Again Flying at Altitude : College basketball: Sky-walking Shelton Boykin was grounded in the big-time program of Texas El Paso, but, two troubled years later, he is airborne at Valley.

The Brigham Young basketball coaches were on the phone wanting to know the whereabouts of their recruit. They had sent a car to pick him up at the Salt Lake City but had come up empty-handed.

His high school coach started looking for him and found him in class, still wearing a suit and carrying his suitcase. Sky-walking Shelton Boykin, a great dunker and a champion hurdler at San Fernando High, was afraid to fly.

Boykin eventually quelled his fear of flying enough to venture off to Texas El Paso on a basketball scholarship, but, once there, he again was grounded. He played only 25 minutes as a freshman and did not rejoin the team for his sophomore season.

More than two troubled years after leaving San Fernando, he is finding the skies a little friendlier at Valley College. A 6-foot-4 1/2 swingman, he is frequently flying for points and adding his hyperkinetic athleticism to the 6-4 Monarchs’ mix of transfers, redshirts and recruits.

“I think going to UTEP was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life,” said Boykin, who felt very small playing big-time basketball for one of the sport’s most accomplished coaches.

Don (The Bear) Haskins coached UTEP--then Texas Western--to an NCAA championship in 1966, and UTEP has the seventh-highest winning percentage in the 1980s among Division I teams. Perhaps the highest-profile coach in the Southwest, Haskins was nonetheless such a distant figure for Boykin that seeing him in a passing car was a memorable occasion.

“I saw him once. I was like, ‘Damn, saw coach,’ ” Boykin said. “Coach Haskins, we didn’t talk too much. It was like ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye’. . . . No player had a good relationship with him. You saw him at practice, on the way to a game. He was like a bear--hibernating.”

Haskins called Boykin “a heck of a nice guy” but admitted that he didn’t remember him very well.

Boykin said that his relationship with assistant coach Norm Ellenberger was even worse.

“To us, he was a coach like a butcher, like, ‘I can use this piece of meat, but I can’t use this,’ ” Boykin said.

UTEP assistant Nate Archibald, a former pro star, was Boykin’s link to the coaching staff. Archibald was a mentor for Boykin and several other players but left early in the 1987-88 season after his troubles with the Internal Revenue Service and other personal problems became public.

“After he quit, things went downhill real bad,” Boykin said. “When Nate quit, we (the freshmen) just turned into practice players.”

Observers in El Paso say that many of Archibald’s recruits, including Boykin, were not talented enough for a Top-20 program like UTEP’s; Boykin claims that he and the other young players had no one to stand up for them after Archibald’s departure.

The 1987-88 UTEP (23-10) team was known for its personality clashes.

“We were bitter enemies,” Boykin said. “First it was a problem because everybody was trying to take each other’s girlfriends. Then it was who got better pub. Then it was who could dance better. It was stupid things.”

Separated from his family and missing Los Angeles, Boykin was overwhelmed by the ennui of the boundless Texas mesas.

“There I could sit in study hall and stare at the books for two hours and not get nothing done,” Boykin said. “If you’ve ever been there for a month, there’s nothing to do. It’s a place to go for three or four days. That’s it.

“I had everything I needed materially, but spiritually, I wasn’t happy.”

According to Boykin, players had access to boosters’ cars and received other perks. A 1989 Newsday newspaper article included similar allegations from Boykin’s former teammate, Sean Harris. There was talk of an investigation, but NCAA investigators reportedly never went to El Paso.

“When we wanted to go out, we’d get a car,” Boykin said. “They were nice cars, Cadillacs, Mercedes, Jaguars. . . . The coaches didn’t loan the cars, but people around the area did. The coaches went by the books, but the people, that’s a different story.

“They took care of us; they had some nice supporters. They’re good people, but after the season everything slowed down.”

Boykin went to UTEP primarily for the opportunity to participate in the NCAA Tournament. However, the deer and the antelope were playing more than Boykin, who was stuck at the end of the UTEP bench and played only three minutes in a first-round NCAA blowout loss to Seton Hall at Pauley Pavilion.

Haskins said that it would take time to convert Boykin, a high school center, into a Division I player.

“First off, we were pretty good,” Haskins said. “Shelton didn’t get to play much, but I think he would have. At that time he was kind of between a guard and a forward, kind of a wrong size. If he would polish up his skills, he could be a darn good player.”

Haskins played Boykin in only 10 of 33 games. Boykin shot once during his entire freshman season, and he had more turnovers (two) than points (none).

Those familiar with the UTEP program say that, as a basketball player, Boykin was a great hurdler. One El Paso reporter called him “one of the worst players to ever play here,” and to some extent Boykin’s conflicts might have been the product of spending more hours on the bench than Judge Wapner.

He wasn’t alone in his disenchantment, though. None of the four scholarship recruits in Boykin’s class still play for UTEP.

Boykin planned to transfer to College of the Sequoias for the 1988-89 season, but UTEP refused to release his transcript because of an overdue library book. He returned to UTEP for the 1989 spring semester and rejoined the track team. He finished third in the 110-meter high hurdles in the Western Athletic Conference meet then headed home to Pacoima.

After one day at College of the Canyons, he switched to Valley. He missed the first two games this season, both Valley losses, while taking care of academic matters.

Valley has lost only once when Boykin plays.

“He adds some leadership,” Valley Coach Jim Stephens said. “He’s been around awhile. . . . A lot of kids are out of high school and don’t know what it is to play at the college level.”

Boykin says that he feels comfortable playing for Valley, and, surprisingly for someone who dislikes Texas as much as he does, his best friend on the team is a guy named Cliff Barnes.

“Us right here, we are real close,” Boykin said. “I started hanging out with Cliff and (teammate) Steve Ward, and they were cool fellas.”

Barnes, a transfer from Cal State Northridge who starts at center, and Boykin spend hours together playing video games. Boykin says that he might go to the same college Barnes chooses. Recently, when Boykin was hospitalized because of an ear infection, Barnes stayed the entire night with him in a bedside vigil.

“Coach says I’m the key to the season,” Boykin said. “I think it’s Cliff.

“I didn’t think I was going to play here because I forgot how good I was. I forgot how fast I was, how strong I was.”

Boykin tempers his braggadoccio with a Magic Johnson-wattage smile and easygoing nature. He also backs some of it up.

He is averaging more than 12 points and eight rebounds a game, and those numbers would be higher had he not been held to two points against Mt. SAC while he was still suffering from the ear infection.

Stephens calls him the best athlete on the Valley team.

“I know one thing, nobody can get up and down the floor with him and jump with him,” said San Fernando Coach Dick Crowell, who still marvels at a certain one-handed, alley-oop dunk that Boykin threw down against Eagle Rock.

Boykin moved into the San Fernando starting lineup during his sophomore season and averaged 16.3 points and 9.8 rebounds as a senior. He was an All-Valley selection as a senior but spent his high school career playing out of position at center.

“He never really developed the tools he needed for off-guard in Division I,” Crowell said. “I think he would have been better off staying on the (West) Coast.”

UTEP was the strongest program to originally recruit Boykin. Santa Clara and St. Mary’s of the West Coast Conference were others that expressed interest.

After this season, Boykin, an administrative justice major, will again go through the recruiting process. He says that he will only run track if the school has a good program and if he’s “bored.”

“I’m going to put that on the back burner and live off the rep,” said Boykin, who won City Section titles in the high and intermediate hurdles in 1987. “I don’t know whether to go out riding high.”

This formerly frantic flier’s basketball career is taking off again too, now that he realizes that playing time is more important than prime time.