Useful Usevitch : There Are Better Basketball Players, but None Work Harder Than Brigham Young Center

The world’s nicest guy learned to play basketball by having his face broken. That’s typical.

Hard knocks are the one thing that have come easy to Jim Usevitch, Brigham Young University’s 6-foot 9-inch senior center. Elbows, remedial reading classes, cuts to his face and from basketball rosters, scholarships offered then taken away, blood. Through the years, short-term misfortune has stuck to Usevitch.

And just as sure as the folks on campus stand at attention when the Stars and Stripes are raised and lowered each day, Usevitch’s response to bad times is always the same--work.

He had to ask a high school friend to teach him how to run. He stayed behind after high school basketball practices to try to coordinate a body with appendages constantly pulling toward opposite poles. He had to bulk up that same body for the pounding of college ball.

It has turned the kid who couldn’t make the freshman team at Huntington Beach’s Ocean View High School into what many think is the key player on BYU’s 18-1 basketball team.

“There’s no doubt that the reason we are where we are is Jim Usevitch,” said forward Michael Smith, the team’s most talked-about player.

Talk and Usevitch have never been close. When he was a 6-foot 4-inch freshman at Ocean View, his height stunted his social growth.

“I was real quiet,” he said. “I guess I felt self-conscious about the way I looked.”

Matters weren’t helped by the fact that he was having troubles in school and had to take remedial reading classes.

“Jim was slow at everything when he got here,” said Jim Harris, Ocean View coach. “He read slow, he walked slow, he talked slow.”

Harris first saw Usevitch in a physical education class and asked him if he wanted to play basketball. Having played in eighth grade and scored all of three points for the season, Usevitch was less than inspired. But he went out and was dropped from the freshman team. He was placed on what amounted to a freshman reserve team.

He stayed late with his freshman coach, Roger Holmes, and learned how to move his feet and hold a basketball. Having troubles getting up and down the court, he asked a friend and track athlete, Stuart Lui, to teach him how to run. He learned that to be effective in basketball, he would have to go against his very nature and deal out physical punishment.

“You will never meet a nicer person than Jim Usevitch,” Holmes said. “You may search the world and find someone as nice, but no one nicer. Still, he learned quick what life was about on a basketball court.

“I remember the first time he practiced against (former USC star Wayne) Carlander. Jim’s under the basket, and the next thing you know he’s on the ground with his nose and mouth bleeding and Wayne standing over him. That was lesson No. 1. There were a lot more times like that. But he never got mad, he never got frustrated. He always got up and wiped away the blood.”

Usevitch said: “I loved basketball so much that I was willing to work that much harder.”

Usevitch developed into an effective if unspectacular player inside. By his senior year he was one of Orange County’s best, though at 6-8, 210 he wasn’t the most awesome physical specimen.

A Mormon--he attended seminary classes each weekday morning at 6:20 throughout high school--the possibility of playing at BYU interested him. But did it interest BYU?

“They would offer me (a scholarship), then take it away,” Usevitch said. “Finally, they told me they had three scholarships and I was the fourth player.”

The three players ahead of Usevitch were guards, and it was only after Roger Reid, assistant coach to then head coach Frank Arnold, suggested that BYU try to get at least one tall player that Usevitch was offered a scholarship.

That was six years ago.

His freshman year he split time between BYU’s junior varsity and varsity. He developed slowly, but by his sophomore year had improved to the point that Coach Ladell Anderson felt he was the most effective center in the Western Athletic Conference. He scored in double figures in 11 of his last 15 games.

But just as he appeared to be hitting his stride, Usevitch left on a two-year Mormon mission in New Zealand.

Anderson said that of all the players he has watched leave on missions--six on the present BYU team--Usevitch was the only one he worried would have a devastating effect on his team, and his job status.

“When he came to say goodby, I said, ‘I hope I’m here when you get back,’ ” Anderson said.

In New Zealand, Usevitch lived in a house divided into three flats. The floors were warped, the water pressure was so weak that to take a shower he had to sit in the tub and hold a hose over himself. He gained weight and played basketball once every few months.

When he got back, the former best center in the WAC found out how far he had slipped.

“Someone called me to play against some high school kids,” he said. “I wanted to get back in shape so I said yes. Well, my first four shots were blocked by a kid who was 6-6. I knew right then I had a long way to go.”

BYU athletes who go on missions know the feeling well. They call it missionary legs.

“It takes about a year to get back to full strength,” said Smith, who did a two-year mission in Argentina.

Usevitch would have preferred to redshirt his first year back. But when 6-9 Alan Pollard transferred to USC, Anderson thought Usevitch was needed right away.

And so he had to play himself back into shape. Playing behind Tom Gneiting, he spent his time off the court lifting weights. He’s still known to pass up postgame showers for a half-hour of pumping iron.

Toward the end of last season, his playing time and statistics grew.

“I told people, look out, Jim is going to be a force next season,” Smith said.

Today, Usevitch, Smith and forward Jeff Chatman make up what has become one of college basketball’s most effective front lines. They average 59 points a game as a trio. BYU averages 92 points a game as a team.

For most people, this team is about Smith and Chatman, bookend forwards with a good chance of making a living in the National Basketball Assn.

Smith, from Hacienda Heights, is flamboyant, cocky and gifted. He’s 6-10 and led the WAC in three-point shooting last season.

Chatman is 6-6 with long arms and a turnaround jump shot that is practically unstoppable.

Usevitch?

“He gets about 0% credit,” said Kevin Niendorf, assistant sports editor of the Daily Universe, the campus paper. “The only people who appreciate him are the people who really know what this team is about.”

Usevitch is uncannily consistent. Averaging more than 15 points and 7 rebounds a game, he is relentless inside. His shots rarely come from outside the key. His rebounds are rarely grabbed over the rim. He is an opportunistic garbage man that just keeps coming.

“Of all the people I’ve played against, I hate to play against him in practice the most,” Smith said. “He never stops. You know he’s always going to bump you and post you and work you. He wears down your body, but what’s more he wears down your mind. You don’t even want to try anymore because you know he’s coming.

“He’s done that all year for us. He gets whatever this team needs. A block, a basket. If I’m not scoring, he’ll pick up the slack.”

Against New Mexico, Usevitch led all BYU scorers with 24 points. In the Tulsa game, with Smith scoring just 13, 9 points below his season average, Usevitch had 21 points.

“People said he couldn’t play, they said he didn’t have the ability,” Anderson said. “But you can’t measure his heart, his will.”

Smith said: “He’s the most decent human being you’ll ever meet, period.”

BYU, as most of its inhabitants will admit, is a conservative school that admires the traditional values of God, country and an honest day’s work.

“We’re the type of people who want to pay taxes,” Anderson said.

When the U.S. flag is raised at 7:45 a.m. and lowered at 5:30 p.m. the national anthem is played and every person on campus is bound to stand at attention. During the singing of the national anthem before a basketball game, nearly all of a BYU crowd will not only sing but place their hands over their hearts.

“We take that very serious around here,” said Jeffrey Holland, BYU president. “Maybe that’s why we appreciate Jim so much. He has had to work so hard and yet he has never lost his enthusiasm or his faith. As I recall, they weren’t going to offer him a scholarship. That shows you how far he’s come.”

Far? Try full circle.

“I remember hearing about one of the first practices Jim was in,” said John Hansen, a BYU assistant. “He was inside, and Greg Kite threw an elbow that caught Jim in the face. He was bleeding from his mouth, but he got right up and kept playing.”

Usevitch said: “I learned a long time ago that I had to play hard inside. Never dirty, but hard. It’s nothing personal against whoever I’m going against. Sometimes people don’t understand that.”

In the opening round of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament last season against New Orleans, Usevitch so infuriated one opponent that he picked up the ball and fired it at Usevitch’s head. What did Usevitch do?

“I ducked.”

Which marks one of the few times Jim Usevitch has avoided a hard knock.