A New Life for the Farmer in the Dell : Ex-UCLA Coach Finds the Only Shadows Now Are From the Mountains

It took Larry Farmer--remember him?--two months to syllogize that what he wanted more than anything in life was to coach college basketball. He just didn’t want to do it at UCLA. Not anymore. Fifteen years of overindulged Pauley, as a player, assistant and, finally, head coach, had wrung Farmer out. He had given, he said, all he could.

And still, that left them wanting. So he left.

On a Monday morning in March of 1984, 72 hours after he signed a three-year contract extension with the Bruins, he chucked it, and retreated full throttle to his parents’ home in Denver. He was safe there. He had the Rocky Mountains between him and a passion that had eventually turned into a job.

Even though Farmer has never detailed his reasons for leaving, he says the pressures of coaching at a school that had seen the glory of championships perhaps too often ran him off, just as they had others before.

“I was no longer having fun,” he says now. “Even though I won 60 games, we had some tough times. When you look at the expectations, it’s too tough. When I left, it was like someone took a tremendous weight off my shoulders. But I wasn’t naive. There were three other people who I’d seen the same thing happen to.” The three were Gene Bartow, Gary Cunningham and Larry Brown.

One day, Farmer had one of the most prestigious jobs in college basketball and the next, he was unemployed, fishing in a stream in Colorado, wondering what to do with his life.

He worked for a time as an analyst on Denver Nuggets telecasts. And he traveled around the Northwest, from Butte, Mont., to Seattle, speaking at basketball camps and clinics, where boys wanted to know more than anything what it was like to play and coach at UCLA.

When Farmer came home to Los Angeles, he didn’t do much of anything except, he says, “spend a lot of my time going over game films of old UCLA games.”

As the weeks went by, he was convinced he wanted to coach again. In the following months, Farmer’s name was connected with numerous coaching openings, but four colleges in particular went after him: Idaho State, Hawaii, Loyola Marymount and Weber State.

In March of 1985, Weber State hired Farmer.

Two question comes to mind. The second is, “Why on God’s earth would the former coach of UCLA want to work at Weber (pronounced Wee-ber) State?” The first question is, “What is Weber State?”

Basically, Weber is a school of about 10,000 students located at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains on the edge of this northern Utah community, which happens to take basketball quite seriously. Last year, the Wildcats outdrew UCLA. It is a member of the Big Sky Conference and, surprisingly, Weber State has managed to build a decent, though obscure, basketball tradition.

Two former Weber coaches went on to win National Basketball Assn. Coach of the Year honors, Dick Motta, currently the coach of the Dallas Mavericks, and Phil Johnson, coach of the Sacramento Kings.

Why would Farmer want to coach here?

For the same reasons he left UCLA. Ironically, Weber State, by virtue of its relative obscurity, offered him what Westwood couldn’t--an opportunity to coach at a school just out of the spotlight, but by no means off stage. It offered a program he could build and take credit for building.

Motta and Johnson were fine coaches who left stellar records behind, but their accomplishments almost are forgotten, while John Wooden’s have grown to legendary and burdensome proportions.

If Farmer could take Weber State to the NCAA Tournament, that would be nothing new. But if he led the Wildcats to, say, the final round of 16, he would be a hero in Ogden. And a bit of a genius to college basketball observers around the country.

Farmer admits as much. “At UCLA, there was nothing I could do that hadn’t already been done,” he says. “For the first time, I’m in a program that can grow with me and I can grow with it. I’m in a situation where I can do some firsts. I want to feel I’m wanted. I want to feel if I’m doing a good job, people will want me to stay.”

In short, Farmer wants to do at Weber State what Bartow has done at Alabama-Birmingham, lift a program into the nation’s consciousness.

And Weber State players, administrators and supporters can hardly wait. Says Athletic Director Gary Crompton: “When I interviewed him, there was no question that we had to have him. Farmer can do some things for us that others couldn’t do.

“He can recruit kids that in the past haven’t been excited about coming here. And because he’s well-known, he can bring us recognition we haven’t had. I think he can take us a couple of steps farther than we’ve been able to go in the past.”

Translation: Farmer can bring to a mostly white-and-Mormon area some black athletes who normally might visit Utah only if the other 49 states were flooded.

Farmer himself wasn’t sure how he would be received in this city. The assuring answer came last December when a group of alums presented him with a new Mercedez-Benz seven games into his rookie season. It didn’t hurt, of course, that the Wildcats were 7-0 at the time, even though they’d lost their top six players to graduation the previous year, and on their way to the best start in the school’s history (10-0).

Even after his team faded to an 18-11 finish, nobody was complaining. Whatever the coach from UCLA was up to, Weber followers liked it. Next year, he might get a Rolls Royce.

Seventy percent of Farmer’s recruiting is focused on California. A slightly higher percentage of the players on this year’s roster are from California and most of them are blacks from urban areas. While Farmer has found a hesitancy by some blacks to come here, due in part to a fear of discrimination by Mormons, who until 1975 didn’t allow blacks to attain priesthood, and cultural differences, he says stereotypes have caused few problems in recruiting.

“I explain that kids won’t be overwhelmed by the KKK. There is a misperception about this state. When I explain how I’ve been treated, they listen and we’ve had great success.”

Said Walt Tyler, a Farmer recruit from Venice who led the team in scoring last year: “Some expect people here to be racist, but they’ve been good to me. The fans are loyal and people are honest. It’s a nice place, but the life style is slow. This isn’t exactly Westwood.”

One Weber official hinted that because blacks are in such a minority here, the athletes are treated extraordinarily well. “Besides,” he says, “nobody cares if Larry has five black players on the court, especially if they beat Utah and BYU.”

Adds Farmer: “The youngsters can’t believe how big basketball is here. They receive a lot of attention, and they like that.”

With five players from Southern California already on the roster, Weber recently signed two more from the Los Angeles area. Anthony McGowan, a forward from Duarte, and Danny Price, a guard from Santa Monica. Both seniors signed early this month.

Price remembered Farmer from his days at UCLA. “He’s the major reason I’m going up there,” he says.

Although Farmer knows he can’t recruit against the big-name schools--not yet anyway--he uses his UCLA connections to reel in players who are on the back burner of the big schools. For now, he goes after the eights and the nines and lets the well-known programs fight over the 10s. “But,” he says, “we’re closing the gap.”

Before this season, the Wildcats were picked to win the Big Sky Conference title. If they do, they will get an automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament. Farmer has contacted coaches such as Notre Dame’s Digger Phelps, Larry Brown at Kansas and USC’s George Raveling to schedule games in the coming seasons. This year, the Wildcats will play DePaul, Wyoming, Oregon and Brigham Young.

“We need the kind of schedule that will bring in TV exposure,” Farmer says. “We need TV to attract the kind of players we’re after. I think it’s within our grasp.”

Along with the DePauls, though, the coach has mixed in teams that should help Weber State roll up a glossy record. Included in that group is Cal State Northridge (0-2), which travels to Ogden on Monday night to face the Wildcats.

More than anything, Farmer seems comfortable here, and in charge. Crompton has, in effect, turned the basketball program over to his coach. “What do I know?” he says. “I’m just a dummy. Farm’s the coach.”

As long as Farmer stays within his budget, he’s given a free hand to build as he sees fit. That includes scheduling, recruiting and having the assistants he wants without interference.

When he came to Weber State, Farmer brought along former UCLA assistant Craig Impelman and hired Dick Hunsaker, a former Weber assistant.

“I feel more freedom,” he says. “I am going to be my own man and I’ll make my own decisions as far as what is best for this program. At UCLA, none of the coaches had control over the program.

“I’m older now, 35, and I’m more confident in myself as a person and as a coach.”

Farmer is blessed or cursed, depending on how one looks at it, by constant comparisons with UCLA. Everything is measured against what life was like at Pauley. Even if he can leave his own legacy at Weber State, the shadows of Westwood will follow.

Last season, when Weber took the floor to play Big Sky rival Northern Arizona, a group of NAU fans chanted a mock version of the Bruin cheer: “U-C-L-A, UCLA fired you.”

Farmer wheeled around to see who would so blatantly make fun of him.

“I glanced back and saw their football team sitting there,” the coach says. “A bunch of linemen. I wasn’t going to be a wise ass. They were all bigger than me. But I felt like yelling back, ‘Hey, they didn’t fire me. I quit.’ ”

Either way, it wouldn’t have mattered. All the linemen knew was that he used to coach at glorious UCLA, and now he was at Weber State.

To a degree, Farmer hasn’t let go and may never let go of past ties with Bruin basketball. In his office, he has six large notebooks crammed with notes of old UCLA practices and games. The notes include information about which plays were run in specific situations and how the plays were run. One of the notebooks includes plays from as far back as 1965.

The Wildcats run Wooden’s high-post offense and he stresses, just like Wooden did, the blessed fundamentals.

“The foundation of what I do has never changed,” Farmer says in alluding to his years with Wooden. “I learned all these things from Coach.”

In his mind, they might as well have come down from the burning bush itself.

It is an unusually warm late-autumn day at Weber State. No snow, no freezing rain, no cold temperatures. Nonetheless, Farmer is suffering from the flu. When he shows up for practice at the Dee Events Center, Weber’s modern 11,000-seat arena, clearly he is a step slow. Still, he tries not to let on to the players.

He moves up and down the court sounding one minute like a drill sergeant and the next like a cheerleader.

“Goodness gracious,” he screams at Walt Tyler, who he privately calls his superstar. “Think, man, think. You can’t make mistakes like that.”

Moments later, a player makes a no-look pass. “Hold it,” Farmer yells out. “Listen men, I don’t want underhanded flip passes during a drill.” Then, the coach steps back and looks painfully at Impelman and both men shake their heads in disgust.

What would Coach think about such nonsense?

Fundamentals aside, Farmer’s coaching style is his own. He is strict with players, but he leaves the door open for them to visit when they feel the need.

“We respect him,” says Dale Baum, a senior from Madison, Wis., “because he relates to us. He’s tough, but he’s open to the players and he makes basketball fun.”

Finally, basketball is fun again for Farmer, too. He is winning and he is making decent money. Although neither Crompton or Farmer would give details, the athletic director says he has raised the coach’s salary significantly, at least twice. “He is the highest-paid coach in the conference,” Crompton says with pride.

Significantly, Farmer feels wanted. After last season, Colorado tried to lure him away from Weber State, but with Crompton offering a liberal salary increase and the program growing ahead of schedule, Farmer decided to stay.

He said just before the start of his second season here that he’s not sure what the future holds or how long he’ll remain, but, by all accounts, the administration, the fans and the community want him.

“The response to Larry has been overwhelming,” Crompton says. “He’s the No. 1 citizen in Ogden. He’s got it made here. If he ran even for mayor, he’d have a helluva chance.”

Yo, Pauley! Look at Larry Farmer now.