Different uniform awaits Butler at end of career

Welcome to Corey Butler’s day-planner. Put on your running shoes and try to keep up.

Last Wednesday night, he and the rest of the Georgia Bulldogs paid a call to the faded blue dynasty of Kentucky. At Adolph Rupp’s arena, Georgia, last in the SEC East by five games, upset the Wildcats 90-85.

Decatur’s Butler was all over the box score like an ink spill: 34 minutes, 13 points, six rebounds, three assists, two steals. On jet fuel and adrenaline, he got back to Athens around 1:30 Thursday morning.

No time to unwind. By 8:15 a.m., he was expected in Dr. Luke Naeher’s office to discuss an upcoming research project seeking a link between wood smoke and tuberculosis in developing countries.

That’s typical of one atypical college basketball career coming to a close at Georgia: One minute Butler is scouting Jodie Meeks; the next he is prepping for a field trip this summer through the lungs of Peru.

The words his stepfather imparted to Butler when he first got to Georgia —- “Sleep is a luxury, you have to earn it” —- still are in play four years later.

There’ll be no coasting to the finish.

He and Terrance Woodbury were the two seniors making their final stand at Stegeman Coliseum during last Saturday’s senior day loss to South Carolina. They will be contemplating their final college game Thursday in the first round of the SEC tournament against Mississippi State.

Unlike so many other Bulldogs of the Dennis Felton era, Butler and Woodbury served their full sentences, gaining no early release for bad behavior.

Walk-on makes good

During Butler’s three playing seasons —- he was a walk-on who spent game day in a suit and tie for most of the first —- he has lost two out of every three conference games he has played. He has watched a parade of players leave the team, rarely voluntarily. Teammate Kevin Brophy died. His coach, the one who took such interest in him on the court and off, was fired at midseason.

Thus, Butler, 21, would just have to write a different kind of success story. Here, near the end of what he’d call “one of the toughest seasons a college player could have,” Butler would become the best story to emerge from Georgia basketball. The theme of the story was perseverance, ultimately underscored by the fact he was the only Bulldog to start all 31 games of a 12-19 season.

A microbiology major with an eye on medical school, Butler carried a load that would buckle a Grand Canyon mule. In fact, there was a point early last season, as his grades began to slip, that his mother and stepfather made the drive from Atlanta fully intending to yank him from the basketball team.

“I was really upset with him and he knew it,” said his mother, Paulette Butler. “He already had told a couple players, as well as the coach, ‘My mom is going to take me off the team.’ And I was.

“I’ve always told him, ‘There’s something bigger in your life that you’re pushing for. You’re pushing to be a doctor, to have a career. You’re pushing differently, not to play basketball the rest of your life.’”

Convinced her son would get back on track, she shelved her idea. Butler got his grades in order —- his GPA is now around 2.8, he says —- and finished out a 2007-08 season that was saved by a shocking, tornado-tossed SEC tournament victory in Atlanta.

Quitting not an option

Butler seriously weighed not coming back to play his senior year and devoting all of his energy to his studies.

“That last year really beat him down,” his mother said.

Ultimately, the idea of quitting was more distasteful than the thought of another few months of sleep deprivation.

“I thought if I quit now, who knows what else I’ll quit in the future,” Butler said.

He hadn’t come to Georgia to play games.

“I think when I was about 12 years old I stopped looking forward to playing in the NBA,” Butler said. He was a 22-points-a-game scorer at Cross Keys High, but he turned down basketball offers at smaller schools to be a student at Georgia.

It was well into his first semester when Billy Humphrey and Mike Mercer, acquaintances from the AAU circuit, suggested he try out as a walk-on. Humphrey and Mercer eventually were booted from the team while Butler stuck, only earning a scholarship this season.

This was a different kind of kid who survived all the turmoil, eventually growing into the role of starter, leader, captain.

He really doesn’t care for “SportsCenter.” Doesn’t watch much college basketball, either. Waste of time.

He says he doesn’t do alcohol. When he plays beer pong, it’s up to his teammate to do all the drinking.

“I have to have control over what I do. I’m afraid if I’m inebriated, I won’t be in control,” Butler said.

He’ll minor in Portuguese because he heard it spoken once and loved the melody of it.

There is a family rule that nobody wants to hear explanations, just solutions. While he had a ready list of alibis should he become too mentally exhausted to play or too physically spent to study, Butler never used them.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard him make an excuse,” Bulldogs interim coach Pete Herrmann said. (Butler has had several bouts of tendinitis in his knees that you’ve never heard about.)

Leader embraces role

This season has sorely tested his decision to keep playing. As a captain and the most articulate player on the team, Butler found himself a spokesman after each bad loss or every crisis, peaking with Felton’s firing. He never hid from the task.

Butler is not approaching the end of his playing days as a time for maudlin reflection. He’s looking forward, instead, to being a “normal” student. To getting on with his life’s work, which always has been fitted for a lab coat, not a jersey.

But he’ll never say that basketball, even Georgia basketball at its most painful, was not worth losing a little sleep.

“Even if my [2008 SEC championship] ring was stolen,” Butler said, “the one thing that no one could take away from me is the fact that for four years I’ve come through a program where we’ve had more cons than pros and I’ve made it through that. I can go through anything. I can keep my head up, knowing I always can do what I need to do, do what I have to do, day in and day out.”

> Next for Georgia: vs. Mississippi State (SEC tournament at Tampa), 3:15 p.m. Thursday; FSSO; 750 AM