STEVE ALFORD

To anyone who has spent time in a gym shooting a basketball, there is nothing quite like hanging the net. It isn't easy to hang the net. It can be done only from a certain part of the floor, with a shot arched just so, garnished with precisely the right backspin. When a jump shooter has traced that transcendental trajectory from the deep corner and caused the bottom of the net to lap up over the far side of the rim and tangle there, he has found the game's sweet spot. (Nets now are made so they dont get stuck)

Steve Alford never let one of his countless private workouts end without hanging the net, and that is one of the reasons he found himself cutting down the net in the Louisiana Superdome after his Indiana Hoosiers beat Syracuse 74-73 for the NCAA title.

Steve had surrendered his adolescence to the game. He wore out net after net—"I'd go through six or seven every summer," he says. "Dad, can I have the keys to the gym tonight," might of been the first words he spoke. "A lot of kids told me I was missing out on a lot of fun, but how was Jaws II going to help me become a better basketball player," said Alford.

The boy has a point. It wasn't going to help him pump-fake Tark the Shark's souped-up guards and bury jumpers and leaners that would beat UNLV in the semifinals. Nor was it going to help him bottom out seven three-pointers in the national championship game, four in the first half.

If Steve had squandered his Saturday nights at the movies, Alford wouldn't have been stuffing strands of net into his own little box with a championship ring.

Alford is an utterly imperfect athlete. Small for a major-college guard, slow without any compensatory quickness and strong only because he ate and flexed himself up to 185 pounds from 150 as a freshman, he owes his success to repetition and work. In his workouts Alford will pick a spot on the floor and take 10 shots. If he doesn't make eight, he'll punish himself with fingertip push-ups or wind sprints.

Bob Knight has often said, "I coach against the game." One of Alford 's great accomplishments this season has been to learn to play against the game. A win over Illinois in late January was the final lesson. "I prepared all week to go against Steve Bardo," he says. "Then Doug Altenberger took me, and I only scored 10 points. From that point on, it wasn't worth preparing for individuals. If you do things the way you can, if you're able to read the screens, it shouldn't matter who's guarding you."

Alford follows one of Knight's mottos, "be hard to guard," as he slaloms through and around teammates' picks. "He's gotten more out of his abilities offensively than anybody I've seen play college basketball," says Knight. "He's about as good a scorer for being strictly a jump shooter as I've ever seen. He's scored more than 2,400 points that way, and that's incredible, considering he doesn't get any tip-ins, drives, or dunks."

Alford 's two straight missed free throws against UNLV were so rare that he can tell you when he last committed the sin. (Six years ago. At Anderson. Down one. Five seconds to go.) His form at the foul line is workmanlike and routine.

Even without a state championship, Alford 's other crowns—"Mr. Basketball” in Indiana, the gold medal, and the NCAA title-have secured his status as an Indiana legend, the high prince of Hoosier Hysteria. Work is woven into the state's 10-foot culture. Half-court pickup games in most states are played "Make it, take it"—you score, and you keep possession. Not so in Hoosierland, where it's understood that every scorer will turn around and play defense.

Alford once passed up watching the Super Bowl with his college buddies, because he had missed a few free throws the night before and felt the Sunday evening would be best spent at Assembly Hall getting up jumpers.

Alford 's greatest act of self-flagellation was deciding in the first place to play for Knight. No player has experienced more of the man's black moods and manipulations. Alford has actually spent six seasons under him, if you include the 17 games with the '84 Olympic team and the Hoosiers ' 18-game trip overseas two summers ago. "Steve was incredibly mature as a freshman," Dakich remembers. "He was getting thrown out of practice then. If Coach respects you and knows you can handle it, he'll do that. When I was a freshman, only Randy Wittman and Ted Kitchel, the seniors, were thrown out."

"Dad threw me out of practice a lot of times to prove a point to his players," Steve says. "That may be the hardest thing, taking punishment for something somebody else did. But I'm a leader, and my teammates are supposed to learn from that.”

"Many times in the last four years when I've been kicked out, I'd get emotional. But every time I think I'm right and he's wrong, I look at the film, and it's amazing. He's right and I'm wrong."

For his part, Alford will always appreciate Knight. "There's nothing in the way of pressure or intensity the world can throw at me now that I haven't already seen," he says.