And so begins a behind-the-scenes peek into the making of a motion picture starring Darington “Butter” Hobson, the UNM men’s basketball team’s junior college transfer, widely thought to be former Lobo men’s basketball swingman J.R. Giddens’ clone.
Will this season turn out to be “Attack of the Clones” for the Lobos?
Potentially, said head coach Steve Alford, as long as Hobson chooses to drop the moniker.
“I don’t call him that, because butter, to me, means you’re soft,” Alford quipped jokingly. “And that’s not something we want.”
Well, sorry, but don’t count on it, coach.
“I love it. It will be my name for the rest of my life,” Hobson said. “I got that playing on the playgrounds in Houston. Guys said I played real smooth and I was tall and light-skinned like a stick of butter. It just kind of stuck with me.”
As far as the other question — does Hobson have the skill to be as good as Giddens — just ask him and he’ll tell you, sort of.
“A lot of people compare me to J.R.,” he said. “And I’m supposed to follow in his footsteps. J.R.’s a great player. Hopefully, I can get the accolades and be half the player J.R. was when he was here.”
Certainly, like Giddens, Hobson has the stature, potential and strut to be the “butter” to the Lobos’ bread.
Whether he’ll become a Co-Mountain West Player of the Year, lead the Lobos in scoring for two years or achieve enough prominence to become a first-round draft pick like Giddens did is yet to be determined.
At this point, you could get the best answer from a Magic 8 Ball: Ask again later.
Either way, all Hobson cares about right now is victories.
“The most important thing is win,” he said. “Just get better and just play against someone other than my teammates.”
Learning to play with his teammates, though, will be equally important.
Alford said that although Hobson and Giddens are strikingly similar and a good comparison, they are by no means carbon copies.
“Both of them are long. Both of them are athletic. Both are big-time rebounding guards,” Alford said, before detailing how they differ. “Darington’s a passer, (he) sees the floor better. Darington (has) a little more point guard-shooting guard mentality, whereas J.R.’s more of a swing guard to small forward.”
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What they do share, talent, isn’t — or rather wasn’t — their only commonality.
By his own admission, Hobson said he was immature and raw out of high school, so junior college was “the best thing that ever happened to me.”
If anything, Giddens’ biggest problem was questionable disposition.
Under former head coach Ritchie McKay, Giddens, at times, was commonly misunderstood, and thought to be a pretentious prima dona. He was hard-pressed to keep his temper from flaring, which ultimately led to two suspensions, an indefinite one handed down in February 2007.
When Alford was hired to succeed McKay, though, he took up Giddens’ slackened chain, instead benching him every time he took ill-advised shots and forcing Giddens to become a better teammate.
Consequently, Giddens morphed from petulant and pampered into a modest leader.
Temperament concerns, however, were never a blip on the radar when it came to Hobson.
Yes, Alford said, for the duration of scouting Hobson, he saw animation and frustration from the Lobos’ swingman. But the head coach, now entering his third season with the Lobos, never had any trepidation about bringing the 6-foot-7-inch guard to New Mexico.
“We’ve seen a little bit of both of that in the recruiting process,” he said. “We’ve been watching Darington for three years. I think he was a little bit upset after the Highlands game — and yet when you look at the stats, I told him, ‘You got 10-12 points; you got 13 rebounds; you got four, five assists and your team wins big.’”
In that department, Hobson apparently has an edge over Giddens, because he won’t have to learn midseason how to keep his attitude in check. He’s already been educated in that field.
Hobson, listing a litany of defective inclinations — “getting techs, talking to refs, getting frustrated when things don’t go my way in the first half, not making shots, sitting on the end of the bench when I get taken out of the game” — said those self-decrepitating and youthful tendencies served as barriers to improving his game. Still, he has been able to work through them and effectively mask such temper tantrums thus far.
“I don’t act on little things that I usually acted on. I learned that in junior college, and coach Alford and Neal are on me every day in practice,” he said. “I know some games things aren’t going to go my way, but there’s other ways I can contribute. All that’s changed and it’s helped me in the long run.”
For that, Alford is grateful.
“Sometimes guys don’t learn that,” he said. “They think they got to score 20-25 to be productive. I don’t think we need for (Hobson) to do that.”
Neither did the Lobos need that type of industrious output from Giddens. Over the course of Giddens’ two-year stint with UNM, he didn’t average more than 16.3 points per game. See, Hobson, those shoes aren’t that big to fill.
Much of the battle, then, Alford said, is getting Hobson not to impose too much pressure on himself.
“We just show him a lot of tape,” he said. “Just give him some nuggets to chew on and look at to relax him.”
Still, nobody, not even Alford, will know how Hobson will respond to all the Division I demands.
“It will be finding out the difference of it — playing in front of maybe a couple thousand to 16- to 17,000, the media attention, the attention to the program,” Alford said. “It’s a much bigger stage.”
That stage — the one which takes precedence over all the other ones — was where Giddens shot his most classic and memorable reels. And, on Friday night, we’ll find out if Hobson, like Giddens, is ready for cinematic production.
