Schuler Lets Enthusiasm Show, Calls Clipper Job Best in NBA

One Mike had just flown home and the other Mike was still in the sky when the decision came down. The general manager of the Clippers called Mike Schuler in Alameda and said: “Mike, this is Elgin Baylor. We’ve selected you to be our head coach, Mike. You’re our choice.” Schuler replied that he was so excited, he could hardly speak.

The other Mike--Fratello, former coach of the Atlanta Hawks--had just left Los Angeles, where he had interviewed with Baylor one more time, then appeared on a Prime Ticket talk show. Fratello, too, wanted to be head coach of the Clippers. You might think of a Clipper coaching job as the NBA equivalent of mopper-upper at a nuclear power plant. Not at all.

“This is a big day in my life,” Schuler said Friday at the Sports Arena, where he was introduced as the team’s newest trouble-shooter. “There were seven coaching jobs available in the NBA, and I got the best one, no doubt about that.”

Even if the Lakers have an opening?

Well, yeah.

That’s how excited Schuler sounds.

He’s got a fever and a fervor in his pitch, pretty much like that other Schuller, the Reverend. The former coach of the Portland Trail Blazers is a missionary of sorts who intends to lead the Clippers from the NBA’s darkness. “There is no reason in the world,” Mike Schuler sells you, “why the Los Angeles Clippers cannot be a good basketball team, and we’re talking about right now, right away!”

When you take over a team that hasn’t had a winning record since the 1970s, the only way you can go is up. Maybe that’s why Schuler wanted this job so badly. Maybe that’s why more than one coach wanted this job badly.

Is it why?

“Partially,” said Baylor, who screened the candidates, “but it’s also because the talent is here.”

It is?

It is. Take it from Schuler. The new coach said he considers Benoit Benjamin one of the five best centers in basketball, which is a mouthful considering that Akeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing and David Robinson are three of the other four. The new coach also said his new club is so versatile that there’s one guy--Danny Manning?--who might be used at three different positions.

If enthusiasm is a prerequisite to coaching the Clippers, Schuler was made for the job. The man loves basketball so much, he probably draws X-and-O diagrams on his wife’s new tablecloth. He has basketball on the brain, this guy. He will devote himself to the Clippers night and day. It is his life.

“I understand that basketball can never be as important to my players as it is to me,” Schuler said. “No matter how much they love it, I love it more.”

So much so that, from time to time, somebody has to tap Schuler on the shoulder and remind him what else is going on in the world.

Mike sometimes misses some of those little items in the morning paper--like, oh, you know, Presidential elections and earthquakes and missile launchings.

“Aw, it’s not as bad as some people say,” Schuler said, able to tease himself about his lack of interest in current events other than who’s leading the Pacific Division. “Like, one day somebody was talking about (Mikhail) Gorbachev visiting the United States, so I said: ‘Who’s Gorbachev?’ Well, I just said that to be cute. But somebody printed it in the paper very seriously.

“But OK, let me tell a story on myself. Show you what a one-track mind I’ve sometimes had.

“One day a long time ago, my family and I were staying at a Holiday Inn in Cincinnati. We were visiting an amusement park there on vacation. Anyway, we were watching TV in the hotel room when this trial comes on TV.

“So, I watch it for a few minutes, and I turn to my wife, Gloria, and I say: ‘Honey, who’s this Dean guy they’re questioning?’

“That’s right. I didn’t even know the people involved in Watergate.

“There are certain things I’d like to redo in my life, and believe me, that’s one of them.”

Schuler, 49, has sat at the side of Bob Knight and Don Nelson and Larry Brown and Terry Holland, picking their brains. He is a born coach, a guy who claims that he was 10 years old when he already knew what he wanted to do for a living. Some kids want to be cops or shortstops. Mikey Schuler wanted to coach.

So, if you say that coaching is his life, you would not be wrong. If you say that coaching is his whole life, would he argue?

Well . . .

“I’ve been afforded an opportunity to pursue my career by my lovely wife. She’s the one who has raised our two lovely daughters.

“Does that mean I love basketball more than I love my wife and children? Absolutely not.

“Does it mean that I love basketball more than I love anything else? Absolutely, I do.

“Do I go to the opera? Do I have other outside interests? No, I don’t. Would I rather go to a sports bar and watch a basketball game on TV than do anything else in the world? Yes, I would.”

And would he rather coach the Clippers than be President of the United States?

Probably, although it’s a tossup as to which job is easier.

We shook hands with Mike Schuler, convinced that the Clippers had hired the right man.

But before we went, we had to ask him one thing.

Who’s Gorbachev, and what position does he play?

“Power forward, I think,” Schuler said.

We promised not to print it seriously.