A DIFFERENT COURSE OF ACTION : Richard Carr Has Been Driving Around Pizzas Instead of Man-to-Man Defenses, but All That Might Change Soon at UCSB

A year and a half ago, Richard Carr was the toast of Thousand Oaks High. Bright student. Great athlete. Popular among the student body. Respected by the faculty.

He had signed a letter of intent to play basketball at Stanford.

“Everything was going great,” he said.

Two months later, he quit the Thousand Oaks team after its second league game.

He started cutting classes.

Finally, he quit school.

He returned in time to graduate and earn his high school diploma, but his grades during the spring semester were so low that Stanford didn’t accept him.

UC Santa Barbara took a chance on him, offering a scholarship. He took it, but then quit school a few weeks into the fall quarter.

He returned to Thousand Oaks, taking a job delivering pizza.

What happened?

It would be easy to dismiss Carr as another flaky teen-ager.

But those closest to him paint a picture of a confused, insecure perfectionist whose fear of failure and uneasiness in the spotlight left him in great pain and unable to cope with the pressures of being a highly coveted, much-discussed high school basketball star.

Said Shirley Holgate, an English teacher and Carr’s closest confidant at Thousand Oaks High: “When I first talked to the Stanford coach, he said, ‘This is one solid kid.’ And I said, ‘No. This is a kid with Jell-O on the inside.’ ”

When Carr returned from Santa Barbara last fall, his father told him he’d have to agree to see a psychiatrist before he’d be welcomed back in the family home.

Which he did for a few months.

And now he seems to have landed on his feet.

He’s still delivering pizza, but he took some classes at Moorpark College this spring, he’ll take some more this summer and UCSB Coach Jerry Pimm is offering him another chance. Despite all that has happened in the last 18 months, he still has a basketball scholarship and a coach who wants him.

This fall, he’ll get a chance to start all over in Santa Barbara.

He says he’ll be ready.

“I’ve done enough screwing around,” he said.

When Carr signed with Stanford in November, 1983, he thought his life would return to normal.

He wouldn’t have to hide when the phone rang. His mailman would breath a sigh of relief. After months of harassment from college recruiters, he could stop being a commodity and go back to being a high school senior.

He never felt comfortable as the center of attention.

When coaches put him on the junior varsity during his freshman year, he believed the older players resented him and asked to be dropped to the sophomore team so he could play with his friends.

“He was thinking of quitting,” Holgate said, “and I told him I’d be there at every game. It sometimes helps to have somebody there for you.”

In 3 1/2 seasons, she never missed a game, home or away.

Carr’s friends, including Holgate, describe the 19-year-old as a perfectionist. “An idealist almost,” a close friend said. He has always strived to be the best at everything he does. Some sports he refuses to play because if he can’t play them well, he said, he doesn’t enjoy himself. But he believes that doing something well is its own reward.

If doing well is the object, why should he be singled out for doing just that?

“It’s internal to him,” said his father, Allan. “He doesn’t want a whole lot of publicity. In fact, when he gets publicity, he dislikes it very much.”

Keith Kirby, who first met Carr when both were fifth-graders, describes his best friend as a very private, independent person.

“He doesn’t talk about anything,” Kirby said. “He’s the most private person I’ve ever met.”

Into this private world stepped a lot of strange people in 1983.

After a junior season in which he averaged 17 points a game and was an All-Southern Section selection, the 6-7 “white Magic Johnson,” as one observer called him, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight.

An A- student who was smooth and fluid, could pull down rebounds and hit his jump shots, Carr said he got three or four calls a day and about 500 letters of interest from colleges across the country.

Holgate acted as a go-between.

“Every college coach I talked to just jumped at him because he was not only a good athlete, but such a bright person,” she said. “I had him for college-prep English and I’d give him a book and he’d read it that night. I’d give him another and he’d read it the next night. . . .

“I think he was the brightest boy in his class.”

But he was living a nightmare.

He hated the attention.

Although NCAA rules allow prospective athletes to make five recruiting visits, Carr didn’t visit any other schools before signing with Stanford.

“I kind of just wanted to get out of having to deal with these people,” he said of the recruiters. “I just wanted to sign and get it out of the way, which isn’t a real good reason to pick a school.”

Finally, it was over.

Or so he thought.

“We thought if he signed early that the attention and the pressure would cease at that point,” his father said. “He really didn’t want to get involved with looking at a whole lot of schools and devoting his life to this business of who to sign with.

“He kept saying, ‘I just want to get all these calls and all these appointments over with.’ I think he was happy to be able to sign at that point. And so was I. I said, ‘We’ll finish all this calling that’s been going on all summer long from these schools, and we’ll just have a year like any other year.’

“So he made an early decision and I breathed a sigh of relief and said, ‘Well, now Richard can finish his senior year, play basketball and go on from there. It’s all over.’ ”

Actually, it was only beginning.

“The phone kept ringing,” Allan said. “He was written up in the newspapers and all of that. I think Richard really felt the pressure.”

He started the season, but wasn’t playing well, by his own standards.

“By anybody else’s standards,” Kirby said, “he was kicking everybody’s butt.”

Midway through the season, he quit. Just up and left after a 64-55 win over Westlake on Jan. 6 and never came back. At the time, he was averaging 17.5 points a game. He had been an all-tournament selection in the Beverly Hills Tournament. The team was 10-3.

He blamed a personality conflict with Coach Ed Chavalier, saying the two had never seen eye to eye in Carr’s three varsity years.

But he also said: “I didn’t have too much confidence. Everybody thought I was Mr. All-American and I didn’t really feel that way about myself. . . .

“I think I was overly competitive. And that’s part of the problem; I was so high on doing well that when I didn’t do as well as I thought I should do, it was a real letdown. So I just said, ‘Forget the whole thing.’ . . .

“It probably would have worked out if I’d been playing better. Actually, I was playing all right, but I didn’t think I was playing very well. I thought I should be scoring a lot of points and really dominating.”

Said Chavalier: “To put it in a nutshell, Richard puts a lot of pressure on himself and I think that it just reached a point where he was having difficulty coping with it. . . .

“He expects a lot of himself. In some cases, he expects too much of himself. One of the things I believe he’ll learn as he grows is that he’ll learn to trust other people and to allow them to do certain parts of a job and it’ll make his job easier.”

Before he left the team, Carr had already started skipping classes. And when he was in class, he said, “I just screwed around.”

Having left the team, he began skipping entire days of school.

Eventually, he quit altogether.

“I was tired of the whole routine--of all the crap that you have to put up with,” he said. “I was tired of going to school.”

For about three weeks, he went to the beach. Or he read. Or he stayed home and watched TV. “Nothing really constructive,” he said.

Was he involved with drugs?

“Beer,” he said. “That’s about it. (And) I wasn’t going out and getting really wasted--at least not during the day.”

He considered moving to San Francisco to live with his mother, but his father found out about it and talked him into staying.

Carr’s parents were divorced in 1975, and his father had taught him to take care of himself. He has done his own laundry since he was 6 years old.

He was always well behaved.

Said his father: “Up until the age of 15 or 16, he was almost angelic, as far as I was concerned. And if there’s some psychology there, having to do with the breakup of his mother and father, one can speculate that that had something to do with it, but I’m not a professional. But I suspect that may have something to do with the way he’s put together.

“And in his senior year, with all the attention that he suddenly got--and being a private person--I just don’t think that he could handle it. And that meant that he would have to get as far away as he possibly could. And that meant going up to San Francisco.”

Holgate believes he was having second thoughts about his decision to attend Stanford.

“I think he didn’t think he could make it academically,” Holgate said. “But those of us who knew him knew he could do it. It’s insecurity, really.”

Said his father: “I’m sure that was it. To me, there’s no question of that. I mean, here he is, coming out of Thousand Oaks High School and going to one of the great schools in the United States. Would he be able to handle it--academically and sports-wise?

“And although he was reassured over and over again that he would get all the help that he needed, I don’t think he really thought that he could handle the whole thing.”

Kirby said Carr simply didn’t want to go to Stanford. He said Carr dropped out of high school to get out of his letter of intent.

“That’s not right,” Carr said.

Whatever his motivation, during the time he was away from school, Carr said he had no intention of returning.

It took a call from Dr. Michael Pelman, a district psychologist, acting on a request from Holgate, to talk him into coming back. He had already been seeing a psychologist friend of his father’s, but it wasn’t until he talked to Pelman that he decided to return to school.

Said Carr: “I’m glad he talked me into it because it would have been really stupid not to graduate.”

He graduated, but he had missed several weeks of school. His spring grades, two C’s and two D’s, were the worst he had ever received. Holgate called Stanford.

“They let out a gasp,” she said.

He wasn’t accepted.

Holgate said Allan Carr was devastated.

But Allan said he felt worse for his son than for himself.

“I considered that Stanford would be marvelous for him,” he said. “I think everybody thought that. But I’m his father. The basic thing there was, the kid was in a lot of pain. And I was more interested in his working through that and figuring out what he wanted to do in life.”

Richard figured he wanted to go to UCSB. Kirby, his best friend, was going there and Pimm, who had recruited him the previous summer, seemed nice enough.

He called Pimm, who offered a scholarship.

“We were surprised,” Pimm said. “We didn’t even watch him play as a senior. We weren’t even aware that he had quit the team.”

Again, however, Carr couldn’t live up to his own expectations when he got to Santa Barbara.

He was out of shape. He didn’t think he was playing well in pick-up games. He was sore and he was falling behind in his classes.

“I thought I was going to go in and do really well,” he said. “I went in and I did OK. And that didn’t help my confidence. . . .

“I hadn’t played basketball in an organized manner at all in several months, so when I went there, it was kind of alien almost. In the summer, I’d gone to the beach. I’d played basketball, but nothing really structured. . . .

“I just didn’t go in with the frame of mind to do well. I didn’t do enough studying. I wasn’t prepared to take on the whole load, so I just said, ‘Forget it,’ and took off.”

He left before the official opening of basketball practice. He had been there for about three weeks.

“He decided his heart just wasn’t in it,” Pimm said. “He came in and said, ‘I’m just not ready. I might be someday, but I need to step back and figure out what I want to do.’ ”

His father figured he needed to talk to somebody.

“He had to figure out who he is and what he wants,” the elder Carr said. “When he came back from Santa Barbara, I told him he couldn’t live with us unless he went and saw a psychiatrist that was recommended to us, which he did.

“I have no idea what Richard got out of his system, or if he got anything out of his system, but I was willing to help him see a professional, and in fact I finally totally insisted on it.”

Richard said he didn’t get anything out of it. Kirby said he regarded the sessions as a “joke.”

“I knew it wasn’t going to do me any good,” Carr said. “It wasn’t a joke, but I didn’t go in with a very good attitude. You pretty much have to want it to work, I think, to have it be effective at all.”

Carr said he “piddled around” for about a month after returning from Santa Barbara. He took a job delivering newspapers, but he didn’t like working in the middle of the night.

He took the job delivering pizza.

Pimm kept in contact, talking to him every other week. Carr attended a few UCSB games last season. A few months ago, he decided he would go back this fall.

“I thought about it once again and re-evaluated what I wanted to do with my life and I decided that would be the best situation,” he said. “And I still wanted to prove that I could play at the college level.”

He plays two or three times a week at UCSB, which is about a 60-mile drive from his home. He’s running and he’s lifting weights. He has gained about 20 pounds since high school, filling out to 205 pounds.

Academically, he’ll be way ahead of the other freshmen when he enrolls at UCSB. He completed 12 units at Moorpark College during the spring semester and is taking six units in the summer. He also scored high enough on an advanced-placement exam to give him 10 more units.

“He seems older and more reflective,” his father said. “Of course, he’s not under the pressure right at the moment.”

“It’s been kind of a mess,” says Richard Carr, sitting in the living room of his father’s Thousand Oaks home. “It’s been tough. It’s been a trial, that’s for sure.

“(But) I’m glad that the whole thing happened. It was a good experience. I can see where I screwed up a lot. I shouldn’t have quit the (Thousand Oaks) team, for one thing. . . .

“It’s been a long two years.”

Still, despite all that’s happened, Pimm said he never lost faith in Carr.

“Youngsters seem to have problems between the ages of 15 and 25,” he said. “If we as coaches, who are supposed to be older and wiser, don’t have patience with them, then I think we’re doing them a disservice.”

Pimm’s patience has surprised Carr’s father.

“Considering all I’ve read about college athletics and the kind of business it is,” Carr said, “I wouldn’t have believed you would come across such tolerance and desire to work with people.

“Richard has made this comment several times: ‘I just can’t believe they want me back and they’re going to work with me.’

“It works both ways. People are interested in you and therefore you get some pressure. People are interested in you and therefore they’ll give you a second chance. He’s a kid people are interested in. He seems to stir up enthusiasm in people and they want to work with him.”

Holgate agrees.

“If you knew Richard well, like I do,” she said, “you’d believe in him. . . . He just has so much raw talent, both athletically and academically, that it’s incredible.”

Richard, indeed, believes he has been given a second chance.

“I look back on it and see that it was really stupid,” he said of his actions, “but it turned out all right, really. I got pretty lucky, I think. I still have a scholarship and I can still get into a good college.

“I could have really blown it. I could have dropped completely out. Things could have turned out pretty bad. I’m pretty much back where I started. Nobody has really held anything against me--especially Coach Pimm. He’s been very supportive.”

Pimm says Carr probably will play a lot as a freshman.

“I feel that he’s on top of what he wants out of life and I feel he’s on top of his options,” Pimm said. “I feel very good about Richard and his four years coming up here.”

Can he handle the pressure?

“Everything comes easy to Rich,” Kirby said. “First of all, he’s brilliant. Second of all, he’s got great natural, physical talent. And everything he’s done has come easy to him. So anytime he’s got to start working, it gets tough for him.

“He has to be the best.”

And if he’s not?

“Then he quits,” Kirby said.

Not this time, Carr said.

“I think I’ve grown a lot,” he said. “Back then, I didn’t handle things well at all. I just kind of avoided things, instead of dealing with them. . . . I couldn’t get on track. I was just floundering along. I didn’t really have any purpose. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. It just kept getting worse. . . .

“I haven’t set such high goals this time. I’m just going to go in and try to fit in as best I can. I’m not expecting to be a star right off, like I did when I first went up there.”

In short, he thinks he’ll be OK.

Time will tell.