HOT, BUT NOT <i> SO </i> HOT : Kevin Floyd, Who Had a Stone Touch at Georgetown, Has a Sweet Shot at Irvine; Now He Needs Stone Face

Kevin Floyd finally stopped his momentum and spun around to see if it had been worth the effort. He was standing 12 rows up in Iowa’s Carver-Hawkeye Arena when he saw that it had. Teammate Ed Johansen grabbed the loose ball Floyd had so daringly and acrobatically saved before hurtling up the aisle between sections of startled fans.

The play was more than just spectacular, it was pivotal. UC Irvine was trailing Jacksonville, 73-71, with 1:46 remaining in a first-round game of the Amana-Hawkeye tournament when Floyd took the hot-dog-vendor route. Johansen made two free throws on the possession to tie the score and the Anteaters went on to win, 79-76.

After the game, Floyd wasn’t exactly beaming, though. When someone pointed out that the play had been a real crowd-pleaser, he bristled.

“I don’t play basketball for no fans,” he said. “That play was no big deal. You see it in the NBA every day. If it helps us win, fine.”

Senior Mike Hess looked at Floyd, then turned to a writer and shrugged. “I thought we did win,” he said.

The thing about Kevin Floyd is that although he may be up in the 12th row--or at least above the rim--during games, he also may be riding an emotional elevator to the basement. Still, he’s seldom surly. This was a new twist. In fact, he’s usually smiling, well-mannered, soft-spoken, articulate, self-effacing and sensitive . . . maybe too sensitive.

Anyone who has seen him play knows that Floyd is a marvelous athlete. The 15,500 Iowa fans in attendance that night will attest to that. As would John Thompson, who came to Floyd’s house in Los Angeles in 1983 and persuaded him to attend Georgetown. And so will Bill Mulligan, the Irvine coach who jumped at the chance to get Floyd on the rebound when he heard that the 6-foot 5-inch guard was leaving Georgetown and wanted to play in Southern California.

But Floyd admits he allows his fragile psyche get in the way of his potential as a player.

“It’s something I need to work on all the time,” he said. “I don’t know what it is. Some days you just wake up on the bad side of the bed.

“But I do let things linger on too much, I know. I think I deal with it on the court pretty well, but after the game, I let things that happened during the game get me down.”

That’s pretty much the way Mulligan sees it.

“I want him to use his athletic ability and still know when to use his head,” said Mulligan, a rather intense sort who has problems dealing with Floyd’s chameleon-like moods.

“He has a tendency to go goofy on you. If he ever gets on an even keel, he could be on a par with the best players in our conference. But he still has too many ups and downs.”

Talk about ups and downs:

Up--In Irvine’s exhibition opener against a Swedish club team, Floyd makes 8-of-11 shots from the floor and finishes with 20 points, 7 assists, 5 steals and 4 rebounds.

Down--Floyd watches the first two games of the season from the bench after Mulligan suspends him for two games after he trades punches with forward Mike Doktorczyk in practice.

Up--After the tournament in Iowa, Mulligan says: “I thought Floyd should have made the all-tournament team over Wayne (Engelstad). He made that save to win the first game, he got 17 against Iowa. . . . He played great.”

Down--Floyd is unhappy that best friend Frank Woods has been dropped from the starting lineup and believes Woods should be moved from power forward to small forward. At one point, Mulligan accuses him of pouting in practice and threatens to throw him out of the arena.

Deeper Down--After the player he’s guarding in the UCLA game (Trevor Wilson) scores 25 points to lead the Bruins to a 116-100 victory in front of Floyd’s family and many of his friends, he is despondent. Mulligan, upset with Floyd’s lack of effort in practice the next day in Iowa, is ready to kick him off the team and send him home when assistant coaches Bob Thate and Andy Andreas intercede.

Up for Air . . . for Now--Mulligan decides that Floyd will play primarily point guard when Irvine begins Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. play today. It is the position Floyd, a junior, believes he could someday play in the NBA. For now, all is well.

But Mulligan’s patience with point guards is historically very short.

“One thing he’s got to do if he’s going to play the point is be cool,” Mulligan said. “Mentally, it’s tough to be a point guard. If you lose the ball, you can’t try to get it back and foul somebody. And he still lets the little things get to him.”

Floyd is making a concentrated effort to keep his emotions from interfering with his performance, but he’s not going to stop speaking his mind, especially in defense of a friend.

“I thought Frank was being treated unfairly,” he said. “I mean, sure, he had a couple of bad games, but if they’re going to yank a senior from the starting lineup like that, well, where’s the stability in this program?

“Frank’s a leader on this team.”

Woods, who is starting and playing well again, chuckles at Floyd’s reaction to his early-season woes.

“He took it harder than I did,” Woods said. “Kev’s strong-willed about things like that. He dwells too much on what’s wrong with the team and what he could have done better. But we talk a lot and try to keep each other up.”

Woods isn’t the only one trying to help. Engelstad, also a senior, makes a point of talking to Floyd before every game. “Stone face, Kev, stone face,” he says.

“He has a tendency to play too emotionally,” Engelstad said. “He has trouble letting something slide. He has a lot of L.A. street player in him.”

Kevin Floyd’s athletic prowess was apparent long before he hit the playgrounds of Los Angeles. He began his athletic career throwing around other 5 year olds in judo classes at an Air Force base in West Germany.

He also competed in baseball, football and soccer during a five-year stay there, but didn’t play his first game of basketball until he was 9 and his father had been transferred to Sacramento.

Less than a year later, his family moved to Los Angeles.

“It was a big change,” Floyd said. “It was my first time in a predominantly black area and a big-city atmosphere with crime and stuff. We used to hitchhike to football practice on the base and nobody locked their doors. In L.A., you had to double-bolt them. But the biggest adjustment for me was having all kinds of sports on TV all the time. We only got to see the big events in Germany. That’s what I remember most.”

His sophomore year at Westchester High School, Floyd played football, basketball and baseball and ran track a little. But the next year he decided to concentrate on basketball. He averaged 20 points, 7 rebounds and 5 assists his senior year and was picking through a bundle of college scholarship offers.

He narrowed his choices to USC, Loyola Marymount, Irvine and Georgetown.

“I was either going to go really big-time or stay near home,” he said, smiling. Then Thompson, whose Hoyas had just won the national title, showed up on his doorstep and cemented the deal.

“When I visited the (Georgetown) campus, it was like my own personal vision of what college should be, all these students bundled up in sweaters and scarfs,” Floyd said. “Then, when the No. 1 coach in the country shows that much interest in me, well, I admit it was a pleasurable feeling.”

Once he enrolled at Georgetown, the pleasure quotient dipped sharply. One week into his freshman season, he had an intestinal flu and was hospitalized for a week. He recovered and thought he was back to playing at full strength, but he wasn’t playing enough . . . the way he saw it, anyway.

The Hoyas finished the season 35-3 and were runners-up in the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament. But Floyd wasn’t in the mood to celebrate.

“I played in 24 of 38 games as a freshman and a lot of people say I was expecting too much,” he said, “but I think if you’re a good ballplayer, you deserve a fair shake, whether you’re a senior or freshman or whatever.”

When Thompson recruited two more point guards, Floyd figured he “could sit on the bench 3,000 miles closer to home,” so he left.

All of which leads to one question: What would Kevin Floyd’s career at Georgetown have been like if he had known how to shoot back then?

“When Kevin first came here, he had the ugliest shot I’ve ever seen on the Division I level,” Engelstad said. “Now, he floats so high and looks so good, we call his jumper ‘The Velvet Stroke.’ ”

The transformation from “The Burlap Brick” didn’t occur as quickly as Floyd changes moods, though.

“When he came here, he was actually embarrassed to shoot with the other players because his shot was so terrible,” said Thate, Irvine’s designated shot doctor, who was faced with fitting Floyd into the Anteater mold of good shooters.

“It was like taking an 8-year-old and teaching him to shoot. Now he’s developed a shot right out of a textbook.”

The sweet jumper, added to the pure athleticism of Floyd’s game, has amounted to a 14.9-point average, a .481 field-goal percentage and a .766 mark from the free-throw line this season. He has done that while guarding the opponent’s best perimeter player with mixed success, which is at least a testament to his stamina. Still, everyone close to the Anteater program sees the potential for much more.

“He still surprises me, and I’ve been playing with him every day for a couple of years,” Woods said. “The things he does on the court . . . and it’s more his quickness than his jumping ability, which is obviously pretty awesome. He can put on the afterburners and blow by people.

“His shot was mechanically squared away last season, but the big difference this year is he steps up and takes the shot with confidence. He’s not tentative anymore. He takes the ball to the bucket as strong as anyone, but when the defense collapses, he has the presence of mind to kick it out.”

On hearing that statement, Mulligan manages a smile. Presence of mind. Is that too much to ask?

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not down on Floyd,” Mulligan said. “It’s just that I’m not the kind of coach who lets things slide. I see something and I react. I think he understands me. I’ve certainly made my position very clear.

“I have to keep an eye on him to make sure he’s with it. We don’t want him to get out of control.”

Of course, it’s not the state of Floyd’s game that concerns Mulligan as much as Floyd’s state of mind. But if he learns to control his emotions as he learned to handle the jumper, life in the Bren Center this season could be a lot easier for all concerned.