wants to be.”

Put another way, that would be because of hard work and dedication.

The things Butler and Ruoff do come not out of great physical abilities, but from putting in the work that Huggins demands.

“We practice hard three hours every day. I honestly believe we are the hardest working team in college basketball,” Ruoff said.

That carries over into games.

You could see it from the first play against Miami. Adam Fletcher, a 6-8 center out of St. Albans, broke loose for what he thought was an easy dunk, only to have Butler come flying from behind to block the ball and send a message right away that nothing was going to be easy for the RedHawks.

And it wasn’t. The WVU defense hounded them, forced 26 turnovers, held them to only 17 points in the first half, stole the ball 12 times and turned the game into a laugher.

Only at one point, as the second half opened with the Mountaineers ahead by 30 points, did Miami have any kind of run, putting together 11 consecutive points as WVU lost its focus, causing Huggins to use an early time out.

Ruoff had seen enough.

“What are we doing?” he thought to himself. “With a player like Michael Bramos (who averages 20.2 points a game), I felt we couldn’t let them get on a run. I was really mad.”

So mad that in rapid-fire succession Ruoff, still aching from his injury, took his second charge of the game. He then assisted on a basket by Kevin Jones, hit a 3 and after Truck Bryant raced coast to coast for a layup, made a nifty pass on a fast break to set Butler up for a slam.

Seconds later he pulled off an elusive spin move, missed the shot but got himself fouled on the rebound.

He had completely taken over the game, and you might say West Virginia went on to tattoo Miami.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.