Ricky Berry Almost Turns Game Into Art Form : San Jose State Guard Scores 31 Points, Without Much Help From Teammates

Ricky Berry doesn’t run, he glides. He doesn’t jump, he leaps. He appears on a basketball court to be the embodiment of one of those graceful, elongated figures in painted depictions of basketball, the game Ricky Berry may play as well as any college player in the nation.

Jerry Tarkanian, Nevada Las Vegas coach, has said that Berry, San Jose State’s two-time All-Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. guard and a member of the 1987 United States Pan American team, will be a National Basketball Assn. lottery pick (one of the first seven chosen).

Dick Vitale says Berry deserves to be lumped with the best college players in the nation.

About the only bad thing said concerning Ricky Berry comes from Jud Heathcote, Michigan State coach, who has long let his feelings be known about Berry’s skills as a ball boy.

“He was terrible,” Heathcote is quoted as saying in a San Jose pamphlet on Berry.

Berry was a ball boy on Michigan State’s 1979 national championship team. His idol on the team was--news flash--6-foot 8-inch point guard Magic Johnson.

And now Ricky Berry is all grown up, and what do you know, he’s 6-8 and he’s playing guard. He scores a lot of points, averaging 23.9 coming into Saturday’s 98-77 PCAA loss to UC Irvine in the Bren Center.

The game, for Berry and for those who watched him, was a lesson in the beauty of an accomplished player and the strange way life has of dragging walking, talking works of art back to hardwood.

He scored 31 points.

He also had a shot blocked by Irvine’s Mike Labat, whose only chance at getting in a lottery is by buying a ticket at the local convenience store.

In the first half, Perry dribbled length of the court past every Irvine defender and, having reached the basket alone, did not dunk the ball but lightly dropped it through.

In the second half, with his team falling farther and farther behind an Irvine team that shot 59% from the floor in the half, Berry attempted to take the ball around his back and instead stubbed it into one of those elegant calves and out of bounds.

“A bonehead play,” Berry said.

Which his team can ill afford because on those legs of Ricky Berry’s rest the hopes of San Jose State.

“We are so reliant on that one guy,” said Bill Berry, San Jose coach.

Sure enough, after Berry’s 31, San Jose’s next highest scorer, guard Steve Haney, scored all of 13 points.

If Berry minds the added weight of his teammates or people’s expectations, he doesn’t let on.

“I don’t try to live up to what anyone thinks of me,” he said. “I just play the best I can.”

Trying is something Berry never appears to have to do on a basketball court. He’s so fluid, his moves seeming so effortless, that the game looks easy. Which, when you lose to Irvine, is just not true.

“This is tough,” he said. “No matter what I do, if we lose, it doesn’t mean anything.”