Socrates Wasn’t a Coach but Cagers Buy His Ideas : Westchester’s Crawford and Mason Know What They Don’t Know and Want to Learn

They don’t walk the streets of L. A. pondering philosophic questions, but there may be a little Socrates in Westchester High School’s Sam Crawford and Zan Mason.

Socrates’ notion of intelligence pivoted on the ability to acknowledge how little one knows. Westchester’s (15-2) success pivots largely on Crawford and Mason, players who have had to learn a lot to realize they have a lot to learn.

Both seem to strive for absolutes while realizing the improbability of perfection.

“Even if we win the state championship,” said Crawford, a flashy playmaker averaging 18.3 points and 8.6 assists a game. “I’m still gonna find out exactly what I didn’t do right and work on it. You have to try to correct everything you did wrong and still not be afraid to make a mistake.”

Added Mason, a 1986 All-City forward averaging 19.8 points and 8.3 rebounds a game: “I’m not satisfied. I need a lot of work.”

Led by Crawford and Mason, the Comets will try to upset The Times No. 1-ranked City team today at 4 p.m. when they travel to Crenshaw for a Central League showdown.

Crenshaw, ranked No. 3 in the nation by USA Today (Westchester is 21st), uses a pressing defense that Crawford will have to break for Mason, the Comets’ most proficient scorer, to be effective.

Both players will have to score, and usually they do. But their similarities end with their work ethic.

Crawford spent his first nine years in Harvey, Ill., a suburb south of Chicago, experiencing what he calls a “very bad situation.” That he pronounces the letter s in Illinois, a curse to most Illinois natives, suggests his distaste for his early years.

Mason grew up in Los Angeles--to 6-7 and 210 pounds--and he is fittingly quiet for the nonchalance capital of the universe. When asked why, he says cooly: “That’s just L. A.”

More likely, that’s just Mason. It is certain, however, that Mason’s name won’t be spoken cooly when college recruiters do their footwork next season, Mason’s senior year.

Mason says only that he is considering Temple, a Philadelphia-based Atlantic 10 school currently ranked third in the nation by the Associated Press. But All Pac 10 and PCAA schools have already contacted him, as has every Atlantic Coast Conference school except North Carolina, every Big East school except Georgetown and every Big 10 school except Indiana.

Despite his height (5-9), Crawford’s future is equally bright, according to Westchester Coach Ed Azzam and Len Furillo, coach at Coolidge High (Washington D. C.).

Coolidge (14-2), ranked 23rd in the nation by USA Today, lost to Westchester, 84-69, at the Las Vegas Holiday Prep Classic after Crawford dismantled the Coolidge press.

“He made our press look like a joke,” Furillo said. “It was outrageous. No one could stop him. He runs the offense so well, he’s so quick and his floor sense is so good (that) size really shouldn’t matter when he plays in college.”

“Sam is too intelligent and too quick for his height to matter,” Azzam added. “He can make the adjustment to college ball. He’s never been intimidated by anyone.”

Taking control seems to be a Sam Crawford trademark. So it’s easy to understand why Crawford, not Azzam, did most of the talking when a Dorsey second-half spurt prompted a Comets’ timeout last week in Westchester’s 89-74 victory.

“Sam has always been the smallest guy telling people what to do,” said Mita Carter, Crawford’s aunt who raised him since he moved to L. A. seven years ago. “He’s very outgoing and he’s always been the leader of the pack.”

In some ways he had no choice.

While students from Chicago’s northern suburbs learned about evolution in school, gangs taught Crawford about survival-of-the-fittest in Harvey. Getting by was a constant battle. Basketball--”in a dark alley, under a bad street light, playing with a bike rim nailed to a piece of wood on a post,” Crawford said--offered an escape from life-threatening situations. It also meant a fight.

“It was a fight all the time,” Crawford said. “If you lost you fought. Every game, you fought. You never lost a game and walked away losing.”

Crawford played baseball when the alley was occupied. But in one postgame fight he was cut, so his mother decided that it would be better for Crawford to live with the Carters in L. A., where he had come to Norm Nixon’s basketball camp for the previous three summers. Two months later he came to camp again and never went back.

The memories remain. “I have a court in my alley nailed to the pole and I go out there and shoot around at night and I try to go back in my mind to what I used to be,” Crawford said. “When I’m depressed I try to leave my world and say I may be depressed now, but this is where I was nine years ago, this is where I am and this is where I’m going, so I shouldn’t have anything to be depressed about.”

A recent tragedy indicates that Crawford will have trouble escaping depression--and Chicago. The day before Westchester suffered a 65-59 defeat to Manual Arts, Crawford learned from his grandmother that his mother’s Chicago home had burned down. “Apparently some people were joy riding and threw a firebomb into the house,” said Carter, Crawford’s aunt. “The apartment caught on fire but everybody is OK.”

“I’ve been feeling bad about it,” Crawford said last week before Carter had told him that no one was injured.

Crawford had said he planned to visit his family soon, but Carter said later that Crawford probably will not go to Chicago until April.

Carter, personal finance manager for former Monkees member Michael Nesmith, says her relationship with Crawford is unique. “I practically raised Sam,” she said, “but in my family there wasn’t much communication and I’ve learned that it’s important to make your children your friends.”

It’s also important to make sure they go to school. Crawford said he attended school in Chicago only when he felt like it--almost never. That changed when he came to L. A.

“School became much more important when Sam came here because no kid was going to live in my house without going to school, and the idea was to turn his life around,” Carter said.

Crawford the philosopher says now that school is still difficult, but he understands what education means to his future. “Most kids will say that school is more important than basketball just because people want to hear that,” he said. “But I’m not in school just to get to college and play ball. I’m there to learn because no matter what happens, I’m gonna be successful.

“A lot of athletes don’t understand the importance of education. Most kids are just in school to stay eligible (for sports), and for a long time I was. I was (at Westchester) just to play, but you have to ask, ‘What’s really important?’ If I get hurt tomorrow I have no problems. I’m just gonna go on to something else.”

Crawford is behind in school so if he doesn’t get hurt he said he’ll have to work extra hard to make himself eligible for college ball in his freshman year.

Hard labor seems to follow him wherever he goes. Using your mind, he says, makes things easier.

“I want other people to come out of Chicago like I did,” he said. “I want other people to use their mind first so they can realize that you can use basketball as something that can change your life.”

A chance to play basketball for DePaul might be the only thing that would lure Crawford back to Chicago. He used to dream of being a Blue Demon as he watched DePaul’s Terry Cummings (now with the Milwaukee Bucks) and Mark Aguirre. Later, through the connections of Mita Carter and his stepfather, former Laker Ron Carter, Crawford got to know Cummings, Aguirre, Magic Johnson and others. Now he can’t forget DePaul.

“The chances are good of me going to DePaul,” he said, laughing. “That was my first interest when I got to L. A., and then when I got my first mail from them I didn’t believe it. All of a sudden they were interested in me.”

The cast of the interested grew at the Las Vegas Classic where Westchester edged Ballard High of Louisville, 74-70, in the tournament championship.

Mason was named the tourney’s most valuable player after he scored 33 points on 16 of 19 shooting and collected 9 rebounds against Ballard. But Azzam thought Crawford deserved the award for getting Mason the ball, and Ballard Coach Scott Davenport was elated just to have taped Crawford’s 15-point performance.

“I used the tape to show our point guard that this is the way a point guard is supposed to play,” Davenport said. “Crawford controlled everything. It was his ballgame.”

Crawford says it’s a team game, that individual trophies mean little. Most important, he says, is the team’s performance. And when it’s time to win, Crawford looks for Mason.

“It’s not important that the trophy went to Zan and not to me,” Crawford said. “I give Zan the ball, and if he doesn’t score, I’ll still give it to him. I go to him when I think we need a basket.

“Zan is a pressure player, he’s proven that. He wins games for us most of the time and he and I like the last five minutes because that’s winning time. That’s when the real players are supposed to shine.”

Like Crawford, the record shows Mason earns his laurels.

“His work ethic is his best quality,” said Azzam. “Zan plays as hard as anyone I’ve ever had.”

The junior played his first team ball in the seventh grade. He was about 6-feet-1 then, he recalled, and the following year he played in L. A.’s Slam ‘n’ Jam summer league with many upper-class high school players.

“That was a big adjustment for me, a lot more competition,” Mason said. “That’s when I started developing my game.”

Concentrating on playing hard and executing the basics kept Mason ahead of other players. “I always paid attention to the coach. That’s how I could keep up with the older guys. I concentrated on fundamentals and out-hustling them, diving for the ball and running the court.”

He did the same last summer at Princeton, N. J., at Nike’s Super Star Camp where, he said, keeping up wasn’t easy. “The guys were amazing,” he said. “A lot of guys were 6-10 or 7-foot, wide-bodies you had to go against. And everybody could score. No weak links. You had to play defense and be aware at every moment of the game.”

It’s aggressiveness that Mason values most. The aggressive style of play at many Eastern colleges strikes him as better basketball.

Two years from now Mason could be playing for one of those schools with at least one City championship to his credit. But first Mason, Crawford and the other Comets probably will have to get by Crenshaw in the playoffs, so philosophy class must continue.

As Mason put it: “In this league we have to work on a lot of things to win. The game never really gets easier. You have to learn different things every year, and you never stop learning. Once you master something, you have to learn another thing that’s thrown at you.”