Spotlight on Dave Yanai : Before Cal State Dominguez Hills’ recent win streak, only his players and peers seemed to know how good the nation’s only Japanese-American college basketball coach is. Now the secret is out.

The glare from television camera lights reflected off Dave Yanai’s glasses as the Cal State Dominguez Hills basketball coach, neatly dressed in a tweed jacket, was questioned by reporters after a road victory at Cal State Bakersfield.

Success has come often for Yanai’s teams, but the media rush--such as this one in the hallway of the Civic Auditorium in this southern San Joaquin Valley town--is as uncommon for him as snow in Los Angeles.

For despite two decades of success as a high school and college coach in the shadow of media-rich downtown Los Angeles, the man Coach Bobby Knight of Indiana calls “a great coach” has toiled virtually anonymously.

Yanai has been at Dominguez Hills for 12 years. Some locals refer to the Division II school as “Cal State Carson,” and that makes it difficult to attract top-notch athletic talent.

Yanai is the only Japanese-American college coach in the United States and has been rewarded several times as one of the best at his trade. Twice he was named Coach of the Year in the California Collegiate Athletic Assn., and once in the Division II Western Region.

Conversations over the years with coaches paint a picture of Yanai as a humble, hard-working and above-board teacher of basketball, “a coach’s coach with no gimmicks,” according to former UC Berkeley Coach Pete Newell.

Adds Knight: “There isn’t a greater guy around.”

Newell considers Yanai a well-kept secret: “Dave could compete in any conference in any part of the country with less talent than the rest (of the teams in the league), and he would win.”

Said Yanai’s wife of 23 years, Sae, who washed team uniforms when Yanai was at Fremont High so her husband could use laundry funds to buy much-needed jerseys for his players: “Dave just loves to coach. Always has.”

Yanai’s Dominguez Hills record of 181-133 is not of mythical proportions. At Fremont, he fared better (120-31). According to his peers, he gets every ounce of performance out of his players. Many of those players, Yanai concedes, are flawed. But his teams are so well prepared that they often win when on paper they shouldn’t have bothered to show up. Many of his losses have gone down to the wire.

He operates on a shoestring budget that includes less than three full-time scholarships a year. Walk-on players often start.

“Dominguez Hills has a reputation,” said Gardena Councilman Mas Fukai, an associate of Yanai. “It is hard to recruit athletes. Still, these young men are great individuals when he is done with them.”

A reporter can usually turn up a skeleton or two in a coach’s closet. Yanai’s closet is bare, except for the accolades. Friends describe him as intense and caring, sincere and knowledgeable.

“If you have anything (worthwhile) inside of you, he will bring it out,” said Sam Sullivan, who played for Yanai and now coaches basketball at Fremont.

Associates say Yanai is a kojin butsu , a nice, honorable guy, with life’s priorities in the right order.

“He is not in the mainstream. You don’t read much about him, but he is one of the real teachers of basketball,” Newell said.

Yanai has been active in the Japanese-American community. He plays host to free youth camps in Gardena and Orange County several times a year and conducts them with the same vigor as practice sessions at Dominguez Hills. At one of those camps, said Yanai’s nephew, Harvey Kitani, basketball coach at Fairfax High, “Yanai worked me so hard I came out of it feeling dizzy.”

Explained Newell: “He has so many things going for him. He is a giver, not a taker.”

Success has usually come with little fanfare at Dominguez Hills. Two years ago, when the Toros won a second CCAA title under Yanai with a last-minute victory over UC Riverside, there wasn’t a reporter in attendance. In a 1988 Sports Illustrated story, former Toro Sports Information Director Steve Barr complained that he left the school in part because he was frustrated at being associated with a winning basketball program that received very little publicity.

Newell suggests that a measure of a coach’s ability is in the homage paid by other coaches, as in Yanai’s selection as CCAA Coach of the Year last season when his team finished fourth and failed to qualify for the playoffs.

“He’s a gem,” said Cal Poly Pomona Coach Dave Bollwinkle.

“If a player can’t get along with Yanai, he can’t get along with anyone,” said Biola Coach Dave Holmquist.

“He’s some kind of a coach,” said Coach John Masi at UC Riverside, which beat Dominguez Hills by a single point in January but lost to the Toros in overtime this month.

Newell says you will seldom find a group of coaches who think that way about an opponent, but he thinks he knows why Yanai is so highly regarded: “He has his priorities right. Players and academics first. There aren’t a lot of coaches today interested in that part.”

Frank Yanai remembers the cold wind on his face as he rode in the back of a pickup down the southern Sierra slope near Bishop. It was the dead of winter, 1945. Frank was 5 years old when his family was released from a Japanese internment camp in the Owens Valley. His younger brother, Dave, 2 1/2, rested near his mother’s feet on the floor. He was born in the camp, as was one of the family’s five daughters.

Their father ran a retail liquor business in Los Angeles when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Soon he was rounded up and ordered to help build the barracks in the internment camp that would house thousands of Japanese from Southern California during World War II. The rest of the family was shipped there later.

When the war ended, it was up to each family to find a way out.

“My father was lucky he had a friend with a truck,” Frank said.

The family returned to Los Angeles and bounced from hotel to hotel, spent a year in the basement of a church, then moved to Gardena in 1947.

Dave liked Gardena. He stills lives there. It is a city with which he has formed “a kinship,” he said.

In his early years, however, Dave was a mischief-maker. He “marched to his own agenda,” Frank said. He spent the better part of his time at a local bowling alley setting pins or in the pool hall. Dave was a hustler.

“Anything to get a little extra money for a hamburger, a malt and some french fries,” Dave said. “At times I had no direction. I marched to my own drumbeat. You could say I lived a full 24 hours.”

At home, his parents spoke only Japanese. On Saturdays, the children attended a Japanese school to remind them of their heritage.

Said Frank: “For the first few years of our lives we were really groping, trying to understand our parents. It wasn’t easy, particularly when we started (American) school.”

Dave picked up English in kindergarten by watching and listening to other youngsters.

“The stereotypical Asian is one of a ‘quiet American,’ ” he explained. “Young Japanese children weren’t able to speak English as well when they entered school, so they learned by watching and doing. When the teacher said it was time to take a nap and to rest your head on your desk, you saw the other kids in the class putting their heads down on their desks and you did the same. You learned from that.”

The boys worked in their father’s fish-drying business.

“It was used in a soup base for Japanese people,” Frank said. The land on which they worked in Dominguez Hills would eventually become the site of the university where Yanai coaches.

Later the family started a gardening business.

“Both our parents worked, so we were on our own,” said Frank.

The brothers found solace in Gardena, despite a tough existence.

“It was a good town. We were lucky,” Frank said. “We had white friends early in life and we didn’t feel much prejudice.”

But what prejudice there was stung Dave. He was taunted in school with chants of “Jap! Jap!” Dave retaliated: “I had my share of fights.”

As Dave grew older, the prejudice “ebbed away,” he said, thanks in part to athletics.

“If you had athletic prowess, kids would give you that measure of respect you were looking for.”

Fukai coached the Yanai boys in youth baseball and watched Dave mature into a fleet-footed outfielder who played at Cal State Long Beach. Dave was active in basketball, too, although he was often the shortest player on the court.

“One of my midgets,” Fukai said.

Dave feels that he has been successful often at Dominguez Hills because he understands the situations that other minority athletes face.

“He is very sensitive to blacks and their plight,” Frank said.

Indeed, Yanai has made a career of finding unsung minority players, offering them an education and turning them into fine players.

Just ask All-American candidate Anthony Blackmon.

The Aliso Village housing projects in East Los Angeles rise three stories above the noisy streets and cluttered gutters near the L.A. River. Dave Yanai, wearing a suit and tie, pulled his new, full-sized, shiny automobile under the front window of a weather-beaten apartment building. He had come to sign a player he felt had endless potential, one who could challenge for the CCAA Player of the Year honor in his senior year.

Tony Carter, a Yanai assistant and now coach at Bishop Montgomery High, rode next to Yanai. This neighborhood looked so tough, he later confided to associates, that he considered not getting out of the car when it stopped at Blackmon’s apartment.

Blackmon, his hair in braids, stepped to his front window.

“Damn,” he thought. “These guys look like some kind of federal agents.”

The pair stepped from the car. Recalled Yanai: “I told Tony, ‘You watch. Anthony will be out on the street to meet us so the guys in his neighborhood know we are all right.’ ”

Blackmon materialized shortly and signaled to a few “brothers” in the street. He had first met Yanai at the City Section all-star game in 1985. Blackmon did not play much in the game and was surprised when an Asian man approached him.

“I didn’t know nothing about Dave Yanai,” Blackmon said. “I was sort of shocked. I said to myself: ‘Oh, an Oriental coach. What a shock.’ Then I said: ‘Oh, wow. Well, a coach is a coach.’ ”

Blackmon was unsure of his future. He had not received scholarship offers and could not afford college.

Yanai offered Blackmon a scholarship: books, tuition and a campus dormitory room. Blackmon is living up to Yanai’s expectations. He leads the CCAA in scoring and rebounding. At least three professional teams have sent scouts to watch him play. Five years ago, he didn’t figure he’d make it to college.

“Growin’ up in my neighborhood, it’s hard to say what I would have done had I not met Dave Yanai,” he said.

Those who know Yanai say that he creates a bond with his players. A bond that never goes away.

Relatives talk about the time that Ricky Bell, a Heisman Trophy winner in football at USC, walked into Yanai’s Gardena home unannounced one Saturday afternoon. He had played basketball for Yanai at Fremont.

“Dave would tutor kids at his home,” Fukai said.

And he occasionally gets heartbroken over some things his players do.

Last summer he was asked to deliver a eulogy at the funeral of a former player, 1975 City Section Player of the Year Ivory Ward. Ward had died from a drug overdose.

“He is so close to his players,” said Dominguez Hills assistant coach Bart Yamachika. “He wants them to succeed so much that when these things happen he takes them very hard, maybe a little more hard than most.”

Yanai, according to Fukai, cried for weeks after Ward’s funeral.

Speaking from his Bloomington office, Knight was long-distance jousting with a California reporter when this question was posed: “Have you ever wondered why, if Yanai is such a good coach, that he has not gone on to something bigger and better, like a Division I school?”

“You ever wonder why you haven’t bettered yourself?” Knight snapped. “Maybe you’re happy as a sportswriter. Maybe he is content where he is.”

Yanai claims he has applied for only one Division I job since coming to Dominguez Hills. Newell has told him that many jobs are not worth moving up to a Division I program.

“I feel confident that I can handle a Division I job,” Yanai said. “In fact, I would relish the opportunity, but I am not obsessed with it. . . . Southern California is a great place to live and raise children. You don’t have to deal with all the elements here that you do in a cold-weather city where there is snow. I don’t want to leave.”

Fukai, and others, feel that Yanai is being overlooked because he is a Japanese-American.

“He belongs at USC or UCLA. . . . He is a diamond in the rough, and he can’t get a break,” Fukai said. “It’s still very much that stereotype of having a head coach that is a Japanese-American.”

Frank Yanai agreed.

“He has been overlooked because he is a Japanese-American, not black, not white. This is basketball, and the guys who make the hiring decisions look at him and say, ‘Gee, would we be taking a chance hiring him?’ ”

Newell feels that Yanai has been overlooked: “Unfortunately, the people who make the hiring decisions don’t have the first clue of what they are looking for. They go on newspaper clippings and take coaches who are already on the Division I level.”

Job openings at several Division I schools, most notably Cal State Fullerton, have brought Yanai’s name up for speculation. However, Yanai said, the bottom line is: “I have a great job I really enjoy. It doesn’t pay a lot of money, but the people here are great to work with.”

Yanai said that if he left Dominguez Hills, he would seek a job with similar benefits.

“I hope he stays in the area,” said Newell. “If he does leave, he doesn’t have to have a preponderence of material to win. . . . However, he should leave only if the situation is right for him.”

Yanai sat in an armchair in a motel room on a recent trip to a game at San Luis Obispo. Three coaches were sleeping in the cramped quarters. The TV was turned to a college basketball game. Yanai pulled out a half-finished cigar and lit up, then reflected on the first 45 years of his life.

“I am very fortunate to be an American,” he said, puffing on the cigar. “I am a survivor, I guess. It was a great experience growing up like I did. It gave me a practical sense of life. It taught me to think ahead so I don’t end up on the short end of everything.”

Yanai let out a sigh, and with it a puff of smoke.

“I guess it taught me not to be taken for granted.”

Then, with a wry smile, he recounted his obscure success with little regret. The real kick in his life over the years, he said, has been watching young people under his guidance grow as individuals, with basketball merely a vehicle teaching them how to get the most out of their abilities.