Monarch Trio a Perfect Fit

Gary McKnight carries a lot of weight around Mater Dei High School. Around his house, too, no doubt, especially in the kitchen, where his particular brand of weight training takes place every day.

Suffice it to say, this coach is no Gary McLite.

But the shadow McKnight casts is as figurative as it is literal, engulfing everything that is scarlet and gray and dribbles basketballs at the corner of Bristol and Edinger.

So it’s easy to forget about the men who sit alongside McKnight on the bench, Phil Bellomo and Dave Taylor--or, as they are unofficially titled, the Mater Dei secretaries of offense and defense.

Bellomo, the one with the bookish glasses and the loudest voice during team timeouts, coordinates the Monarch offense. Taylor, the one with the aging surfer looks, directs the defense. This combination has been in place since 1983, and Saturday night it contributed to another Mater Dei Southern Section championship--the school’s sixth under McKnight.

Bellomo and Taylor are also listed under McKnight, but only because someone has to placate boosters, meet the press and write in the starting lineup. This is a triumvirate in the truest sense. McKnight runs the Monarchs the way Bill Walsh used to run the San Francisco 49ers--detached, with a firm belief that authority was meant to designated.

“For a high school head coach, I think he’s unusual,” Taylor said, following Mater Dei’s 83-57 victory over Loyola at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. “I don’t know of any other high school coach who lets his assistants have this amount of freedom.

“I think it’s a credit to him. He makes Phil and I feel so important to the program, we have to do a good job.”

Bellomo describes it as a major-college program atmosphere.

“You see this kind of thing in a lot of college situations,” Bellomo said. “At UNLV, their assistants are as active as you can find.

“I don’t know if what we do is really unique, but Gary is not someone who’s into the ‘He’s-got-to-do-it-all’ thing.”

Bellomo’s offense has set standards for balanced efficiency this season. The Monarchs are 30-1 without one player averaging as many as 15 points a game.

Taylor’s defense is yielding an average of just 45.5 points a game and Saturday, limited a Loyola team that scored 44 points in one quarter against St. Paul to a mere 57.

McKnight, meanwhile, has blended the whole concoction into seven trips to the Southern Section finals in his eight seasons at Mater Dei.

So, who’s the brains behind this operation?

Taylor simply smiles at the question and waits for the next one.

Bellomo laughs and shakes his head. “You’re not going to get me to say anything about that,” he said. “We just have a real good coaching situation, a real good chemistry.

“There’s three of us and it works.”

Taylor, 32, has been with McKnight from the start at Mater Dei. Their relationship began in Little League, with Taylor the player and McKnight the coach, and it developed into a working arrangement when McKnight was hired as the Monarchs’ head coach in 1982.

Bellomo, 28, arrived a year later. McKnight recruited him off the campus of La Verne College. Among Bellomo’s credentials: a part-time job in media relations with the Los Angeles Lakers. His duties include corraling players for halftime and postseason interviews with broadcasters Chick Hearn and Stu Lantz. He also sits next to Hearn at Laker home games and hands him notes that read: “The last time the Lakers held an opponent to under 90 points was . . . “

This connection of Bellomo’s has had an interesting trickle-down effect on the Monarchs.

“I get a lot of my ideas at those games,” Bellomo said. “If a genie were to come out of a bottle and ask me what I wanted, I’d say, ‘To be in that league.’ I love that league--the up-and-down pace, no zone defense, the wide-open style.

“After ‘87, when we had to go from a post-oriented offense with LeRon (Ellis) to a perimeter-oriented offense, I tried to incorporate some of the things I saw while watching the Pistons and the Lakers. How Vinnie Johnson and Joe Dumars got open and how they adapted to different defenses.

“That whole perspective helped me a lot.”

Saturday, Bellomo ran a scaled-down version of Showtime at Loyola--in essence, playing right into the opposition’s strength. In style, Loyola and Loyola Marymount share more than a few syllables, but Bellomo didn’t want any flinching in the face of the fast break, so he revved it up, too.

“We’re just as much a transition team as they are,” Bellomo said. “We felt they couldn’t play 94 feet with us on defense and play it for 32 minutes.”

A good hunch. By halftime, the Cubs were down by 17 points and dragging their tongues to the locker room with them.

Defensively, Taylor devised a way to clamp down on Ryan Jamison, the Cubs’ 6-11 center of action, by full-fronting him and denying him the ball from the high post.

“Jamison had six points,” Taylor said with an amount of pride. “Obviously, we did what we wanted.”

McKnight has a good thing going, no doubt, but for how long? How much longer before Bellomo and Taylor start to yearn for a high-school program to call their own?

For the moment, both claim to be content with the small type.

“To be a head coach,” Bellomo said, “you’ve got to deal with a lot of politics. I love basketball, not politics. Gary lets me do basketball.”

Taylor seconds that motion, with one addendum.

“Obviously, the winning is fun,” he points out.

Obviously. There’s always that.