Frieder Basking in Glow of Sun Devils

Nearly a year after he abandoned the basketball team that was about to win the NCAA tournament and headed southwest, Bill Frieder was asked if he had any regrets.

He shook his head.

“Are you kidding?” he asked.

He isn’t sorry he left Michigan at the exact moment the Wolverines, the only college team he had ever coached, started their intoxicating run through the tournament. He doesn’t feel guilty about the way it happened. He doesn’t hate then-athletic director Bo Schembechler for making him leave when he wanted to finish the year. He doesn’t miss the Big Ten, or the fans who booed him or the media who he says tormented him.

In fact, there is nothing about his home state, his school or the program he built that Frieder would want back.

Not now, after he’s seen the palms and the sun and the desert at Arizona State University. Not after he’s looked into the stands to see the adoring fans give him a standing ovation for a nine-point loss. Not after he’s proven he can make a mediocre team almost good in his first year. Not after he’s seen what it’s like to recruit in his place in the sun.

“I wasn’t happy,” Frieder said in his office last week. “And that’s why I left. I left because of my unhappiness. I busted my tail for that area, all my life. I won state championships in high school. They had one of the most productive times in Michigan basketball when I was an assistant there. It was the best era when I was a head coach. We won the NIT, we won Big Ten titles. But that wasn’t enough. To get more boos than the opposing coach during introductions, you get upset with that.”

Then came the phone call from Arizona State late last winter. It wasn’t the first time another school called Frieder, now 47. But it was the first time he seriously listened.

“You finally say, you’ve got to go,” he said. “You’ve got a group out there that wants you, that has a great place, and that’s going to pay you twice as much as what they’re paying you here. Why would we even consider staying? So we left.”

That, in a nutshell, is why Frieder was sitting in a hotel room in Seattle, watching his team win the 1989 NCAA title on television, as one of his assistants, Steve Fisher, stood in his place beside the bench. And that is why he now is losing to teams he would have beaten with his Michigan team, recruiting like mad, and loving it.

The Sun Devils, who haven’t had a winning season since 1982-83, are 12-11 this season, 5-9 in the Pacific-10 after losing, 71-50, Thursday night at Arizona. Season-ticket sales are up nearly 50 percent to 7,200. Frieder, known for a wonderful touch with recruits, has signed five players who are so good, national observers say he has one of the top 10 freshman classes next year. Frieder reportedly will make an extra $20,000 for the top-notch recruiting class because of a clause in his contract, believed to be worth about $400,000 a year.

“The team is better than I thought,” he said. “We’ve done well. Things are good.”

Close your eyes as Frieder talks and he sounds like Schembechler, the athletic director who told him if he had another job, he should simply leave. Frieder’s vowels are as flat as the Michigan countryside where he grew up, his cadence as steady as the people he grew up with.

Open your eyes, and he almost looks like Bo. He squints a lot. A smile is rare. He wears a blue warmup over a yellow shirt -- Michigan colors. (The yellow is Arizona State gold, not maize, he says, and to prove it, he pulls back the jacket to reveal a Sun Devil over his heart.) A Michigan Big Ten championship watch is wrapped around his wrist and a Michigan Big Ten championship ring sits on his finger. He expects Fisher will get him an NCAA ring. His old players have his phone number, and they still call.

“They lose to Purdue, they lose at Indiana, and all of a sudden, my phone’s ringing,” Frieder said. “Rumeal Robinson and Terry Mills, those kids are close to me and always have been. So they call and we talk.”

They don’t have to worry what time it is. Frieder’s always up. He sleeps a couple hours a night. He eats all the wrong things. “Pop, fast food, bad stuff,” he said. He won’t stop working to watch the news, see a movie or even see the house his wife recently bought for them and their 10-year-old daughter.

“Bill is a very intense guy,” said the man who hired him, Arizona State Athletic Director Charles Harris. “He’ll work like crazy.”

The title of Frieder’s book says all you need to know about him. “Basket Case: The Frenetic Life of Michigan Coach Bill Frieder.”

The last movie Frieder saw was “The Godfather.’ That was 17 years ago. He had never heard of “The Wizard of Oz,” until someone mentioned the stage show was being put on at Arizona State.

“That’s a true story,” Frieder said.

He also doesn’t know the year President Kennedy was shot. He said it happened when he was at Michigan, “’64 or ’65.”

“I don’t think I’ve watched the news, ever,” he said.

He’s not proud of this, but he’s not ashamed, either. He is a basketball coach, nothing more, nothing less. He barely played the game himself; he was a scrappy 5-foot-10 guard at Saginaw High School who played part-time and averaged seven points a game. He went to college at Michigan and never played again.

Leaving Ann Arbor with an MBA in 1965, Frieder spurned business offers to coach high-school basketball. He joined the staff of then-Wolverine Coach Johnny Orr in 1973, and become head coach in 1980, after Orr left for Iowa State. Frieder, known for the trademark towel he wears over his shoulder, took the Wolverines to the NIT title in 1984, followed by five straight NCAA tournament appearances and two Big Ten titles in a row.

But his talented Michigan teams never made the final eight, much less the Final Four. The rap was Frieder couldn’t coach in the big games. He got nervous, word was, and then made his players nervous. So fans at Michigan, where football comes first, got on him.

“That started with the Michigan press and Dick Vitale: Can he coach?” he said. “Out here they talk that I can flat-out coach. I can coach. You don’t win Big Ten championships without being a good bench coach.”

“He either learned bench-coaching since April or was able to do it all along,” said Harris.

The people out here think they’ve found a savior in Frieder. It was the second time they tried to hire him; the first time, in 1986, Frieder said, then-Michigan athletic director Don Canham called him in, gave him a $25,000 raise and told him to stay, so he did.

This time, he fully expected to coach Michigan through the 1989 tournament.

“If I would have gone into that tournament denying that I had an interest in Arizona State, and when the tournament was over, gone to Arizona State, the media would have blitzed me. On March 14 or 15, I knew I was coming here. For a day, I thought it could be kept secret. It couldn’t. I was not going to lie to my team or the media or the public. I did it the way I thought I should do it with full intentions of coaching my team. C.M. Newton did it at Vanderbilt; Terry Holland is doing it at Virginia right now. I wanted to do it that way.”

But Schembechler said he wanted a Michigan man to coach his team, so Frieder was gone.

“It was too bad, it really was,” he said. “I belonged with that team. Personally I feel we would have won it if I had been there. Those kids were destined to win a national championship. They were a veteran club, they had gone to the regionals the year before and were playing real good basketball. I felt bad I wasn’t a part of it, but if that’s the worst thing that ever happens to me, I’ll have a great life.”

Frieder acknowledges the possibility, however, that the team may have won the NCAAs because he left.

“You never know what affect adversity has,” he said. “It can help a team.”

There is no doubt in his mind the publicity surrounding his decision helped his new team.

“You had everybody out here following Frieder’s team, everybody out here getting excited about Michigan, all the recruits on the West Coast knowing Bill Frieder. You could not buy that kind of publicity.

“When (parents and recruits) ask me questions about leaving Michigan, I’m a good salesman. I can make that look like Michigan’s fault in a minute. I was being honest, here’s why I wanted to move, I was fully intending to coach my team, but he wouldn’t let me. Now, all of a sudden, I’m a good guy.”

Frieder remains the ultimate good guy in Arizona, at least for now. He knows that with all those recruits, the team should be much better next year and everyone will know it.

“With the freshmen, we’ll be up and down, but the Pac-10’s not as good as the Big Ten, so we might win a few,” Frieder said. “The following year, when they’re sophomores, they’ll be pretty good. We can be qualifying for the NCAA tournament the year after next.”

This is exactly how it happened at Michigan, Frieder rebuilding quickly to get near the top. But when the fans begin to expect great things, Frieder was asked, won’t they become disgruntled if they don’t get it?

“If they start booing and become critical, we’ll just move further west,” Frieder said. “We’ll move to San Diego, Santa Barbara or somewhere. I know what I’m going to do. I’m not going to take it again.”