All Gray Wants Is to Please the Pacers

Once, he was compared to Pat Ewing.

Then, it was Bill Walton.

At this point, he’d settle for Mark Eaton.

Stuart Gray got offers from virtually every major college in the country while he was at Granada Hills’ Kennedy High School. At UCLA, the 7-0 center couldn’t even get the ball.

These days, he’s just trying to get some experience, and perhaps regain some lost respect, in the relative obscurity of the lower reaches of the Indiana Pacer roster.

“I’m not being judged now,” he said. “I know that if I work hard, I’ll show improvement. People appreciate that in Indiana. This (Indianapolis) is a blue-collar town. People want you to be a blue-collar player. You just have to contribute. You do not have to be a top scorer.

“At UCLA, there was a lot of pressure to be a top scorer,” he said. “That’s not to say they’ll accept a dog here, but they know it takes time. It’s not like instant soup.”

For a while, it looked like instant stardom for Gray.

He was named most valuable player in the basketball competition at the 1981 National Sports Festival, after averaging 18.3 points and 9.3 rebounds in leading his West team to a gold medal. Among those he faced was Ewing, then a 19-year-old high school student from Cambridge, Mass.

Gray was City 4-A Player of the Year as a junior at Kennedy after averaging 24.4 points and 13.6 rebounds. The following season, he bumped those totals up to 31 points and 17 rebounds.

Then he was off to Westwood, to be the next Walton or the next Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

He was more like the next Kent Benson--a lack of great jumping ability to complement his size, but no lack of heart.

To add to his problems, Gray began his Bruin career in a shooting slump. Pretty soon, his teammates weren’t passing him the ball. Nor did he want it. “It got to the point where I didn’t want to touch the ball,” he said.

It got better.

His totals went up every season: from 4.9 points per game to 7.8 to 9.9; from 4.8 rebounds to 6.9 to 7.9.

Still a long way from Walton country.

And Gray didn’t care to pursue the comparison any further. After his junior year, he bailed out, tossing his name into the NBA draft. A big reason, he said, was outgoing coach Larry Farmer.

“I knew if he was coming back, I didn’t want to. I wasn’t learning anything,” Gray said.

Farmer disagrees.

“I had people on my back for three years asking me, ‘Why are you playing that kid? He’s just going to get you fired,’ ” responded Farmer, now a commuter between his Van Nuys home and his job as a commentator on Denver Nugget telecasts. “I stuck with him even though I took a lot of flak because I felt he could help the team. I have no trouble sleeping at night.

“When I got Stuart, I saw something I hadn’t seen before, a lack of confidence, a lack of self-esteem. I had more confident scorers, so what I tried to do was minimize the responsibilities on Stuart year by year because he had never proven anything to me.

“I had guys around him who could put the ball in the basket, so I looked to him for defense and rebounding. I knew he was disenchanted, but when we got him involved in the offense, he’d do something that was not productive.

“The other players lost confidence in him. They wouldn’t give him the ball. I would tell them, ‘Give him a second look.’ They came back with a look in their eyes that said, ‘Why? He’s not doing anything with the ball.’

“Maybe in years to come, he’ll see that he got a hell of a lot more out of the program than he thought. If I was as bad a coach as he thought, he wouldn’t be in the NBA now. He didn’t get in on just raw ability. He absorbed enough to make him fundamentally sound, but if he didn’t think he was getting anything out of me, fine. I always think of something (Coach) Gene Bartow said: ‘No one can mess up a great player.’ ”

Farmer recalled one night last season when Gray was having trouble rebounding against a Pac-10 opponent. The Bruins sitting on the bench were yelling ‘Jump!’ at Gray in unison.

“At that moment, I couldn’t look down the bench and look in the eyes of those kids who would have liked to have been playing and justify all the criticism,” Farmer said. “It was like they were saying to me, ‘How long are you going to take this?’ It dawned on me they were right. It was time to either light a fire under the guy or go with someone else. Maybe I was wrong. Jumping ability was obviously not something I can coach.”

A longtime Gray watcher was Walton, who observed him as a Bruin television commentator and as an occasional opponent or teammate in summer pickup games.

“He would play well and never get the ball,” Walton said of Gray’s college career. “Some coaches don’t know how to use a big man in an offensive set. He’s certainly not Kareem, somebody who is going to go into the low post and score 50 points. But when a guy flashes open, you’ve got to get him the ball. You’re not asking him to create as Kareem does. Stuart would make good moves and get open, but they would not get him the ball.

“Still, a guy has to get out and command the respect of the coaches. They are not going to give a lot of playing time to the players that sit back and wait for the coaches to call their name. A lot of those guys are not going to make it.”

When Farmer didn’t come back, when the head coaching job went to Walt Hazzard, why didn’t Gray change his mind?

“I think Hazzard will be good. He will take it upon himself to keep the distractions at a minimum,” Gray said.

“I just wasn’t ready to take my fourth time at bat. It got to the point where I was not enjoying it. I might have quit if I had stayed there and I didn’t want to do that. With all the changes going on at the time, it wasn’t college basketball. It was a sideshow. It wasn’t real with all the distractions--the alumni, trying to deal with the press and all the expectations.

“They’d already come to the conclusion I’d never be anything and it was time to write their dirty comments. All they want is offense. If you don’t score points, you’re not effective.”

There were other problems.

“We wanted to play in the NIT,” Gray said of his junior year. “They (the administration) made some half-(baked) excuse (for the Bruins’ failure to enter the tournament). That hurt us. It made us look like snobs. You know how we found out? We found out by reading it in the paper. We’re not a bunch of snobs. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride. There are only two tournaments in the country. At least we would have had a few more games.

“How they handled that helped make up my mind. I felt good about myself after doing it (going professional). I knew I wouldn’t have to come back to the same old problems.”

There’s a new problem: Can Gray, a man not known for his ability to get off his feet, make the big leap to the NBA?

He had his doubts right from the start. There was never really a question he’d be drafted, but he admits he was so scared he “couldn’t watch TV” on draft day. He remembers being so scared during a preseason game that his arms “felt like iron.”

In retrospect, Gray feels his second-round selection, the 29th pick overall, was just about right. “Going No. 29 says that you’re good, but need time,” Gray said. “That’s very much so. I’m going to get better in a couple of years. I’m still like a fourth-year (college) player.

“A clean start is what it took. I can put everything into perspective now. When I have a bad week, I can sit back and think about it with no distractions. I can see what was wrong and where to go from here.”

There has been a lot to think about. Through Indiana’s first 48 regular-season games, the 21-year-old Gray appeared in 32 as a backup center, averaging 8.1 minutes, 2.4 points and 2.7 rebounds with a 40.3 field-goal percentage.

“He has good basketball talent, but he’s not playing nearly as well as he is capable of,” said Walton after watching his fellow alum against the Clippers recently. “He doesn’t appear to be very comfortable. He doesn’t seem to be playing with any confidence. Everything seems to be going on around him. He’s not getting involved. He has got to get out there and do it.”

One NBA official says simply, Gray will never make it, that Indiana would like to dump him. Not so, say the Pacers.

“He came to us with an awful lot to learn--to play the post, to play with his back to the basket, to play defense,” Indiana Coach George Irvine said. “He has a hell of a lot to learn. It’s the kind of thing where he takes two steps forward and one step back.

“But he’s making progress. We see it in practice. He has a great body and he’s very coachable. But he’s got to learn to use his body better. He’s aggressive, but he’s like a young colt. We don’t want to dampen his enthusiasm. He does get down on himself rather quickly, but he shouldn’t. We’re not disappointed in him. He’s learning.”

Early in the season, Gray came in for garbage time against the New York Knicks and responded with seven points and 11 rebounds in the fourth quarter.

‘I thought, ‘Hey, this is not that hard,’ People told me I am now going to go up with the big boys, but I am not that small myself,” the 250-pound Gray said.

“But you’ve got to learn. When Moses Malone goes for a rebound, if you get your face in there, it might not come back with you. But I’m learning old tricks of the trade--when you’re boxing out, how to reach around and grab the guy’s shirt so he doesn’t go anywhere. It’s learning how to outsmart your opponent, how to prevent your man from getting the first advantage, how to keep your feet so you don’t get off balance. I’m still learning to pass. I may be looking for people now, but I’m not seeing them yet.

“I’m starting with rebounding first, blocking out and going to the boards. I don’t have to worry about offense here and that takes a lot of pressure off. I just let it happen.”

If Gray is looking for a role model, he could probably zero in on Eaton, who followed a less-than-illustrious career at UCLA with a less-than-illustrious debut in the NBA. He was a project, a player in need of several years of development. Three seasons later, Eaton is the league’s leading shot blocker and a powerful force on the boards for the Utah Jazz. Of course, he is also 7-4 and has good mobility.

Irvine may have only laid the foundation on his project, but he expects some immediate return on the investment.

“We expect him to contribute right now,” the Pacer coach said. “We didn’t draft him to sit around for three years so he could learn for some other coach to use him.”

To speed up the project, Irvine has turned Gray over to his assistant, Mel Daniels. Gray could do a lot worse. In the Pacer press guide, the top five rebounding seasons in club history are listed. All five belong to Daniels.

“He shoots an effective hook, has a nice jumper and has the motor skills,” Daniels said. “He becomes frustrated, though, because he has to learn things he should have learned a long time ago--power moves, lateral movement, positioning himself. He’s got to channel his aggression into a positive thing. He’s tiring himself out and not getting anything out of it.”

Gray loves being under Daniels’ wing.

“I never had anybody to teach me at UCLA,” he said. “I never had an assistant coach just working with me like Walton and Jabbar had. I’ve gotten hungry again. That’s what it takes.”

Daniels has some definite ideas of his own on what it’s going to take for Gray to become a success.

“I want him to shoot a 12-foot jumper and feel comfortable with it,” the Indiana assistant said. “That’s his range. It was Socrates (actually, it was the Seven Sages) who said, ‘Know thyself.’ He’s out there taking 15-, 16-, 17-foot jump shots. Forget that and taking the ball between your legs and all that stuff. He’s seven feet tall. He’s supposed to be a center. Be a center. He’s not a seven-foot guard or a seven-foot forward. I want him to play within himself.

“I don’t expect him to be Bill Walton or anybody else. I expect him to be Stuart Gray.”