Loyola Going Like ’61 in ’88 : This Team Runs Until <i> You</i> Drop

Paul Westhead is a great fancier of horse racing, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen his Loyola Marymount basketball team play.

When Westhead and his wife, Cassie, were touring Ireland in 1981, they took in the Irish Derby. The great steed Shergar won that race, by a mile, and jockey Lester Piggott did a remarkable thing at the top of the homestretch.

“He stood up in the stirrups and waved at the people in the grandstands,” Westhead says. “The headline in the paper the next day was ‘Shergar Wins in a Common Canter.’ ”

Westhead laughs, sips his coffee, and says,

“One thing’s for sure. We’re never going to win in a common canter.”

Few teams in the history of James Naismith’s sport have ever been more uncommon or more anti-canter than Westhead’s Loyola Lions. They have scored at a faster rate--110.4 points a game--than any team in college history except for the 1975-76 Nevada Las Vegas team, which averaged 110.5. The Lions have won 24 straight games and enter the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. playoffs as a dark-horse, or at least a horse of a different color.

It’s a crazy story. Westhead stumbled upon a new formula this season, got some great transfer students and elevated his usual race-horse style of play into a whole new stratosphere.

Westhead is the nutty professor, a very uncommon cantor. An English professor at Loyola by day, he runs his team with a philosophy borrowed from Thoreau--”Simplify, simplify.”

Loyola has no playbook. Loyola has no plays. You won’t see the point guard hold up fingers unless he’s testing the wind for a 40-foot jump shot. The team has no real center.

Westhead runs all practices at warp speed, full-court, nonstop, always. He begs his players to shoot fast and often, with no conscience or hesitation. When Westhead wanted advice on improving his team’s defensive press, he spent half a day with the L.A. Rams’ coaching staff.

He has reduced the game to its barest essentials, to a point where, come game time, the coach has all the function of a pinup calendar on a garage wall--nothing more than a familiar face to look at during breaks.

“I don’t think we’re middle America’s favorite team,” says Westhead, laughing again, clearly enjoying the team’s offbeat image and run of glory. “We don’t have nine plays on the right hand, nine defensive counters on the left hand. We have a kind of general notion of how our guys are going to defend. They kind of make it up as we go.

“Some people in our league (the West Coast Athletic Conference) questioned if this was the way the game was conceived. We’re all disciples of what has worked. In college, the Bobby Knight approach has worked. Very methodical, take your time on offense, pick the defense apart until they beg for mercy.

“I’m not knocking, but we do the exact opposite. We’re kind of laughing in the face of tradition. Basically, basketball coaches like to have control of their team, and if the players shoot the ball within a second and a half of getting it, as we have done, the coach is not going to have much control.”

The more intense the game, the calmer Westhead’s sideline demeanor. In big games he could pass for the host of “Masterpiece Theater.”

“I try to put on a face to meet the faces I meet,” Westhead says, properly crediting that philosophy to T. S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Then Westhead laughs again.

“Our guys play at such a pace, they don’t have time to see what’s going on on the sidelines. Nothing matters to them. I could leave the gym. They have reduced the game to its barest essentials.

“Basketball’s a very simple game. The slower you play it, the more complex you make it. The simpler you make it, the more you put it back into the hands of the players.”

You can hear other coaches saying: “Into the hands of the who ?”

That’s why Westhead figures he will never be in big demand at basketball clinics.

“I could end clinics,” he says.

It all sounds so simple, but several questions are raised. One of them is: “Hey. Westhead. Isn’t he the clown who got fired for slowing down the Lakers?”

To quickly rehash the old story, Westhead was fired as Laker coach early in the 1981-82 season. Westhead swears he slowed down the team briefly in order to install a new half-court system, vital for NBA survival, and was totally committed to returning to master-blaster showtime Lakerball real soon.

But Westhead lost control of the situation, the players reacted immaturely, and as Westhead became a Howard Hughes-ian recluse he alienated team owner Jerry Buss. Westhead was out, Pat Riley was in.

Then, simply enough, Westhead got fired as coach of the Chicago Bulls for two reasons:

--The Bulls had no talent then, and no-talent teams tend to fire a lot of coaches.

--The Bulls considered Westhead a run-crazy space cadet.

Be assured of this: Westhead has been, for all his years, a race-horse coach, total fast break. That’s how he came to the Lakers in the first place, as a right-hand man to Jack McKinney, also a showtime-style coach.

So it is no surprise that Loyola runs. But 110 points a game? What happened?

For one thing, in his third season at Loyola, Westhead got the horses, so to speak. He already had players who believed in his kamikaze system--Mike Yoest, Mark Armstrong, Enoch Simmons and Jeff Fryer. He inherited three real nice transfers--Bo Kimble and Hank Gathers from USC and Corey Gaines from UCLA--who were willing to buy into the system heart and soul.

“They’d have done anything,” Westhead says of the transfers. “For them it was, ‘What’s the script? Just gimme the script.’ ”

Chemistry.

And serendipity.

“I’ve always been a running coach, but I’ve never been much for a pressing defense,” Westhead says. “I never thought it was humanly possible to do both. I found out different by accident. I was tired of teams in our league slowing the ball down on us. In the past I’d grin and bear it, then I did this new thing initially as retaliation.”

He told his players to press full-court, man-to-man, cheek-to-cheek.

“We found that our defense makes the other team’s offense play at our pace, and I’ve never seen that happen in basketball before, at any level. We announce that we are going to shoot the ball within seven seconds. We find that the opposition, even a slow-down team, shoots it in less time than that, because we either steal the ball or give you a layup, and who wouldn’t take a layup, for free, in four seconds?”

It’s the damnedest thing you’ve ever seen.

“Against Santa Clara in the regular season, we gave up 15 or 16 layups in the first half. But we forced 28 turnovers in the game. We’ll beat anybody in a layup contest.

“We never practice a zone offense, because we’re going to shoot the ball before you get your zone set up. If we get you in a fast pace, we’ll score 100 points without blinking.”

Winning the game, of course, is a little more difficult.

“I admit this style wasn’t coldly calculated. The press was an obvious solution to avoiding a slowdown, but I didn’t know it was humanly possible to play all-out, both ways. Our guys are probably the best-conditioned athletes in the world.”

There was more to the system than simply rolling out the balls and pointing the way to the hoop. Westhead broke down ingrained habits.

“You learn the game at a certain pace. You think it’s the only way to play,” says Westhead, a dedicated marathon runner in his spare time. “One team scores, there’s always a moment there where they wave to the fans, the other team takes a deep breath, roll their eyes at each other. There’s a lag there of a few seconds, and I always felt that was wasted time.

“So that’s the way we practice. We never run anything half-court, it’s continual transition. It’s more of a mental practice than just the physical.”

Unconventional? That’s Westhead.

Example: It occurred to him that on the press, his players function like football defensive backs. The opponent in-bounding the ball is like the quarterback, trying to complete a touchdown pass.

So Westhead phoned the Rams and asked defensive coordinator Fritz Shurmur to be allowed to sit down with the coaches for a morning. Westhead picked up several valuable pointers, little things, such as having Corey Gaines play a half-step off his man, rather than straight up. It made a dramatic difference.

Yes, the Lions are actually well coached and well prepared. Still, they constantly run a fine line between artistic genius and vaudeville pratfall. With very good, but not overwhelming, talent, the Westhead system requires complete commitment by every player, every second. For giving him that, Westhead is eternally grateful to the players on this team.

In return, he lets them shoot the ball with all the forethought and aplomb of five guys desperately bailing out a leaky lifeboat.

In the conference title-clinching game against Santa Clara, Bo Kimble shot 2 for 15 in the first half, and Loyola trailed. The first two Loyola shots of the second half were three-point bombs by Kimble. Both good. Exit, Santa Clara.

The Lions led one game by 10 points with 20 seconds remaining, and guard Jeff Fryer got the ball and immediately cast up a three-pointer.

“Without blinking,” Westhead says.

There’s no time for blinking in Loyolaball, as opposed to what Westhead refers to as the normal style of basketball.

If the Lions haven’t won the affection of the game’s purists, they are surely the sweethearts of the playground. Since most kids like to run, Loyola’s style and exposure this season might make it easier for Westhead to recruit the blue-chip types who have always overlooked Loyola, with its tradition of dreadful basketball.

So Thursday’s NCAA first-round game against Wyoming in Salt Lake City could mark the start of a dynasty. Or it could simply be the end of a wonderful whirl of a season at the little school on the bluffs overlooking Playa del Rey.

Either way, the style is infectious. Just the other day, the girls’ varsity team at St. Bernard High School was trailing its archrival at the end of three quarters, 49-36. In girls’ basketball, that’s an insurmountable lead. Chick Hearn refrigerator time.

But St. Bernard went berserk, running, pressing, stealing, snarling. They Loyola’d the other team to death and won the game, 69-63.

It was a big win for St. Bernard Coach Monica Westhead, Paul and Cassie’s eldest daughter.