East Meets West in Two Fabulous Freshmen : Turmoils of Tom Lewis, From Boston to Mater Dei to USC

His face is impassive on the basketball court, masking any emotion that may be simmering inside of him.

He moves skillfully and smoothly, with a style that is mature beyond his years. Yet, he’s only a 19-year-old freshman.

Tom Lewis has seemingly everything going for him. He was one of the most acclaimed players in Southern California high school history while leading Santa Ana Mater Dei to two Southern Section championships.

He had been honored, publicized and recruited by major colleges since his sophomore year in high school.

When he finally chose USC, it came as a surprise to so-called insiders who had flatly predicted that he would wind up at a more prominent basketball school.

Lewis has made freshman mistakes, to be sure, on a very young team, but he is the team’s leading scorer, averaging 18.2 points, and only veteran forward Derrick Dowell and center Rod Keller have more rebounds.

He plays with a sort of aloof confidence, but there is an air of loneliness, too, about this young man who seldom smiles.

According to Pat Barrett, Lewis’ surrogate father and counselor, Lewis doesn’t trust or confide in many people, seldom reads the papers to glow in their accounts of his play, and is a private person.

“I was never very sociable, not even in high school,” Lewis said.

Lewis made headlines of a different type recently when he said, without elaborating, that there was “turmoil” in USC’s basketball program. He recanted his statement after talking with Coach Stan Morrison, saying that he understood to his satisfaction why all players are not treated alike, reportedly a source of his discontent.

A headline in the Orange County Register suggested that Lewis might be leaving USC, although he has since denied that he has any intention of transferring to another school.

Even so, transfer has now become a taunt directed at Lewis on the court, while spurring new rumors.

UCLA rooters chanted, “Transfer! Transfer!” when Lewis was at the free-throw line in a recent game at Pauley Pavilion.

And the Gold Sheet, a national betting publication, speculated that Lewis may transfer to UC Irvine.

“Those rumors will never stop because of Tom’s high visibility,” said Barrett, who rarely misses a USC practice. “More than half the people who write these things, we haven’t even talked to. He’s not leaving USC as far as I’m concerned. I know what he’s going to do.”

Morrison said that he hears such rumors frequently, adding: “Highly recruited kids with high visibility are often subject to the rumors put out by evil people.”

So Lewis will now have to ride out the storm of innuendoes.

Lewis is from Boston, where his parents were divorced when he was a small boy. His mother remarried and the original family split up. An older brother stayed in Boston with his father. His mother, Judy, and her new husband, Peter Yanover, moved to Orange County along with Tom and his sister.

“I haven’t been in contact with my father since I was 7 years old,” Lewis said. “He never expressed any interest in me. He thought that if I wanted to see him, I should come to him. My brother and sister have maintained contact with him, though.”

Lewis was going into eighth grade when he came West. Barrett, an assistant coach at Capistrano Valley High in Mission Viejo at the time, recalls the first time he saw Lewis.

“He was playing on a Dana Hills all-star team and he didn’t say two words to me,” Barrett said.

But Barrett saw something in Lewis that set him apart. “He was a hard-nosed kid out of Boston who would go after anyone,” Barrett said. “He was thin, but he could play. He ran like a deer and dove for loose balls.”

Barrett showed an interest in Lewis, and the youngster responded. Their relationship flourished as Barrett took Lewis to summer league games, counseled him about basketball and encouraged him to study.

Lewis played on Capistrano Valley’s sophomore team as a freshman, but then Barrett got an opportunity to become an assistant coach at Mater Dei and took it.

It wasn’t surprising when Lewis followed Barrett to Mater Dei, given their close relationship. But it created a controversy later.

“After his sophomore season at Mater Dei, Capo Valley took Tom before the CIF rules committee and said I illegally recruited him,” Barrett said.

“We won that case but now everybody was looking at me as if I was a crook. What is forgotten is that when Tom first went to high school, he was 6-3 and 145 pounds and no one had ever heard of him.”

These days, Barrett, who played at Cypress College before earning a letter at San Jose State in 1975, is a bachelor father.

Lewis left his mother and stepfather early in his sophomore season to live with Barrett and his parents in Garden Grove. Peter and Judy Yanover subsequently moved to Phoenix, where Lewis visits them occasionally.

“My family became his family,” Barrett said. “I was 26 at the time Tom moved in, and I thought, ‘Wow, I have a 15 year-old kid.’ My family treats him like another son. They fell in love with him and he fell in love with them.

“Even now, he goes home every chance he gets. Sometimes he’ll come home during the week and drive back to USC at 6 in the morning.”

Lewis shares a room in a USC dormitory with Rich Grande, another highly regarded freshman. Barrett, now out of coaching, has a part-time job driving a forklift in Chino.

Lewis’ high school career has been well documented. He averaged 19, 30.6 and 32 points in each of his three seasons at Mater Dei as the Monarchs won 86 games, losing only 5.

USC wasn’t apparently in the recruiting picture as major colleges began to bear down in their efforts to land Lewis.

“It got down to Syracuse, Nevada Las Vegas and UCLA,” Barrett said. “USC was always in the background.

“Stan was at a lot of our games, even if it was just for the last quarter. He was always there. He wouldn’t give up. I thought, ‘We aren’t treating him very nice, and he’s really a nice guy.’ ”

But Lewis couldn’t decide where he wanted to go.

“I finally asked Tom, ‘Where do you want to live when you get out of school?’ He told me Southern California. So I told him why go someplace where you’re not that well known. All your connections and support are here.”

The list was then revised, and USC was now in the picture, along with UCLA and UC Irvine.

Barrett said that UCLA was rejected because Walt Hazzard’s coaching staff appeared at only three or four of Lewis’ games during his senior season.

“They (UCLA) didn’t show enough interest, although they were on the phone a lot,” Barrett said. “I think they wanted to recruit him as a mantle piece.”

There was also the suspicion among schools that a package deal was involved in recruiting Lewis, meaning that Barrett would come along, too, in some capacity.

Lewis said recently that he didn’t favor any one school over the other until he finally selected USC. But Barrett said that Lewis was leaning toward UCLA before Larry Farmer resigned as the school’s coach at the end of the 1983-84 season.

“Tom liked Farmer and his assistants, Kevin O’Connor and Craig Impelman,” Barrett said. “As for me, I’d always been a die-hard Bruin fan.”

Now, though, Barrett is a USC supporter.

According to Lewis, Barrett scolded him after reading the freshman’s statements in a paper about the turmoil in the program. “He’s all for USC,” Lewis said.

Barrett does spend a lot of time at USC, but he’s not on the coaching staff. It’s not that kind of a package.

“He comes to practices, but like all visitors, he sits up in the balcony,” Morrison said. “He’s openly supportive of our program and openly tough with Tom. Tom listens to him and he trusts him because of all that he has helped him through.”

Said Barrett: “I’m very hard on him and I know it. I’m also unfair at times. I expect him to score 20 or so points every game. And, when USC loses, I try to make it sound like it’s his fault, even though it isn’t.”

Lewis is a scorer, but he is shooting only 43.9% from the field, and even though he scored 27 points in USC’s 77-75 overtime loss to Washington State Thursday night, he missed 14 of his 24 shots.

Some of Lewis’ teammates say that he disrupts the rhythm of the offense at times by shooting too much. But Morrison says he’s comfortable with Lewis’ shot selection.

Lewis has a variety of offensive skills, though, including a free-throw percentage of .867 that is among the leaders in the Pacific 10. He’s working on other phases of his game.

“My main goal this year is to become a better defensive player,” he said. “Defense wasn’t that much of a concern for us at Mater Dei. We were usually up by 20 or 30 points. You have to take a lot of pride in

defense. You don’t get much recognition from it.”

But there is another goal that Lewis has, or, that Barrett has set for him, that goes beyond a promising college career and, perhaps, another career in the NBA.

“He’s the first one in his family to go to college,” Barrett said. “His degree is the most important thing to me. I talk to him more about how he is doing in school than we talk about basketball.

“He has his priorities straight. He wants to get a degree in four years. Sure, he’d like to play in the NBA. But a degree from USC is like gold, and the connections after graduation are unbelievable. I’m just trying to keep him on the right track.”