Hazzard Always Found a Way; He Is Looking Again

Man and boy, full-court or free throw line, no one threw in any uglier baskets than Walt Hazzard. They came from everywhere, under his arms, under his legs, behind his back, underhanded, overhanded, line drives, soap bubbles, rim shots, prayers, fallaways.

They would have had to improve merely to be called “garbage.”

“He squirts points,” a disgusted rival coach once complained. “He’s like an octopus.”

He was like a golfer with a loop in his backswing, a batter with a hitch. If he were a pitcher they would have described his motion as “herky jerky.”

The only thing he did right was win. If you wanted to see pretty jump shots from the top of the key, picture layups, sky hooks, dunks, you didn’t watch Walt Hazzard. “He looks like he’s throwing up an anvil,” Eddie Gottlieb once complained.

But you did notice after a while that it went in. Walt Hazzard was in the position of the celebrated golfer who once scraped the ball to the hole via two sections of rough, a sand trap and frog hair and then tapped in an 85-foot putt and when his opponent who had taken a more proper route to the hole exploded, he inquired sweetly “Are we playing ‘how?’ Or ‘how many?”’

Walt Hazzard played how many. He was like the skilled card player who made do with a pair of treys or raked in pots with king high. As a schoolboy, he led Philadelphia’s Overbrook High to an 89-3 record. At UCLA, he played on the shortest team that ever won the NCAA and it went 30-0. As the ball players said it, Walt Hazzard specialized in capital “W’s.”

There was also a reason for his unorthodoxy. Growing up in the playgrounds of Philadelphia, young Walter Hazzard faced the kind of competition which would not stand there, let him set up for the classic, high-style mid-court jump shot with the elbows braced just so, the wrist cocked, the arm angled. If you did that in South Philly, you wound up with a broken arm.

Recalls Hazzard: “I had guys like Wilt Chamberlain, Wayne Hightower, Woody Sauldsberry, Wally Jones out there. Sometimes the entire future draft list of the Harlem Globetrotters. Man, you had to invent ways to get the ball in the basket. It was like smuggling the ball through a picket fence. You had to shoot the ball through your legs, around corners, under their legs. You think Wilt was going to stand there while you combed your hair and smoothed your jersey and got ready to jump-shoot? You think Guy Rodgers or Playground Pete were going to step back while you got everything just right?”

But if Walt Hazzard’s shotmaking seemed to come out of a manual “How Not To Play Classic Basketball,” the rest of his game was textbook stuff. No one whistled the all-court passes with the velocity and accuracy of a Hazzard. No one was more adept at drawing the foul as he brought the ball up court, at throwing a defender off balance, at finding the open man. Hazzard quarterbacked the teams he played for. He set the table. He was the delivery system.

He had great players to deliver the ball to in the pros. Jerry West. Elgin Baylor. But he was more than just a caddy. Somehow, Walt Hazzard threw in 45 points one night. He averaged 23.9 points in 1967-68 which was seventh in the league and only one basket behind Oscar Robertson. If no one was open, Walt Hazzard threw it in himself.

He threw elbows with the best of them but he rarely fouled out. A typical season would find him with 500 assists and only two or three disqualifications. Once, after he changed his name for a while to M. Abdul-Rahman, a rival, Rick Barry, came in to observe “I don’t care what he calls himself, I recognize the elbows. That’s Hazzard.”

His shoulders were broad for more than basketball. At UCLA, he was not exactly John Wooden’s whipping boy but neither was he the teacher’s pet. Early on, the coach perceived he had to expect more of Walt Hazzard than some of his other stars.

“I remember I could make five or six outstanding plays and then I’d throw the ball away and Coach Wooden would yell ‘Hazzard, where were you on that one?!’ Then, someone else, say a Gail Goodrich, could mess up on three or four plays, then hit a jumper and the coach would say ‘Way to play!’ ”

Did Hazzard read anything into that? Walt shakes his head. “You recognize that some players can take criticism and continue to play their game. Others need encouragement or they go in a shell.”

Walter Raphael Hazzard is now the coach himself, the fifth UCLA has tried since Wooden. The alumni is being fair. They told him to take as much time as possible to rebuild a champion--take a few months. Westwood fans are notorious for their patience. Like African dictators. Or hungry lions.

Walt Hazzard has to figure a way to get this ball in the basket. He has to figure a persona. A great coach has to be a great actor.

He can’t be John Wooden. The scent of new mown hay does not waft off Walt Hazzard. You learn more than basketball in the mean streets of Philadelphia.

Maybe he should throw a towel over his shoulder and look at basketball owlishly through horn-rimmed glasses and an open tie and collar a la John Thompson. Only, there’s no guy out there wearing two undershirts and cruising the court like a runaway flying horse for him.

The team he inherited is a little like Walt Hazzard. It has to find a way to beat you. If it doesn’t come immediately to mind, it calls for some degree of inventiveness, improvisation. It is a team which, like the coach, cannot afford mistakes, or discouragement. It dangles on the brink as in mid-season when it had a 3-6 record and trailed Oregon State in a game at home, 22-4. Hazzard’s team won that in two overtimes.

Since that time, it has lost five games, but three were by one point and two of them were in overtime. It is a team which the experts look at and say “I don’t see how in the world they can beat you.” But that’s what they always said about the coach, too.