“Beast him! Beast him!” the Arizona Wildcats would scream about Channing Frye in practice. “He’s light! He’s skinny! Beast his ass!” Then they’d punk him around something fierce to justify tagging him with the ultimate put-down name: Ham Sandwich -- as in soft, mealy-muscled, squishy. Salim Stoudamire, his freshman classmate, even brought in a real ham sandwich one day to underline the point.

“Channing has only discovered in the last year that his knees are hinged, that he can actually bend them,” coach Lute Olson cracks.

	Cruz: Brandin Knight & the Panthers are on the prowl. Palmer Steve Blake makes it all work for Maryland. Keown: Jared Jeffries is turning it on for the Hoosiers. Wickersham: Keith Bogans is back on his game, making the Cats a scary team. Gustafson: Trevor Huffman is out to prove the Golden Flashes are the real deal. Kirkpatrick: Channing Frye is quickly becoming the beast of the Big Dance.

So what’s an 18-year-old baby-face named Channing supposed to do with his 6'10", 222-pound dishrag of a torso anyway? How about run, jump, shoot, pass and block, then bend, batter and break the hearts of the opposition. As if scoring 16 points and grabbing seven rebounds weren’t contribution enough in Arizona’s 86-81 opening victory over UC Santa Barbara, Frye absolutely saved his teammates’ beasty-boy butts in the second round with 18 points, 11 boards, 5 blocks and twice that many scare-aways and no-you-don’ts in a 68-60 brawl over that raunchy roadhouse of a gang from Wyoming.

“They weren’t respecting my game,” the suddenly brash center said afterward. “They kept coming closer and posting me up. I was so excited. I think the best feeling was when I blocked a couple in a row. I sent a message: ‘You may think you can come in here, but you can’t.’ ”

Frye was speaking of the Cowboys’ massive (sixth in the nation) rebounding squadron, which had laid waste to poor little Cinder-Zaga with 12 blocks, and featured such nasty characters as 6'8" lumberjack Josh Davis and 6'10" guns-of-steel warrior Uche Nsonwu-Amadi, both of whom looked as if they could bench-press Jackson Hole. Against these guys, Frye looked like some strangely out-of-place fry cook. But there he was, smack down in that New Mexico hell-kitchen known as The Pit, scoring, boarding and swatting Wyoming shots every which way until junior Luke Walton hit two clutch jumpers to lift the Cats out of danger and into the Sweet 16 for the ninth time in Olson’s 19 years in Tucson.

“We’re trying to push Channing,” Olson says. “He can be as good a big man as we’ve ever had here. But when he loses aggression, he’s not half the player.”

Frye epitomizes what Arizona’s desertion-plagued, freshman-pocked team has become under the tutelage of the silver-haired, 67-year-old mentor he calls “our grampa.” The Wildcats were left out of the preseason polls for the first time since 1995. But from back when the Lutester was worrying that Frye would get “bounced around like a Ping-Pong ball” against the likes of Florida’s Udonis Haslem and Maryland’s Lonny Baxter and USC’s Sam Clancy (teams Zona wound up beating), through to season’s end -- when Stoudamire (not Frye) was chosen Pac-10 Freshman of the Year -- Olson’s rookies have seemed to know the way to San Jose (with Walton and junior point Jason Gardner holding the compass, of course).

“When I hear Coach compliment me,” Frye says, “I want to work that much harder, just be an animal.”

How about a beast?

This article appears in the April 1 issue of ESPN The Magazine.