ON THE PROWL : Possessed by the Game, Bill Frieder Has Had Success; Others Have Doubts

Everything you don’t know about Bill Frieder, he is prepared to tell you, if only you can keep the man still.

Frieder, for eight years the coach of the University of Michigan’s basketball team, doesn’t have the patience for a newspaper--which he skims only for other coaches’ quotes--nor for movies. Even on airplanes, he is a pacer.

On nights before Michigan games, when the players are supposed to be asleep, Frieder sometimes slips into the room of Gary Grant and Glen Rice, his star players, and wakes them to talk a little basketball.

When Frieder finally leaves, Grant and Rice often peek down the hall. “He’ll just be pacing,” Grant said. “He’ll go get a Coke, drink it and come back to my room. We’re used to it by now.”

In an occupation known for its share of night owls and people estranged from popular culture, Frieder may be the most extreme example of them all.

He is a coach whose knowledge of everyday life extends little beyond fast food, who says he does not read books and who at one time, as an assistant to then-Michigan Coach Johnny Orr, was such a tireless recruiter that between Christmas and the end of the season he ate only two meals at home.

His body clock has no rhythm. He goes and goes until he is exhausted, flops down, then rises in a few hours and goes some more.

After a game, he sometimes watches the film, writes a few letters to recruits, watches a game on TV--”I love that ESPN!”--grabs a bit of sleep around 4 a.m. and is back at Crisler Arena at 7 a.m.

His reputation as an obsessive recruiter can stand on one anecdote.

Some years back, someone is supposed to have said of Glenn (Doc) Rivers, then an Illinois high school player who eventually went to Marquette and now plays for the Atlanta Hawks: “If Bo Derek is a 10, then Doc Rivers is a 9.”

To which Frieder admits he responded: “Forget Rivers, who’s this Bo Derek kid?”

He is a man so consumed with basketball that he swears he has not seen a movie since “The Godfather” in 1972, and that in the 20-plus years of his marriage to his wife, Janice, the Frieders have seen precisely three movies, the two others being “Rosemary’s Baby” in 1968 and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in 1969.

“Movies take too much time,” Frieder said. “I don’t need that.”

This apparent single-mindedness may lead one to wonder how he managed to meet his wife in the first place. Simple enough. She is the daughter of Frieder’s high school basketball coach at Saginaw High in Saginaw, Mich.

He treats his body as a gas tank, to be refueled only when empty.

“I’m a sandwich guy, a Wendy’s guy,” Frieder said. “I don’t eat at certain times. I don’t normally eat, period. I eat when I get hungry--or I just drink a Pepsi.”

But although he has guided Michigan to a 165-79 record in eight seasons and led them to a school-record 28 victories in 1985-86, his reputation as a coach has one major failing--negligible success in the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament.

He was named national coach of the year by the Associated Press in 1985, but if you haven’t heard much about Frieder, it’s probably because he’s never around after the first weekend of the tournament.

Although Michigan won consecutive Big Ten championships in 1985 and ‘86, the Wolverines have lost in the second round in each of the past three years, and no Frieder-coached team has ever made it to the third round.

His 1984 team won the National Invitation Tournament, but that has been no great solace to the people of Ann Arbor, where the Wolverine failures in the tournament have been well noted. Michigan went to the Final Four twice under Dave Strack in 1964 and 1965, and once under Orr, in 1976, when Michigan lost to Indiana in the national championship game.

“What has happened to Bill is a continuation of the great years,” said Jud Heathcote, Michigan State coach, who despite being Frieder’s in-state rival is one of his better friends among Big Ten coaches. “They’ve won the back-to-back Big Ten titles but lost in the NCAA second round and people look at that and say, ‘Well, you haven’t been successful.’

“They’ve had tremendous success, but so many people here measure that by, ‘Did you win it all?’ Even Bo Schembechler, they say he can’t win the bowl games. They lose the Rose Bowl and you’d think they’d gone oh and 11.”

Michigan (24-7) ranked 10th in the AP poll, is about to try once more in the NCAA tournament. The Wolverines, who were highly regarded much of the season but faltered late, falling out of contention for the Big Ten title, will play Boise State (24-5) Thursday at Salt Lake City in the first round of the West Regional.

Frieder’s detractors question his abilities as a bench coach, and point to the sometimes brilliant, sometimes lackadaisical play of his often tremendously talented teams.

Already this season, some of that erratic play has been evident. Earlier this season, Michigan beat Iowa, 120-103. In the teams’ second meeting, Michigan took itself out of the Big Ten race with a 95-87 loss.

“They sometimes have trouble,” Heathcote said. “They have tremendous talent, but they seem to have lapses of 10 minutes every game. If they can eliminate that--either the kids themselves or the coaching staff--they can go to the Final Four, even win the national championship.”

Frieder has also come under some criticism for what is regarded as a lack of attention to academics.

Michigan is known as one of the best academic institutions in the country. But the year that Proposition 48 took effect, two of Michigan’s prize recruits--Rumeal Robinson and Terry Mills--failed to meet the academic guidelines and were forced to sit out.

This season, freshmen Demetrius Calip and Sean Higgins, the former Los Angeles Fairfax High star who was released from a letter of intent with UCLA and then signed with Michigan, were declared academically ineligible for the second semester.

Robinson, Frieder said, has a learning disability that prevented him from performing well on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Mills, he said, probably didn’t have the academic ability to be at Michigan.

“People were upset we admitted Mills. To my recollection, we’d been recruiting him for five years. Then he took the test and didn’t do well. It might have been embarrassing for the university, but I think we had a moral obligation to admit him after recruiting him that long. I don’t see what’s wrong with giving a kid a chance.

“I’ll be honest with you. If I’m going to be the basketball coach and I believe they can do the work and somebody starts telling me I can’t admit them, I can’t coach here. If you want the program, you have to let me run it.”

As for Higgins and Calip, Frieder said they did not do well on their finals but had been doing well at midterm. Higgins, Frieder said, was close to the university’s 2.0 grade-point average but had missed a number of classes.

“That’s not going to give you the breaks,” Frieder said.

Mostly, Frieder chooses to ignore his detractors.

“I’ve got confidence. That’s why I don’t worry about people that complain about me,” he said. “I know I can go out and fleece them all to make a living. I know I’m more competent than most of them.”

Frieder is a 1964 graduate of Michigan, although his involvement with the basketball team as a student went no further than that of a fan, shouting from the stands.

“I was crazy on the coaches,” he said.

Cazzie Russell was playing in those days, and Frieder stuck around for an extra year after graduating “just to watch that team,” which lost to UCLA in the 1965 national championship game.

He also earned a master’s degree in business administration, a degree that earned him a job offer from Standard Oil at a starting salary of more than $12,000, a pretty penny in 1965.

Frieder turned the job down and took a salary of less than $5,000 for teaching and coaching the junior varsity team at Alpena High in Alpena, Mich.

After two years, he got out of coaching for a year and sold insurance. Success came easy, as it always has for Frieder in anything that has to do with numbers. He was his company’s top salesman in Michigan that year, and one of the top five in the nation.

“It was just like recruiting or anything else,” Frieder said. “You go out and hustle and talk to people and get appointments and you do well. I’ve got great confidence that if I’m ever fired I can go make money.”

After a year, though, he wanted to get back into basketball and took a job as the junior varsity coach at Flint Northern High in Flint, Mich. He then became the varsity coach and guided the school to a 22-2 record and a Class A state championship as a first-year varsity coach.

The next year his team was 25-0 and won the championship again. The year after that, his team slipped to 18-7, but it didn’t much matter. By the end of the year, Frieder had persuaded Orr to hire him as his assistant.

The tale of his hiring is one that reveals Frieder’s persistence.

Orr was playing in a charity golf tournament, and Frieder showed up to tell him he wanted the job. Orr didn’t want to discuss it right then, and headed into the clubhouse. Frieder followed. Orr still didn’t want to talk. That night, Orr had to drive north for some reason, more than 100 miles. Frieder followed him.

“I just kept chasing him,” Frieder said. “Luckily for me, he stopped after about 30 or 40 miles and said OK.”

Heathcote said that some of Frieder’s tales of long hours are to be taken with a grain of salt.

“Everybody works hard. He just talks about it a little more,” Heathcote said. “There are a lot of coaches wrapped up that much in the game during the season. Bill might be an exception in that he’s basketball 12 months a year, rather than four.”

Seven years after becoming an assistant, Frieder was named head coach when Orr left to take the job at Iowa State.

There are apparently only a few things that can hold Frieder’s interest for more than about 20 minutes. Basketball is one. So is blackjack. Although reports differ as to whether he has given up his penchant for the game, Frieder readily admits that he has been banned from several Las Vegas casinos for being a card counter.

The mind for numbers that has helped him play the stock market and the real estate market with great success over the years and that can call up the halftime score of many a long-past game gave him great success at blackjack. In the days when he was a poorly paid high school and assistant coach, Frieder said he would make twice-yearly trips to Las Vegas to pick up a quick couple of thousand. No more, he says.

“I can make that kind of money with one speech now,” he said. “It doesn’t make business sense to go.”

Numbers have been his thing since he was small, Frieder said.

“If it’s a number, and it’s important, I can remember it.”

As a boy in Saginaw, he worked in his father’s produce business.

“I grew up in the fruit market, the wholesale and retail business, dealing with numbers every day. So many quarts to sell, so many pecks in a bushel. I was always really good with numbers, really good.”

The business venture that currently is holding Frieder’s interest is a book he is writing with Jeff Mortimer, a reporter with the Ann Arbor News.

The working title: “Basket Case.” An earlier version: “The Way to Fried-um.”

Frieder received national attention earlier this season when he appeared to be shoving either a television camera or the cameraman as he went into the locker room at halftime of the Michigan-Iowa game, angry over an official’s call. He defends himself briefly, but then throws up his hands.

“The more controversy, the better my book will sell.”

That incident is one that prompted Dick Vitale, the ESPN commentator, to say that “Frieder makes Bobby Knight look like Mother Teresa.” It is a good line, but one that Vitale has used with other coaches’ names in the blank.

Frieder takes offense at being compared to Knight.

“I’d commit suicide before I got that bad,” he said.

It is not lost on Frieder that he will be following in the steps of Knight, his Big Ten rival, when the book is published.

Knight, of course, was the subject of the 1986 best seller, “A Season on the Brink,” by John Feinstein of the Washington Post.

Included in that book was an account of the start of a feud between Frieder and Knight, whom Frieder almost unfailingly calls “the irascible Bobby Knight.”

The gist of the story is that Frieder approached Knight a number of years ago before a Michigan-Indiana game and asked him to speak to a reporter who Frieder thought was being unfair. Knight, long an admirer of Orr and--at the time--a friend of Frieder’s, agreed.

Then, during the game, Frieder yelled at the officials to give Knight a technical foul. Knight thought that unconscionably disloyal after having granted the favor. The two hardly have spoken since.

“He told his side, now I get to tell my side,” Frieder said.

What is Frieder’s side? He’s not saying.

Frieder, not talking?

“I’m promoting my book.”

A few wins in the NCAA tournament would probably help.