COLLEGE BASKETBALL : COACHES, PLAYERS, TEAMS, TRENDS TO WATCH IN THE 1985-86 SEASON : CALLED FOR TRAVELING . . . : LARRY BROWN : Coach Who Came Over With Mayflower Has Found Happiness at Kansas, for Now

What can you say about Larry Brown. Still Kansas after all these years?

The man has been here for two seasons, with the bitter-cold winds whipping off the prairies up against his field house each winter, and all people can marvel at is his sheer stick-to-itiveness. And here he is, still Kansas after all these years, going into season No. 3.

When all is said and done, that is, in fact, what you say about Larry Brown: That he’s still here. He always wins, wherever he coaches basketball, so why say that? He won with the Carolina Cougars in the old ABA, with the Denver Nuggets in the NBA, with UCLA in the NCAA, with the New Jersey Nets in the NBA and now with Kansas in the Big Eight. It’s just that wherever he wins, as you can tell, he leaves.

He’s been winning at Kansas--22-10 after leaving the Nets in a huff, then 26-8 last season--so it’s natural to look around his office for packed bags and plane tickets.

What’s that, Larry? You miss L.A. restaurants, New York theater? The NCAA is unrealistic? The wind is cold? But you’ll stay forever? Make way for Bekins! Certainly that’s the pattern. Consider his two seasons at UCLA: He won, of course, but by the second season was suggesting that his salary was inadequate--he never even asked what it was when he took the job--and discovered personal slights wherever he turned. Brown-watchers knew that the end was coming the morning he complained that the university thought so little of him that he couldn’t even get his office walls painted.

It was Bekins time, with Brown denying it even as the trucks backed up to his door. Then, characteristically, once moved, he was full of remorse and still calls it all a big mistake. “I was dumb,” he says. “I would never do that again.”

Of course, that was two moves ago.

Like any species hoping to survive, Larry Brown blends into whatever environment he happens to be in. In the coastal cities he was GQ from tie to toe. Sharp enough to open letters. But now, here he is in Lawrence, hard by the Agricultural Hall of Fame, so the look is more rural. Not “Hee-Haw” rural, mind you. He can look sharp in boots, jeans and a western-cut shirt, too. Still, you look for the horse.

As almost usual, sitting in his office, he is radiating his sense of well-being. Happy at last, for now. He speaks of the small-town joys--doughnuts at Carol Lee’s, walks on campus, the lone hill in town from which you can see, well, the rest of Kansas.

He has a house that, were it on the market in Los Angeles, would require serious oil money to maintain. His daughter is in school here. So is his wife. He has a TV show, a radio show, a summer basketball camp, a shoe contract that would knock your socks off.

There is no New York press to misrepresent him. “I loved the pros,” he says. “But 100 games of . . . stuff? I care what you guys think of me.”

He has a job at a school where the field house is named after Phog Allen. It’s on Naismith Drive. Wilt Chamberlain once dominated this landscape like an ambulatory silo. There’s basketball tradition here. “More people from Kansas in the Hall of Fame than any other school,” he says.

He has a good team, picked No. 1 in the conference, a burgeoning power.

Oh, college coaching is the best, he says. He has some ideas about the NCAA and some about just what an education really is. But there’s nothing like the relationships and loyalties of college players, of watching boys become men.

In the pros, he was management. Oh, Buck Williams once dropped by a summer camp. But nothing like college. Former Bruin Michael Holton, just cut by the Suns, is dropping by Kansas just this afternoon. To stay with his old college coach. “To get his head together,” he says.

It sounds perfect, you say. “It’s a special place,” Brown agrees. Then: “I miss the climate of L.A.--the wind comes off there in the winter . . . “ Then: “I miss the theater of New York, so my wife could be a little more comfortable . . . the restaurants of L.A. . . . “ Then: “It’s been tough on my wife. I never asked her to come here, I just told her. I’m kind of disappointed in that.”

Then: “Of course, when it’s basketball, I don’t need to go to Michael’s, do I?”

Well, if Larry Brown is never sure of what he needs, what are we to think. That Bekins is on the way?

Part of his problem is not that he moves. What coach hasn’t moved?

“Stan Albeck has moved four times in four years, and who writes that he’s a nomad?” Brown asks, exasperated with his image.

His problem is that he moves from college to pro and back, two entirely different things, looking not for better money or programs like any ambitious coach, but for some kind of philosophy. Or happiness. What to make of that? Happiness?

Now at Kansas he says he’s happy but not completely. He didn’t expect that, anyway, so don’t read too much into his longings for beach weather and dinner at Spago’s.

Even when he keeps mentioning how tough it is on his wife, believed to be no small influence in his cosmopolitan quests, it is a fact that she is achieving some independence here, going for a journalism degree, and maybe she is finding happiness as well.

These longings, don’t read too much into them. They’re just his way of saying, well, everything that’s on his mind. That’s part of his problem, too.

No, basically he’s happy. And by now resigned to his reputation as a wanderer, a breaker of trusts. “If I don’t bring it up in recruiting, someone else will,” he says. “I have to fight that. But I’ve done it, I haven’t invented those stories. So I should be asked that question. It’s fair for them to ask. It’s getting better, though. They tell a kid I leave all the time. I say, ‘Hey, I’m starting my third year.’ ”

Well, it’s a start. But this is his sixth job in the last 13 years--his fourth in little more than four--so it will probably take another season before he’s regarded as a fixture here and they start naming buildings and streets after him.

That he’s happy here is amazing, considering that it was never one of his goals to coach in Lawrence, Kan. He came here on impulse.

“I didn’t know anything about the team,” he says. “Didn’t know what the financial arrangements were. But I had confidence in myself.”

At the time, even though his Nets, brought back from the dead, were preparing for the playoffs, all Brown knew was that he wanted back in the college environment. And if Kansas had been good enough for Dean Smith, well. . . .

There are things about the college game that seem made for Brown. He likes the kids and he takes a pride in their progress that he was never able to enjoy in the pros. He talks of kids he’s recruited out of shacks, kids with no more social skills than a barnyard animal.

“Kids who don’t own a sports jacket and a tie, now they’re checking into hotels, writing checks, going to a Laundromat,” he says. “A kid came to play basketball here, his belongings in a little bag. He had zip. But now he dresses in a suit, although he wears his whites with it. But this is education, too.

“The kids tell me they want to come here for the education. But what’s wrong with saying they’re coming here to play basketball. That’s all right, too.

“And don’t give me that Harry Edwards stuff about graduating. He doesn’t go into the homes I do, see the conditions I do. At UCLA I argued over admitting a kid who didn’t qualify. Forget whether he graduates, I told them. He’ll be around Michael Holton for four years. And he’ll already be better off than if he passes one course.”

It is strange that he talks about players like this--what basketball can do for them as opposed to what they can do for basketball. And it’s spontaneous enough that it seems less an advertisement for his idealism than his ideals themselves.

Not that Brown is in this entirely for the enrichment of today’s youth; though the homes he goes into may be bad, the players he talks to are always good. And didn’t he hire an assistant coach named Ed Manning, whose son--and what are the odds on this?--6-11 Danny soon followed?

Make no mistake, one of the things Brown needs to do is win. But he also needs to be part of a kid’s growing up. And he needs the kids to need him. When he says that Michael Holton is returning, there is a sense of pride. He didn’t have this in the NBA.

One of the things Brown may be set to learn is that he can’t have everything just anywhere. The purity of his mission--to lead kids--is polluted even at this level. He needs a kid so he hires his dad. He can’t be a winner and Boys Town all in one. But he knew that.

So he accepts a lower level of basketball in college in exchange for the intimacy of his players. He accepts more money at Kansas--than, say, at UCLA--in exchange for disrupting a family life and living on a prairie. He looks out his window. “It’s a nice day today but those winds in the winter--it gets cold,” he says.

Faced with compromise before, he simply left. But now, still Kansas after all these years, he compromises, reluctantly.

“I’m a dreamer on the one hand, a realist on the other,” he says, going on year No. 3. “And I don’t understand the difference.”