COLLEGE BASKETBALL ‘89-90 : Big Reason for Lewis’ Change Now Apparent : Basketball: Tom Lewis was considered selfish at USC, but raising a daughter is the main concern now for Pepperdine standout.

Before going their separate ways, Hank Gathers to Loyola Marymount and Tom Lewis to Pepperdine, they were teammates and classmates as freshmen at USC. During one class midway through that 1985-86 season, Gathers recalled recently, he passed a note to Lewis.

“A lot of the players on the team don’t like you,” Gathers’ note said.

“I don’t care,” Lewis wrote back on the same piece of paper. “Nobody has to like me.”

On Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, Pepperdine will play at Loyola Marymount. Before the game, the referee will introduce co-captain Gathers to co-captain Lewis. The significance of the moment will be lost on neither.

Four years ago, the only thing that Gathers believed Lewis was capable of captaining was a sinking basketball team, which is what USC had at the time.

It is not likely that players have changed so much since then that they would elect someone as their co-captain who does not care if he is liked. So it must be assumed that the change has been in Tom Lewis.

“I can just look at him and tell he’s a changed guy,” said Gathers, who has remained friends with Lewis even though their universities are rivals in the West Coast Conference.

“It’s obvious on the court because he’s passing the ball more. At SC, he had the ability to do a lot of different things. Passing was one of them. But he very rarely did it because he was out only for Tom.”

The change in Lewis, however, is even more obvious away from basketball. In fact, he believes that it was his maturity off the court that led to his emergence as a team leader. “I’m a better person, which makes me a better player,” he said.

Sure, he is older. A teen-ager when he entered USC, he turned 23 earlier this month and will earn his degree in communications next spring. It is only natural that he would have grown some as a person.

But he also found a comfort zone at Pepperdine, which offers a more intimate setting than USC. A church-affiliated university in Malibu with an enrollment of 6,800, it might not be right for everyone. But apparently it was for Lewis.

His first coach at Pepperdine, Jim Harrick, treated him like a member of his family. One of Lewis’ closest friends today is Harrick’s son. Although Pepperdine’s current coach, Tom Asbury, does not have the same relationship with Lewis, they share a mutual respect.

More importantly, however, Lewis has found true love.

It came in a small package during his freshman year at USC and has not gotten a whole heck of a lot larger yet. His daughter, Holly, will turn 4 in January. Now, no one can say that Tom is out only for Tom.

“I’m a good basketball player, but I think I’m a great father,” he said. “I know that I try my hardest. It’s also the thing that gives me the most satisfaction.

“Of all the achievements I’ve had in basketball, none of them come even close to comparing to the way I feel about Holly.

“But it’s also helped me in basketball. I’ve learned a lot about life, about growing up and deciding what’s important. Being a father puts things in perspective real quick.”

It would be difficult to find anyone who follows basketball in Southern California who is not familiar with Lewis’ saga. Because he was able at a young age to do what is supposed to be done with a basketball, put it through the hoop, his private life has hardly been private.

While living in Boston as a child, his parents divorced. He has not seen his father since the age of 7. His mother worked two jobs while raising three children before she remarried and moved to San Juan Capistrano.

As a high school freshman, Lewis played for the sophomore team at Capistrano Valley, which was coached by Pat Barrett. When Lewis and his mother had a falling out, at least in part because he could not get along with his stepfather, he left home and moved in with Barrett and his parents in Garden Grove.

The following year, Lewis transferred to Santa Ana Mater Dei High School, which later hired Barrett as a member of the coaching staff. Other coaches charged that Mater Dei used “undue influence” to recruit Lewis. His relationship with Barrett was put under a microscope. Was Barrett, not quite 30 at the time, a guardian angel or an opportunist?

But if the world was swirling around him, Lewis kept his balance on the court. As he grew from 6-foot-3 to 6-7 in three years at Mater Dei, the team lost only five games and won two Southern Section championships. He was a two-time high school All-American, averaging 32 points a game as a senior.

He was recruited by many of the country’s most prestigious college basketball programs--Kentucky, Syracuse, Maryland, UNLV, UCLA. Deciding to remain in Southern California but unhappy about UCLA’s coaching change to Walt Hazzard, he chose USC.

Again, he found himself at the center of controversy. Other players from that team say that there was resentment because USC’s coach at the time, Stan Morrison, gave Lewis the green light to shoot, a rare accommodation for a freshman.

Lewis said Morrison gave him nothing; he earned his shots because of his production. He led the team by scoring 17.6 points a game, more than any other freshman in the nation.

“I don’t think he was being selfish,” said another freshman on that team, Bo Kimble, who transferred to Loyola Marymount after the season. “He was only doing what the coach would let him do. But the older guys didn’t know how to deal with it.”

Gathers said he and Kimble told Lewis that he should try to get along better with his teammates, advice they believed he needed after he was involved in several fights during practices.

“I believe that, deep down, Tom cared about whether he was liked or not,” Gathers said. “But he didn’t know how to make it happen for him at that time.

“He had never learned how to play a role on a team, how to affiliate his talents into a team with players who were just as good as he was.”

Lewis was under such intense scrutiny in high school that he already had built a protective shell around himself by the time he arrived at USC. He got along with Gathers and Kimble, but most of his other teammates found him aloof. Neither he nor they made the effort to become friends.

So most of them never were aware of his personal problems that season. In January, his girlfriend, who was still in high school, gave birth to their daughter. Lewis, who had never had much luck with fathers, suddenly was one.

“Some of the players thought that I didn’t like them because they didn’t see me very much outside the gym,” he said. “But they didn’t understand that, while they were going to parties on weekends, I was going home to help change diapers.”

Soon, he also would be changing universities, fueling further controversy. USC Athletic Director Mike McGee asked Morrison to resign at the end of the season, then hired George Raveling, leading to the transfers of Gathers, Kimble and Lewis. Lewis chose UC Irvine, changed his mind before attending a class and landed at Pepperdine.

Lewis said he did not feel wanted at USC after Morrison left. He still corresponds with Morrison, who is the coach at San Jose State.

“I wish it had worked out at SC,” Lewis said. “I don’t know whether it was McGee or George (Raveling) who didn’t want me to stay. But now they’ve got the players they want, the program they want. Now they have to sleep in their own bed.”

Even after Lewis arrived at Pepperdine for his redshirt season in 1986-87, Asbury, an assistant at the time, said he and Harrick believed that Lewis would have been better off if he had remained at USC.

“We felt that what he needed at that particular time in his life was some stability,” Asbury said. “He would have had a coaching change either way, but it wouldn’t have been a change of scenery.”

As it turned out, Harrick gave Lewis what he needed.

“Tom just needed some tender loving care,” said Harrick, now at UCLA. “When you talk about parents, he was almost devoid of that kind of relationship. I took him into my home, introduced him to my family, and we all became really close.

“He was not an easy guy to get to know, but his reputation, the perception that he has some kind of attitude, is not right. He wants to be a good guy, and he is a good guy.”

Lewis said Harrick also lectured him for hours about becoming a complete basketball player. But in Harrick’s attacking offense, Lewis played the role of shooting guard as well as small forward and was still primarily a scorer. He led the team in scoring as a sophomore, averaging 22.9 points.

Before last season, however, Harrick left for UCLA. Lewis was faced with his third coaching change in four years, this time to Asbury. He was Harrick’s assistant for nine years, but his philosophy was different. His team would be more structured offensively, more disciplined defensively.

It was not a perfect fit for Lewis at the start of last season. Asbury sent him home early from some practices. In a game at Gonzaga in January, Asbury benched Lewis for the second half.

“He saw that we would do something about it if he didn’t give us what we wanted,” Asbury said.

Since then, they have had an understanding. They will do things Asbury’s way, but they also will talk about them.

“We’ve had our moments, and we still do in all honesty,” Asbury said. “He’ll question you; he’ll tell you what he thinks. I like that. We will not let each other not communicate with each other. That is a real mistake with Tom. He has to be communicated with.”

Among things that Asbury has communicated to Lewis is that he must concentrate more on defense, rebound, look for the open man and, above all else, take better shots. He still led the team in scoring last year, but his average was down to 16.2 and his shooting percentage was a feeble 42.2%.

“I don’t think Tom’s problem is selfishness,” Asbury said. “It’s just that he wants to win so much he takes things on himself. I’m trying to convince him that he can help us more if he takes better shots and shoots 50%. That’s very do-able.”

Lewis appears to have gotten the message. He said one of his best games last season was against UC Irvine, when he took only nine shots but was tenacious on defense and on the boards.

“I don’t think he’d want a steady dose of that,” Asbury said. “A scorer likes to score. But I think he will score more this year.”

If he averages 17.2 points, he will become Pepperdine’s all-time leading scorer.

“Coach Asbury is the same as any other coach,” Lewis said. “He wants an overall game from me. There’s this misconception that we don’t get along. That’s not true at all.

“We have a different relationship than I had with Coach Harrick. But people should stop thinking that we have problems. In fact, sometimes I kind of enjoy him.”

Lewis appears to be enjoying life in general. He lives on campus at Pepperdine but still spends free weekends in Garden Grove with the Barretts. As Pat Barrett works with 23 other basketball players at the Performance Training Institute in Anaheim, he does not have time to attend every one of Lewis’ practices, as he did at USC.

The court of public opinion is still divided on Barrett’s role in Lewis’ life, but both Harrick and Asbury have nothing but good things to say about him.

“He was much maligned, but the fact is that he and his parents are good people and they love Tom,” Harrick said. “They deserve all the credit in the world for getting Tom through high school and to college. Now, Tom is growing up and becoming his own man.”

It is not easy, being a college basketball player, student and father. It might be even more difficult for him next year when he begins playing professionally, if not in the NBA, then perhaps in Europe. That will put more distance between him and his daughter. He realizes that would be the best way to provide for her, but he is not particularly looking forward to being separated.

“On Holly’s last birthday, I practiced until 6 (p.m.), drove for two hours down to her mother’s house in Mission Viejo, stayed for three hours and drove two hours back home,” he said. “I’m going to hate it when I have to leave on the day after Christmas to go with the team to Louisiana or somewhere. I just want to spend as much time with her as I can.

“What happened with my own father makes me want to be around a lot more. The first thing I said after she was born was, ‘I’m not leaving.’ I’m going to see this through. I’m going to be with her for life.”