Scholar-Athlete : When Mitchell Butler Enrolled at Oakwood, His Life Turned Around Like His Slam Dunk

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.”

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 half court 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 acknowledge, 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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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.

About 12% of the overall student body of 560 students are 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.

“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.”

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.

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.

“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.