time
management, to his diet,
where it wasn't
just a matter of
eating right, but
eating enough.
"Last
year,
he was a flip of
the coin," Coach
Matt Painter says.
"Half the time
he was there,
half the time he
wasn't."
It was a rough
go of things for
Hammons and all
those his ups and
downs affected.
Tom Campbell
Classmate Jay Simpson (left), who called Hammons "lazy"
last season, has seen a transformation by the Boilermakers'
7-footer into a confident player willing to work.
"It got really stressful and by the end of the season I
really just couldn't take it anymore."
To understand the feeling, one must understand the
story of Hammons' freshman season.
He came to Purdue after two years at Oak Hill Academy, a prep school in Virginia that annually enrolls some
of the nation's finest high school talent.
That was especially true during Hammons' time at
the school, where his role boiled down to "rebound and
dunk" for a team that won all 44 of its games his senior
year. Not much more was demanded of him considering
the awesome array of weapons assembled around him.
It was an adjustment then when the 7-footer arrived
at Purdue and was immediately asked to not only carry
more of his college team's offense than he did for his
prep school, but also make the myriad of other adjustments freshmen are confronted with anyway.
And Hammons' laid-back, sometimes aloof even, personality didn't always jibe with the role Purdue needed
him to play, as probably its most important player, or at
least a close second, all things considered, from Day 1.
His inconsistencies spilled over from game nights
to the practice floor, to intangibles like punctuality and
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