Grant-ed, He’s Very Good . . . : . . . But Having Escaped Once, Why Does He Try It Again?

Boyd Grant quit basketball, just shy of a nervous breakdown. Well, that may be overly dramatic. But Grant, the best thing to happen to Fresno since someone figured a way to get raisins into a cereal box, was surely on some kind of downward road. Steep? It was just about free-fall.

There were the telltale signs, variously grouped under burnout, the catch-all sickness for our age:

--He once became confused trying to sign his own name to a check. Oh, yes. Boyd .

--His mind performed the visual equivalent of white space during a speech at the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. Final Four. “Uh, uh, uh.”

--His blood pressure was dangerously high. During a game, his own team ahead , he rushed a UC Irvine assistant coach.

And the most chilling, and finally the most persuasive, symptom of all: In 1985, Fresno State finished 15-15. Grant, had he been an introspective sort, might have read the veins on his neck as a relief map pointing the way to self-destruction.

But he wasn’t particularly thoughtful that way. He needed a .500 year to save him from the destination. For a coach such as Grant, who won 194 games and a National Invitation Tournament title in nine seasons there, going .500 was kind of like doctor’s orders.

His is a story perhaps all too typical. And except for the gift of a 15-15 season in a basketball hotbed, he might have continued typically. Coaching worse and worse, feeling the pressure more and more.

You know the type. Perhaps he would have eventually, and spectacularly, stroked out on the bench, the ultimate technical. Maybe he’d have gotten to that Irvine assistant next time, have been forced to retire in disgrace. More likely he’d have gone 14-16, then 9-21, and faded quietly. A lot do.

“You remember Boyd, don’t you? Kind of scholarly looking, the toast of Fresno for a while, just one hell of a coach. Got old, I guess.”

Before that happened, Grant got out. Just quit. These things then happened:

--His blood pressure returned to normal.

--He spent the Christmas holidays with his family and was amazed and happy at the sheer amount of time suddenly available to him.

--His legacy at Fresno State, where he turned a 7-20 team into a 21-6 conference championship team his first year, remained intact and his future in honorable administration appeared secure.

And the story ends sensibly?

A year later, Grant signed to rebuild a floundering basketball program here at Colorado State.

Grant, 54, sits at his desk in a tiny office. The Rockies loom beyond, geese settle in a pond by the football team’s practice field. He is a calm man, totally disarming on this neutral and tranquilizing ground. He does not look like a man burned out, or even rekindled. He looks normal.

Yet he must answer, over and over, the central question. Did he write a suicide note when he signed his most recent contract?

Did you ever notice that sportswriting tends to the overly dramatic?

“Hey,” he says quietly, “a lot of coaches go through misery. Some of them even think, if they’re not miserable, they’re not doing the job. That’s sad, maybe, but true. It’s just that it was making me more miserable.”

Yeah, but it also made you quit.

Grant agrees, but points out that coaching at Fresno State might have been a unique position.

“They were so hungry for attention,” he says, remembering. “They just wanted something.”

Grant and his basketball team turned out to be it. He followed that 7-20 team and, with one that wasn’t even fun to watch--”vomit basketball,” he agrees--had the town crazy.

“By the fifth game, you couldn’t buy season tickets anymore,” he says. “Like I say, they were out there waiting for something.”

Accommodating the talent, or scarcity thereof, Boyd designed a conservative offense-aggressive defense brand of ball that turned off everybody but the citizenry, who could appreciate success at the expense of style. His first season, Fresno State went 21-6 and became an instant power in the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. Basketball became Fresno’s, uh, raisin d’etre.

The fans responded immediately. Wearing red--they must have looked like an angry blood clot to opponents--they enthusiastically boosted team and coach alike. After a 27-3 season in 1982, boosters came up with a $175,000 bundle, spread out over five years, to keep Grant in Fresno.

He was agreeable. The next year Fresno State won the NIT. The word was, Grant gave good value.

But at a terrible price. It was nothing sudden, or dramatic. But the anxieties, by their accumulation, began to take their toll. He was always competitive, harder on himself than anybody else could have been. The years of pressure, season in, season out, were crushing the life out of him.

It was not a pressure that anybody or thing applied. He heard zip from boosters, was treated well all done the line. But Grant got to looking at this thing he created and began to feel increasing responsibility for it.

“It was just me, nobody else,” he is saying. “But can you imagine a program, minus-$28,000 when I came and now making a couple of million dollars a year? People paying athletic scholarships to get a seat?

“That was a lot of entertainment I was suddenly providing. I felt I had to be putting on a better-than-average program. I had to be better than good.”

With each sporadic loss, Grant tossed and turned. Losing was always tough for him. Now it was simply tougher. In his head he knew that the talent of the players, the material, dictated the season to some extent. He knew that in his head.

“I never needed any newspaper to second-guess me,” he says. “Every decision I made, I’d wake up and think of something else I should have done. Why didn’t I have the kids better prepared against the press?”

He was beginning to believe that he had become so totally involved in his little empire that basketball was passing him by. It was a chilling thought. “Maybe I had gotten so concerned I was missing something.”

For two years, Grant hinted that he’d be there forever only if forever took him to, oh, 1985. It was no real surprise when he announced he was giving up coaching. He was half-regarded as a madman by then, anyhow. Besides, Fresno State had just gone 15-15.

“I no longer wanted to feel the anxieties I had,” he says. “And there was a feeling that it was definitely time to go.”

He slipped quietly into that coach’s twilight zone. He performed some fund raising and contemplated his “retirement” at full pay.

“A lot of people would like to get out, and I don’t say they lack courage by not doing so,” he says. “I was certainly one of the fortunate people. I never lost a paycheck.”

Grant knew, at some level, that this wouldn’t last forever. Still, he reveled in his new leisure. He still talks about how he was able to rendezvous in Reno with various children for the holidays.

“Opening presents together,” he says, still surprised by the memory. For a basketball coach, this evidently is a pretty fresh concept. “I forgot how much fun that could be. It was a relief not to coach. Suddenly I had nothing on my mind.”

He knew he’d never coach again, he had shut that door for good. Whatever came up, well, something would eventually.

What came up was Colorado State. His alma mater called.

It can be argued that Colorado State, which has had a decade or more of slippage, was looking for a quick fix. In any event, the school was looking for somebody to get things started at the gate and on the floor. There was really just one man to call.

Boyd Grant, who used to argue calls until his veins popped, argued this one less than you might have thought. It made him feel young, alive again.

“Well, Boyd,” he remembers telling himself, “you still have some years left.”

This is where, should we tend to the overly dramatic, we say: Maybe, maybe not, Boyd. It’s a killing game, basketball coaching. At least the way Grant does it. That blood pressure can go up in a Fort Collins minute. And they’ll want 20-win seasons and full houses here, too, believe it.

That’s why they called him. He delivers. What will you do then, Boyd? If you don’t win? Don’t draw?

Trick question: Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?

Grant smiles, gives the obvious answer to the obvious question. This is different. No that’s not quite right. He’s different.

“You know, I got to thinking,” he says. “What if I had won them all at Fresno State, what difference would it have made. What if I had lost them all? What difference would that have made?”

These are big thoughts, too big for sports pages, so Grant quickly down scales.

“I watched a lot of basketball after I quit and I saw teams lose that, really, couldn’t have won if they had played better, or been better prepared. It’s not always in your control.

“Maybe that last year I just didn’t have the material. I still think a person has to put pressure on himself, but now I try to tell myself there are just some things I can’t control.”

This season, his first at Colorado State, Grant has not been blessed with a particularly talented team. Or so the preseason polls would suggest. Three of them picked Colorado State for the lower division, tops, in the Western Athletic Conference. Yet his arrival has been heralded with hope. Attendance is 50% ahead of last year’s.

“This is another community that’s waiting for a winner,” he agrees.

Grant will try to give them one. Will he die trying?

Overly dramatic.

Still, he was surprised recently. Colorado State went to Baylor for a nonconference game and lost, it’s only loss so far. Grant woke up in a Waco motel, felt fine at first.

“And then I remembered the game,” he says. “I’d forgotten how you can wake up and feel so bad, what a down feeling it is. I woke up in a motel room and I felt absolutely terrible.”

He pauses, half amused.

“I’d forgotten all about that.”