Column: Ex-UCLA coach Jim Harrick’s basketball passion lives on

This is Jim Harrick’s time of the year. The blood flows a little faster. The adrenaline gets to work earlier in the day.

It’s about to be college basketball season. The squeak of gym shoes on hardwood floors is music to his ears, even though these days he’s not the orchestra conductor.

Harrick is two things, a teacher and a basketball coach. He would not like the characterization without the teacher part. Nor would it be accurate.

He is 76 now, is healthy and active and still a name that resonates with college basketball fans. And that’s not just around Southern California, where he lives. But around the country.

You do not coach a team to an NCAA title and be forgotten, especially when that title was UCLA’s 11th, at a school where John Wooden won the first 10. Harrick is like the Bruins’ cherries jubilee. His title is the school’s celebrated asterisk.

He was on a sports panel the other night in Glendora, at a fundraiser for a charity named Sowing Seeds for Life. And he was a pig in mud.

His fellow panel members were Tracy Murray, Casey Jacobsen and Mike LeDuc. Murray played at UCLA and in the NBA; Jacobsen at Stanford and in the NBA. LeDuc has been such a successful fixture as coach at Glendora High School that he could win 1,000 games before he is done.

It was basketball talk. Good stuff. Much perspective. No fan-pandering tripe.

Both Murray and LeDuc addressed the absence of teaching in the now dominant AAU ranks. LeDuc bemoaned those who de-emphasized the teaching part of the game, and Murray chimed in that, in all too many youth leagues now, “They just toss the ball out and tell them to go play.”

LeDuc coaches while Murray and Jacobsen are broadcasters. They remain directly active. Harrick does some motivational speaking and some broadcasting, but he clearly doesn’t need daily employment to retain his passion.

Harrick talked about how the NCAA tournament, as popular as it remains, has become “a JV tournament,” because of the one-and-done rule that allows players to go to the NBA after a year in college.

He said he was encouraged — convinced — that the additional leverage NBA Commissioner Adam Silver gained from his widely applauded handling of the Donald Sterling situation would allow him to convince the National Basketball Players Assn. that the one-and-done rule needed to be extended by a year.

“What a difference that would make,” Harrick said.

The game hasn’t always treated him the way he’d have liked it to, but it has never left his heart.

Harrick grew up in West Virginia and actually played in high school against Jerry West. He came to California with a dream and only a few dollars in his pocket. Before he was done, he had parlayed a job as an English teacher and high school coach into a college coaching career that brought him to UCLA for eight seasons, including that Ed O’Bannon-Tyus Edney NCAA title run in 1995.

He also coached at Pepperdine, Rhode Island and Georgia. With UCLA, that totaled 23 seasons, and in those 23 seasons he took his team to the NCAA tournament 16 times. His coaching record is a jaw-dropping 470-235.

UCLA is his forever, just like Notre Dame is Lou Holtz’s forever. Both coached at different places. Both think and breathe one school.

“UCLA captures your heart,” Harrick said.

This, remember, is from a man who was fired by the Bruins over a falsified expense report about a dinner with recruits.

He also left Georgia after the 2003 season over alleged recruiting and academic violations involving his son, who was one of his assistant coaches.

“The game never stops exciting you,” Harrick said, “but sometimes you have to face the politics, and.…”

His voice trailed off because his desire was, and is, to love the game to its utmost, even if it didn’t always love him back.

Memories, and people, mellow.

Harrick talked about the art of being a teaching coach.

“I remember taking a team early in practice,” he said, “and making them stand at the center circle. And I’d tell them to make sure their feet were all the way into the circle because that’s the way we wanted to be as a team. All in.”

He is no different from anybody else who has known the man whose statue looms over all outside Pauley Pavilion.

“Thank God for Coach Wooden’s system,” Harrick said. “It isn’t the only way to play basketball, just the best one.

“I remember when I was coaching and I could never get him to come to a practice. One day, when I saw him, he whispered in my ear, ‘I don’t want to steal your thunder.’”

Tuesday was a big day for Harrick. He went to lunch with Don MacLean, Mitchell Butler, Toby Bailey, Edney, Murray and Gerald Madkins. All are former players of his. All have achieved great post-UCLA success.

“We sit around, tell stories, they rip me up,” Harrick said. “What a joy.”

Then he planned to go and watch UCLA’s current basketball team, under Steve Alford, practice.

“Steve’s a good man. He’s going to be fine,” Harrick said.

More important, Harrick is going to be fine.

He has ridden the roller coaster of a major college basketball coach. He has mourned the passing of his beloved wife of 49 years, Sally, who died five years ago this month.

But there are still hardwood floors everywhere, and the squeak of basketball shoes. Also, the certainty that he is welcomed at any of those places.

To most, basketball is a game. To Jim Harrick, it is sustenance.

bill.dwyre@latimes.com

Twitter: @DwyreLATimes