CINCINNATI -- To pick up his textbooks at the Xavier bookstore, Tu Holloway first must navigate through racks and racks of Musketeers jerseys -- his jersey, No. 52.

It is strange, he admits, but no stranger than the double-take looks he catches as he traverses campus.

Once, Holloway loved to playfully disarm fellow students. He'd whip his head around and catch them when they were trying to figure out whether he was, indeed, Xavier's little big man on campus.

The game hasn't been fun for Xavier's Tu Holloway. AP Photo/Al Behrman

Now, he mostly keeps his head down as he walks from the Cintas Center to the academic advising offices.

He's deflecting the cold on a brisk January day, but you wonder whether he's deflecting the attention, as well.

On Friday, it will have been two months to the day since Xavier and Cincinnati engaged in an ugly end-of-game brawl that brought the simmering nastiness of the Crosstown Shootout to the surface.

Since that Dec. 10 game, Cincinnati is 12-4, riding a surprising seven-game win streak in the weeks immediately after the brawl to earn the Bearcats a little cushion for the Big East roller coaster. Xavier, meantime, is 8-8, a promising 8-0 start derailed and careening off course. The Musketeers, proud owners of all or part of the past five Atlantic 10 titles and NCAA tournament berths in 10 of the past 11 seasons, are fighting to avoid a final crash.

What's wrong with Xavier probably can be best summed up in one Chris Mack exhortation from practice.

"C'mon, Tu," the coach yelled the day before the Musketeers hosted Saint Louis, "I want my tough guard back."

He's in there somewhere, lost in the maze of Holloway's mental anguish, paralyzed between humiliation and confusion and tangled up in a naive hope that, by playing like more of a pleaser than an aggressor, he'll change people's opinions.

"I think it all took some of the life out of me," Holloway said. "I know I need to get it back. I just don't know how. I'm thinking too much, way too much. To be great, you have to play with emotion and passion. I'm trying."

There is no undoing what Holloway said. In this age of gotcha media, Holloway's words after the game -- "We've got a whole bunch of gangsters in the locker room. Not thugs, but tough guys on the court. And we went out there and zipped them up at the end of the game." -- will live forever.

The defense Xavier has offered -- that Holloway never threw a punch -- is not much in the way of a balm on this festering wound.

Holloway gets that. He has taken and is willing to accept blame for what he said.

What he doesn't get, what he can't shake, is how, in that handful of seconds, everything changed, seemingly forever.

People who lauded his career for four years called him a disgrace, some going so far as to pen nasty letters to the Xavier basketball offices. Worse, people who didn't know him, had never even heard of him, decided they knew who he was.

Mostly what eats at Holloway is he can't quite figure out how to change it.

Or whether he can.

"I walk on campus and people are looking at me. I used to turn around real fast, catch them," he said. "Now I wonder, what are they thinking about me? Are they looking at me differently? You know, you say all the right things, you try to do the right things, but, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. One mistake, and it's not the same."

The day starts in Chris Barbour's office. Xavier's second semester has begun, and the Musketeers' academic adviser wants to meet with his players.

Thanks to heavy summer loads, Holloway needs just two more classes to graduate -- a Thursday evening business ethics class and a senior workshop that meets on Sundays.

Holloway and Mario Mercurio, Xavier's director of basketball administration, head over to Barbour's office.

Mercurio is not a coach. Once a student at Tennessee, he latched on as a student with former Xavier coach Skip Prosser, transferring to his hometown school and earning a double major in finance and marketing. He is sort of a jack-of-all-trades, charged mostly with making Xavier's nonconference schedule and serving as the university's liaison to Nike Basketball.

"He's really my baby sitter," Holloway joked. "Twenty-two years old and I need a baby sitter."

Barbour is the academic sitter. He has known Holloway since the New York point guard first came on campus. Before he was named the team's adviser, Barbour led the Musketeers' study table and tutored Holloway for a class. Barbour sheepishly admits he wasn't much help.

Now he reminds Holloway to get him his syllabuses , and he helps the senior set goals for the semester -- a C+ in what Barbour concedes is a tough business ethics class and a 3.0 for the semester.