UCLA’s National Search Has Local Ending : After the Big Names Spin Out, It’s Time to Take Positive Turn

Jim Harrick, come on down. The price is right. The job is yours. You are the new UCLA basketball coach. You are our winner. We’ll have nice parting gifts for all our other contestants.

Congratulations, Jim. It’s you and UCLA, kid. You win the car, the desk, the chair, the lamp, the VCR and the lifetime supply of towels and jockstraps. We’ll put the rest on a gift certificate.

Your players? Well, they’re ready for you. Of course, they were ready for anybody. They heard everybody but Bobby Knight and Gene Hackman mentioned for the job. They saw Larry Brown spin around more often than the Temptations.

Several of them thought they might be old and bald as the former Lew Alcindor before UCLA finally found its next coach--but, now that you’re the man, they welcome you with open sleeveless arms, and intend to treat you with the same courtesy and respect they would have given UCLA’s first choice. Or second choice. Or third choice. Or people’s choice. Or taster’s choice. Or whatever.

Pooh Richardson, the Bruin basketball player, for one, definitely feels that way, saying of UCLA’s administrators, “I hope they don’t look at him as some sort of consolation prize.”

We like your attitude, too, Jim. First, get your foot in the door. Then, make the sale. Three or 30 years from now, nobody will care how you got the job. All they will care about are the important things--like, how many Final Fours have you been to, and how many dreamy Simi Valley schoolboys have you signed lately, and how many times have you been told that you were just what everybody from the UCLA student union to the faculty lounge had been looking for? Another wizard.

“Did you know that John Wooden was the fourth choice of UCLA when he got the job?” Harrick asked after his introductory press conference Tuesday. “He’s told me that story many, many times. And, if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.”

For anybody out there wondering how Harrick happened to land this attractive position, we hereby include a capsule summary. Be advised that UCLA found him at Pepperdine University of Malibu, and not at the Ajax Employment Agency.

Be also advised that Harrick is an alumnus of Morris Harvey College--which, as most of us know, was one of the four or five hundred best basketball schools in all of West Virginia. And that was even before it became the University of Charleston.

It all began the other day when Larry Brown, who changes his mind the way Cher changes her clothes, called up one more time to say, “Hello, I must be going.”

It was 3:30 in the morning, Jayhawk Saving Time, when he turned the crank on his telephone and had Marge, the Kansas operator, dial the UCLA athletic director Sunday to confirm that he was absolutely, positively, definitely, incontrovertibly not accepting the UCLA job, he was pretty sure.

Larry had to be at the White House later that same day, to be part of the Rose Garden ceremony honoring his championship team, and to give Edwin Meese a few good tips if he was intending to check out the job market.

UCLA Athletic Director Peter Dalis did not take his phone off the hook, though, because, as he said of Brown, “I don’t think he went to bed all night.” Dalis half-expected another call around dawn, with Brown volunteering to coach weeknights at Kansas and weekends at UCLA.

Meanwhile, out in wavy Malibu, poor Jim Harrick waited and waited. He drove along in his car and worried and wondered and felt as uncomfortable as it is humanly possible to feel in Malibu. Life was indeed fine at Pepperdine, which happens to have a campus that is slightly uglier than Utopia and slightly prettier than Hugh Hefner’s place in Holmby Hills. Yet, Harrick wanted that UCLA job, even if others from coast to coast didn’t.

“One thing about a basketball coach--you’d better never, ever, ever, ever, ever give up,” Harrick said. “I’m sure it did occur to me several times this past weekend, ‘Jim, this job has passed you by.’ I was caught in a whirlwind. Your mind is going about 82 m.p.h. while your body’s trying to go 40. But, opportunity is a strange thing. Sometimes it comes around more than once or twice.”

It first came around when a reporter called up Harrick and told him Larry Brown had finally followed Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s advice: Just say no. This was Friday, when Brown said his most surprising no.

“C’mon, don’t play with me,” Harrick told the reporter at this news. “You’re kidding, right?”

Then came the long weekend, when Harrick waited for UCLA’s Dalis to call. What he didn’t realize was that Dalis was busy hearing Brown’s second, third and fourth thoughts on the matter.

From the beginning, Dalis had been straight with Harrick, telling him where he stood, which was at the back of the line behind Downtown Lawrence Brown. Harrick said he understood. He also said he wasn’t sure he’d leave Pepperdine for the Lakers or Celtics, but he was ready to leave it for UCLA.

At long last, UCLA called. Leave Malibu, Dalis said. Take the Pacific Coast Highway. Turn left at Sunset Boulevard. Cross the 405. Stop when you see Westwood. Pull into a parking space. It’ll have your name on it.

“I tried to bring my office and view here, too, but they wouldn’t let me,” Harrick said.

What if he drives that ocean drive back to Pepperdine to get his stuff, and they won’t let him leave, as Lawrence did to Larry Brown?

“Nope. They’ve closed off that road to me,” Harrick said.

He is gone for good, and UCLA’s players are glad to have him. Glad to have anybody, but glad to have Harrick in particular. Richardson knows him. He played for him in the Pan-American Games. Pooh calls him a class act and believes the Bruins are as well off as if they had gotten a big name.

“Guys were rumored to be coming from the Midwest and all over the place,” Richardson said. “You just can’t go out and snatch somebody’s coach, just because you want him. You just can’t say, ‘I’m gonna get Dean Smith. C’mon, Dean. Let’s go. Pack your bag.’

“Coach Harrick was what you call a dark-horse candidate, but we made out all right. Changes have been made. And anybody who doesn’t like it, I’ll root for them to leave right now. Not me. I’m staying.”

Trevor Wilson, once rumored to be going, also is staying. The sophomore forward said of Harrick: “He’s going to be demanding. I have friends at Pepperdine who say he won’t take anything less than 100%. Well, I hope so. We got excited about the big-name coaches we were hearing about, just because of their reputations, but Coach Harrick knows this place better than some outsider.”

Harrick was so excited to come, he had UCLA make out an agreement and he signed it before any money figures were jotted down on it. They can fill it in later, he said, sounding something like Andre Dawson. All he wants is to get started on the job, to get UCLA’s players to play with “insatiable pride,” to settle for championships and not consolation prizes.

And, of course, to make it to the national tournament.

Wilson was in the back of the room when Dalis asked: “Trevor, are we going to make it next year?”

Wilson didn’t answer out loud, but he nodded.

“Little more positive, please!” Jim Harrick shouted.

Out with the old, in with the new.