CLEVELAND — David showed up with a giant slingshot, and fired it at Kentucky from every direction.
And he has awakened a sleeping Goliath.
“I give them their props. Salute them to getting to 36-0. But tomorrow they’re gonna be 36-1,” West Virginia freshman Daxter Miles Jr. vowed.
The fifth-seeded Mountaineers (25-9) are talking the game of their lives, but now they will have to play the game of their lives against No. 1 Kentucky in their Sweet 16 showdown in the Midwest Regional of the NCAA Tournament Thursday night.
They have successfully poked the bear, tugged on Superman’s cape, announced that Kentucky sometimes doesn’t play hard, and certainly not as hard as they do.
“That’s talk,” Willie Cauley-Stein said. “If you’re playing against teams like UCLA, Kansas, or good teams, and you’re able to do what we did to them without playing hard? Imagine what we do playing hard then if you don’t think we play hard.
“Now I’m kinda juiced, like this game’s gonna be really fun. Like they made it kinda personal now. It’s just gonna be one of them games … if you want to watch a good game, you’re gonna want to watch this game.”
Asked if it lights a fuse, Cauley-Stein said: “Absolutely.”
Tarik Phillip, a 6-foot-3 sophomore guard, grew up in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn.
“No team has ever seen our style of play,” Phillip told The Post. “Teams run up against us and they get rattled. [There’s] no preparation for our style of play. It’s constant pressure. We all come in and do the same thing. It’s like there’s no real drop-off. The starting five comes in, applies pressure, we got dudes coming off the bench that apply super pressure — it’s just the same thing over and over again and they wear down. Most teams out here really got one ball-handler, two ball-handlers maybe … when you see that, that usually doesn’t cut it with us.”
Can you rattle Kentucky?
“Anybody could be rattled against us, I feel like,” Phillip said.
“We don’t have the best five guys, but we do have the best 13 guys,” Gary Browne said.
Wait, there’s more.
“They don’t really rebound the ball as well as we thought they did for having big dudes,” Phillip said.
Jonathan Holton talked about growing up an underdog in Liberty City, Fla.
“I kinda like beat the odds,” Holton said.
Now he tries again.
“Eight McDonald’s All-Americans, we like work just as hard as them. Nothing was like promised to us from the get-go. They had us losing to Buffalo, Maryland, we have overcome all that. So it’s nothing like really to be afraid of and all that kind of stuff,” Holton said.
Shock the world?
“Yes sir,” Holton said.
They are a reflection of their pugnacious coach, Bob Huggins.
“Being gully, that’s what we call it, man, gully — making it a scrappy game, that’s our character,” Devin Williams said. “We get down in the trenches. We ain’t get scared to get dirty, and that’s the way it’s got to be.”
Who are these guys?
Juwan Staten, a 6-1 point guard. He’s a team captain, All-Big 12 first team, averaging 14.2 points per game.
Phillip: “Best point guard in the country.”
Williams, a 6-9, 255-pound sophomore from Cincinnati who scored 16 points with 10 rebounds against Maryland.
Phillip: “Zeus.”
Holton, a 6-7 junior forward from Miami.
Phillip: “I wouldn’t say compare him to Dennis Rodman, but he’s very wiry.”
Browne, a 6-1 senior guard from San Juan, another team captain.
Phillip: “He’s a great leader, great leader.”
Miles, a 6-3 guard from Baltimore who scored 22 points in the first two NCAA Tournament games.
Phillip: “Tough as hell.”
“It’s 93 percent of the people in the world or the country or whatever don’t really believe in us,” Williams said, “and the other seven or the other six is West Virginia and a few reporters that we got here that believe we can do it. We got to use what we have, man.
“Right now it’s just us.”