Analysis / Walt Hazzard’s First Year : He Goes Out in a Bang, After Plenty of Noise Along the Way

The first year of the second coming of Walt Hazzard ended spectacularly.

UCLA won the NIT, and Hazzard got into an angry exchange with a writer--this one--during the postgame press conference.

Nobody said it was always going to be easy, or fun.

It was a learning experience for nearly everyone. Bruin fans learned that they have a coach who is capable of restoring the tradition. That doesn’t mean that a return to glory is inevitable, only that Hazzard has the weight for the job.

In light of the school’s recent habit of hiring untested coaches--Larry Farmer had never been a head coach, and Hazzard had never coached a Division I game--this should come as a relief.

Hazzard learned some things:

--Be realistic. The Bruins started the season unranked and were not even among the 52 teams that got votes in the Associated Press poll, but he clearly hoped to make the NCAA tournament. Early in the season, he said such things as “We hope to see them again,” after losses.

It caused him to take his early-season poundings harder than he had to. He would talk a lot later about the Bruins’ vow to return to New York, but the enduring image of Dec. 22 is of a downcast Hazzard, in the St. John’s dressing room, being taken aside and consoled by Lou Carnesecca.

--Walk before you run. The Bruins took a 2-3 record into Brigham Young on their way to New York for that fateful meeting with St. John’s, and Hazzard seemed to think they were over the hump. He spoke of hoping to beat BYU, then playing tough against the Redmen “and see what happens.” What happened was the Bruins lost to BYU and were routed by St. John’s. He never got caught looking ahead again.

--Don’t talk to rival players. He almost started a riot at Cal just by telling Jeff Thilgen, who’d been tussling with Reggie Miller, to cool out and play ball. Hazzard often looks angry, even when he’s not, and Cal Coach Dick Kuchen led a charge off his bench.

--Think, first. Coaching UCLA means having to say you’re sorry a lot.

Hazzard issued a series of apologies, starting with one for railing at the “experts” after the first Oregon State game back on Jan. 2.

“Don’t paint me as an adversary,” he told his next media breakfast. He said he loved the press because it helps promote college basketball.

He apologized for saying USC had “lucked out” in the four-overtime victory at Pauley.

He got into major trouble by making indiscreet remarks about the recruiting of Crenshaw’s John Williams. That one got him on the national wires and resulted in a printed apology that was distributed on UCLA letterheads.

But Hazzard’s players learned the most of all.

They learned that basketball is not just a game of pretty jump shots. They learned their first real lessons about conditioning and hard work. They learned to play tough man-to-man defense. They learned that basketball is a physical game, “war without bloodshed,” in Hazzard’s oft-repeated phrase.

After the season turned up, rival coaches started reminding everyone that Hazzard was working with four high school All-Americans--Nigel Miguel, Brad Wright, Corey Gaines and Montel Hatcher.

The problem was that he was also working with a completely inexperienced team. Washington’s Marv Harshman had a starting lineup with eight seasons’ worth of starting experience. Hazzard had one player who had started for one season, Gary Maloncon.

That so many of the players developed as phenomenally as they did was all to Hazzard’s credit. They said that over and over.

Wright, who had never been in shape in his life, who appeared intimidated by every quality center he went against early, did a dramatic turnabout in the second half of the first Oregon State game, devouring Steve Woodside and going on to a fine season that may get him picked as soon as the second round in the NBA draft.

Wright, however, would have remained a Bruin if he could have. He had played only 32 minutes as a freshman, and the Bruins toyed with the idea of petitioning for a retroactive redshirt season. Wright was dying to stay.

Miguel went from a utility player with no jump shot, and no shot of going on, to point guard. It was Hazzard’s most audacious move and his best. Miguel ran the team capably, defended wonderfully, made All-Pacific 10, rediscovered his game and has a chance of making the NBA’s second round.

Reggie Miller took 15 rebounds in the first eight games and few shots inside 20 feet. Then he became the second-leading rebounder for the rest of the season, developed an inside game, became a good defender and finished the season as the most valuable player in the NIT. Miller is the player the Bruins landed the year they lost Reggie Williams to Georgetown, but by the end of this season, there wasn’t much separating the Reggies.

Hatcher, a bust the season before and through December, didn’t even play in the first Oregon State game. Shortly thereafter, Hazzard made him a starter. By the end of the season, Hatcher was becoming the player he’d been advertised to be.

In the NIT final, Hazzard turned him loose on Steve Alford. Hatcher, more than Miguel, held Alford, who had been averaging 23 points in the tourney and shooting 60%, to 16 points on 7-for-15 shooting. Hatcher fired off jump shot after jump shot in Alford’s face.

This silver lining had a cloud behind it, though. Public relations.

Hazzard, as you might have noticed, likes to talk. Figuring out where and when and how much to say was a new problem.

His assistant, Jack Hirsch, came up with one solution. With writers descending upon Westwood to profile the new staff, Hirsch kept jokingly referring to himself as an “abrasive Jew.” When it started getting into stories, Hirsch recoiled and vowed never to talk to the press again. He kept his word, although everyone kept on publishing, too.

Hazzard, more tractable, made mistakes, made up, then made more mistakes. He led his team in tearing up the Sports Illustrated profile they hated so much, an act too close to book-burning to be entirely welcomed from the representatives of a respected university. He reminded the writers all season that they’d picked the Bruins to go nowhere.

“You wrote us off,” he told the West Coast press after his NIT victory in Pauley over Fresno State.

“You buried us,” he told the East Coast writers upon arriving in New York.

Actually, few of them had said harsher things about the Bruins than Hazzard, himself, who could be hell on wheels after victories and losses, alike.

After an unimpressive victory at home over Cal, he ripped into his team publicly. Asked about the play of Wright and Maloncon, he said, “I guess they took the night off.” After the losses at St. John’s and Washington State, he said he’d been embarrassed.

If the writers tired of hearing how badly they’d treated the Bruins--Hazzard hadn’t exactly been jumping up and down before the season to protest, remember--it was accepted as part of the old give and take. Everything was fine until the Bruins accepted their NIT bid.

If it was a neat opportunity for the Bruins, it was hardly like making the NCAA tournament. The Bruins had turned the NIT down the previous year. The NIT was drawing increasing criticism around the country for its ad hoc pairings policy.

Hazzard seemed to take any discussion of the NIT as a thrust at UCLA. He talked of having grown up watching the great NIT performers, Barney Cable, Lavern Tart, Jim Hadnot. Finally he claimed that it hadn’t been until the last 15 years that the NCAA eclipsed the NIT--”and we had something to do with that.”

This, of course, was all patent farce. It has been 29 years since Bill Russell appeared in the NCAA final, by which time the NIT was already an also-ran. How do Barney Cable and Lavern Tart rate against Jerry West and Oscar Robertson, who last appeared in the NCAA 24 years ago?

So Hazzard jumped me at his last press conference, complaining about a “paper in our town. that doesn’t give us much support.”

Not that I’d like to be remembered as pro-UCLA, or anti-UCLA, but in March, I wrote in a column that last year’s Bruins deserved a trip to the NIT, that there would have been nothing to gain for the school, but that such wasn’t the case this year. Such selectivity of memory would not surprise any writer who ever covered a UCLA beat.

Well, there were good times and bad times. Hazzard had to endure such scenes as Santa Clara winning its first game at Pauley Pavilion, and USC students jumping around Pauley with their brooms to celebrate the first sweep since the days when the NIT was pre-eminent. In his rookie season, he had to endure having the Trojans emerge as the team of destiny, right up until his Bruins became a team of destiny, too.

What wonders lie ahead? We’ve got a chance to find out, if Hazzard doesn’t go up in smoke, first.

UCLA / The Year in Review

UCLA OPP W-L 87 Idaho 58 1-0 60 Santa Clara 68 1-1 61 at DePaul 80 1-2 70 at Memphis St. 86 1-3 98 USIU 50 2-3 81 at BYU 89 2-4 69 at St. John’s 88 2-5 69 Oral Roberts 61 3-5 49 at Oregon St. 59 3-6 67 Oregon 59 (2 OT) 4-6 75 Washington St. 48 5-6 64 at Arizona St. 61 6-6 52 at Arizona 53 6-7 63 Washington 51 7-7 80 California 69 8-7 100 Stanford 71 9-7 77 at USC 78 (2 OT) 9-8 52 Notre Dame 53 9-9 58 at Washington St. 66 (OT) 9-10 61 at Washington 67 9-11 69 Arizona St. 65 10-11 72 at Stanford 66 11-11 53 at California 48 12-11 75 Louisville 65 13-11 78 USC 80 (4 OT) 13-12 58 Arizona 54 14-12 59 Oregon St. 51 15-12 72 at Oregon 69 16-12 78 Montana 47 17-12 82 Nebraska 63 18-12 53 Fresno St. 43 19-12 75 Louisville 66 20-12 65 Indiana 62 21-12