Jan 31st, 2010
Anybody seen Dior Lowhorn lately? He must have stepped away for a minute . . . or a week . . . or a season. Oh, wait a minute, there he is. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s him. Do you see him? Number 33 over there?
Dior Lowhorn had been 0-for-6 on three-pointers in his previous four games, but hit the three biggest three-pointers of his career in a span of 3:11 against Gonzaga on Saturday -- Associated Press photo
But can that be him? That guy wearing No. 33 is hitting three-pointers from all over the place, so that can’t be him, can it? And this guy hit the three critical three-pointers on Saturday that enabled San Francisco to pull off the biggest win since Rex Walters became the Dons coach, a stunning, 81-77 overtime victory over Gonzaga, which is ranked No. 13 in the Associated Press poll and No. 8 in the ESPN coaches poll.
It’s not easy to rate upsets, but this has to be one of the biggest surprises in the country this season. It’s certainly the Dons’ biggest win since 2005 when they beat a No. 11-ranked Gonzaga team that featured Ronny Turiaf and Adam Morrison.
But this season’s USF team is 7-14 overall and 2-4 in the conference and had lost three straight coming into Saturday’s game, including a home loss to last-place Santa Clara a week earlier and a 16-point home loss to Portland just two days earlier. Meanwhile, the Bulldogs were riding a nine-game winning streak and had not lost a regular-season West Coast Conference game since February of 2008, a streak of 27 in a row. After beating Portland and St. Mary’s on the road in the Zags’ first two conference games, any Gonzaga loss in the conference at this point would be major surprise.
The biggest surprise was the play of Lowhorn, whose scoring average has been on a slow decline lately and whose outside shooting had been outright lousy. A decent three-point shooter last year when he averaged better than 20 points a game, Lowhorn came into the Gonzaga game hitting 17 percent of his three-pointers this season and averaging 13.7 points in his six WCC games. And it was even worse lately. In his previous four games, he had been 0-for-6 on three-pointers, and since the start of December, Lowhorn had made only 4 of 38 three-point attempts.
On Saturday, he exceeded his total of the past 14 games by hitting 5 of 7 attempts on his way to scoring 22 points, only the second time in seven WCC games he had exceeded 15 points.
What got into Lowhorn?
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it was the Five-Hour Energy drink I had before the game.”
Apparently the dose lasted long enough for him to make the three biggest three-pointers of his USF career. The Dons trailed by three when Lowhorn missed a three-pointer with 15 seconds left that would have tied the game. But amid a scramble for the rebound, Gonzaga’s Steve Gray flipped the ball backward to prevent it from going out of bounds. It deflected off a USF player’s hands and went directly back to Lowhorn, who had not moved.
Lowhorn reloaded and launched another three-pointer, and this one went through to tie the game with 9.8 seconds left, sending the game into overtime.
Thirty-one seconds into overtime, Lowhorn hit another three-pointer to put the Dons ahead by a point, and after Gonzaga regained the lead on a Matt Bouldin jumper, Lowhorn put USF ahead to stay with his third three-pointer in a span of 3:11.
“It’s all psychological,” Lowhorn said.
In the past month, Lowhorn had lost confidence in his shot, and he began thinking about it. And any shooter will tell you that’s a recipe for further problems.
The trouble seemed to start when he experienced a rapid heart beat in the high altitude in Colorado back on Dec. 1. Lowhorn feared he had a heart problem, and went through a battery of tests, causing him to miss the next game against BYU. He was ultimately given a clean bill of health, but by then Lowhorn was feeling the pressure – of being a senior, of some missed opportunities, of an inexplicable slump and of a final college season slipping away.
“I had a lot of anxiety about a lot of things,” Lowhorn said. “But now it’s my last semester, I’m going to graduate in the spring, and I can relax now.”
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