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BIG MAN ON CAMPUS : At Oakwood School, a Remarkable Union of Athletic Prowess and Academic Acuity Makes Mitchell Butler

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<i> Times Staff Writer </i>

There isn’t much critical ammunition with which to blast Mitchell Butler. By nearly universal account, the Oakwood School student has impeccable credentials in both athletic and academic arenas and is of sterling character and resolve, a women-and-children-first kind of guy.

And yet, some people are never satisfied. Take, for instance, a pair of Butler’s schoolmates who often teased the high school All-American about not trying a particular all-world dunk in a real game. Sure, Butler had thrown down an assortment of rim-rattlers in the past, but his friends insisted on something revolutionary, so to speak.

“From the very beginning of the year, they’ve been after me to do a 360,” Butler said. “But every time I had a chance to dunk, there was a defender near me. And that makes a maneuver of that sort fairly difficult.”

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No kidding, especially for those among us whose dunks are limited to the doughnut shop.

Last month, Butler finally found the opportunity he was looking for. In a game against Liberty League foe Windward, Butler swiped the ball and was at halfcourt before anyone realized what had happened. The turnaround move that followed turned a few heads, hardly a new occurrence in Butler’s four-year varsity career.

“Their point guard made an errant pass and I stepped in and stole it,” said Butler, a 6-foot-5 1/2, 200-pound senior. “It took them some time to react, so I had a good lead. I was all alone, so I jumped up, did a little 360, and put it through.”

At Oakwood, it sometimes seems as though the world revolves around Butler, one of the school’s most personable students and someone who, administrators readily admit, has helped give the school an athletic identity where none previously existed.

When the Inglewood native enrolled at Oakwood--a private, K-12 school of 560 students in North Hollywood--his life, in a manner of speaking, also had turned full circle. The basketball fortunes of Oakwood, currently the defending Southern Section Small Schools Division champion, soon followed suit.

Mitchell Butler was floored. In the old days, this would have been A-plus work, a top-flight paper. But this wasn’t Inglewood and he wasn’t on hardwood. This was Oakwood, where academia isn’t an afterthought, it’s a focal point. Gray matter is all that really matters here.

Butler had been asked to do a psychoanalytic interpretation of a fable, the “Three Little Pigs.” By Oakwood’s barometer, however, the effort was the academic equivalent of an air ball from 10 feet.

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“The paper that Mitchell wrote was unlike most of his papers--and actually was a rather poor one--and I was quick to tell him it wasn’t up to his usual standards,” said Oakwood Headmaster Jim Astman, who also teaches a psychology class.

After an hourlong meeting with Astman, Butler went to work on a revised edition.

“A week and a half later, unsolicited, he turns in a brand new analysis where he had taken every piece of what we’d discussed and incorporated it into what was now a marvelous paper,” Astman said.

For Butler, who last November accepted an athletic scholarship to attend UCLA, his adventures at Oakwood always have seemed destined for a fairy-tale ending.

In November, he was named “Best in the West” in a Southland newspaper’s annual preseason survey of college coaches and scouts, better than anyone at any position, at any high school level. National publications generally have agreed.

In a mid-season edition, Kentucky-based Hoop Scoop magazine ranked Butler the 29th-best player in the nation, ahead of standouts such as Tracy Murray of Glendora (45th), Dedan Thomas of Taft (52nd), Adonis Jordan of Cleveland (58th) and Ed Stokes of St. Bernard (73rd).

Yet the only numerical values Butler was interested in when he transferred to Oakwood were the ones on his slide rule.

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Like most students at Oakwood, Butler is more than capable of handling himself in the classroom. He is currently taking classes in anatomy, pre-calculus, physiology, art, psychology and Latin. Oakwood is generally portrayed as a school for eggheads, and Butler does not subordinate academics to athletics.

Et tu, Butler?

You bet.

On Monday, Butler and Astman met to discuss some recent reading assignments. (Warning: For those who think Freud is the surname of the Houston Rocket guard nicknamed “Sleepy,” skip the next few paragraphs.)

“We’re looking at the moral dimensions of psychoanalysis,” Astman said, slipping into a professorial tone. “He just finished the ‘Sexual Enlightenment of Children’ by Freud. He now has a new article by a woman at Harvard who has raised serious questions about Freud’s choice of the Oedipus myth to discuss sexual conflict in children. She proposes a different method using psyche and Eros . . .

“I get as much out of these sessions as he does.”

Heady stuff, yet Butler says his long-term academic goal is to become a sports psychologist.

“Hey, I like Freud,” Butler says, grinning.

He also likes the strict academic regimen. Butler’s grade-point average is 3.0. Out of pride, he plans to retake the Scholastic Aptitude Test because he only scored 1,000--he is confident he can top 1,200.

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“I would have been an A student at Morningside High School, no doubt about it,” said Butler, who started attending Oakwood in the sixth grade after having never received less than an A grade in any public-school course. “But I think at UCLA I’ll have a pretty simple time with classes and adapting to the time constraints. Guys from a public-school background might be in for a little more trouble.”

Butler left Inglewood and the public-school system through a series of fateful and often humorous events. As strange at it seems, an Andy Hardy-type movie eventually led, albeit somewhat indirectly, to his transfer to Oakwood.

As a fourth-grader, Butler found himself watching a movie on television that featured children in some sort of camp environment. After pestering from Mitchell, his mother Linda agreed to check into local camps. He did not specify what variety.

“I remember I started in on my mom with it right away,” he said. “I wanted to get away and experience a little bit of life away from home.”

Eight years later, he still is enjoying the experience, although Oakwood is rarely confused with Boys Town.

Linda Butler contacted a friend who knew former Laker Happy Hairston, who operated a basketball camp at a Southland high school. Butler enrolled at the camp and soon thereafter formed a friendship with Hairston.

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Hairston, who had established a foundation that helps steer underprivileged or inner-city youths to private schools, was impressed by Butler’s academic acuity and scheduled an interview for Butler with Oakwood administrators. A year later, Butler was placed on academic scholarship--the school absorbed its considerable tuition, now $8,000 a year.

Approximately 12% of the overall student body of 560 students in grades K-12 comprises minorities. Butler says that he is uncomfortable with the stereotype people have of students from the inner city. His father Arthur is a chef at Centinella Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood and his mother manages the apartment complex in which the family lives. They are far from wealthy and the surrounding area is inhabited by some frightening characters, he said, but his parents have instilled a system of values that remain with him today.

His oldest brother, McArthur, six years his senior, was a linebacker at Nevada Las Vegas. Michael, who is five years older than Mitchell, will graduate from Grambling in May.

“A lot of kids’ parents in the area don’t care about academics,” Butler said. “Our parents have always been strict with us and made sure that we get the best out of what’s given to us.

“I have a special opportunity, a special gift that’s been given to me on a silver platter, and I have to capitalize on it. I’m always willing to put in the extra effort, to put in a little bit more, never be satisfied with what I have. They taught me that.”

Butler does not downplay the added sense of perspective that the transfer helped bring about, however. To a degree, it has allowed him to see opposite ends of the spectrum.

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“I’ve had a chance to experience both worlds, and I think it’s good in the sense that I can look at both sides,” he said, “and I can see what it is I that I would or wouldn’t want to do.”

Butler’s levelheadedness and temperament have won over many people, teachers and coaches included.

“He has maturity beyond his years,” UCLA Coach Jim Harrick said. “He’s tremendously unselfish. He really wants his teammates to share in his success. He could shoot every time up the court, and his teammates would never say a word, but he doesn’t.”

His teammates not only have enjoyed the benefits of Butler’s success, but shared it.

“He never looks to who it is that he’s passing the ball to,” said Jon Mark, a senior forward. “He wants the worst person, the rookies, to score, too. He’s always right there cheering the loudest for everybody to get a chance.”

His teachers say that they are careful not to push too hard because Butler is so receptive to new ideas and so often exceeds their expectations.

“If there’s any sort of onus that he has to live with, it’s that he is this perfect kid,” Astman said. “I have to continually remind myself that this is also an adolescent and that expectations are too great in terms of his character. I’m sure he likes to get out with his friends and goof off, too.”

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For some, Butler would be a guy most students would love to hate. Every school seems to have someone like him, the darling quarterback who dates the best-looking cheerleader and gets the best grades. But Butler’s humility and sense of humor, his teachers say, have short-circuited any resentment.

“Here’s a kid that has it all together,” Oakwood Principal Fred Mednick said. “He’s handsome, he’s smart, he is a great athlete, and he’s not at all exploited it. He likes to laugh at it.”

Yet Butler’s successes on the court have sent an electric jolt through a campus that heretofore had thought of athletics as nothing but an amusing sidelight. Before Butler, the school had never won a Southern Section title of any kind and had never sent anyone to a Division I school on an athletic scholarship.

The school’s rather bohemian school paper, the Gorilla, devotes as much or more space to toy drives, deforestation, earthquakes and media reviews--replete with a caption reading “Thank God” under a picture of a bloodied Geraldo Rivera--as it does to sports.

In fact, Butler’s recent signing with UCLA ran on page 11 of the 12-page publication. A picture accompanying the story shows Butler standing underneath the school’s lone basketball hoop next to a pair of grinning seventh-graders, who, unlike some of their peers who take him for granted, seem very impressed, indeed.

It long has been the bane of Butler that people perceive his competition as less than competitive. But Oakwood, which has played in the Small Schools championship game each of the past two seasons and made the playoffs in Butler’s freshman year, was moved to the 1-A Division this season.

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While he plays against many players who are half his size and fall far short of his athletic abilities, he often is triple-teamed because he is Oakwood’s only established offensive threat.

Yet to offset the lack of competitiveness at the 1-A level, Butler has played in a variety of other leagues. As a sophomore, his team won the West Coast title in the 15-and-under division of the American Roundball Corp. His teammates included Nick Sanderson of Bell-Jeff, UCLA-bound football player Brian Allen of Hart and future Bruin teammate Darrick Martin. Butler has played in ARC competition ever since.

He also plays in pick-up games to hone his game, sometimes against the likes of NBA star Kiki Vandeweghe and high school or college stars from the Los Angeles area such as future UCLA teammates Martin, Trevor Wilson and Don MacLean.

Butler’s dominance of the Small Schools Division, however, has been a boon to school spirit, if not his personal athletic progress. Butler has brought out a fanatical following where apathy once reigned. Now, it’s cool to be true to your school.

At Oakwood, where a handful of spectators was once the norm, Butler has them turning out in droves--10 times the previous rate at the gate. And interest has spread to other athletic teams.

“He has created such excitement and enthusiasm for sports in general that it’s incredible,” said Astman, who knows a superlative when he utters one. “The attendance at the games is exciting, unbelievable. We have better attendance across the board and more interest in all areas.

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“Before Mitchell, we were lucky if we had 25 people. Now, it’s unusual if we have less than a couple of hundred.”

His influence has been startling. Oakwood was 10-11 the season before Butler joined the varsity, and the Gorillas now have appeared in the playoffs in four consecutive seasons. Oakwood, which is 17-5 after an 88-50 first-round playoff win over Dunn on Wednesday night, plays at Mammoth at 7:30 tonight.

Not all of the Butler Effect has been desired. At Oakwood, brains and brawn don’t always mix.

“Mitchell has, in fact, given us a variety of experiences we wouldn’t have otherwise had,” Astman said. “We have been exposed to recruiting practices of colleges, journalists, to a variety of agencies and people we would have never had exposure to otherwise.

“Nor were we comfortable with all of it. We got pens, letters and all kinds of stuff sent here from recruiters. . . . No one asked me a single question about his academics. . . . Whenever we saw a car pull up and a man in a suit got out, we automatically assumed it was a college coach.”

In all, the publicity and exposure have been overwhelmingly positive, Astman said. And for a school whose lone basketball hoop is located outdoors in the middle of a parking lot, the terms of the trade-off have been more than acceptable.

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Oakwood’s secondary school, which includes grades 7-12, is located within sight of North Hollywood High on Magnolia Boulevard, little more than a three-point shot from the southbound lane of the Hollywood Freeway.

Mednick’s office overlooks a tiny courtyard that bustles with student activity. On the window of Mednick’s office door is, appropriately, a small picture of Albert Einstein. For at Oakwood, everything Butler does is subject to a Theory of Relativity.

Even after he signed with UCLA, Butler found himself wrestling with the nagging question of how well he might have fared at a large high school, in an established program, against players of his own caliber.

Butler, the Southern Section Small Schools Player of the Year after his sophomore and junior seasons, averaged 22 points on the varsity as a 6-foot-2 freshman and currently leads Valley-area players in scoring (28.5 a game) and rebounding (16.0), as he did last season when he was selected The Times’ Valley Player of the Year. But he has has heard the whispers.

He says, however, that he never seriously considered transferring for the sake of playing at a school with an established athletic program. Yet, had Butler been slightly bigger as a youth . . .

“Coming into the school, everything was for academic reasons,” he said. “I had no idea that I would blossom into what I am as a player. But in going back to that time, if I had known that I was going to turn out this way, I probably wouldn’t have attended Oakwood.

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“I probably would have been just as naive as the next player and stayed in the public-school system. I really had no clue about what lay ahead of me.”

Astman said that once Butler showed signs of being a superior athlete, he approached Butler’s parents about the possibility of a transfer, fearing that the school would inhibit Butler’s growth as a player.

“I confess, I sometimes worried about whether this sort of place would be giving him the kind of push that somebody with his talent deserved,” Astman said. “I did speak with the family about it, and they’ve all along been very clear-headed, saying that there were many avenues through which Mitchell could get the sort of experience against the level of competition that he needed.”

Said his father, Arthur: “He’s a blessed child and a gifted child. We really stress to him that he uses his gifts and balance out the books and sports.

“The city moves fast, and sometimes kids can get involved in things they don’t know how to get out of. We felt this was the best way.”

Harrick recalls hearing of Butler a few seasons ago, and wondering what the commotion was all about.

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“I remember reading all about him, about this kid who played at this small school,” said Harrick, who then coached at Pepperdine.

A few weeks after moving to UCLA, Harrick and dozens of other Division I coaches last summer saw Butler at the prestigious, invitation-only Nike Camp in Princeton, N. J. For Harrick, it was the first time he had seen Butler play, and it was an enlightening experience.

“There’s no question that he was as good an athlete as there was back there,” said Harrick, who was not the only coach impressed. Said Arizona Coach Lute Olson: “All year long, people have been saying that Mitch Butler is one of the best players in the country. And his performance at Nike only verified what people have thought for a long time.”

Indeed, Butler’s presence at Oakwood ultimately has not cost him athletically, at least in the short term. Harrick, in fact, believes that it may have helped him in certain respects because Butler has the freedom to improvise.

“It’s helped his offense tremendously,” Harrick said. “He has all kinds of moves, and it’s only helped him refine what he wants to do.”

There have been a few reservations, however, as there are for any player about to join the college ranks. Harrick says that Butler must improve his ballhandling and shooting range, and to be sure, playing at an Oakwood has drawbacks. At Oakwood, a throng means drawing 200. At some college venues, it’s closer to 20,000.

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“You put a kid from Oakwood in Pauley against Louisville, and it might be a different story,” Harrick said. “You take a kid and throw him out there in (Louisville’s) Freedom Hall, and who knows?”

Yet Harrick said that Butler probably would have played if he was now at UCLA, which is thin at the guard position because of an injury to Gerald Madkins. Butler, who plays just about every position at Oakwood, is expected to play at off-guard in college.

“He was our No. 1 recruit at (the off-guard) position, no question,” Harrick said. “He might very well have been able to help us this year, sure.”

Butler insists that all along he felt that the level of play at Oakwood was not a major consideration. The trade-offs were always worth it.

“I never said, ‘Geez, I need to go to a bigger school to get more notoriety,’ ” he said.

“It hasn’t hurt, not at all. When I think about it, it’s like, ‘I’m ranked in the top 25 in the country and people say I don’t get enough out of it? Where would I be at a big school? What would my position be now?’ I don’t know.”

Butler, begrudgingly, admits that he is a big fish in a small sea at Oakwood. He said that he is acutely aware that some of the school’s younger students look up to him--literally and figuratively--and view him as a role model. And at Oakwood, where it sometimes seems there is a Porsche in every student’s garage, the irony of this has not escaped him.

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“There are guys everywhere who don’t have the proper system of values, who fall askew,” Butler said. “I’d like to go on and be myself but still be someone other kids can emulate and model themselves after to a certain point.

“To be respected by your peers, to know you’ve come such a long way and that people recognize it is nice,” he said. “I think that’s the key thing, that people can look at me and understand all that I’ve been through and that I stuck it out.

“I just want to hopefully wash away one of the layers of that stereotype that’s put on athletes.”

Because of Butler’s extraordinary mix of talent and background, Butler’s story has attracted national attention. ESPN’s “Scholastic Sports America” program did a profile on Butler that aired three weeks ago. Its focus was Butler’s transition from the city to suburbia, and how he has handled the attendant problems.

“It turned out well,” Butler said. “Basically, we got to see the full, entire circle with me out here and me at home.”

Well-roundedness, it would appear, translates well to the TV screen, too.

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