Paul Harris disappeared into the Carousel Center as soon as he got there on March 5, 2006.

Mike Hopkins needed to go shoe shopping for one of his sons, Michael, and he figured he would take Harris along to show him around. But Harris, who was making his official visit to Syracuse after committing to the Orange in 2005, quickly excused himself and walked off.

A little while later, he rejoined Hopkins inside the mall and brandished a brand new toy truck he had bought for the coach’s son.

That trip, which also included a Syracuse-Villanova basketball game, was the only one Harris bothered to make to any of the programs courting him – and the ‘No. 1’ reason for that was Hopkins.

‘I’ve got as much love for him as he’s got for me,’ Harris said.

Harris isn’t the only player on the Syracuse men’s basketball team who feels this way about Hopkins. In the past year, the Orange assistant coach has drawn Jonny Flynn, Rick Jackson and Scoop Jardine – all top 100 prospects, according to Scout.com – to Syracuse to form the core of the nation’s second-best freshman class for the 2007-08 season. He persuaded Harris the previous year and Eric Devendorf the year before that to don orange.

For Hopkins, recruiting isn’t just all about basketball. He promises his recruits nothing. He shows them some love and commitment. He never lies to them. And it also doesn’t hurt if he makes them laugh every once in a while.

‘He has got a great personality,’ Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim said. ‘I’m fortunate to have assistant coaches that understand the recruiting angle and what has to be done in recruiting.’

Jackson heard many promises from the schools that were recruiting him, which included Villanova, Rutgers and Georgia, among others. He was going to step right into the starting lineup, some coaches told him. He would receive the ball every time down the court, others offered.

‘A lot of them just lie,’ the 6-foot-9 Jackson said. ‘You can tell when they’re lying. They just say things that you want to hear, and I don’t want nobody telling me what I want to hear. I want to hear the truth.’

Hopkins gave it to him. The Orange’s frontcourt situation meant Jackson shouldn’t expect to be SU’s featured big man. The only thing Hopkins could guarantee was that Jackson would receive playing time on Syracuse’s young team, and that was good enough for Jackson.

Hopkins’ words also resonated with fellow Philly-area prospect Jardine, because Hopkins had lived the life he was pitching them.

Hopkins played at Syracuse from 1990-93, breaking into the starting lineup during his last two years and even captaining the team as a senior. He got the chance to play professional basketball both in the Continental Basketball Association and overseas after he graduated. And when his playing days ended, Boeheim welcomed him back to the Orange, where he now stands on the verge of taking over the reins of his own program 12 years later.

‘It’s not a bunch of crap,’ Hopkins said. ‘How can you sell somebody on a school when you’ve been there for two years? I can honestly sit there and tell them what coach Boeheim has done for me and my career.’

All this inspired Jardine so much that he chose not only to go to Syracuse but to wear Hopkins’ jersey No. 33.

‘It was just seeing that he was a great person, and he had my best interests as a coach, a person, a mentor,’ Jardine said.

Harris started receiving letters from Division I schools while dominating on the hardcourt for Niagara Falls High School in 2004, but more than a few programs had reservations about recruiting him.

After all, Harris spent 13 days in the Niagara County jail as a 16-year-old after being charged with possession of cocaine. Niagara police had found him in a car with a drug dealer, and Harris paid the price for refusing to rat on his buddy.

But none of that mattered to Hopkins. He was the first coach to show up in Niagara Falls to meet Harris and to find out what the young man was really like.

‘People would call and go, ‘Why are you taking him? I heard he’s a bad kid,’ and this and that,’ Hopkins said. ‘When you build a relationship with somebody, you see them in a different light. I saw so much good in that kid.’

Hopkins’ gesture moved Harris, who grew to see the coach as a fatherly figure. Without making any official campus visits, Harris verbally committed to the Orange in the summer of 2005.

‘He told me no matter what, I’m always family if I come to Syracuse, and that’s how it’s been,’ Harris said. ‘That just touched my heart.’

Hopkins’ presence at Niagara Falls also made a Syracuse fan of Harris’ high school teammate, Flynn. But what truly sold him on the Orange was the commitment Hopkins showed in recruiting him as an individual.

Naysayers insisted SU was recruiting Flynn only to appease Harris, but Hopkins disproved that theory by showing up at every one of Flynn’s AAU basketball games the summer before his junior year – between 40 to 50 of them, Hopkins estimated. Sometimes, the team played three games a day, starting at 7 a.m. and ending at 10 p.m.

Hopkins would speak to Flynn if he got the chance to. If not, he would just stand on the sidelines in his all-orange gear, watching the speedy point guard play.

‘You’re trying to show them that you want them more than anybody in the country,’ Hopkins said.

Flynn committed to SU before his junior season started, on the same day Harris did. He then blossomed that year without Harris, who had moved on to Notre Dame Prep in Fitchburg, Mass. Flynn capped a stellar season by getting selected to play for the Under-18 national team at the FIBA Americas Championship. It vindicated Hopkins’ commitment to the guard.

NCAA rules limit the number of times coaches can contact potential recruits during the academic year. They can visit a high school senior only seven times at most and only during a 130-day-long window during the spring. They can call juniors no more than once a month, and seniors no more than twice a week.

Hopkins has an easy solution around these rules – get recruits to call him.

When courting the Niagara Falls standouts, Hopkins would call them at 5 a.m., before the Orange began its 6 a.m. practices, knowing they wouldn’t answer their phones.

‘Hey, what are you doing, you piece of poop?’ Hopkins would yell in a voice message. ‘We’re already here working out! When you’re in bed, you’re dead.

‘That’s one of my quotes,’ he said. ‘When you’re in bed, you’re dead. ‘Boom! Holler back.”

A return phone call from Harris or Flynn later in the day wouldn’t count against his quota. And the duo sure did call back, time and again, intrigued by his crazy antics.

‘I don’t call them and give them the ‘B.S.’; I call them to make them laugh,’ Hopkins said. ‘I like to make people laugh. I like to make people feel comfortable.’

But Hopkins considers his greatest weapon the unofficial visit. He can’t visit a recruit more than seven times during the academic year, but nobody’s counting the number of times he tells a high school coach about a big football game at Syracuse that his star player should come and watch.

And when a potential recruit arrives on campus, Hopkins blasts him with another dose of craziness. When former SU center Craig Forth and his parents pulled into the parking lot of Manley Field House on one such visit in 2000, Hopkins dashed down the building’s back stairs and blindsided the 7-footer, tackling him and jumping on his back.

Forth got to see a side of Hopkins that day that many other current and future Orange players would see – and love.

‘All you’re trying to do is for them to say, ‘He’s crazy,” Hopkins said. ‘How do you separate yourself? How do you give them something different that they’ve never had?’

Published on November 7, 2007 at 12:00 pm