Over the past few years as the sports on campus have jumped to elite levels and attracted elite athletes, WVU fans have become very aware and appreciative of 40-yard dash times, wingspans, bench press figures and vertical leap measurements. Yet never will they overlook or underestimate work ethic and the color of one’s color.

It’s what made an undersized Dan Mozes so successful and a moderately athletic 2004-05 basketball team so fun. It’s what made Owen Schmitt so cool and what’s making people think of Schmitt when they see someone else these days.

Thoroughman, the West Virginia sophomore forward from Portsmouth, Ohio, turns a basketball game into a demolition derby. He is to basketball what Owen Schmitt was to football, always a collision waiting to happen.

West Virginia’s colors may be blue and old gold but Thoroughman’s colors are black and blue and old gold. He wears bruises the way Gen. MacArthur used to wear medals.

It isn’t that he means it that way. He’d rather be as smooth as Devin Ebanks, as agile as Wellington Smith.

But that isn’t him.

He’d never win American Idol, but he might win a bar-room brawl.

Cam, who you must remember is a 6-foot-4 post player who essentially trusts one leg, did indeed make an impact against Duke in last season’s NCAA Tournament and afterward teammates were all too happy to say he was more of a “Bob Huggins player” than most realized. Why, he’d wanted to get surgery to fix his balky knee late in the season, but Huggins pretty much pleaded with Thoroughman to wait until the offseason because Huggins and the Mountaineers were going to need him. He’d become that valuable, which was a big change from where he’d started.