THE LAST HURRAH : Brad Wright Bids Westwood a Reasonably Fond Farewell

It’s farewell to the survivors, UCLA’s class of ‘85--Gary Maloncon, Nigel Miguel and Brad Wright--recruited by Larry Brown, reassigned to Larry Farmer and redesigned by Walt Hazzard. For a Bruin, it’s all in a career.

Tonight, they’ll take the floor in Pauley Pavilion, against Oregon State, for their home game as Bruins. They’ll be a little wiser in the ways of the world. Some of the things they learned, they might not have minded putting off for a decade or so.

Miguel, a high school All-American, was shuttled between forward and guard but was mostly on the bench for three seasons.

Maloncon took Miguel’s forward spot, started this season as leading scorer and team captain, then, as a senior, lost his starting job to freshman Craig Jackson.

Stuart Gray, the original star of the class, couldn’t take the pressure and hardshipped out to the NBA after his junior year. There were rumors that he’d been run off by the new coaching staff, though Keith Glass, Gray’s agent and Brown’s former assistant, says that wasn’t the case.

“Stuart wouldn’t have stayed if they’d built a statue of him on campus instead of that Bruin,” Glass said from his New Jersey office.

Then there was Wright, who sat behind Gray for three seasons while people said unkind things about Gray and nothing any more enthusiastic about Wright.

A year ago, Wright had concluded that he was the one who’d have to go. A year ago, the big danger in Westwood was in getting caught in the crush in the doorway.

Wright was going to transfer. He says he had his new school picked out, although he won’t identify it. Then Farmer resigned, and Wright returned.

Then Wright’s new coach, Hazzard, landed on Wright’s back, wearing 10-league boots.

But now it’s a season later. Wright is leading the Pacific 10 in rebounding and blocked shots in conference games. He’s fourth in field-goal percentage and 16th in scoring. The pros finally know he’s alive.

So how does he feel about leaving?

If he could, he’d stay.

“Without a doubt,” Wright said. “I have so many things to learn. I feel like I just didn’t have enough time to do it in one year.”

For a while, they thought he might be able to stay. Wright’s freshman season consisted of 32.5 minutes in 10 games, and Hazzard thought about petitioning the NCAA for another year of eligibility. The NCAA will allow such moves, but only if a player has played in less than 20% of the schedule, or in this case, five games. Wright missed by five games, or about 15 minutes of playing time.

“I was recruited by 250 schools,” Wright said. “Why did I come here? That’s a good question.

“I came under Coach Larry Brown. He told me I wouldn’t play a lot my first year, and maybe my second. But I would learn and possibly play some power forward. But under certain circumstances (Brown left for the New Jersey Nets), he left.”

Farmer saw Wright as a center only, and his second-best center, at that. Gray began his career of crumbling under the pressure of trying to be the next Bill Walton. Wright got off the bench only to spell Gray.

Wright said: “I went to Stuart. We’d always had an OK relationship, but then people started talking about whether I should be playing, if it was racial.

“I told him, ‘Hey man, I’m not fighting for your position. I just want to work for a position. The only way we’re going to win is if we support each other.’ From then on, we got closer and closer. Every time he came out of the game, I’d be standing up cheering. I really meant in. It wasn’t his fault, what happened, and it wasn’t my fault.

“My second year, I played half the season after Stuart’s injury. I was scoring 15 points here and there. I thought, ‘Wow! I did pretty good.’ I thought, ‘Now I’ll get a chance.’ I went to the Soviet Union with a team over the summer. I thought, ‘Great, it’s really happening. Coach Farmer might play me at forward.’ ”

Farmer, however had two veteran, strong-willed forwards, Kenny Fields and Darren Daye. Wright stayed a No. 2 center.

“After my junior year, I began to think I couldn’t play basketball at UCLA,” Wright said. “I thought Coach Farmer was trying to tell me something. It was just the type of person he was. He couldn’t hurt me and say it right out. But I couldn’t sit for another year. Nothing negative about the coaching staff, but I thought it might be in the best interests of myself and the school if I left. I was on my way out.”

Wright turned around when Farmer left. Then he met Hazzard, who was no day at the beach, himself.

Hazzard had assistants who shared the fans’ skepticism. One of them, before the start of the season, summed up Wright in two words:

“Can’t play.”

Hazzard ran Wright in training until Wright was about to drop. Hazzard turned his new banger, Jack Haley, loose on Wright until Hazzard feared that Wright would have nothing left for games.

“You’ve got to stay on top of Brad,” Miguel said before the season. “Brad got into that kind of thing where he thought, ‘Whatever I do, Stuart is still going to start.’ ”

The new staff, primarily volunteer assistant Sidney Wicks, also taught Wright something about getting tough. One way Wicks did it was to scream at Wright a lot.

“I stare people down now,” Wright says. “I don’t do it to intimidate them. I do it to say, ‘I’m out there doing business.’

“Last year, I’d be tapping people on the butt, helping ‘em up. I won’t help anybody up this year. Take (USC’s) Clayton Olivier. I knocked him down once or twice the other night. He knocked me down. I had nothing to say to him. But off the court, we’re really good friends. We hang out together. We have a bet, loser buys dinner. I owe him a dinner. But at the time, I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about kicking his butt up and down the court.”

There are still nights when Wright forgets and comes out as Dr. Jekyll instead of Mr. Hyde. There was the Cal game, when Hazzard pulled him early, and Wicks climbed all over him on the bench, and Hazzard said later of Wright and Maloncon, “I guess they took the night off.”

But they all lived through it. In retrospect, it was even fun, in a painful sort of way.

“I’m a pioneer in UCLA basketball,” Wright said. “We’re starting to turn it all around. You watch this team. You watch Coach Hazzard. He’s going to recruit. He’s going to win. John Wooden lives in Coach Hazzard.”

Bruin Notes Oregon State, 21-7 and, 11-6, won the first meeting, 59-49, after the Bruins had come from 12 points behind to trail by one in the second half. Oregon State’s A.C. Green scored on a couple of offensive rebounds to pull it out. . . . Freshman forward Craig Jackson, who probably would have guarded Green, has been lost for the rest of the season with a broken bone in his right hand, so the mismatch against Green will probably go to--whom else?--Nigel Miguel, two inches smaller and 25 pounds lighter. . . . Walt Hazzard said: “Gary Maloncon, being our captain, was going to start the game anyway. Now Gary is not only going to start, he’ll play.”

Oregon State has had trouble defending inside. Coach Ralph Miller has gone all season with two big men, Green and Steve Woodside, with three guards. Opponents, recognizing that Green and Woodside must avoid foul trouble, have attacked them. In one recent stretch, the Beavers lost four of five games in Gill Coliseum, including one to Arizona State and another to New Mexico, the fourth-place team in the Western Athletic Conference. . . . The next UCLA big man? Trade Tech’s 6-8, 240-pound, 24-year-old Carl Pitts says he’ll sign with the Bruins. They’re still trying to recruit 6-9 Jonathon Edwards of Walker High in New Orleans, with Georgetown the competition. And they’re fighting half the Big East for 6-8 Tico Cooper of Allegheny Community College in Pittsburgh. Tito Horford, the 7-footer the Bruins lost to Houston, was the only quality big center in this year’s class, so they’ll try to get by for a year with shorter, bulkier types.

How the Pacific 10 coaches voted down the shot clock this year, according to Hazzard: “Len Stevens (Washington State coach) set up a conference call before the season. He said we were going to put the clock in anyway, it should be this season so we could get used to it. The vote was 5-5. Len Stevens has the last vote and he votes no! I almost dropped the phone. Someone, I think it was (Arizona State’s) Bob Weinhauer says, ‘Len, didn’t you set this call up?’ Len said, ‘Yeah, but I had second thoughts.’ ”