The broadcast journalism major, it seems, is a procrastinator not real comfy with this whole deadline thing.

"Just about 10 minutes before we got to the press conference, he said, 'I think I made up my mind. I'm gonna go into the NBA Draft.' That's how he does it," Ron said. "He's so much of a good person that he thinks he's stepping on toes. He thought he was hurting the (Arkansas) coach's feelings, the players he was leaving behind.

"But one thing we have to give him credit for: He made those decisions," Ron added with a glance at his wife. "Nobody can say that it was 'Dad's decision' or 'Mom's decision,' because it didn't happen that way.

"I just was wanting him to make that decision a month and a half before. Because I knew it was the best thing. But I couldn't make him do something he didn't want to do."

· · · · ·

Ron's boy very much wanted to go down the slide at Beaver Lake.

He had no idea what was coming.

"They (pranksters) put soap on the slide, and they pushed me down it," Ronnie said. "I tried to stop myself. This pole was holding the slide out of the water, and I tried to grab it. Right when I was going into the water, I hit the pole and it fractured my arm."

Humerus bone busted; just above the elbow.

Dad knew the situation was serious: "I mean, you could see where it came out."

The youngster's closest ally didn't know what to think: "None of our children," Carolyn Brewer said, "had ever broken anything."

Ronnie, though, immediately pondered a frightening possibility: "I can't play basketball again."

After the arm was set and placed in a cast, Ronnie said, "My mom was like, 'Well, you've got to stop playing basketball. You've got to let it heal.'"

"The guy (doctor) told us it was going to heal properly," Ron added. "It wasn't going to mess up the growth plate or anything."

So Ronnie waited. And waited.

When the day came that the cast finally was removed, he could wait no longer.

"I hadn't practiced, but my dad was coach of the team," Ronnie said. "My dad was like, 'You've got to sit on the bench.' I said, 'I can play.'"

Not very well, as it happened; muscles in the limb had atrophied.

"My dad was like, 'Son, you've got to stop,'" Ronnie said. "I was like, "I'm all right, I'm all right.'"

Was he?

"This arm here," Carolyn said, pointing to her own by way of example, "(still) goes all the way around."

Yet Ronnie played anyway that day the cast came off.

"After that," he said, "I didn't feel like it was going to bother me at all."

And it hasn't, really, even if his shot never has been the same.