Analysis : A TOUGH CALL : One Phone Conversation May Have Cost UCLA the Deal With Brown, but at Least Some Think It Was for the Best

It’s a story that will be told and retold, analyzed and embellished until it has become a legend. Larry Brown accepted the UCLA job, flew back to Kansas to announce his resignation and, instead, announced that he was staying at Kansas.

So what happened?

Did UCLA blow this deal? Did UCLA really offer so much he was embarrassed? Is Larry Brown crazy? Why didn’t the whole scenario end when Brown said that he had decided to stay at Kansas?

Did one phone call from a guy named Joe Glass make all of the difference?

Let’s start with the firing of Walt Hazzard as UCLA’s basketball coach. The timing on that was a little unusual. It wasn’t at the end of the Bruins’ season. It was a couple of weeks later, just before the start of the Final Four.

The splash story of the day was that Jim Valvano of North Carolina State was being offered however many millions of dollars to come to UCLA. Not so. The smart money, from the start, was on Brown.

Brown, who had coached successful Bruin teams in 1979-80 and 1980-81, had left, in frustration over run-ins with the administration. But he had left a lot of good friends at UCLA, and they started paving the way for his return.

Brown had been saying since the day after he quit eight years ago, and up through his appearance in the Final Four, that leaving UCLA was the biggest mistake he had ever made. He loved UCLA.

The question, reportedly, was whether UCLA officials would take him back after he had left in the first place. He asked all of his friends to put in a word for him.

Well, the UCLA officials were convinced when Brown won the national title that Monday night. On Thursday, they sent a Lear jet to Kansas to pick him up, and they brought him and some of his assistants back to Westwood and had a meeting that was, by all accounts, not just productive, but warm. There was a camaraderie about that meeting, which lasted until 1:30 a.m. A deal was offered, and accepted.

Brown himself placed a call to his old friend Jim Lampley at Channel 2 to announce that he would be the next UCLA basketball coach. It was a done deal. Brown was ecstatic.

But before Brown signed the contract, he thought that he should return to Kansas to tell his players, the national champions, and to hand his athletic director his letter of resignation.

Peter Dalis, UCLA athletic director, had a bad feeling about that. He knew Brown to be an emotional, excitable guy. He wasn’t sure what Brown’s reaction would be when he got back among the loving folks who didn’t want him to leave.

At UCLA, there were those wishing he had lost to Oklahoma in that final game so that the pressure and the emotions would not be running so high for him back home.

Dalis wanted Brown to sign the contract before he left. But in the end, Dalis let him do it his way.

Brown was quiet on the trip back to Kansas. Those with him figured he was just exhausted. He hadn’t had a moment’s sleep in days. And he is known to have mood swings.

The plan was for Brown to take his letter of resignation to Kansas Athletic Director Bob Frederick, and for Frederick to announce the resignation at a press conference. But because there were more than 300 people waiting in the athletic offices, Frederick offered to go to Brown’s house to pick up the letter. Brown’s secretary was at his house with the letter ready.

When Frederick arrived, Brown was talking on the telephone. Frederick doesn’t even try to take credit for making a counter offer or just a plain persuasive debate in getting Brown to stay at Kansas. Frederick admits that when Brown hung up the telephone, he turned to Frederick and told him he was staying at Kansas.

It all came down to the eleventh-hour call or calls made while the jet was waiting and Brown was packing. The key call was from Joe Glass, Brown’s godfather and financial adviser, the man who took him in and raised him. Glass had not been included in the negotiations with UCLA.

Old-timers at UCLA recall that Glass hasn’t been real fond of UCLA since the late J. D. Morgan, the athletic director when Brown was hired the first time, told Glass that he didn’t deal through agents, he dealt directly with his coaches. And now, again, Glass was not included. He was in New York.

When Brown went over some of the points of the contract with Glass, they discovered a discrepancy. One item appeared in the contract different from the way it had been discussed earlier. Brown was told he would be given a large loan, at a low-interest rate, and that the interest would be dropped altogether if he stayed long enough. On the contract, that was written in as a mortgage loan.

Glass pointed out to Brown that he should be able to use that money any way he wanted. He reportedly got Brown riled up by suggesting that the folks at UCLA were trying to slide something past him. Brown called UCLA and was assured, very shortly thereafter, that the wording would be changed. But by then it was too late. The damage was done.

Shouldn’t UCLA have known that any little glitch could nix a deal with such a volatile person as Brown? Sure, they knew that. They thought they had the contract just the way he wanted it. And when they learned they didn’t, they thought that by agreeing to make it the way he wanted it, they had solved the problem.

When he was interviewed by Lampley later in the day, Brown said that UCLA’s offer was more than he had ever expected. And the next day he told a reporter that it was “too generous.”

At UCLA, they were not kicking themselves for the glitch but for letting Brown out of their sight. Had someone been by his side, his reaction to the phone call might have been defused. But, on the other hand, do you want a coach who has to be watched? After seeing Brown visibly distressed as he announced that he was staying at Kansas, seeing him almost cringe at the cheers from Kansas fans, hearing him say in an interview that evening that he had wanted to be the UCLA coach, they were begining to wonder if he knew what he wanted.

And they were beginning to wonder if they wanted a coach who was so unpredictable, so touchy. As one UCLA official had put it the day of Brown’s visit: “He’s like a cat on a hot tin roof. We don’t want to do anything to upset him. He’s so skittish.”

That sort of thing can get very hard to work with over the years.

But just as they were starting to think that maybe it was all for the best, the lobbying began again. Wasn’t it obvious that Brown still wanted to be the UCLA coach? Wasn’t it obvious that the UCLA fans had been excited at the prospect of getting a national champion to save the program?

Back to Brown. More stories, crazier than before--all secondhand and third-person, but all based on the assumption that Brown wanted the job. And it didn’t end until Monday night when, after returning from the Kansas team’s trip to the White House, Brown finally called and said, in effect, “Let’s just forget the whole thing.”

When UCLA hired Pepperdine Coach Jim Harrick Tuesday, there were some wistful what-if thoughts from Brown supporters. But there were more sighs of relief.