For Morrison, It’s Take This Job and Love It

Sports is thick with thugs and thieves, liars and louts, guys who warm themselves on rocks and shed their skin semi-annually. It is a double bill Western at the Bijou, and the guys in the white hats are generally getting creamed.

But lately, the projectionist has been remiss. One of the good guys has been left standing.

Stan Morrison, the basketball coach at USC and therefore, by definition, one of the most flogged souls on the planet, is stuck in a bizarre run of good fortune.

This morning, he woke up to find himself in first place in the Pacific 10. This is rather rare. Every time a USC basketball coach takes over first place, they put up another pyramid.

This is no slight on Morrison, who is a rarity in his own right. No, this is a slight on Morrison’s job. For you would not take Morrison’s job if you were down to your last saltine and living at your mother-in-law’s.

Apart from the fact that you don’t have a home gym, can’t get your own students to come to the games, are often outdrawn by sewage board meetings, and do backyard battle with the most successful school in college basketball history, it is a very nice job. At least the pay is lousy.

All of which should tell you something about Stan Morrison, 45, a walking billboard for the notion of hope over experience.

This is a card-carrying nice guy, a man who has stood in line twice a week for six years to take his clunk on the skull without comment. At USC basketball, pain is Job One.

Such is the fate of an incurable optimist. Morrison is the kind of guy who starts a crossword puzzle in pen; gets bombed by a pigeon and figures it’s pennies from heaven.

Morrison Masochism knows no flinching. Nobody recruits harder and nobody gets more rejection notices in the mail. In the ongoing war for Mater Dei prep star Tom Lewis, USC made the final eight and was then expunged from Lewis’ list. One reason, according to one of Lewis’ compatriots, was that the school didn’t have a gym.

Oh, that . Just a slight glitch in the job. USC will play four games this season at Cal State Dominguez Hills in beautiful downtown Carson, which is more luxurious than where USC practices, at Trade Tech in beautiful downtown Los Angeles. Morrison would prefer to play his games at the Sports Arena, but he is beaten to the scheduler’s office by NCAA powers such as Disney on Ice and Van Halen. Morrison begs the Pac-10 to release its schedule earlier so that he can book the Arena more often, but the Pac-10 sees that USC is the only school without its own on-campus arena and, well, it’s only USC . . .

So Morrison begs the USC powers that be to build an on-campus arena and they notice that Stan’s players aren’t wearing chinstraps and they say, “Yes, well, that’s in committee.” Meanwhile, Morrison has to sit in the living room of Mr. High School Hoop Hero and say things like “You’ll love Cal State Dominguez Hills. Just something about the electricity of the place, you know what I mean?”

Still, Morrison beats on against the current, ceaselessly.

“Nobody works harder than Stan,” says Morrison’s chief adversary, Walt Hazzard. Walt should know. Of Hazzard’s five starters this season at UCLA, four were recruited by Morrison--Reggie Miller, Gary Maloncon, Nigel Miguel and Brad Wright.

Morrison, of course, gets routinely jilted by the Millers and Miguels of the world, so he goes out and gets a bunch of lugs from the local “Y” and beats them anyway. He did it again Friday night in double overtime. In fact, in five of his six years at USC, Morrison has gored UCLA at least as often as they’ve gored him. Maybe this is the year he gets both ears.

“I took this job because I knew it was the biggest challenge in college basketball,” Morrison said after the win over UCLA. “I knew if we turned it around here, we’d have done something nobody else could. . . . They just keep dangling that carrot out on that stick for me.”

So when is lunch?

Somebody asked Morrison after the double-overtime win if he thought his heart could stand another game like it.

“Oh, yeah,” Morrison said. “Got a great heart. My heart can go on and on.”

Here’s to it.