COLLEGE BASKETBALL ‘87--88 : THEY’RE GOING WAC-KO : Smith Is on a Mission at Brigham Young to Be a Little Different

PROVO, Utah — Conformity is not Michael Smith’s way.

Where to put the drawstring on his basketball uniform? Let it hang out. Yeah, looks cool that way.

Where to wear the headband? Try wrapping it around an ankle. Betcha even Jim McMahon never thought of that.

What to do with the hair? How about a flat top. Or extra close around the sides and a little bushier on top. Or that same look with a stringy peroxide blond tail. Wait till the coach sees this.

It’s style. And in sports, style is in.

McMahon and his headband. Michael Jordan and his tongue. Brian Bosworth and his hair and his earrings and his mouth and his . . .

Sport thrives on colorful individuals. Smith simply wants a piece of the action.

Only there is a complication. Smith attends Brigham Young University, the bastion of Mormon higher education. What might have gone without restriction during his days as a prep All-American at Los Altos High School in Hacienda Heights invokes quite a different reaction at BYU.

Smith said: “I like to say you can be a perfect, clean-living, perfect-standing member of the church in keeping with all the standards, plus be a good kid and a good person and do good things, but not have to always look the part.”

Smith tries hard to do both.

He does not smoke, drink or use caffeine. His basketball skills and 3.7 grade-point average make him an academic All-American. His 23 months on a church mission in Argentina are witness to his commitment to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He is involved with Mormon youth groups.

By those standards, Smith is a model student, athlete and church member. It is that other side that some folks around BYU find irritating.

It is the Michael Smith who runs downcourt, thrusting his fist in the air, who waves a towel from the bench, who talks trash on the foul line, and who, after scoring a particularly rewarding basket, once followed an opponent down the court, patting that player on the rear while rubbing his closely cropped head with his hand. It was the ultimate in-your-face disgrace.

“I show my emotions very easily on the floor--whether I’m happy or whether I’m sad,” Smith said. “I’m one who will smile on the court, show disappointment on the court, tell someone nice pass with a high five. If we run off 10 points in a row, and the other team calls time out, I’m going to be telling the fans to stand up and clap.”

This is the same fun-loving Michael Smith who, while on his church mission in a remote section of the Andes, once knocked on a door and jokingly introduced his companion missionary as Fred Flintstone.

Not the kind of behavior that would have church elders shouting, “Yabba, dabba, do!”

“Sometimes, what he thinks is OK, people will look at and think it’s an odd thing to do,” said Ladell Andersen, BYU’s coach.

“He is a great kid. The little things he does are not something you kick him off the squad for. You just tell him, ‘Don’t do that, Mike. People are laughing at you. Do things on the floor that make them respect you, not things that make them make fun of you.’

“I don’t know why he does these things. Sometimes, he acts like he is 22 going on 14.”

Smith simply wonders why the fuss.

Part of it may be the generation gap between Smith and Andersen, 57. Part of it may be Smith’s coming from a family in which his father’s keen sense of humor set the family tone. Part of it may be his growing up in family where creativity was encouraged--his mother taught the family on the violin and his father introduced the children to photography.

Much of it, of course, is being a Southern Californian used to beaches, sun and fun plopped down into what may well be the most conservative school in the most conservative state.

Wearing thrift-shop clothes, listening to new wave music, and silk screening custom designs on T-shirts, pants and shorts are not everyday occurrences on the BYU campus.

As Andersen, a Utah native, noted: “He is from a different part of the country, you know.”

But hardly from another planet. Yet, that is the kind of reaction Smith sometimes evokes.

“What I do is not much different from what I’ve grown up with,” Smith said. “But when I came here, in this environment, people started talking about it. They made a big deal about haircuts. Things at home that I wouldn’t think twice about.

“A lot has been said about it, and because a lot has been said about it, I’m starting to believe it. When you hear something for so long, you start thinking, ‘Maybe I am a little different.’ ”

Take his music, for example. Smith’s preference is for British new wave artists. These groups do not make BYU a usual stop on their U.S. tours. But Smith did have a chance to see three of his favorites this summer when Echo and Bunnymen, New Order, and Gene Loves Jezebel played in the nearby ski resort town of Park City.

“People here think I’m a little different because I listen to a certain kind of music back home, which is in,” Smith said. “But up here, because they haven’t heard about it or can’t get it as easily, they think it’s strange.”

The reaction should not come as a surprise to Smith. After all, he was warned.

Two months before enrolling at BYU, Smith gained notice for his hair and his outstanding play in the 1983 National Sports Festival, now known as the U.S. Olympic Festival. He earned a berth on the U.S. team that played in the World Junior Championships in Spain that summer. His hair earned him a different kind of notoriety.

“Smith, the hip hoopster from Hacienda Heights who sports a coiffure that even Sid Vicious couldn’t love, is headed to BYU, and boy would I give $100 to see his first day there,” read one newspaper account.

Luckily for Smith, his mother spared him the confrontation. While his father drove home and Smith sat in the front seat of the family car, his mother snip-snipped.

“There was nothing wrong my haircut,” Smith said. “It was just like it is now, only with a little tail in back. I mean the basketball world had never seen that?”

The attention paid to his dress, hair and mannerisms disturbs Smith. Not so much because he is bothered by the criticism, but because he shudders at the possibility of being lumped in with the sporting world’s other characters.

Asked whether his actions draw comparisons to Danny Ainge and McMahon, the two best known and flashiest of recent BYU athletes, Smith took exception.

“McMahon is not Mormon,” Smith said firmly.

As for Ainge, Smith noted, “This is not meant as criticism, everyone must do what they feel is right, but Ainge never went on a mission.”

Smith does not want his flashes of individuality to obscure his devotion to church or his ability as player.

Smith is 6 feet 10 inches and 225 pounds, but has the shooting touch of a guard. Last season as a sophomore, he led the Western Athletic Conference in three-point field goal percentage at 48.6% and free-throw shooting percentage at 90.4%. He also led the Cougars in scoring, averaging 20.1 points a game, and rebounding, 8.5 a game.

He is one of three returning starters from a team that finished 21-11 and twice defeated Wyoming, the coaches’ preseason pick to win the WAC title this season.

Coincidentally, the Cougars were eliminated in the first round of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament last season by New Orleans, a team then coached by Benny Dees, who has taken over at Wyoming.

Smith used last season to reacquaint himself with college basketball after missing two seasons while on his church mission. Now Cougar fans are looking forward to a season with all the promise Smith embodied when he arrived in the fall of 1983 as the most highly acclaimed high school athlete ever to enroll at BYU.

At Los Altos, Smith was an all-star in football, basketball and volleyball, and was named the California Interscholastic Federation male scholar-athlete of the year. In football, he set single-season Southern Section records for yardage, 3,347; passes, 382, and completions, 252, and a single-game record for touchdowns, 8. In basketball, he was named to virtually every All-American team.

Off the field, he was the student body president--he defeated an unopposed candidate in a last-minute write-in campaign--and an honors student. His only grade lower than an A was a B+ in a junior English class.

Smith was known as Mike then, but he developed a preference for Michael when he got to BYU. “There are a lot of Mike Smiths in the world,” he said.

But even in high school, Smith had shown a preference for little personal extras.

“I used to make my own knee braces out my brother’s old wet suits,” Smith said. “Or I’d make a wristband and silk screen a little design on it. Or I’d silk screen my own socks that said how many points I was going to score that game.

“In football, I’d do things a little different. I had this personalized towel I made that said, ‘And he came to pass.’ ”

The slogan, Smith said, was a common phrase from the Book of Mormon, a church addition to the New Testament.

“Mike is really a rather mild-mannered person,” said Bill Rockwood, his basketball coach at Los Altos and a long-time family friend. “It’s just on the basketball court that he comes out of his shell. In high school, he was a little shy. He was not the way he is now, so self-assured.”

The change is the product of his time as a missionary, Smith said. His experiences in Argentina taught him much about himself and reinforced his religious faith.

“When it was time for me to go home, I didn’t want to go home, if you can believe that,” Smith said. “After two years, I just fell in love with the cities, fell in love with the people, fell in love with the life style. I’d never been that happy in my life.

“Though I never worked harder, I never felt such joy.”

Smith was raised in a devout Mormon home. His mother, Marie, and his father, Dennis, have made the church important in the lives of their five children. Clark, 27, and a sister, Shauna, 26, are graduates of BYU. Clark, a walk-on forward, played basketball with Michael at BYU for one season. A younger brother, Mark, 19, is a sophomore quarterback at BYU.

But although only the youngest son, Steven, 10, still lives at home, the family stays close. Shauna lives in Provo with her husband and their 1 1/2-year-old daughter. And Dennis Smith never misses a home game, driving 12 hours from the family home in Hacienda Heights.

Dennis Smith served on a church mission in North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. It was expected that his sons would serve as well. Clark spent two years in southern Japan and Mark is about to leave for Bolivia.

“It was something we were taught in our family since we were little,” Michael Smith said. “At 19, we would go on a mission.”

But growing up, Smith could not have figured that he would develop into such a gifted athlete and that the time for his mission would interrupt his athletic career. Smith was in the middle of his freshman season and started several games at point guard before Andersen unexpectedly told him to make a decision.

“The coach was concerned with his future and the team’s future,” Smith said. “He said he wanted to know by Sunday, which was like a week away.

“Basketball was definitely a factor. A lot of things at the time were,” Smith said. “I was 19 years old. That is a pretty exciting time of your life. College was going well. To give it all up for two years, working 10 hours a day, not going to the beach, not going out with girls, not going to be able to do this or that, just trying to find people to teach the gospel to. I had to sit down and weigh my beliefs.”

After a week of fasting and prayer, Smith decided to leave school and basketball for service. After a few months of training in Spanish and in missionary work, Smith left for Argentina.

Smith thought he could continue to play basketball regularly while on his mission. But such activity is at the discretion of each mission president and Smith’s said no.

“At first I said, ‘What? No basketball. No way,’ ” Smith said. “But pretty soon, it got to the point I didn’t miss it that much.”

He might not have had the energy to play regularly even if he had been allowed to.

“It was very tiring work, the hardest two years of my life,” he said. “You know it’s going to be difficult, but I had no idea how tough until I got there.

“You hear great success stories, like how a missionary is walking along one road, and gets this feeling he should knock on this one house. So he knocked, and the family said, ‘You’re the Mormon missionary. We’ve been waiting for you.’ And they get baptized.

“You hear a lot of that before you go. The mission is put up on this pedestal. It is going to be the greatest two years of your life. Then you get there and realize, ‘Hey, this is going to be the hardest two years of my life.’

“You get discouraged because you can’t find anyone to teach, or you start teaching a family and they don’t take into the message.

“But the success of the mission is not measured by how many people you baptize. In my mission in South America, we were baptizing less than any other mission in South America. You can’t measure success that way. You measure success in how well you conform to the rules and how you dedicate yourself to the mission.”

And, as with most things where Smith is concerned, there were lighter moments. The best might have occurred when he was working Esquel, a town of 10,000 in the Andes mountains near the Chilean border.

A professional basketball team from Buenos Aires, featuring two U.S. players, came to town for two exhibition games with a local team. The first night, Smith stayed home and the locals lost by 30 points. The next night, Smith and his missionary companion got permission from the mission president to watch the game.

But no sooner had he walked in, Smith said, than a man asked him if he played basketball and would he play for Esquel? Smith declined and took a seat in the stands for a preliminary indoor soccer game.

“Sitting up there, we got to thinking, ‘This might be a way to capture the hearts of the people,’ ” Smith said. “If I could go there and, perhaps, make this Esquel team do well or win, they’d know who I was and want to know more about what I was doing there. It could be a great thing for our little purpose. For that reason, I decided to play.”

Smith scored 41 points, and Esquel won the game by 12.

“I walked down the street from then on and everyone knew who I was,” Smith said. “That’s how we were able to get in so well with the people in that little city.”

Smith played basketball on only a couple of other occasions during his two years in Argentina. He knew when he returned home in July, 1986, that he would have a lot of work ahead of him to get ready for his sophomore season at BYU.

He started the season as a reserve, but by January had worked his way back firmly into the starting lineup. By February, he was pretty much his old self.

“As a college player, he could be as good as I’ve ever coached,” said Andersen, who sandwiched two years with the Utah Stars of the old American Basketball Assn. between 10 seasons at Utah State and four at BYU.

“When you consider his height, his shooting range, his overall shooting, his free-throw shooting and passing, you combine those things and he doesn’t have an equal. Pick out any one of those things and I can pick out a player who has done it just as well or better. But when you consider all of them, he is as good a player as I’ve ever been associated with. I’ve been around a long time, so that’s saying quite a mouthful.”

It is his admiration for Smith’s skills that has him so upset with Smith’s antics, Andersen said.

He recently called Smith into his office and told him he was cracking down, after Smith had played poorly in a preseason scrimmage. Smith showed up for it wearing surf wear under his jersey.

“I’m trying to take some of those things away from him,” Andersen said. “They take away from his image. I don’t want anyone to see anything other than the best of Mike Smith. All he needs to do is play. If he does that, he doesn’t need anything else.”

Smith still wonders why everyone is so concerned about his image.

“I showed up the other day at practice with about a four-day old Fu Manchu,” Smith said. “We had an exhibition game coming up the next night. One of the coaches said, ‘What’s that you got on your face?’ Coach Andersen said, ‘Well, he won’t have that tomorrow. I assure you of that.’ ”

Smith appeared for the game clean-shaven.

“I don’t do those things to annoy them,” Smith said. “I’m just having fun. I’m not out to hurt anyone or gain power over anyone. I don’t do those things to make them notice me. If I do them, it’s because I would have done them normally. I think the coach thinks I do a lot of things to draw attention to myself.

“It makes me laugh. But being up here, I have to tone things down, conform to their ideas.”

Andersen, however, is not convinced that he has had his last talk with Smith.

“I thought I covered everything,” Andersen said. “But with Mike you never know, it might be something new the next day.”