COMMENTARY : Gillespie Steps Out of the Canyons, Into the Limelight at USC

They were pat answers mostly, but Mike Gillespie isn’t used to the mass media.

During his 16 years as coach at College of the Canyons, he seldom met in his cluttered little office with more than two reporters after a game.

On Tuesday, he was talking to more than two dozen reporters--and blushing before a bank of TV cameras and photographers--in the Town and Gown Building at USC after being named to replace Rod Dedeaux as the Trojan baseball coach.

“How do you think you will do trying to replace a legend ?” Gillespie was asked more than once.

“You don’t replace guys like Rod Dedeaux,” Gillespie said. “They’re irreplaceable.”

Dedeaux won 28 conference titles and 11 College World Series at USC. His record was 1,332-571-11.

Gillespie was just the coach of the junior college next to Magic Mountain.

“You only hope that you can build a program that the university and Rod can be proud of,” Gillespie said. “Rod is the single most significant man ever in amateur baseball.”

Gillespie, who was asked by a radio reporter how he’d like to “leave the dustbowl,” handled the media gracefully, but it was only last week that all the talk of coaching at USC was taking its toll. He had appeared mentally exhausted.

“It’s frustrating,” he said last week of the uncertainty.

Gillespie, 46, won his third state community college baseball championship two weeks ago. He was making plans to leave June 10 for Alaska to coach the semipro North Pole Nicks of the National Baseball Congress.

One minute, he was ordering state championship rings. The next, he was tracking down players to take to Alaska. The phone didn’t stop ringing.

If the constant questioning over the state championship, the major league draft and the Nicks wasn’t enough to rattle his composure, there were interviews with the USC search committee. Gillespie, one of the most successful junior college baseball coaches in the country over the past two decades, had to prove to a nine-person panel that he was capable of leaving Newhall and leading the Trojans.

Certainly, he had credentials. He had played for the Trojans’ 1961 national championship team and on their 1960 runner-up. At Canyons, he won 11 conference titles and compiled a 418-165 record. This season, the Cougars won 41 games--more than any community college team in state history. Gillespie has sent dozens of players to major universities and several to the major leagues.

He coached the Nicks, a team composed mostly of Division I players, to the National Baseball Congress national championship last summer.

And, two weeks ago--as Dedeaux and USC Athletic Director Mike McGee watched--Gillespie led his team out of the losers’ bracket to win the state championship.

Gillespie, simply, had nothing left to prove at the junior college level.

But some alumni thought that if USC were going to hire a junior college coach to lead its baseball team, it might as well next ask a pony to carry Tommy Trojan.

The search committee, however, looked past the “junior college” label stamped on Gillespie. One of the immediate rewards: Only hours after the announcement, Dodger sportscaster Vin Scully took a minute away from his play-by-play in Philadelphia to offer congratulations on the air.

For Gillespie, who for several years was rumored as a possible successor to Dedeaux, the frustration and anxiety was over. Dedeaux, 71, placed a USC baseball hat on the teary-eyed Gillespie to cap the change.

“There is no mystery to success in baseball,” Gillespie said. “Just throw strikes, play catch and put the ball in play.”

There shouldn’t be any doubt whether Gillespie will be successful at USC. He will. He only had to get there first.