Thomas’ Walking Papers : Plodding Taft Offense Forces Talented Guard to Slow Pace as Senior, but the Runnin’ Rebels of UNLV Beckon

Dedan Thomas vividly remembers the day last fall when he ceremoniously redecorated his bedroom. Or, more accurately, de-decorated it.

Six months ago, the Taft High senior’s walls were papered with recruiting letters from dozens of Division I schools. White drywall had been transformed into a rainbow-colored road map to the Final Four: Arizona, DePaul, Notre Dame, Nevada Las Vegas, USF, UC Santa Barbara, Iowa, Arizona State, Cal and UCLA, among others. All had inquired about Thomas’ collegiate intentions.

This was first-class postage, indeed.

When Thomas signed in November to play at UNLV, however, the collegiate paper drive ended. The Runnin’ Rebels were the team, Thomas said, that would allow the 5-foot, 10-inch point guard to orchestrate the flow the way he had always dreamed.

“They run,” he explained, succinctly.

After the ink had dried on his letter of intent, that is precisely what Thomas did--scooting directly to his room. “I took it down,” he said of the correspondence. “Since I had committed, I took it all down.”

A few months later, Thomas has good reason to add padding to his walls. After spending 2 seasons piloting one of the best fast breaks in the Valley area, Thomas is spending his senior season choreographing a team that often moves like senior citizens, despite its 15-3 record.

“It’s not that we don’t want to run,” Taft Coach Jim Woodard quipped. “We just can’t.”

Thomas’ theme this season: Walk, Don’t Run.

“It’s a lot different this year,” Thomas said. “It’s, um, well, we don’t have the speed we had, we don’t have any all-state track runners. We just work it into the big men, and I walk it up the court--a lot.”

Last season’s team, with Thomas leading the fast break, was capable of rendering the knockout punch in a matter of minutes. Taft rolled up the points as fast as Thomas could maneuver the ball downcourt.

Thomas ran the break with such efficacy that his teammates often marveled at his ability to find the open man. And on the dead run, the open man better have open eyes or he’ll be nursing an open wound.

Even speedster Quincy Watts, a Times’ All-Valley forward last season and a three-time state sprint champion who now attends USC, sometimes found himself transfixed by Thomas’ fast hands and court wizardry.

“I have to keep my eye on him because I know if I’m open he’ll get me the ball,” Watts said before a playoff game last season. “Instead of going in there to rebound, I’m watching what he does with the ball. Sometimes when I’m out there on the wing, I find myself watching him wheeling and dealing. He’s amazing.”

Of course, any player would look slow in comparison to Watts, and Thomas is a blur to many others. This year’s Taft team, however, has redefined the word “sluggish.”

In fact, Woodard only half-jokingly says that when Thomas starts the fast break, “the last three guys downcourt are wearing red shirts.” Red is Taft’s primary school color.

To effectively run an offense at point guard, certain characteristics are necessary. Foremost, the player must be fearless in the face of a strange and swirling brew of defenses, which can entice the unwary player into turnover after turnover.

Fortunately, Thomas’ mother said that he has been running obstacle courses for years.

Of course, there is always room for improvement.

“He’s always been lightning quick,” Francis Thomas said. “As a kid, he was scary. He used to run toward an object at full speed, then at the very last second . . . By the time he was 7 years old he had a scar on every part of his body.

“He’d run all over the house. He used to frighten me sometimes.”

Now, of course, Thomas chills opponents and freezes others on his way to the basket. Despite facing a variety of defensive coverages, Thomas continues to post the numbers expected of a player of his caliber. In 1987-88, on a team with better overall balance, depth, speed and talent, Thomas averaged 13.9 points and 10 assists a game. Despite the team’s slow-footed offense this year, Thomas is averaging 18.8 points, 9.1 assists and 5.3 steals as the only returning full-time starter.

Yet Thomas’ contributions are more than quantitative. In Taft’s 45-42 loss to Cleveland last week, Thomas scored 8 points, but more importantly he dictated the pace that gave the Toreadors a realistic chance at a huge upset of the Cavaliers, the second-ranked team in the state.

Even in the face of Cleveland’s full-court press, Thomas established the pace on both ends and the Cavaliers, in fact, eventually called off the press in the second half.

“Regardless of the fact that he only scored eight points, he totally controlled the tempo of that game,” Woodard said. “When you can make teams as great as Cleveland move away from their normal thing, that says something.”

If Thomas has a weak point in his game, it is his perimeter shooting. Once hesitant to shoot from outside, Thomas spent time over the summer refining his jump shot, searching for less rattle and more hum.

“Last year, I’d just turn them down,” he said. “I’d turn 15-foot jump shots down all the time. Now I look to shoot it. At least, most of the time I do.”

Thomas has delivered from outside several times in critical situations. In a Northwest Valley Conference game last month at El Camino Real, Thomas picked up his fourth foul in the third quarter with Taft holding a 12-point lead. Ordered by Woodard to stay on the perimeter to avoid drawing a charging call, Thomas made 3 consecutive jump shots from the 17-foot range and scored 7 points in the final 2 minutes of the third quarter as Taft cruised to a 76-57 win.

Yet like all assist-oriented guards--his idol is Isiah Thomas of the Detroit Pistons--Thomas sometimes prefers to pass up open shots. Woodard says that Thomas’ altruism does not always pay, so to speak.

“I try to encourage him to take the jump shot, not to pass off if he’s open,” Woodard said. “Sometimes he’ll miss one or two shots and start backing off. But he is capable of making them, like he did against El Camino. That was boom, boom, boom.”

Thomas spent many hours of his summer vacation hammering away from longe range in sweltering gymnasiums with senior guard Adonis Jordan of archrival Cleveland. Jordan, who will attend Kansas, is considered one of the best outside shooters in the Valley and is one of Thomas’ best friends. So when Thomas needed a few pointers, he visits his Dr. of J, the soon-to-be Jayhawk.

“You can teach a guy to shoot the J,” Jordan said. “But some of the other stuff, his dribbling, his awareness, his vision on the court, you can’t teach anyone that. He could pick up the J in one summer--and he’s already much better.”

Jordan, who moved to California from Brooklyn in 1987, said that Thomas rates with the best on either coast in terms of ballhandling. And when East meets West? Jordan readily admits that Thomas is the better ballhawk of the two.

“He can handle it with the best of them,” Jordan said. “That’s the thing in New York, to handle the ball and run the floor. If he was in New York, he’d definitely hold his own. There might be a few who are about the same, but there wouldn’t be many that were any better.”

Like Jordan, Thomas is an emigrant of sorts. Raised near Crenshaw High in Los Angeles, Thomas probably would have attended Crenshaw had not his mother, an RTD bus driver, been transferred to the Valley after Dedan’s eighth-grade year. He initially found the San Fernando Valley to be worse than he ever imagined.

“I didn’t like it here at all,” he said. “I hated it. I thought it was real hot and real boring.”

To cure the relocation blues, Thomas found solace in a place most people would find hot and boring--local gyms. As his reputation grew, he quickly made friends, including Jordan.

“I went to a lot of the local gyms and hung out mostly with my brother,” Thomas said. “After a while, I met guys like Adonis and it wasn’t as bad.”

Thomas spent his freshman season playing on the B team in anonymity. As a sophomore, Thomas made the varsity as a reserve guard, playing behind senior Jason Bromberg.

“I had no idea how good Dedan really was,” Woodard said. “Jason was starting basically because he was a senior.”

Bromberg, however, contracted the chicken pox in the middle of the 1986-87 league season, and Woodard inserted Thomas into the lineup. In his first start, Thomas had 10 points and 12 assists against North Hollywood.

Thomas, of course, hopes his debut in a UNLV uniform will be as successful. Yet academic problems could postpone Thomas’ appearance.

Thomas has not satisfied either provision of Prop. 48, the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. rule that requires high school student-athletes to score 700 or better on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and carry a 2.0 grade-point average in a specified core curriculum.

Thomas, who took the SAT for the third time Saturday, also will attend night school this semester--he needs 2 more semesters of math to satisfy the curriculum requirement and must score 70 points higher on the SAT, he said.

Thomas said that if he does not meet Prop. 48 requirements, he may play at a junior college next season before transferring to UNLV. He said Ventura College heads a list of candidates.

“I’m not really looking down the road right now,” Thomas said. “I’ll just see what happens and go from there.”

Said Woodard: “He’s a bright kid who didn’t even start taking school seriously until a couple of years ago. He’s trying to make up a lot of ground.”

Thomas also said that he will stick with UNLV despite any penalties against Rebel Coach Jerry Tarkanian, who faces possible NCAA sanctions for past recruiting violations.

“I didn’t have any second thoughts,” Thomas said. “I just asked myself how they could do that to (Tarkanian) when it happened so long ago. They should have penalized them a long time ago.

“They’re the best team on the West Coast, no doubt. It’s the best place to be.”

For now, however, Woodard is confident he has the best playmaking guard in the City Section in Thomas. Woodard, who first watched City basketball as a junior high student in 1954, calls Thomas “the best dribbler I’ve ever seen.”

And like his personal style, Thomas has gone about his duties with only a modicum of flash.

“I think sometimes the best pass isn’t necessarily the most spectacular one, but the most logical one,” Woodard said. “It may not be the behind-the-back and over-the-head pass, but it still gets the job done.

“He’s the quintessential, under-control point guard.”

Woodard said that Thomas’ worth is hardly difficult to gauge. In fact, without Thomas, Taft would be leagues apart from other North Valley teams.

“We would not be competitive in our league,” Woodard said. “We’d probably be able to count the wins on one hand.”

For the team’s best player, Taft fans routinely put their hands together when Thomas makes spectacular plays or slips another double-team. Yet Thomas also shoulders a disproportionate share of the blame when things go wrong. For instance, he took some heat when he twice missed important free throws in the waning moments of a 67-65 loss to University in December.

Thomas said that he takes pride in being confident enough in himself to shrug off momentary setbacks.

“Some guys, when they miss a free throw like that in a big game, their season might be over,” he said. “They’d be all messed up. When we lost that game against University, I bounced back pretty good.”

As well-known as Thomas is in high school basketball circles, he isn’t the top cat of the family. Thomas’ half-brother, Bobby Irvin, is a rap music artist nicknamed “Bob Cat.” Irvin has performed alongside pop stars such as L. L. Cool J.

And like his little brother, Bobby is in a transition phase. Irvin is now a record producer and solo artist and has an album due out soon on Arista Records, Thomas said.

“He’s doing real, real well,” Thomas said.

For both Thomas and his brother, despite the changes, the beat goes on. Up-tempo or not.