Westwood's outlet center

By Diane Pucin

July 12, 2007 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

LAKE OSWEGO, ORE. —

According to just about every organization that gave out an award for the nation’s best high school basketball player, Kevin Love was the guy.

So, as he has just arrived in Los Angeles, ready to start what is expected to be a short but spectacular college career, Love is truly expected to be a big man on the UCLA campus.

He certainly looks the part -- 6 feet 10, 250 pounds, everything square.

Love looks as if he might be immobile or plodding on the court, but he isn’t. His size-18 feet land lightly, barely making a sound. He makes court-length passes with a flick of the wrist, so fast and easily that some say he might be a top major league baseball prospect as a pitcher.

“That’s true,” says Mark Shoff, Love’s high school basketball coach. “First time I saw Kevin as an athlete it was throwing a baseball. Kid’s got a great arm.”

But Love is also very definitely a polished basketball player, with a nuanced feel for the game that some players a decade older haven’t mastered. He rarely finds himself in bad position, and what might look like a blind pass -- a little showing off -- is really not.

Stan Love, Kevin’s 6-8 father, played at Oregon and then for the Baltimore Bullets and the Lakers in a four-year NBA career, so he usually gets credit for his son’s all-around game.

But he doesn’t take it. Stan says Kevin seems to have been born with a feel for when and where to throw the basketball.

That said, though, there was always a deep appreciation around the Love household for big men who could play. Kevin’s middle name -- Wesley -- is a tribute to one of them. Wes Unseld was a teammate of Stan’s on the Bullets.

Many basketball professionals, UCLA Coach Ben Howland included, say Love is the best passing big man since Unseld.

That means something to Kevin, because he appreciates basketball history. One of his favorite stories is about his dad once dunking on Wilt Chamberlain.

“Yeah,” Stan says, “It’s true. But here’s the rest of the story: The next four times up the court Wilt was pointing at me and dunked in my face. Four times in a row.”

Visit the 1,800-seat gym set in emerald green perfection in this leafy Portland suburb and just imagine the bursting energy the Love-led Lake Oswego team must have generated during its past magical season.

Kevin must have been treated like a rock star, right?

“Ah, no,” he says. “I don’t think we sold out a game until halfway through the playoffs. You’d think maybe we could have drummed up some excitement at least in the first round. But this is a football school. I walk down the street and nobody looks twice.”

Stan pipes up with a one-word explanation -- “jealousy.” Kevin nods. It is that way with this father and son. Kevin says, “This year the fans kind of jumped on the bandwagon late,” and now Stan is the one nodding vigorously.

“You’d think when you have a once-in-a-lifetime player,” the father says, “that you might fill the gym.”

If Love’s basketball brilliance didn’t attract fans to the games, it did nudge some into anonymous cyber chatting.

“Everybody likes to say this is a great place to raise a family,” says Kevin, who was named the Gatorade boys’ prep athlete of the year Tuesday, “but a lot of stuff goes on here, political stuff. I guess it happens everywhere if you’re the best athlete or the best basketball player. People talk. Because I didn’t go to Oregon, I think that made some people not appreciate me.”

Stan may have rubbed some people the wrong way by being what one observer called “a little ubiquitous” in his presence around the team. Local papers reported Stan was angry with Shoff for not starting Kevin in a game during his junior season after he had been out with mononucleosis, but Ernie Spada, the father of Lake Oswego’s point guard, said that spat was “over in an instant.”

Spada recalls the school’s gaining a reputation for failing to embrace extraordinary basketball talent long before Love arrived on the scene.

“Before Kevin broke the all-time Oregon scoring record, another Lake Oswego kid broke it, Salim Stoudamire,” Spada says. Stoudamire, a guard, went to Arizona and now plays for the Atlanta Hawks. “I’m a basketball junkie, and when I realized [Stoudamire] was going to break it, I grabbed young Ernie and hustled over to the gym.

“I thought I’d have to sneak in, but the place was half empty. So Salim breaks the record, they stop the game and make the announcement, and maybe eight or 10 people stand and clap. This is a community that never knows what it has in basketball.”

Spada, who coached Kevin in youth leagues, says Love was always popular with teammates. “Guys love playing with Kevin,” he says. “Kevin’s not a wallflower, and he’s not shy about his talent, but he’s also a great teammate.”

If there are any hard feelings here about Kevin, Stan guesses that it’s because he had played at Oregon, and fans assumed his son would follow. “When it was clear Kevin wasn’t going to Oregon, I think some people turned off on Kevin,” he says.

The Loves -- Kevin, Stan, Kevin’s mom Karen, his younger sister, Emily, and older brother Collin -- live in a tousled suburban home filled with evidence that teenagers reside there, with shorts and socks and caps and backpacks tossed seemingly everywhere.

It is often filled with Kevin’s high school teammates, who tend to travel as a group and spend their time playing basketball computer games or watching baseball games or classic footage of former basketball greats. “Usually big men,” Kevin says of the basketball games. And, when it comes to baseball, it’s the Yankees. “I know it doesn’t sound cool,” Kevin says, “but I love Alex Rodriguez. I loved his game even before he got to New York.”

Karen is a neonatal intensive care nurse and has just finished three consecutive 12-hour work days, but she herds the family into a room that Emily calls “Kevin’s shrine” -- filled with trophies, photos, framed jerseys and autographed basketballs.

Emily, who is entering eighth grade, hopes to ride horses in Olympics equestrian events some day. She has long blond hair and the straight-backed posture of royalty, but she is not much of a talker.

Stan loves to tell of the one-hour visit the family had with John Wooden last year. The UCLA legend would periodically interrupt his storytelling and say, “What did you say, Emily? I can’t hear you.” It was a joke, Wooden’s sweet way of encouraging the shy girl to chat.

Collin is three years older than Kevin, and it was while following him around in a baby walker that Kevin first remembers holding a basketball. “Collin would be bouncing the ball,” Kevin says, “and I’d follow.”

Karen says there is no doubt where Kevin, who was 5-2 in kindergarten, got his height.

“We have a family photo from Stan’s relatives in Sweden and there is one man that stands a head above everyone else,” she says. “He’s at least a seven-footer and Kevin looks a lot like him. No one knows who he is, but he’s like a Viking Swede.”

Collin and Kevin will share an apartment in Los Angeles, where the older boy, who has been attending junior college, plans to continue his education while also helping to provide a safe haven home for his brother. “Coach Howland approves,” Karen says.

The apartment also will provide the rest of the family a place to stay when they come to watch Kevin play. And they will come often, because Southern California is as much home to the Love family as Oregon is.

Stan played high school basketball at Inglewood Morningside High for Jim Harrick and Karen went to Costa Mesa High. Stan tells a story about how he didn’t start playing basketball until his sophomore year of high school.

“I like the beach and sunshine and I don’t like buildings blocking the sun,” he says. “I ran some track and played baseball my freshman year. Jim Harrick saw me walking home all the time. He made me come to talk to him and said, ‘Quit walking girls home from school and get in the gym.’ ”

Kevin giggles and his buddy, point guard Spada, shoots him a look and whispers, “He walked the girls home too?”

Stan’s brother, Mike, and his cousins, the Wilsons, were the Beach Boys. Stan and Karen married after Stan’s NBA career ended. They soon had the three children and were living in Pacific Palisades, but Karen said their life wasn’t perfect.

“Stan had a business, I was working, it was the typical L.A. lifestyle -- working so much to afford the house and a nanny was raising the kids,” Karen says. “So in 1989 we moved to Oregon. We picked Lake Oswego because it had a good school system.”

The house behind theirs was the Spadas’, and Kevin and young Ernie have been best friends from the very first day they were neighbors. Ernie is going to Humboldt State, where, he says, it will be a big adjustment playing with an ordinary center again.

Spada’s advice to UCLA point guard Darren Collison: “Get Kevin the ball and be ready to catch the ball.”

You could say Kevin is already good friends with the enemy. He says he and O.J. Mayo, USC’s top recruit, plan on working out together this summer.

Stan says he has heard people who wonder how Kevin, from a close-knit family, who played for the same school in the same town for four years, and whose entourage is entirely family, has anything in common with a kid from West Virginia whose father has spent time in prison, who played for four high schools in three states, and who is sometimes accompanied by an assortment of lawyers and shoe company representatives.

“You know what they have in common?” Stan says. “They talk basketball. O.J.’s a good kid when you get to know him. Kevin’s a great kid. They respect each other. They’re cool.”

Love’s best friend now, “Little Ernie,” is asked to sum up what Bruins players can expect from Love next season:

“He’s a good locker room guy, a good teammate, a leader, he’s tough. In other words,” Spada says, “he’s going to be pretty good, and so is UCLA.”

diane.pucin@latimes.com

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National players of the year

Kevin Love was named Gatorade male high school athlete of the year. Three of the last four winners are in the NBA.