COURTING THE GAME : Bob Boyd Taking a Year Off From His Retirement

In Bob Boyd’s first season as a Division I coach at Seattle University, his team qualified for the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. basketball tournament and came close to rewriting history.

It was a watershed year, 1964, since John Wooden was laying the foundation for his championship dynasty at UCLA. Yet . . .

Seattle was UCLA’s opponent in an NCAA regional game at Corvallis, Ore., and, as Boyd recalls, his team had a seven-point lead with five minutes to play.

“Then our center, L.J. Wheeler, tore up his knee near the end of the game and we lost, 95-90,” Boyd said. “I never got that close again. But at the time, I thought it could be done every year.”

Boyd didn’t know it then, but his coaching career would be largely overshadowed by Wooden’s legendary accomplishments at UCLA.

“I have no ill feeling about it, but I was at the right place at the wrong time,” Boyd said of his 13 years as USC’s coach, 9 of which were in direct competition with Wooden.

Boyd has spent the last two seasons in retirement, but he recently decided to return to coaching and has taken a job similar to the one with which he launched his career. He will coach Riverside Community College next season, as a one-year replacement for Dave Waxman, who has taken a leave of absence to pursue graduate studies at USC.

It was at Santa Ana College--now Rancho Santiago College--from 1958 through 1963 that Boyd gained the experience and notice that led to his employment at Seattle and later USC.

Later, there was his five-season term at Mississippi State--after he left USC under strained circumstances.

These days, Boyd and his wife, Betty, live in a condominium adjacent to the Monterey Country Club in Palm Desert. He said he is financially secure enough not to be concerned about being employed.

“Most of my time has been spent on leisure-time activities,” he said.

“However, I missed coaching basketball. I’ve had a number of opportunities to coach in different parts of the country. As inviting as it was, I couldn’t do it because it would betray the people in Mississippi.

“When I left Mississippi, I told people there that I was leaving to be close to my family. For me to take off again, my close friends back there would say, ‘He said he had to go back home and now look what he’s doing.’ ”

So Boyd has made a compromise of sorts. The Riverside job, along with some teaching commitments, is only 65 miles from his front door in the desert. It’s apparently an interim position, and Boyd, 58, says he is open-minded as to future coaching jobs, as long as he can retain his home base in Palm Desert.

But opportunities that he spurned in the past are apparently not available, leaving Boyd at least slightly puzzled.

“I know I’ve missed an opportunity to coach in pro basketball several times,” Boyd. said. “Pete Newell offered me a job to coach the San Diego Rockets before they moved to Houston. The Portland Trail Blazers offered me the job twice in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I chose not to do that. Recently, no one has asked me.”

He also accepted, then rejected the Lakers’ coaching job at one time.

“I’m interested in the Clippers, but they haven’t shown any interest in me,” Boyd said. “In trying to be self-analytical, which is difficult to do, I’ve heard this description of me: ‘He can coach, but he’s not that good of a recruiter.’

“Now the pro game is pure coaching--the draft and evaluation of players take care of itself. I thought at one time I could do that quite well.”

Whatever other faults Boyd may have, no one of any stature in basketball has ever said that he can’t flat-out coach. Recommendations come from Newell, Bob Knight, Dean Smith and even Wooden, among others.

But his timing at USC couldn’t have been worse.

Consider that his 1970-71 team with Paul Westphal, Mo Layton and Ron Riley had a 24-2 record, yet did not play in the NCAA tournament.

Only conference champions and selected independent teams went to the playoffs at that time. The two losses that season were, of course, to UCLA, the eventual NCAA champion. Conceivably, USC was the second-best team in the country, yet had no postseason platform.

In 1973-74, Boyd had a 24-5 team featuring Gus Williams and another second-place finish in the Pacific 8 behind UCLA, and was shut out of the NCAA tournament again.

In fact, Boyd’s USC teams finished second six times and third four times in his 13 seasons at the school. But with UCLA so dominating, who remembers?

“The basketball program couldn’t enlarge on itself,” Boyd said of USC’s non-participation in the NCAA tournament. “Identity in postseason play tends to grow. In those good years, we didn’t do anything but get ready for the next season.”

Coaching against Wooden in the ‘60s and ‘70s was a formidable enough obstacle, and Boyd had to deal with all of UCLA’s talent, notably Lew Alcindor, now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

“Alcindor was a sophomore in the first game I ever coached at USC, a season opener in 1966-67 against UCLA,” Boyd said. “We lost, 105-90, and Alcindor scored 56 points. I told Betty on the way home from the game that we can’t let that happen again. He was so good, so dominating.”

So Boyd devised a strategy to neutralize Alcindor.

“We never had to guard him again,” Boyd said. “We ran a high post, a cutting delay game in the next seven games we played against Alcindor. That was the only time we ran that offense, but people in the city of Los Angeles thought I was always playing an extreme ball-control, stall offense. That was the influence the UCLA program had.”

USC finally beat UCLA in 1968-69, Alcindor’s senior season. After losing in double overtime at the Sports Arena, 61-55, Boyd’s Trojans won the next night at Pauley Pavilion, 46-44.

Wooden had a 149-2 record in the 10 seasons he coached at Pauley Pavilion, USC getting rare victories in 1968-69 and 1969-70.

Curiously, Wooden’s retirement after the 1974-75 season provided Boyd with no respite. In fact, he endured his first losing seasons in 1975-76 and 1976-77 and didn’t beat UCLA again.

“For me to say why it happened, would sound like it was someone else’s fault other than mine,” Boyd said. “But I did get it corrected. In my last year at USC (1978-79), we won 20 games.”

It was a season during which Boyd announced his resignation in January, effective at the end of the season. He was in the final year of his contract and he wanted Dick Perry, then the athletic director, to give him an extension before the season ended. Perry wanted to wait until the end of the season.

“With the clarity of hindsight, I made a mistake,” said Boyd, who decided he wanted his job back when the Trojans won their last six games of the regular season without injured star center Cliff Robinson and got the NCAA berth that had eluded Boyd for so many years.

Even though Perry seemed receptive to Boyd’s request, Boyd later had another change of heart and let matters stand where they were.

“To this day I don’t know why I did that,” Boyd said.

Boyd remained at USC for one year as an associate athletic director, them moved to Del Mar, ostensibly to pursue business interests.

Boyd laughs at such a deception now, saying that in reality, he was broke. That, in fact, was a primary consideration in his accepting the coaching job at Mississippi State in Starkville.

In looking back on his USC career, Boyd acknowledges some mistakes, such as not getting to know the administration, or, perhaps, cultivating the media.

“I gave the impression that I was aloof,” he said. “I didn’t mean to come across that way.”

But Boyd, a former USC player, doesn’t regret his association with the school, despite the perception that USC basketball is just a fill-in sport between football seasons.

“For me to go back to USC in 1966 was a great time in my life,” Boyd said. “I would have taken the job for room and board. I got only $15,000 the first three years and, until the Lakers offered me a job, I wasn’t going to get a raise. But Jess Hill (USC’s former athletic director) offered me a $5,000 raise to stay on.”

Considering that the USC basketball program is foundering with three consecutive last-place finishes in the Pacific 10, the last two under George Raveling, Boyd’s record at the school, 216-131, looks very good indeed.

And Boyd’s future? “I don’t need to win a state championship (at Riverside),” he said. “I just find a need to do an effective coaching job. Maybe I’ll go on from here.

“If nothing happens, I’ll continue to do what I’ve been doing--nothing.”