It’s Fast, but Will It Last? : Westhead Trying to Make a Point by Making Points

You see things; and you say “Why?”

But I dream things that never were; and I say, “Why not?”

--George Bernard Shaw

Paul Westhead dreams, too, just like your literary giants.

He envisions a never-ending fast break. OK, it’s not world peace or “Hamlet” but it worked once and, tiny spark of invention or not, it’s his own.

But here’s “Why not”:

This is the NBA, not the NCAA; he doesn’t have the players; if he did, they might not be able to maintain this pace for six months of one-night stands across America; pro opponents can run his zone traps all night and come down, three on two, and make 10-footers all day; losing acquires its own momentum, sabotaging credibility.

If you doubt any of this, check the standings: Denver 1-10.

Invention is easy compared to flying in the face of convention. They might have laughed at Christopher Columbus, but they’re falling down and holding their sides at Westhead.

Former NBA coach Alex Hannum called it “crap-a-doodle” before the Nuggets even played an exhibition. San Antonio’s Larry Brown said he could see the quick-fire offense but not the defense because, “I like to guard people.”

Haven’t we seen this before, this nice, literate, ordinary-looking father of four, taking on--what?

“The world?” Westhead suggests, laughing.

“When you lose by 40, you’re really taking on the world. Let’s see, I’ve still got my wife, Cassie, my daughter--I think.”

Monica, his oldest daughter, is a high school coach at Bishop Montgomery in Torrance. He jokes that she tells him to run something more prosaic.

Westhead laughs a lot as if it’s nothing, the whole world looking at him as if he’s--what?

“Yeah, whether I’m the space scientist. Well, surprisingly there is very strong reaction. And I say surprisingly because--I mean there are people who think it’s innovative. There are people who think it’s crazy. There are people who apparently are very angry, who hate this. I think it’s kinda surprising, a lot of people say things and they’ve never seen it. They just see the scores. So obviously, I can’t put too much stock in them.”

Even if one disinvests, he still goes home through a hostile world to a tiny band of believers, mostly blood relatives.

“I’m OK,” he says. “The only thing I feel a little exposed about--we don’t have it down yet. Our team isn’t really into the groove of it.”

That’s what he tells himself: it works, they just don’t have it down yet. He won’t back up. He has told the Denver press: “There are no options.”

Thus, the tragic flaw, or the heroic strain of Paul Westhead.

Paul’s a romantic. He’s a dreamer. He’s Huckleberry Finn.

“He tells his writing students to be outrageous. He always tells them, “Be brief, be bold.”

--Cassie Westhead

The first thing you need to know about Westhead is that this romance with non-convention has been going on a long time.

On a watershed night in the late 1970s, Westhead, then the bright, young coach at La Salle College in Philadelphia, went up against Don Casey’s Temple team. Temple was encamped on the perimeter in the deliberate offense Casey learned from his mentor, Harry Litwack, and Litwack must have gotten from Dr. James Naismith and it was like b-o-r-i-n-g Westhead to death.

So Westhead sent, not one of his players to the other end of the floor--he’d done that before, his “box and none”--not two, but three little Explorers. The crowd went nuts.

Temple won the game but a point was made.

Even if no one is exactly sure what that point was, then or now.

“Casey says to me, ‘You SOB,’ ” Westhead says laughing. “But we were good friends and he won the game. He says, ‘Everybody’s cheering you and I won the game!’ They’re all mad at me!’ ”

Unorthodoxy took the glow off Westhead’s halo and he was glad to accept Jack McKinney’s offer to become a Laker assistant. He was once again a boy wonder when he stepped in for the fallen McKinney to coach the Lakers to an NBA title.

Westhead got a four-year $1.1-million contract. Within a season plus 11 games, he was fired after a run-in with Magic Johnson over the team’s pace.

Ironically, Westhead slowed it down for the moment.

There might have been other problems, like maybe he’d lost touch with the roster. Once, the Lakers were being trounced at halftime and Westhead, fond of classical allusions and parables, told a story about being adrift on a lake. It ran long and the team got out late for warmups.

“Here we are, down by 18, and he’s in some damn rowboat with no oars,” Norm Nixon growled to reporter Scott Ostler.

If there was any doubt as to Westhead’s love for the running game, he dispelled it in his next job with the Chicago Bulls. They ran like mad, complained about him loudly and he was out in a year.

After that, Westhead went to a junior college in Palos Verdes, as an English teacher-basketball coach, until the job at Loyola Marymount opened up.

Five years later, he was the hottest name going.

His Loyola years produced the current system--not only a fast-break offense but a game-long full-court press. The Lions began making the NCAA tournament. Last spring, after the sudden death of Hank Gathers, they launched the miraculous run that carried them to the final eight. People told Westhead their wipeout of defending champion Michigan changed the way basketball is played.

But was it a real test of the system?

The Lion players emerged from a week of mourning Gathers and surfed on a wave of emotion.

“I felt like I had the power and energy to do whatever I wanted to do,” says Gathers’ best friend, Bo Kimble, now of the Clippers.

“It just seemed like I could have run for days. It was like every rebound I went for, I got. I was just like full of energy.”

Indisputably, the system worked. Denver called.

This is gravy time for Paul. He just figures, “I’m going to be as cavalier about it as I possibly can , “--of course, hoping all the time it’s going to work and he’s going to convince the Denver Nuggets this is the greatest way to play basketball. I think it’s neat that he can do that. Our family is pretty well raised now. We’re going to be all right.

--Cassie Westhead, before the season.

Maybe Westhead was so devastated by his Laker firing that, consciously or otherwise, he tried afterward to demonstrate the injustice of it, that he was, as he called himself at his introductory Denver press conference, “the fastest-paced coach.”

He denies it.

On the other hand, he never ran like this. Also, he seemed to recognize the dimensions of his fall. In his Loyola office, he hung reminders of the NBA. There was the Sports Illustrated “classroom” shot with Westhead in a bow tie and the uniformed Lakers at desks. There was a Bulls’ promotional poster, shot on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Early in his Loyola career, Westhead was asked the biggest difference from the pros.

“You mean, besides the salary?” he said, smiling.

Now he has this vision . . .

It’s a documentary. They’re showing, let’s say, a game between the Chicago Bulls and Portland Trail Blazers. And a solemn narrator says, “This is the way they used to play, with the guard walking it up to half court and the defense watching him.” And it’ll look as silly as a man on a ladder taking a ball out of a peach basket.

Until then, he’s a man with a dream, a family that loves him and a world of critics.

What, him worry?

“No,” Westhead said. “This is why I’m coaching. This is what I do. This is . . . my thing.”