Anderson Matures Into Performer of Note : College basketball: Occidental’s 6-foot-10 center was a self-described ‘stiff’ when he played at Los Alamitos High School.
As long as a tuba was wrapped around him, Chris Anderson always felt at home on center stage.
He could not lift the instrument when he began playing it in the fifth grade--”Why couldn’t he have chosen the piccolo?” asked his mother, Lynn--but by the time he had reached junior high, Anderson was an award-winning soloist for a jazz ensemble that played a festival circuit throughout the western United States.
“I was a swimmer when I was a kid, so my lungs were really big and I could get some good sound through that sucker,” Anderson said. “I was always the biggest guy in school, so I wanted to learn the biggest instruments. First I learned the string bass, then the tuba.
“Everything was just enormous.”
As the years passed, Anderson and his sousaphone became more proportionate. Today, at 6-foot-10, 210 pounds, he still plays, but he now dwarfs the instrument.
Anderson, a senior, also stands tall above opponents as the starting center for the Occidental College basketball team. A self-described “stiff” when he played at Los Alamitos High School, Anderson has developed into one of the top Division III post players in the West.
Once timid under the basket, Anderson now is a powerful force on offense and an enforcer on defense.
“You can take most players as freshmen, work with them for four years and at the end say, ‘This guy is a good Division III player,’ ” La Verne Coach Gary Stewart said. “With Chris, you go through that and you say he is not a Division III player. He can play at a higher level.”
Anderson believes so too, and to that end he will pursue a professional basketball career in Europe or Australia after he graduates from Occidental in June with a degree in exercise science.
But before taking his turn-around jump shot overseas, Anderson will attempt to help the Tigers (6-12 overall, 2-4 in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) turn around their season.
Anderson has been Occidental’s most consistent performer. He is averaging 18.4 points and 9.2 rebounds--fourth and third, respectively, in the SCIAC--and leads conference players with 46 blocked shots.
“There’s a difference between someone who stands tall and someone who plays tall,” Claremont Coach David Wells said. “Chris has improved immensely. He’s as fine a defensive post player (as) our league has seen in a long time.”
Anderson also is among the tallest. SCIAC centers usually measure in at 6-5 or 6-6.
“I don’t think there’s anybody in our league that can stop me one-on-one,” Anderson says. “(At the Division III level), I’m not used to playing against people my size that have any kind of athletic ability.”
Anderson was the one lacking in talent when he arrived in Eagle Rock in 1986 after a mostly forgettable high school career.
As a freshman at Huntington Beach High, the only uniform he wore was that of the marching band. Music provided the impetus for a transfer to Los Alamitos, where band director and longtime friend Chuck Wackerman had taken a job.
By then, Anderson was 6-5 and ready to trade his spats for a pair of high-tops. He participated in the jazz band and went out late for basketball, but he did not play much for the sophomore team. He made the varsity as a junior but did not start. As a 6-8 senior, he still wasn’t good enough to make the starting five, but he averaged four points and four rebounds.
Nonetheless, he received several “business reply” recruiting letters from small schools, including Occidental.
“They were looking for a smart tall guy,” Anderson said. “They didn’t care whether you could walk or not.”
Most people who saw him early in his freshman season weren’t sure Anderson could do that much without falling.
“I remember seeing him and saying, ‘Boy, they’ve got their work cut out with this guy,’ ” Pomona Coach Charlie Katsiaficas said. “He really hadn’t caught up with his body. He was very, very raw.”
And very, very scared.
“I had no mental clue on what to do with the basketball and what to do if people wanted me to score,” Anderson recalled. “I was the biggest basket case.”
As noted, however, big goes a long way in a small-college conference such as the SCIAC.
Playing for the junior varsity as a freshman, Anderson progressed under the tutelage of assistant Cleve Buckner, who played for the New York Knicks.
“He’d fall or get knocked down on the floor and stop playing for a while because he was waiting for a call,” Buckner said. “At the end of his first year, he started picking himself up off the floor.”
Anderson averaged 12.1 points and 6.5 rebounds as a sophomore on the varsity and came into his own last season when he shot 60% from the field. His averages of 18.2 points and 8.8 rebounds a game ranked fifth and second, respectively, in the SCIAC, and he led the conference in blocked shots with 2.9 a game. He was a first-team all-conference selection.
Anderson is confident that his size and skills will translate well at whichever outpost he lands after graduation.
Several former Occidental players have played overseas, including Coach Brian Newhall, who played in France for two years after graduating in 1982, and John Keister, who is now playing in Paris.
Buckner believes that Anderson’s best days as a basketball player are ahead.
“Chris is going to make leaps and bounds after this year,” Buckner said. “The other people developed (as players) as much as they were going to when they finished here. He has a chance to go farther than anyone else.”
