Larry Farmer’s Desert Rebound

AS THE HOMETOWN basketball team trots, then runs down the hardwood floor, the crowd begins to cheer. “Pass! Pass!” the coach yells. “That’s it . . . Now dribble! Dribble! . . . Defend your position!”

One of his players steps in front of another. “That’s it . . . Screen! Screen!” the coach shouts, this time gesturing wildly. “OK, he’s open. Take it! Take it!”

Swish. Two points.

Then, as the visiting team tries an inbound pass, the ball is intercepted and hurled cross-court for a penetrating drive that ends in an easy layup.

Suddenly a referee’s whistle blows, and everything comes to a halt. But not because of a penalty or player substitution. Instead, from the corner of the court, a few spectators appear with blankets in their arms. They spread out at midcourt and, joined by some of the players and one of the officials, begin to pray. A few minutes later, another whistle sounds and play resumes.

Here, in a cross between sports fanaticism and Islamic fundamentalism, is the brave new world of Arab basketball. There are no cheerleaders. No waves. No slam-dunk competitions. But the fans don’t need them. The men beat on bongos, and the women let loose ear-piercing, falsetto shrieks loud enough to scare any opponent.

In a land where the players have names like Hussein and Hisham rather than Magic and Moses, the hometown coach is one Larry Farmer and his squad is the Qadsia team, defending champions of the KBA--the Kuwait Basketball Assn.

It’s a far cry from the campus at UCLA, where Farmer played varsity basketball for three years and coached for nearly nine. But in Kuwait, basketball is the newest and fastest-growing spectator sport. Throughout the country, teams are being organized, courts are being built and Middle Eastern round-ball dynasties are being born.

For almost two years, Farmer has quietly lived an improbable dream. He is a man-child in the promised land of petrodollars, a pampered visitor in the Arab world’s ultimate welfare state. “Coach Larry”--as he is known nationwide--is also an expatriate star in the compact sheikdom along the Persian Gulf. He is recognized everywhere. But then again, it’s difficult for the 6-foot-5, 225-pound black American basketball coach not to stand out.

Back at the sports arena, the Qadsia team is controlling the boards against the Fahaheel team on this warm desert evening. Many of the fans, who attend free because there is no admission charge, sit in plush leather armchairs a few feet from the action and clamor in support. Watching with more than a passing interest is Sheik Fahad Al Ahmed, father of the modern Kuwaiti sports movement and head of Kuwait’s Olympic committee.

Soccer has traditionally been the No. 1 sport in Kuwait, but in the past 15 years, Al Ahmed has embraced basketball as a galvanizing force for nationalism. In the pursuit of patriotism, which Al Ahmed says “is not a sentimental whim but a destiny” to preserve the Arab nations, there is no budget. If money is needed for basketball, it is spent.

And a lot has been spent to bring Larry Farmer to Kuwait.

ALMOST AS SOON AS HE arrived in the Middle East in August, 1988, Farmer was jarred by the lifestyle differences. Kuwait is a country whose citizens pay no income tax, no property tax and no sales tax. Education and medical care are free. Food costs are heavily subsidized. Everyone is guaranteed a job.

But no one is guaranteed to have fun. “You can’t find a beer here, and it’s not exactly a party capital,” Farmer says with a laugh. “I had to make a huge social adjustment.”

On his first day in Kuwait, he went to a bank to open an account. No one would speak to him. “I thought it was because I was black,” he says. “But then someone came over and told me I was ‘uncovered.’ I was wearing shorts.”

Then there was the mail. Farmer found that he had to pick up letters and packages at a government ministry because foreigners’ mail is censored. “I remember how shocked I was when I first went down there,” he says. “A man sat across from me, opened my mail, especially my magazines. As he turned the pages, he cut out all the ads for Calvin Klein and Guess? jeans with a razor. Of course, by doing so, he also cut out the stories I wanted to read, which were printed on the other side.”

And there was learning to cope with the boredom of a loosely structured schedule. Farmer, his wife, Chris, and their 1-year-old son, Larry III, live a life of luxury in a three-bedroom, three-bathroom high-rise (provided by Kuwait) in the well-appointed Kuwaiti suburb of Jabriya. “There’s not really very much for me to do here,” Chris says, “but that gives me more time with our son.”

The Farmers rise at the leisurely hour of 8 a.m. Two days a week, they drive their modest, gray Nissan sedan down the highway, past an occasional sandstorm whipping across the flat desert, to the Sultan Center. At the upscale food and department store, everyone knows Farmer. Some people wave and smile; others ask for autographs.

“You can get anything you want here, as long as you’re prepared to pay for it,” Chris says. Prices are exorbitant because everything is flown in from abroad. Lettuce costs $6 a head. Oreo cookies run $7. American steak is $8 a pound. Typical Farmer purchases include Syrian pickles and Persian Gulf shrimp, local items that are inexpensive by comparison.

Around 11:30, Farmer seeks out the company of his friends. At the American School of Kuwait, a high school with a predominantly American faculty and Arabic enrollment, he plays pick-up basketball games with the teachers and students.

In the late afternoon, he heads for practice at the gym, an ultramodern sports palace in the suburb of Qadsia. State-of-the-art equipment, including a scoreboard in English and Arabic, fills the arena. Large portraits of the Amir of Kuwait, His Highness Sheik Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, gaze down on the court. Next to the basketball building is a four-story hotel, used only when teams from other countries, such as Egypt, Bahrain and Dubai, are in town.

As part of his contractual obligations, Farmer not only coaches the Qadsia team at the sports complex but also oversees a comprehensive basketball training program for hundreds of Kuwaiti schoolchildren and a half-dozen local coaches.

The remainder of Farmer’s time is spent playing with his son, writing letters, reading books or watching videotapes from friends back home. Like the mail, the tapes are subject to censorship. “They scan the commercials,” he reports. “Kissing on television is not allowed.”

“Of course,” Farmer adds, smiling, “in Kuwait, while everything is prohibited, nothing is impossible.” An invitation to a U.S. Embassy party, for instance, usually means he can get his hands on a cold beer.

THE LONG ROAD TO KUWAIT began in Denver, where Larry Farmer was a high school student who dreamed of playing for America’s No. 1 collegiate team.

The middle of three brothers and the son of an electrician father and a caterer mother, Farmer earned prep All-America honors at Manual High School. “I read about the top 20 college teams, and UCLA always stood out,” he says. “But I never thought they’d even see me play in high school.” So Farmer sat down and wrote the school a letter and enclosed his SAT scores. He was accepted.

In Westwood, Farmer earned honors as outstanding first-year player. He made the varsity team during his sophomore year and became a starting forward as a junior. In his three years on the squad, the Bruins won 89 games and lost only one in marching to three NCAA championships. While in school, Farmer met Joyce Cox, a UCLA song girl who performed at home games. They were soon engaged.

For a brief moment, Farmer’s pro basketball career looked golden. In 1973, after he graduated with a degree in sociology, he was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers and received a $10,000 signing bonus. But he lasted only through the exhibition season.

“As hard as I tried,” Farmer recalls, “I wasn’t good enough. I was clearly playing over my head.” The day before the regular season was to begin, Farmer was released from the team.

A couple of weeks later, Farmer got a call from Denver: The Nuggets were interested. Farmer called his dad for advice. “My dad just told me if I wanted to do it, to do it.” Then Farmer called Sam Gilbert, the legendary UCLA booster and his surrogate father, who naturally had the school’s interests at heart. “He told me not to go to Denver. He told me the NBA was not a life for me and told me to stay by the phone; he’d call me back. That was a Friday.”

On Saturday, Farmer had a new job and returned to Pauley Pavilion as UCLA’s new graduate assistant coach. Salary: $220 a month. He moved in with Gilbert’s family in Encino.

But Farmer still wanted to play basketball. “I needed to get it out of my system,” he says, “even if I couldn’t make the NBA.” A year later, he accepted a relatively lucrative offer--$2,000 a month, all expenses and a bonus--and flew to Koblenz, West Germany, to play for a private, semi-pro basketball club.

“It was great,” he recalls. “I was their all-time leading scorer, and I was getting paid.” In late 1974, Gilbert called. John Wooden, Farmer’s old coach, was retiring, and UCLA needed an assistant coach. Gilbert wanted to know if Larry was interested. Could he be there Friday night?

Farmer flew back and started the next night as full-time assistant under new coach Gene Bartow. Salary: $12,000 a year. He married Cox and moved to a Culver City apartment.

In 1976, Farmer met the Kuwaiti connection. His name was Fahmi Al-Khadra, a young athlete sent to the United States by the Kuwaiti government to study coaching techniques and basketball management. For nearly a year, Al-Khadra lived in Los Angeles and hung out with the Lakers, the Bruins and the USC Trojans. He liked the Bruins best, partly because he became friends with Farmer.

When Al-Khadra returned to Kuwait, Farmer stayed at UCLA, where he served under Bartow’s replacement, Gary Cunningham, and Cunningham’s replacement, Larry Brown. “I was a company guy,” he says, “but I was a happy company guy.”

When Brown left to coach the Denver Nuggets, it was finally Farmer’s turn. On March 17, 1981, Farmer--then only 30--became the youngest head coach in UCLA history. Even after six years as an assistant, the top job was a tough one.

“I had no honeymoon,” he says. “I was expected to win.” In his first season, Farmer coached the Bruins to a 21-6 record. The next year, UCLA went 23-6. But then, the team started to slip so badly that it didn’t make the NCAA tournament.

Rumor had it that Farmer would be fired. Instead, UCLA offered him a three-year contract which, when combined with promotional and broadcasting fees, was estimated at $450,000. Farmer agreed to the new contract. Three days later, he changed his mind, and UCLA hired Walt Hazzard.

“I looked around and found I had been consumed by the experience,” Farmer says. “I was burned out. One day I sat down with my wife. We agreed we had missed a great friendship.” After six years together, they divorced.

During his last year as head coach, Farmer had begun dating Chris O’Brien, a graduate student whom he would eventually marry. “I didn’t want to make the same mistakes with Chris that I had made with Joyce,” he says. “I needed to focus on the relationship.”

So Farmer began looking for a new job. After landing work as “color” man for Denver Nuggets broadcasts, however, he began to miss coaching as much as he had once missed playing.

In March, 1985, he accepted the head coaching job at Weber State College in Ogden, Utah. His first season was flawless. He won his first 10 games. The media loved him, the fans loved him, the school loved him. But his second season was a disaster.

“They told me they wanted to be nationally ranked, to be on television, the usual,” Farmer says. “So we devised a tough schedule (against higher-ranked teams), and we began to lose.”

During this time, Farmer received a call. Fahmi Al-Khadra was on the line. Was Farmer interested in coaching in Kuwait? “I didn’t even know where it was on the map,” Farmer confesses. “But I had heard it was a war zone. We had reflagged their tankers, and U.S. warships were escorting them through the gulf.” Concerned about his safety, Farmer rejected the offer.

Shortly thereafter, Weber State fired Farmer. “I really felt jilted when I left,” he says, then adds with a grin, “I guess I wanted to join the Foreign Legion.”

Halfway across the globe, Al-Khadra had a near-cosmic notion. “It was divine providence,” Al-Khadra remembers. “I decided I’d call Larry one more time.”

This time, he made Farmer a richer offer. “I was still scared about going, first, because I’m an American and, second, because I’m black.” Farmer recalls. This time, though, he accepted--on one condition. “I told Fahmi I’d come over for a week or two, and if I didn’t get shot, I’d stay.”

IN THE 22 MONTHS that Farmer has been in Kuwait, he has twice led the Qadsia team to the national championship--also known as the Amir’s Cup. But the successes are less a reflection of extraordinary athletes than a result of his knack for driving home the fundamentals of the game. Three days a week, for several hours at a time, Farmer does just that during team practice at the sports arena.

When the players pull up in their Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes, they appear in their dishdashas, free-flowing, ankle-length robes, and their kafiyahs, crisp, white hoods. They amble past the court, which is overrun by about 60 youngsters who are wrapping up their turn with Coach Larry. After a trip to the locker room, the players reappear, looking more like pro athletes in their black and gold jerseys.

Then Farmer gets down to business. He whips out 3x5 cards containing notes on basketball drills, and he puts the team through its paces. Visitors drift in and try to sit inconspicuously in the stands. The hangers-on usually include a few wide-eyed local kids and some of the Qadsia power brokers--older gentlemen who sit silently, holding their prayer beads and nodding to one another when one of the players makes a good shot.

Over and over again, Farmer orders the players to run different plays. He stresses discipline, hard work and competitiveness, even during workout scrimmages. Teaching strategy, however, is a tougher task. “I do more diagramming now,” he admits, “because of the language problems.”

Farmer isn’t the only foreign sports coach in Kuwait. Nor is he the only American basketball coach. In addition to Jim Calvin, a former assistant coach at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and Gary Moss, a transplant from West Texas State University, the government recently imported a gymnastics coach from Romania, a handball coach from Yugoslavia, a tennis coach from Great Britain and a soccer coach from Brazil. But the eyes of Kuwait are on Farmer--and basketball.

“Kuwait is not the place you think about right off the bat when you think about basketball,” says Larry Brown, head coach of the San Antonio Spurs and Farmer’s former boss at UCLA. “But I’m no longer surprised by the idea. Kuwait won’t go wrong with Larry. He’s a terrific fundamentalist and teacher. I learned a lot from him. They will, too.”

On Friday nights, the national Kuwaiti television network broadcasts NBA games played during the previous week or so. Farmer’s players watch religiously and try to imitate the stars’ ball-handling techniques and slam-dunk acrobatics.

Forward Faisal Bouresli, 29, is positively obsessed with the sport. At 6 feet 5, he’s the team’s star and its tallest player. “I love basketball,” he says. “Coach Larry helps me play my best, to pass the ball, to play as a team player. But I love to dunk.”

Last year, Bouresli, who owns a general goods store, ordered his tailor--in Bahrain--to make copies of the uniforms of the stars of every NBA team. On some days, Bouresli suits up for practice as the Los Angeles Lakers’ Magic Johnson. On other days, he is the Chicago Bulls’ Michael Jordan. One player Bouresli doesn’t mimic is the Boston Celtics’ Larry Bird. “I just don’t like him,” he explains. “No finesse. He just stands there and shoots.”

Where Bouresli and other players might entertain thoughts of rivaling their NBA idols, Farmer remains realistic. “Most of these Kuwaiti teams aren’t very good, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be in a few years.” Comparing his team to American college teams, he allows: “They’re not at Division I level of play, but my team could play against most Division II teams and have respectable games--even win.”

The coach’s assessment notwithstanding, winning is everything to the Qadsia team. In fact, some of its games are awkward mismatches. “There are the real rout games, and no one feels good about them on either team,” Farmer says. “But the refs won’t stop the game. They’re all afraid to lose face.”

During one recent contest, Farmer’s team was overwhelming its opponent. In fact, with 14 minutes remaining, the game was a shutout. “It was incredible, and it was sad,” he says. “The other team kept fouling us. That’s all they could do. And, one by one, their players began fouling out. Soon, there were no other players to put in the game. When the last remaining player had no one to inbound the ball to,” Farmer says with a laugh, “the refs finally got the message.” The game was stopped with 13 minutes on the clock and Qadsia on top, 113-0.

“When we win, the Amir gives us gifts,” says Ghanim Omran, a 20-year-old forward who also works at the Ministry of Labor. “The gifts take care of all of our problems.” Both the players and Farmer receive items ranging from gold Rolex watches to cash bonuses of $5,000 to $10,000. And when Farmer’s team wins the Kuwait championship--as it has done the past two seasons--there are even more gifts.

Despite the lavish rewards, Farmer’s coaching style hasn’t changed much from his UCLA days. Working in Kuwait does afford a certain amount of freedom, however. “What I love about coaching here is that it gives me an opportunity to experiment with different coaching theories and styles,” he says. “As a coach in the U.S., you’re under too much pressure. Here, I can make mistakes and not get second-guessed in the press.”

He still favors a man-to-man defense and a high-post offense, but it doesn’t always work. “You can’t play man-to-man and then move to a fast break if you’re not in condition,” he says, “so we play more zone defense and I substitute players more frequently.”

If the Qadsia team has weaknesses, the biggest is getting its players to attend practice sessions. “In the U.S., people want to play so they can move to the NBA and earn money,” Farmer says. “Here, everybody already has money. So we have a little agreement: If they don’t practice, they don’t play.”

Despite Farmer’s emphasis on preparation, the players worship him. “He is a hard coach,” guard Hussein Abudahoum says. “He conditions us, makes us practice ball control, running without the ball, passing and throwing the long pass. And we have fun.”

ON THIS BALMY NIGHT, the outcome between Qadsia and Fahaheel is not in question. Qadsia is ahead by 30 points. Still, Farmer is pacing in front of his bench, flashing hand signals to send in plays. “Pick! Pick!” he yells. “Watch him!” An opposing shot is blocked, and the turnover results in a three-pointer for Qadsia.

With two minutes to go, Qadsia is leading, 95-42. The players want to shoot for 100 points. Farmer insists that they take time off the clock instead.

The pace slows, and Qadsia sinks one more basket before the buzzer. The final score: Qadsia 97, Fahaheel 42. But Farmer refuses to let his players boast. “What’s important,” he tells them after the game, “is that you played together as a team. Nobody was showboating, and it worked. The other team was left with only outside shots, and they couldn’t make them.”

As Farmer walks out of the gym, he is given a slow high-five by team manager Abdulrasool Ahmed, whom Farmer has given a peculiar nickname. “Don’t ask me why,” Farmer says, “but I just call him ‘Bruce Lee.’ He loves it.”

“Coach Larry,” Ahmed says, “you win again. You are,” he pauses, searching for the right word, “a champion. Will you win the next game?”

“Bruce Lee, inshallah ,” Farmer answers, using the Arab word for “God willing.”

And God willing, Farmer says, he’ll be happy to stay in Kuwait at least a little while longer. “This is a great gig,” he says. “I don’t have any worries. I don’t worry about the budget because it’s limitless. I have no alumni breathing down my neck, no ticket sales to drum up, no NCAA officials. The only thing I have to remember is not to embarrass Kuwait. And as long as my guys play ball, that won’t happen.

“Every once in awhile, I’ll be getting ready for a game. I’ll be sitting on the bench, and I’ll look around at the crowd, at the players and it will suddenly dawn on me that this isn’t Pauley Pavilion, and I’ll wonder what I’m doing here. I was never very good about predicting my life. My career has always been a step ahead of me.” He sighs. “So here I am in Kuwait. I’m sure there must be some reason for me to be here, and I’m not complaining. Please tell everyone back in Westwood that right now, Larry Farmer’s doing just fine.”