Come Out to Welcome Larry Back

Bring back Brown.

Bring back Brown.

Bring back Brown.

Bruins should be brown, so we want Larry. Come on, you UCLA basketball fans, let’s hear it. Let Larry Brown have his old job back. Let him be coach again. Love is wonderful, the second time around.

Look, Steinbrenner brought back Martin. Taylor kissed and made up with Burton. Paul is talking about singing again with George and Ringo. You know Maddie’s going to go back to David. Hey, people can get back together. Reunions are fun. Let’s call up that nice Larry Brown in Kansas City right now and tell him we are going to fix him up again with that beautiful babe UCLA. It’ll be more fun than phoning the 976 Party Line.

Jim Valvano doesn’t want the job. That much became clear Saturday, when Valvano withdrew. He and his wife went out and priced houses when they were in town Friday, so maybe that drove them right back to North Carolina, where a two-bedroom home can actually be bought for less than $300,000. Really.

The suspicion of your obedient servant is that Valvano doesn’t want UCLA because UCLA doesn’t want Valvano. Not at that price. Valvano reportedly would have needed something like $2.5 million to coach the Bruins. If he’d have squeezed that quarter-million out of that turnip, football’s Terry Donahue would have marched into the athletic director’s office the next day and demanded $2,500,001. Either that, or he would have sent six large defensive linemen into the office to terrorize that athletic director.

So, it’s a no from Valvano. Tom Lasorda is safe. He still has the L.A. market cornered on wacky Italians. Valvano would have been in town about 15 minutes and had a sandwich named after him at Musso and Frank’s. Within 30 minutes, the place would have been Musso and Frank and Jim’s. He’d have had a guest appearance on “ALF.” Jim Valvano is to shy what Doc Severinsen is to drab.

So, where does that leave us? That leaves us with Larry Brown.

Lucky us.

Brown is the man we want. Brown is the man for the job. He was the man for the job the last time he had the job. He knew that. We knew that. We were all just a little slow on the uptake when it came to realizing that.

Spread out the Westwood welcome mat. Brown called leaving UCLA “the biggest mistake I ever made.” We hear that he wants his old job back so badly that he’s been on the phone, telling them not to do anything until he could get finished with this Kansas business at the Final Four and come make his case in person.

That probably explains Saturday. When Kansas started out so fast against Duke in that tournament game, it probably was because the coach told the Jayhawks to hurry up and get this thing over with, since he had pressing business somewhere else. If the game was close, Duke would just call a whole bunch of timeouts and keep dragging the damn thing on and on and on.

Just kidding. It’s true, though, evidently, that Larry Brown does want the UCLA job, just as it is true that we want Larry. Do you hear that, UCLA people? Bring back Brown. The man can coach. The man has been to the Final Four three times in the 1980s alone, and not exactly with Lew Alcindors and Bill Waltons on his squad. The man is smart, energetic, experienced, cute and wears swell Ralph Lauren sweaters.

We want Larry. And we don’t just want him because we can’t have Valvano or because we can’t have Lute Olson. We don’t even care that Arizona sealed off Olson’s escape clause so that he can’t flee to another Pac-10 team. We don’t need Lute. Besides, we shouldn’t be trying to hire an Arizona coach who hasn’t even served out his Iowa contract yet.

There is nothing Olson can do for UCLA that Brown cannot. Brown is a name. Brown can recruit. Brown is a game coach. He isn’t one of those guys who just stands there on the sidelines waiting for CBS to call a timeout. Brown knows what he’s doing. He could have won 20 games with Danny Manning and any four guys from Topeka.

“Larry Brown is a great, great coach,” as Billy Packer said Saturday on TV.

There’s only one problem with Larry Brown.

What if UCLA can’t get him? What if, now that Valvano and Olson are out of the picture, Brown changes his mind? Or raises his price? After all, the Nike’s now on the other foot.

Well, there’s always the Pepperdine coach. Or the Loyola Marymount coach. Or maybe one of those coaches from the East who have been snapping up Southern California’s best high school players the last few years.

We’ll think about that later.

For now, call Larry and tell him we’re leaving the porch light on.

Offer him profit-sharing. Reagan’s new house in Bel-Air, rent-free. Donahue’s car. A Westwood frozen yogurt stand. Whatever it takes. Lie if you have to. Just get him here.