Samhan and St. Mary's: Coolest Cinderella Ever

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- For the record, no, Mickey McConnell did not call the bank. The shot that broke a tie with 1:15 left in Saturday afternoon's game and propelled McConnell, Omar Samhan and St. Mary's to a 75-68 second-round NCAA tournament upset of Villanova was not intended to go in off the backboard.

"I just kind of threw it up there," McConnell said at the postgame press conference for which he showed up in bare feet. "It was a little left, and luckily the backboard was there. So ... I'll take it."

McConnell and the 10th-seeded, West Coast Conference champion Gaels are taking it all the way to the Sweet 16. While that may be a surprise to most of the nation, it's anything but a surprise to one of the program's biggest fans. Samhan's mother, the 6-foot-11 senior center said, decided not to even bother coming all the way East for the first two games.

"She said, 'I'll just meet you next week in Houston,'" Samhan said. "She's like, 'Yeah, just win two games. I'll book the ticket.' So my mom's had a flight to Houston since Selection Sunday. I'm glad we'll be there too, because she was going either way. That's where we get our confidence from -- my mom."



Share Mrs. Samhan must have a pretty good sense of humor, too, because her son and his teammates are a riot. They treated their postgame news conference as a group comedy show, dishing funny answers to questions, heckling each other as they gave those answers and generally acting like a bunch of college kids hanging out on the quad with nothing to do but make each other laugh.

"That's how they are," said St. Mary's coach Randy Bennett, clearly the straight man. "They're pretty loose. They know the boundaries, but you're supposed to have fun. Shoot, who knows if any of these guys, or myself or anybody at St. Mary's will ever get to this point again?"

This crew knows it's doing something rare and special. Samhan, who grew up in San Ramon, Calif., watching Gaels basketball and imagining himself playing for the school in tiny nearby Moraga, is a student of St. Mary's basketball. Knowing that, somebody asked him if he thought this was the biggest win in school history.

"You're supposed to be diplomatic with questions like that," said Samhan, the 6-11 senior center, when asked if this was the biggest win in St. Mary's history. "But...No. 1. Best win ever. Quote me. Omar Samhan said, 'Best win ever.'"

Samhan weighed 310 pounds when he arrived on campus as a freshman. He's down 50 from those days, and he's about to spend the next week as a sports media darling. But as dominating as he's been in the team's two tournament games so far, he's not all St. Mary's has. He's got McConnell, the clutch outside shooter. He's got Ben Allen, Clint Steindl, Matthew Dellavedova and a seemingly endless stream of their fellow Australians. And together they've got years of experience slugging it out with Gonzaga in the WCC and believing themselves good enough to beat teams like Villanova, even if they haven't had a chance to show it.

"It's not some kind of good-feeling story," McConnell said. "We should be here."

In fairness, St. Mary's has looked as good as any team in this tournament so far. They manhandled Richmond in the first round, raced out to an early lead on Villanova on Saturday and held on as a team that was once ranked No. 2 in the nation made a furious second-half run. When the Wildcats tied the game with just over 10 minutes to go, Allen broke the huddle with some confident final words.

"We haven't made our run yet," he told his teammates.

But while this bunch may be confident, they certainly don't take themselves too seriously. They're aware that they're the kind of team America will see as a square peg when the tournament starts up again next week. They know they don't look like the rest of what's left of this year's field. They find it as funny as everybody else does.

"We laugh all the time about how we have a ton of Australian guys on our team and stuff like that," Samhan said. "We were playing...I think it was Oral Roberts or somebody, and they were having a dunk contest, and we were just sitting there watching and joking, saying, 'Man, I wish we could.'"

But as much as they can laugh at themselves, the Gaels also know that underdog mentality helps them stick together. They ride each other, but they love each other too. And they say that shows through with the way they play.

"We don't have guys jumping 40 inches in the air," Samhan said. "But we do have guys that will dive face-first out of bounds for a ball. We're supposed to be here. We're a real team and we deserve to win because we've put in the work."

When the work was done Saturday, Samhan bounded into the St. Mary's fan section at the Dunkin Donuts Center to party with the elated group of Gaels fans who'd made the trip.

"There were more people at the game for Villanova than we have students at St. Mary's," Samhan said. "The people we have are so loyal and so dedicated to us. I just wanted to see them and to embrace them. I'm just so happy we were able to do this for St. Mary's."