Asbury Is Doing Just Fine at Pepperdine

Tom Asbury looked over at the other team’s bench a few weeks ago and found himself coaching against Dean Smith. Pepperdine played North Carolina in a game of basketball, did the best it could, then lost without disgrace to a bunch of superior athletes and their distinguished coach.

“Come on, give me a break,” Asbury said later, laughing this one off as a learning experience. “He’s won 700 games. I’ve won 7.”

Pepperdine also has played Nevada Las Vegas, Connecticut, Texas, UC Santa Barbara, decent teams all. Good rehearsals guarantee good plays. OK, so there’s been an occasional Northern Arizona and Mississippi Valley on Pepperdine’s plate. At least it’s not like some of those Eastern schools that open their seasons playing hula hoops against Hawaii Hilo and Hawaii Loa and Macadamia Nut Community College.

“If you look at our pre-conference schedule and look at Duke’s, we’re better battle-tested than they are,” Asbury said. “You can play Appalachian State and Susquehanna all you want. You’ll win, but it won’t help you prepare for what comes later.”

Today, the Waves face a rematch with Loyola Marymount, which they defeated last Wednesday night for their fifth victory in a row, holding the nation’s top-scoring team to 79 points in the process. Hey, Tom Asbury’s closing in on Dean Smith day by day.

When a wave came across the mighty Pacific and swept Jim Harrick, the big kahuna of Pepperdine basketball, all the way from Malibu to Westwood, much was made of the way UCLA’s program was left hanging, how it had been thrown overboard by the unsinkable Larry Brown, how it had turned to Harrick in the hour of its need. Funny, but nobody said much about how Pepperdine was left hanging.

Maybe it was because everybody there knew the program remained in good hands. Asbury was Harrick’s assistant for 9 seasons. They were tight as tight could be. Their wives sat side by side at the games. Together the two guys had gone to war against a lot of Dean Smith types, and there were years when Pepperdine was a better bet in the national collegiate tournament than UCLA was.

On the morning when his telephone rang at 6:30 and it was Harrick on the line, telling him that UCLA had offered him the job, Asbury was not exactly shocked. He knew this was a position his good friend wanted, and he also knew that Larry Brown had left UCLA in a fix.

By 10 a.m., Asbury was having breakfast with the Pepperdine athletic director. By the time they got the check, it was pretty clear the head-coaching job was his. Asbury met with Pepperdine’s other movers and shakers, and that was pretty much that.

“I doubt if a couple of major college hirings have ever gone down so quickly,” Asbury said, looking back. “It was like, boom! Everything just rolled into place. Jim got his job, and I got mine. When you’re 43 years old, you sometimes worry that your chance is never going to come. But they rewarded my loyalty and everything has worked out pretty well for everybody concerned.”

UCLA is winning, and so is Pepperdine. Neither club figures to be among the Final Four at Seattle, but both could win their conference titles, and postseason bids are there for the taking, if the coaches can continue to get strong efforts from their players. And, in the meantime, Pepperdine vs. Loyola continues to be a more stimulating local basketball rivalry than UCLA vs. USC.

Of course, they have USC to thank for that. Hank Gathers, whose scoring average is somewhere up there with Michael Jordan’s, went over to Loyola from USC. Tom Lewis, another Trojan defector, is doing quite nicely for Pepperdine. He scored 25 against Loyola the other night, matching Gathers point for point.

The Waves probably stress defense over offense a little more than they did under Harrick, who has a knack for putting points on the board.

They have switched from a high-post offense to more of a passing game, although Asbury says he and Harrick planned to do that anyway, adjusting to current personnel before the Larry Brown escapade.

Asbury started out coaching high school ball just outside Denver. Since the last time he played on a team, during a cup of coffee with the old American Basketball Assn.’s Denver Rockets, he has spent a lot of years in training to be a college head coach.

He was an assistant at Wyoming when Harrick brought him to Malibu, which qualifies as one of the more dramatic changes of scenery any coach might encounter. It was like Ben and Hoss Cartwright selling their ranch and moving to Ft. Lauderdale.

At Pepperdine, the first thing a coach or player must deal with is the perception of this being the basketball equivalent of Club Med. Some people think Pepperdine plays with a big plastic ball that the coach has to inflate with his own breath.

“You know what they think back East,” Asbury said. “From 8 in the morning till noon, the Pepperdine basketball team practices on the sand in Malibu.

“Well, just so everybody will know, I’ll tell you something. I’ve never been on a surfboard in my life. I wouldn’t go swimming to save my life. And, if you knew most of the guys on my team, they wouldn’t even stick their toes in the ocean to get them wet.

“Very few times have we ever gotten a kid because of the campus. It’s the most beautiful campus in the country, in my opinion, but the kids come here for the academics and the basketball. The kids are surprisingly blase about how the campus looks.

“It’s the parents who can’t resist the campus,” Asbury said. “Since I’ve been here, we’ve never lost a parent.”

They haven’t lost much else, either.