For Openers, It’s Oregon State : UCLA Is in Pac-10 Phase and Beat Figures to Go On

The Pacific 10 phase of UCLA’s basketball season, also known as Portrait of a Dynasty Down On Its Luck, will start here, with the Bruins hoping for better times. They aren’t likely to start tonight.

Once again, the Bruins seem to have been overmatched, this time by an Oregon State team that put together the Pac-10’s best nonconference record, 9-1. The Bruins, who put together their worst--3-5--better hope that whoever did this schedule for them wasn’t in charge of omens, too.

Coach Walt Hazzard, who has enough problems, vows that this one won’t occur again.

“Chico State,” he said recently, suggesting opponents for next December, to replace DePaul, St. John’s and Memphis State. “UC San Diego. I’ve got one for you. Dordt College. D-O-R-D-T. We’re trying to find out where they are.”

Whether events were beyond Hazzard’s control or not, it’s the program that pays the price. Attendance at Pauley Pavilion is running at an all-time low of 6,034 a game. One of the two student sections, all prime seats once filled to capacity by a campus lottery, sits completely empty every game. The other, on the floor, has generally been two-thirds full. Without the pep band, it would have been one-third full.

At last week’s game against Oral Roberts, a member of the stat crew held up a sheet of paper, announcing:

Tonight’s Attendance

12,081

(Seats)

Another member of the crew held up another sheet that said:

Closer to

5,841

Saturday’s Viewpoint (letters to the editor) column in this paper, once dominated during basketball season by Bruin honks doing their Jim Murray imitations at the expense of any coach deemed unlikely to duplicate John Wooden’s record, sits ominously quiet. No letter concerning UCLA basketball has been run in the last two weeks. The boosters have adjourned to the beaches, the mountains or playing with their grandchildren.

Of course, little of this has to do with Hazzard. UCLA administrators do not seem to mind in the least when it is noted that the program submarined under Larry Farmer, who was hired by the prior administration, Bob Fischer’s.

The job ate Farmer up and by all descriptions, he withdrew. Despite his personal charm, he is said to have left the recruiting to assistants. He phoned in sick for several of the weekly media breakfasts and dispatched assistants in his place.

But pinning it on Farmer is the easy way out. After all, Farmer was invited back by this administration, Peter Dalis’, and urged to return by some of his closest friends. Farmer told a friend that one reason he couldn’t resign was he didn’t know how he’d tell two people: his assistant coach Craig Impelman, and his mentor, Sam Gilbert. When he finally figured out a way, he withdrew for good.

UCLA has always been fortunate enough to win without spending a lot of money, and has gotten used to it. The Bruins don’t fire coaches and pay them off. The Bruins don’t hire big-money coaches like Eddie Sutton.

Instead, figuring or hoping that they required only an ex-Bruin who could do it John Wooden’s way, they hired Farmer, then Hazzard. Hazzard’s experience as a head coach was at least superior to Farmer’s, which was none. Hazzard has small-college and junior college experience, but he’s still a Division I rookie with lessons to learn.

“If everything was hunky dory, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” Hazzard told seven writers at a recent media breakfast. “If everything was going good, if the program was in good shape and recruiting was set, if we were still getting the best players instead of seeing Kevin Holmes and Lawrence West (both from Southern California) in a DePaul uniform, I’d still be at Chapman College, or somewhere else.”

The worst thing you can say about Hazzard so far is that, even given his personnel and the schedule, he hasn’t done the world’s best coaching job. The best things you can say about him is that he seems to realize it. “I don’t like losing, but I’m a young coach,” he said recently.

Even so, he’s a lot older than he was six weeks ago.

What Hazzard did was the old Bruin classic: go back to the Wizard’s way. The zone press, man-to-man defense and a high-post offense worked for Wooden. They worked for Hazzard at Chapman and Compton and he expected to it to make them work again in Pauley.

Most of his players, however, weren’t what you’d call defensive specialists. Few of them have demonstrated great prowess in guarding anyone. As far as the press goes, they line up in it, as opposed to playing it. They don’t attack out of it.

Besides that, times have changed. Teams learned to run presses decades ago, in response to the original Bruin terror. Good presses, like Georgetown’s, still take their toll. Bad presses take their toll in reverse.

“Let’s face it, you’re not going to beat a good team with a press,” said BYU Coach Ladell Andersen, before his team toyed with the Bruin press, jammed the ball underneath all game and won. “Unless you have Keith Erickson back there under the basket, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the other team is going to score.

“It’s like matchup zones. They were the thing a few years ago. I was talking recently to Jud Heathcote, who kind of started that with those Magic Johnson teams at Michigan State. He told me, ‘It’s the worst defense in basketball now.’ Teams learn how to play against it.”

If Hazzard doesn’t subscribe to all, or any of that, he concedes that he may have given his players more defensively than they could handle.

“Could be,” Hazzard said. “We have a lot of players who’ve played in summer leagues, where they play pro rules. I have mine. You get yours.”

Asked if he might now use the zone defense he once swore he’d never play, he said: “We have to coach this team and use its talents, what it’s capable of.”

What is it capable of? As scorned as this group has been, there isn’t a bad player among the nine Hazzard uses. All of them could be, and most of them have been, contributors in a winning program.

The problem is that none of them is a star, either.

The most likely prospect for stardom is Gary Maloncon, a 6-foot 8-inch senior forward with jumping ability, whose post-up jump shooting overcomes a lot of the things he doesn’t do well, such as handle the ball or make a play for someone else. The staff has been all over him to get a rebound and stop getting posted up, himself. After the St John’s debacle, Hazzard suggested that his starting front line was in jeopardy of starting no longer. In the next game against Oral Roberts, Maloncon came out with fire in his eyes and put together a 12-point, four-rebound first half that turned the game.

“That’s what we expect of him,” Hazzard said. “He’s our captain. He’s our leader.”

Center Brad Wright catches a lot of grief, although if everyone had come as far as he has, the Bruins would be in better shape. He has averaged 10.5 rebounds over the last four games. At 6-11 and 223 pounds, he is a decent athlete with mobility.

Still, Wright hasn’t played as well against centers of his own size and ability. After a career as a backup, he seems to think of himself as a backup.

Reggie Miller, the other forward, is a defensive problem, if a potential offensive star. At 173 pounds, he has two choices, provided this program lands the players Hazzard hopes to: bulk up, or become a guard, or both.

Nigel Miguel has been a better point guard than anyone could have expected. He wouldn’t be mistaken for Isiah Thomas, but he can get the ball up the court. After a 1-for-9 start, he is shooting 47.4% from the floor. Corey Gaines can play. Montel Hatcher, perhaps the most physically gifted Bruin, appears to be finding himself. After shooting 4 for 21 in the Santa Clara-DePaul losses, which looked like his sophomore swan dive all over, he has shot 43%, which is at least a rally.

This group has four McDonald’s high school All-Americans, Miguel, Gaines, Hatcher and Wright. A former Daily Bruin sports editor suggested that for all the enthusiasm about Stanford’s 8-2 start, it was done with players who were recruited way down the line, that Dr. Tom Davis would kill for players like Gaines and Maloncon.

The problem is that, except for Maloncon, they’re learning a new position or starting for the first time, under a staff that has no member with one day of prior Division I coaching experience.

And they’re UCLA. If Hazzard expected to finish better than .500 this season, it may be because he underestimated the pressure. You may know about it, but until you’re there, you can’t quite feel it.

When Santa Clara won at Pauley, the Broncos celebrated for a half-hour and got torn apart the next week by Weber State. DePaul, St. John’s and Memphis State got a national TV game just by scheduling the Bruins, whether they were the old Bruins or not, and treated the victories as landmarks.

It won’t get any easier for UCLA. If they don’t like the Bruins elsewhere, it’s nothing to the loathing they feel at Corvallis and Seattle and Tucson. A Bruin never has to look far beyond the end of his bench to find his friends, home and away these days.

Anyway, Hazzard has substitutes in mind. Pooh Richardson, an All-American guard from Philadelphia, is already signed. Tom Hammonds, 6-8 and 240, from Crestview, Fla.; Stevie Thompson, a Crenshaw junior; J.D. Reid, a 6-10 junior from Virginia Beach, Va., and most of all, 6-7 Tom Lewis of Mater Dei High figure in his recruiting plans.

Lewis is a key, the first message that Hazzard wants to send Arizona State, Louisville, DePaul and the rest that the Bruins are back in charge of their own turf and don’t be wasting your recruiting budget on Southern California.

The Bruins think they’re doing well with Lewis. According to recruiting gossip, Arizona State is doing every bit as well. Stay tuned.

And then there is the other press.

Among perceived enemies are certain members of the press, notably Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick, whose description of the team was deemed “racist” by Hazzard, though by no one else with a more detached viewpoint.

Kirkpatrick’s account was unflattering, certainly, and irreverent, assuredly, but when you’re UCLA and undergoing your worst start in 38 years, you’d do well to learn to take a joke.

There was more grumbling after a Times column by Mike Littwin and after the account of the Memphis State loss by Rick Reilly. These should be kept in perspective. The Bruin athletic department has a long and hallowed tradition of moaning about coverage, the quality thereof, the quantity thereof, quotes in Morning Briefing, graphics on the box-score page, the Viewpoint . . .

Hazzard, who has said repeatedly, “We’re going to have to show our toughness,” for the most part, has. Once personally forbidding, he has been patient and candid. He wears gray pin-striped suits, smiles whenever possible and says as many diplomatic things as he can manage.

Underneath, though, he’s still a pure Philadelphia playground warrior, who wants to burn that ethic into a team that’s going to have to show more of its toughness. The schedule may be getting easier, but the season won’t.