Enmity Tinges Dedeaux’s Exit : Former USC Coach Unfamiliar With View From Stands

As the USC baseball team trotted onto the field for a game a week ago, Rod Dedeaux stood quietly by the dugout just as he has, seemingly, since the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel. He began coaching the Trojans 45 years ago, and the sight of him standing by the dugout seemed at first glance no more unusual than spotting his buddy, Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda, standing near a snack bar.

But something was terribly wrong with the scene. For one thing, Dedeaux was wearing pants. Real pants. The kind that didn’t meet a pair of maroon socks just below the knee. Pants that went, by gosh, all the way to his shoes. And the shoes. They were nice and shiny and black and all that, but they had these fancy leather tassles where the laces should have been. And even worse, there were no metal spikes protruding from the soles.

Meet Rod Dedeaux, ex-USC baseball coach. And, according to at least one USC official and most of the players on the USC team, not voluntarily the ex-USC baseball coach.

Dedeaux, 71, packed away his 1,332 USC victories last June 3 and gave way to Mike Gillespie, a former College of the Canyons coach. The news conference at USC’s posh Town and Gown room was filled with compliments, niceties and wide smiles. It was, according to observers, the most ivory ever displayed in a room without a piano.

Dedeaux said he decided to retire because it was time for someone new to take over.

“We owe this to a great number of people who have played this game (at USC), and played it so successfully over that time,” he said.

But there was one line from Dedeaux that day that might have come closer to revealing his feelings: “I’d like to remind you of my definition of a successful coach,” he said. “That’s a coach who’s still working.”

The official story from the school was that Dedeaux had decided to retire before the 1986 season. Dedeaux and USC kept it a secret, school officials said publicly, because they wanted to search for a new coach with as little commotion as possible.

But even Gillespie, a member of the 1961 USC national championship team, admitted last Wednesday he had a slight hunch last summer that Dedeaux was being ushered out of the job.

“We had no heart-to-heart talk when he was leaving,” Gillespie said. “He didn’t take me aside and offer any personal words about the situation. I guess I never felt he was being forced to leave, that he was actually being fired, but I also never got the feeling from him that he was chomping at the bit to leave, either.”

Some of the USC players who were with Dedeaux for a few years and are now seniors under Gillespie were more blunt.

“We heard the rumors for a while that they were trying to get Coach Dedeaux to quit, but we always thought he’d give it up on his own,” outfielder Terry Brown said. “But last year, the feeling on the team was that he was asked to leave. The understanding on the team was that USC felt Rod had been here long enough and that they told him he was retiring.”

And from infielder Don Buford Jr. of Sherman Oaks, son of the former Baltimore Orioles star: “Everyone on the team knew Rod wanted to stay. He told us that. He made it very clear. We never knew he was gone until we read it in the paper. If he had planned to retire, he never would have let that happen. He would have told us first.

“He definitely didn’t make the decision.”

And a USC official, asked if there was a chance Dedeaux might attend last week’s game against Chapman College, replied: “No chance. He’s pretty bitter about the whole thing.”

There was no outward trace of bitterness in Dedeaux as he stood by the dugout before the game, talking and laughing with Gillespie and trading handshake after handshake with his former players. But when the game started and Dedeaux moved into the aluminum bleachers at Dedeaux Field, his mood changed.

“It seems pretty strange to be here,” he said. “There’s so much of my blood and sweat that went into this place. I’ve never been up here before. I don’t know where to sit. This is the first time I’ve seen the Trojans play when I wasn’t in the uniform.”

Dedeaux, who is now USC’s director of baseball, a position created for him when he stepped down as coach, admitted he missed being on the other side of the chain-link fence that separates the bleachers from the field.

“I feel a little less gratification not being involved with the players themselves,” he said. “I was so involved with their lives. I watched so many kids grow up. Already I miss that. I feel a bit detached from it all now.”

The main force in the changing of the guard in the USC baseball program was Athletic Director Mike McGee, who headed the search committee that decided Gillespie was the man to succeed Dedeaux.

And the ex-coach hinted that McGee, who was instrumental in the departures of basketball coach Stan Morrison and football coach Ted Tollner, might have played an even larger role.

“I recognized that with a new athletic director, he wants to come in and do things his way and to bring in his group of people,” Dedeaux said. “I got the feeling that if I left the job he’d be happier. Nobody asked me to leave or told me I had to leave, but I felt that maybe they’d feel better if I left.

“Now, I’m just interested in seeing USC baseball succeed. That’s been my life since 1931, when I enrolled at USC. But it’s not easy just to sit here and watch. I never really thought about doing this. But I’ll get used to it. I think ‘SC is bigger than any of us, bigger than any one person.”

Last fall, Dedeaux told a Sports Illustrated writer that he did indeed retire but admitted that the presence of McGee “made up my mind a little sooner.”

McGee said this week that the decision was Dedeaux’s and that it was made during the summer of 1985. But McGee also said he didn’t remember who initiated the subject of Dedeaux’s retirement.

“We discussed his future role in 1985 and he made the decision that summer,” McGee said. “We go through discussions with the coaching staffs every year after every season, but right now I don’t have the slightest recall of who said what when. I just remember that such a discussion was initiated.

“Remember, this is a man who was coaching for 45 years. This must be very tough on him right now. I don’t know if he’s having second thoughts about it, but it was his decision to move to the administration side. We did not ask. That was not a request by the institution.”

Dedeaux also was reportedly upset that his son, Justin, who was an assistant coach on his staff, did not get the job when he departed.

“I would be untruthful if I said I wouldn’t have liked to see Justin take over,” Dedeaux said. “It would have been nice, from a father’s point of view. I know his taking over was discussed. But I’m satisfied with the way things worked out.”

Gillespie, who guided his teams to 11 conference titles, five state finals and three state championships during his 16-year tenure at Canyons, knows the job he has been given is a large undertaking. But he said he does not feel the same kind of pressure that hounded several successors to John Wooden at UCLA.

“Maybe I’m naive and maybe I’m a little dim, but I honestly haven’t been aware of any such pressure,” he said. “Maybe it’s there, but I haven’t felt it. Absolutely everybody I cross paths with here, from (university president) Dr. Zumberge to Mike McGee to Rod himself, has been very receptive and supportive of me. I feel no pressure to be another Rod Dedeaux. But I think at USC it’s reasonable that there be high expectations of the baseball program. The program and the commitment and the support the university gives makes that expectation reasonable.”

Gillespie already has made major changes in the baseball team. Under Dedeaux, the Trojans were traditionally a big-inning team, stealing few bases, seldom bunting and relying on the heavy hitters to clear the bases. Gillespie concluded the 1987 Trojans would have few long-ball hitters, so he has changed the team into a running, gambling squad that is adept at playing what California Angels’ manager Gene Mauch calls “little ball.”

The changeover proved a big success during the fall exhibition season when USC posted a 15-3-2 record, its best fall season in 10 years.

“Rod always took a major-league approach to the game,” Gillespie said. “He played for the one or two big innings. I looked at the dimensions of this park, determined we didn’t have many guys who are going to hit it over the fences and saw that we did have some speed, so I made some changes. We’re more aggressive on the basepaths now. We bunt more, we sacrifice more. We manufacture runs instead of waiting for someone to knock it over the fence.”

Gillespie said there is not a huge difference between the facilities at USC and College of the Canyons. The biggest difference, he said, is when it’s time to recruit.

“Recruiting is the job,” he said. “That’s the challenge. To identify the good players around the country, make a judgment on them and then convince them to play here. To succeed in this job means to do that part of the job very well. And the difference between recruiting at College of the Canyons and recruiting here, it’s just a tremendous difference.

“Even with all the parity in college baseball today, USC is still perhaps the most recognizable name of all. USC is still the biggest attraction in college baseball, and that’s awfully nice, that recognition factor.”

And he said that despite the changes he’s made from the Dedeaux era, some of the old coach remains.

“When I played for Rod I came away with one memory more than anything else,” Gillespie said. “That was to keep the game in perspective. Rod always did that. When we lost, and we didn’t lose very much back then, he didn’t make you feel that you had betrayed mother, God and country. It was always a feeling of, ‘Come back and get ‘em tomorrow.’ He kept it in perspective and kept us loose.

“I won’t try to be like Rod Dedeaux. I can’t. But that was one of his qualities that I admired very much and will try to keep intact at USC.”