12 Stanford

There are hostile arenas, then there's what Stanford found itself in before the tip-off of a game against a New Zealand club team in Hamilton , N.Z., during a five-game tour Down Under in June. After player introductions the lights were turned off, whereupon the arena filled with the sound of running feet. When the lights came on again, the Cardinal players were face-to-face with about 60 Maori tribesmen dressed in skirts and war paint and brandishing spears. "They were chanting and shaking their sticks and making crazy faces," says junior guard Casey Jacobsen . "I turned my head and started laughing because, honestly, I didn't know what else to do. We found our later that the ritual was billed in the program as The Challenge. Whatever it was, it worked, because that was the only game we lost."

Jacobsen expects Stanford will do a better job of overcoming the more conventional challenges it faces this season, including the replacement of four starters from last year's 31-3 team. "I think we're as talented as last year, we just aren't as experienced," says Jacobsen . "Remember, when I was a freshman, the team had lost four starters from a Final Four team, and the one returning starter, Mark Madsen , got hurt in the first game. But we still did all right." In fact, the Cardinal started 12-0 and finished 27-4.

One player Stanford can't afford to lose to injury if it expects to have that sort of success this year is the 6'6" Jacobsen , who spent the off-season working on his ball handling and says he has improved his game "100 percent" over last year, when he shot .472 from beyond the three-point line and was named a first-team All-America. Another key is 7-foot, 230-pound junior center Curtis Borchardt , who has blocked 61 shots (seventh best in school history) in just 37 career games. He has missed 28 other games because of a peculiarly perennial foot injury. In the 20th game of his freshman year, against USC, Borchardt suffered a stress fracture in his right foot and then did it again in the 20th game of his sophomore year, also against USC. "I've got to get through a game against them, that's one of my goals," says Borchardt , who's now recovered.

Of greater concern to coach Mike Montgomery is who will replace Michael McDonald at point guard. The candidates are freshman Chris Hernandez , fleet-footed junior Julius Barnes and senior Tony Giovacchini, the least athletic of the trio, though the likely starter. Working in the weight room this summer, he increased his vertical leap by four inches, and recreating in New Zealand , he increased his mental toughness by about 150 feet. After, in his words, "wussing out" of joining six of his teammates in bungee-jumping off the Kawarau Bridge, a 141-foot drop and the shortest of three bungee jumps in a package deal, Giovacchini went back to his hotel room and made a vow to himself. The next night he went to the second-level jump alone and took a 154-foot plunge off a cliff overlooking Queenstown. "I had to show the guys the videotape to prove I did it," he says. "It was really scary, but I proved to myself that I can take on anything if I set my mind to it."

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