Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Hundreds of basketball players have added to the statistical history of the game. But how many can say they added a word, as in "I've just been Pittsnogled. Click photo for larger image. Related article West Virginia Notebook: Salukis no dogs when it comes to defense

Hundreds of basketball players have added to the statistical history of the game. But how many can say they added a word, as in "I've just been Pittsnogled.

Kevin Pittsnogle doesn't give a damn what you think.

Go ahead and yap about him having prison-esque tattoos, a nearly see-through-thin moustache and goatee, a bowl haircut, jug ears, a rail body and a guard's game for a guy the height of a center. Jeer at him if you want, Trailer Trash, because to him it is both an inescapable truth and a wellspring of perseverance that he spent half his lifetime in what polite company calls a mobile-home community.

He isn't in this business of college basketball stardom, of his funny surname morphing into a March predicate -- to be "Pittsnogled" is to have an un-basketball-looking fellow swish a 3-pointer in your face or score 20-plus points in an improbable victory -- for you.

He's in this for himself, for his wife and new baby, for his sister and mom and dad and close circle of family and friends, for his state and school, and, most of all, for his hoop dream: Arising from the Pheasant Ridge Mobile Home Community, then from the modest home near the Martinsburg projects, and becoming an NBA player.

That's why, when he perfected his catch-and-shoot style on an unforgiving gravel court in the trailer park or the circle lane where his big sister threatened to block his every attempt and a neighbor threatened to call the police for his every errant shot that strayed into her yard, he played from dusk past midnight with a single purpose. He wanted to be a shooting star his own inimitable way. His jump shots in the pretend final seconds weren't breathily announced as a Michael Jordan dagger or a Larry Bird rainbow for the game-winner. Rather, he was merely Kevin Pittsnogle being Kevin Pittsnogle.

Still is.

It explains why he dares to swim against the mainstream.

Why he drives a banana-yellow 1971 Dodge Charger. Why, at age 20 early in his junior season, he wore a white tuxedo and derby hat to his wedding, held at the Martinsburg High auditorium, and ordered Big K soda and corndogs and Domino's pizza (delivered late) for his reception, held in a Martinsburg senior-care facility that his mother oversees for Berkeley County. Why he collects Japanese long swords called katana and collects friends in need of help. Why he practiced his autograph as a child, something that serves him well so often nowadays that he accidentally signs notes to his own mother, "Kevin Pittsnogle #34." Why he graduated ahead of schedule in December and became the first in his family with a four-year degree

Instead of his heart on his sleeve, he wears his emotions on his skin -- emblazoned in dark ink, screaming as it does across a pasty-white, 6-foot-11 canvas. It is a family album he carries with him every moment of every day: His Maker, his sister and parents, the child his bride miscarried, the child they had six weeks before the 21-year-old father and his fellow West Virginia Mountaineers embark on another NCAA tournament journey.

He keeps some emotions below the epidermal surface, such as the close friend he lost the same day he left Martinsburg for Morgantown four years ago and the few tense days a fortnight ago when his newborn son lay sick in a hospital, losing weight to a raging infection.

He is a passionate, Eastern-Panhandle West Virginian with a son at home in Morgantown and a sword collection back in Martinsburg, tatts and facial hair, a sweet shot and a professional chance, a singular persona and a sole ambition. Kevin Pittsnogle cares only to be Kevin Pittsnogle ... in the NBA.

"Basically, he sees the world through his own eyes," said Kyle Triggs, the Mountaineers' head team manager and former Martinsburg High teammate whom Pittsnogle convinced to join him in Morgantown, the better to achieve Triggs' dream of becoming a basketball coach someday. "He has his own personality."

As his own mother, Tammy, put it: "He likes to be different."

Funny thing is, his father is a Kevin Pittsnogle being a Kevin Pittsnogle, too -- a mechanic for a waste-management company who arises long before dawn for work and disdains tattoos, showiness. No wonder mom calls her lone son Junior.

The eyes of March

Tomorrow, Pittsnogle will lead a veteran bunch of Mountaineers (20-10) into a first-round, NCAA tournament date against Southern Illinois in the Palace at Auburn Hills, Mich. It was this time a year ago when the big fellow burst into the national consciousness, leading his team past another Missouri Valley Conference team (Creighton) before scoring 22 points in beating Bob Knight's Texas Tech in the Sweet 16 and 25 points in losing a Final Four spot to Louisville. He enters this tournament with the Mountaineers on a bit of a downer, losing five of their past seven games, yet him having just earned third-team All-America, the first West Virginia player so honored since 1972.

"We don't feel too much pressure," he said of this second NCAA go-round. "We're going in this year like we did last year. We like slipping under the radar. We got nothing to lose."

This from a guy who, just a couple of weeks ago, refused to let his sister, Erika Blaylock, go to bed until he beat her at a board game, and that took until 3 in the morning. He doesn't handle losing well. It's probably a good thing he and the rest of Coach John Beilein's players progressed to the point around the middle of last season where they didn't lose often, winning 32 of their 46 games since. This ascension not only revitalized the simmering Jerry West-Hot Rod Hundley-Rod Thorn popularity of Mountaineers basketball around the state, it brought brisk sales to No. 34 jerseys (even better than West's legendary No. 44) and brought autograph-seekers to both Kevin Pittsnogle and the 5-11, vociferous, bespectacled mother whom fans know as Momma Pitts.

To think, in the beginning, the family sport was bowling.

"That's his second sport," Tammy Pittsnogle said. "He has a 220-something average. He loves to bowl."

After bowling came football, where he got blocked from behind at 11 and temporarily lost the feeling in his legs, leaving the field on a stretcher. So much for that game. Tammy offered him $100 to go out for football as a Martinsburg High freshman, but he wouldn't. It left only basketball.

"Just something we were good at," said Erika, the defensive whiz who likewise wore No. 34 for the Martinsburg High girls' team. "I played ball with him every single day, light to dark. I always tried to stuff him, so he would get rid of it fast before I got to him."

It wasn't so much the tricky gravel surface at the mobile-home community as it was the sticky sisterly defense that compressed his outside shot from a lump of coal into a diamond. Kevin Pittsnogle began regularly firing those game-winning shots over 5-11 defender Erika Pittsnogle around age 10, when the family left the trailer court for a paved cul-de-sac a few blocks from the Capitol Heights projects, where gunshots were occasionally heard. That was the neighborhood which produced their basketball best friend and the brother's most ardent supporter, Mykie (pronounced Mah-KEY) Myers.

"Kevin would say, 'I'm going to the NBA,' and I'd punch him out and say, 'Whatever,' " Erika remembered. "Mykie would say, 'Back off, Erika, he is going to play in the NBA.' Mykie was the only one who believed him."

Myers drowned in a man-made lake on the July 2002 day that Kevin Pittsnogle first left for Morgantown. He played a song for Mykie at his October 2004 wedding to Heather Ellison. Maybe it's no coincidence that his firstborn's name, Kwynsie, is spelled so similarly.

Shooting star

"If he played in a system where he had to constantly have his back to the basket, he would not have been successful. He would not have had fun. And that's not Kevin," Martinsburg High coach Dave Rogers said. "He knew what he wanted. He knew that was his ticket."

"Freshman year, not too many people knew who he was until the Miami game, when he went 7 for 7," recalled Justin Turner, another friend to whom Kevin Pittsnogle grew close, another youth -- like Myers -- with a pothole-ridden past whom he talked into joining him, first as Martinsburg High's team manager and then as a Morgantown roommate. Then the big guy's path started to have its own bumps. He hovered around an 11-point average his first two seasons in Beilein's flowing, 3-shooting offense, but he gradually lost playing time by the middle of his junior season. Before playing at Pitt last February, center D'or Fischer got sick, and Kevin Pittsnogle got his starting job back. He hasn't lost it since.

After tallying 22 points and six rebounds that triumphant Feb. 23, 2005, night, he has been on quite a roll. He averaged a career-high 19.5 points and 5.7 rebounds per game this season, thanks to new and improved post moves, a lighter 242-pound frame (after cutting back on his beloved pizza and losing 25 pounds in the preseason) and other alterations after learning about his weaknesses in an NBA predraft camp in June.

The ink

One huge change: He got ink, starting in 2004.

"I wouldn't allow him to have any until he was 18," Tammy Pittsnogle said of her son's tattoos. "I tease him now: Maybe I should have let him have one, or he wouldn't have done all that." Wouldn't you know, he convinced Momma Pitts to seek her own ink. She has likenesses of her kids on each leg and their names on her back.

Kevin Pittsnogle Sr. added with a smirk: "I don't have any at all. I don't need a tattoo to be bad."

The woman who did most of his son's artwork is Patty Colebank of Thinkin' Ink in Morgantown. She remembered Kevin Pittsnogle being late for a pregame because he was still in her chair. "I don't think he actually likes getting tattoos, but he likes having them," she said.

Heck, his might be the most stared-upon body of any West Virginian nowadays. But ask him to explain his ink and he demurs: "They all kind of run together."

Turner hasn't forgotten. In fact, he believes he started it, going the 12 miles to Williamsport, Md., to an artist to whom Kevin Pittsnogle soon followed.

Turner explained his friend's path of body art: The "Gift from God" ink on the big guy's upper right arm is a tribute to his parents and the Lord blessing him with a shooting touch. Along with that came, on the inside of the left arm, a tribal tattoo with a band. Next arrived the flaming basketball on the left shoulder, the dragon on the lower right arm, the mother, father, sister and lost child tribute on his right leg and the Jesus replica on the left leg. That was followed by the left elbow and forearm ink for his family and, finally, the right arm adornment for baby Kwynsie.

Should he prove in predraft camps in Portsmouth, Va., and Orlando, Fla., that he can guard a pro-caliber center or power forward, he just might have to find some skin space for an NBA team logo. Certainly, the pros might find room for him in a situational role as a 3-pointer shooter. "Would it surprise me if he made the NBA and had a long career? No. But there are some questions there," said Chris Ekstrand, a writer and analyst who for years edited the NBA's draft media guide. "But he's a guy you'd like to see make it. ..."

It goes all the way back to the east side trailer court, where sister Erika stood a fortnight ago deep in reflection. She admitted she would be the one, not her baby brother, to chase into the stands after some Trailer Trash-talker. Yet here she is, with a husband -- she got married at 18, same as her parents -- and a new home and a job at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center and a family of her own, Isaiah, 7 months.

"We've both reached our dreams," said Erika, 22, standing where the old gravel court has been turned into a parking spot. She glanced around. "Well, Kevin hasn't reached his yet."

Fialist for the Wooden and Naismith awards.

Third-team All-America as named by the National Association of Basketball coaches -- West Virginia's first All-American since Wil Robinson in 1972.

With Mike Gansey, became only the third and fourth Mountaineers to earn All-Big East first-team honors this season.

Twice was named Big East player of the week in the 2005-06 season.

FYI

Pittsnogle (586) and Gansey (516) are the first WVU teammates to both surpass 500 points in a season since Lowes Moore (597) and Maurice Robinson (517) in the 1977-78 season.

Looking back: 2005

Kevin Pittsnogle's 2005 NCAA tournament numbers:

Opponent.....Rd......FGA.....FG.....3PA.....3P.....Reb.....Ast.....Pts

Creighton.....1.....13.....6.....7.....3.....5.....2.....17

Wake Forest.....2.....7.....3.....4.....2.....4.....2.....8

Texas Tech.....3.....13.....7.....3.....2.....8.....0.....22

Louisville.....4.....15.....9.....9.....6.....5.....1.....25

Total..........48.....25.....23.....13.....22.....5.....18.0

INSIDE

Pitt notebook: Keith Benjamin, Pitt's starting small forward, spent yesterday in an area hospital with an undisclosed illness, and his status for the Panthers' first-round NCAA tournament game tomorrow against Kent State in Auburn Hills, Mich., is unknown.

Page D-4 Matt Freed/Post-Gazette

Hundreds of basketball players have added to the statistical history of the game. But how many can say they added a word, as in "I've just been Pittsnogled."

Matt Freed/Post-Gazette

West Virginia's Kevin Pittsnogle works around Pitt's Aaron Gray during the Big East Tournament.

ABOVE: Pittsnogle works against Pitt's Aaron Gray in their Big East tournament game March 9.

RIGHT: John Beilein's Mountaineers have won 32 of their past 46 games -- a .696 winning percentage. It is an ascension that coincides with the rise of Pittsnogle.

Associated Press

LEFT: Pittsnogle and Mike Gansey celebrate after West Virginia defeated Texas Tech to advance to the Elite Eight of the 2005 NCAA tournament.

West Virginia photo

Wil Robinson

All-American in 1972

Lowes Moore

6th on WVU's all-time list

Associated Press

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