Even after 35 minutes on the court, a slew of interviews, a shower and long plane ride, Jimmy Baron still could not sleep Sunday night when he arrived home following his now legendary performance at Duke that wowed everybody who saw it, including Mike Krzyzewski.
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| Jimmy Baron put himself on the map by sinking eight 3s at Duke. (AP) |
"I was just trying to get my mind off the game a little bit," Baron said. "And then I turned my Xbox off and SportsCenter was showing the highlights."
Of course, they were.
And welcome to your new life, Jimmy Baron.
You know, the one where you are a national figure, a hot topic, the measuring stick by which all other shooters are judged. A week ago, you were only known to those who closely follow college basketball, the Atlantic 10 or read the Friday Look Ahead. But thanks to Sunday's 24-point performance (featuring eight 3-pointers) at Duke, you are now a bona fide star of the sport.
Dick Vitale yapped about you during North Carolina's win over Kentucky. Doris Burke talked about you during Syracuse's win over Richmond. And then there was Fran Fraschilla, during Oklahoma's win over Davidson, explaining how he and his sons watched you go bananas in Sunday's 82-79 loss and found themselves high-fiving each other after each make.
"At that point I called Jimmy and told him he's like Michael Caine in the 1980s: just everywhere," said Mike Laprey, Rhode Island's assistant athletic director for sports communications. "He's become the benchmark for anybody who hits a 3 this week."
Fair or not, this is the way our world works.
You remain a relative unknown, regardless of what you do, until you do something on a big stage that grabs the nation's attention, and then you're everywhere. It's what happened to Stephen Curry last March, Joe the Plumber last month and Jimmy Baron this week. But the reality is that Baron has always been a great shooter worthy of recognition, evidence being how he's made 42.7 percent of the 3-point attempts in his career. Furthermore, Sunday wasn't the first time Baron sank eight 3-pointers; he also did it Dec. 5, 2006, in a 72-68 victory over Brown. But nobody really noticed that performance because nobody really notices anything done against Brown.
Duke is another story.
People notice when you drop eight 3-pointers on the Blue Devils on national television, which is why Baron's days of an unknown are done. He'll play at Monmouth on Thursday night, and I assure you at least two people who would not have otherwise attended will be at the arena because they want to see that Baron kid who nearly beat Duke. Actually, it could be two dozen. Or two hundred. I don't know. But the point is that the anonymity with which Baron played the first 94 games of his college career is now gone, and if you don't check the Rhode Island-Monmouth box score late Thursday to see how Baron played, then you are not worthy of high-fiving Fran Fraschilla's children.
Meantime, Baron will adjust while trying to stay the same. Sure, he'll still shoot it from anywhere, and probably make it, too. But he swears he won't let the newfound attention force him into bad habits or make him try to live up to an image outsiders might now possess. In other words, the plan is for Baron to just keep doing things the way he's always done them, and if more people than normal take note, he knows that's just part of living in a post-Duke-game world.
"This is what happens when you play a top-notch team and have a good game; you get that national recognition," Baron said. "But I'm just trying to keep an even keel. I can't let myself get too caught up."
