City Boys’ 4-A Basketball Final : Fairfax Savors Victory Before Taking On State

Bob Braswell is only 25 years old and in his second season as coach at Cleveland High School in Reseda, but he is still a man of the world, basketball-wise. Two consecutive trips to the City 4-A championship game make him so.

He had also faced Fairfax three times during the regular season, so when he laid out the Cavaliers’ game plan for meeting No. 4, this time for the City 4-A championship, no less, he spoke from experience. Pressure the guards, get a quick lead and force Fairfax to shoot outside, Braswell said, and the nation’s second-ranked team may go down.

Good thinking.

Bad execution.

Fairfax, the 3-A champion in 1985, landed the 4-A title and remained undefeated Friday night with a 86-58 win before a Sports Arena crowd of 11,510. It ended at 11:39 p.m., but, for the most part, had been decided much earlier as the Lions built a 21-point lead near the end of the third quarter and played what Coach Harvey Kitani later said may have been their best game of the season.

“This was one of our goals,” Kitani said. “We can savor the victory for a few days, but we still have work ahead of us.”

Tournament MVP Chris Mills (24 points, 11 rebounds), J.D. Green (21 and 16), Sean Higgins (20 points, on 8-of-22 shooting from the field, and 14 rebounds) led Fairfax to its 25th victory and into the state playoffs this week. There, it will be up to other teams to use Cleveland’s plan, which still seems the only way to attack a team with so much ability inside.

“Nobody has put pressure on them (Fairfax),” said Joe Weakley, an assistant on the Crenshaw team that won the last two state Division I titles and lost to Cleveland last week in the City semifinals. “They don’t have any guards. But they all played well together tonight.

“I don’t think they can go up north and play the same as they do down here. They’ve done so good so far because there’s no pressure for them here. They’ve been able to coast down here.”

Cleveland hit just 38% of its shots from the field (21 of 55) and was outrebounded, 52-23. The Cavaliers also made only 16 of 28 attempts from the free-throw line (57%) compared to 26 of 32 (81%) for Fairfax.

“What we really wanted to do was force them to shoot outside,” said Braswell, whose team finishes the season at 20-4. “We did that in the first quarter and the first half, and they (Fairfax) were missing. But then they would get second shots, and we wouldn’t convert at the other end. We were so bad offensively that it hurt us defensively. We just didn’t get any momentum.

“We were so flat. I had hoped that eventually we would come out of it, but we never did.”

Joining Mills on the all-tournament first team were Higgins, Green, Adrian King of Cleveland and Gary Gray of City 3-A champion Granada Hills (a 60-55 winner over Birmingham). Mills, who scored 103 points in the three playoff games, King and Gray were unanimous selections.