Action That Is Loud as Words

Don MacLean was down on all fours, out of bounds, behind the basket. Nine other guys followed the bouncing ball. Once, twice, three times UCLA’s players tipped it, but it wouldn’t fall. MacLean got up, got back into the game, snatched the ball near the rim with those long, Edward Scissorhands fingers of his and, while being fouled, eased it into the hoop.

He enjoyed it.

Windmilling his right arm like a baseball pitcher making a delivery, MacLean came within a couple of inches of a USC opponent’s nose. Hard telling what might have happened had his hand made contact, which undoubtedly explains why Willis McJunkin, the referee, rushed to MacLean’s side, wrapped an arm around his waist and whisked him away.

“Don, Don, Don,” McJunkin said.

Hanging onto him, the official appealed to MacLean to settle down, to keep himself under control. No sense aggravating anybody, even by accident, the reasoning went, and the leading scorer of UCLA’s nationally ranked team understood exactly what the man meant. So, when McJunkin lightly spanked his bottom for emphasis, MacLean lightly slapped him right back.

“He knows me,” MacLean said. “He knows the way I play, that I play with a lot of emotion. “It would have been pretty stupid of me to make a three-point play and get a technical foul all at once, wouldn’t it?”

Until that moment in Thursday night’s game at Pauley Pavilion, the ever-improving junior who averages 24 points a game had barely changed expression, much less gone ballistic. He mixed it up beneath the hoop, forearm-bashing and spinal-tapping without complaint. He congratulated teammates on good passes, counseled Mitchell Butler on a bad one with a gentle: “Let me get set.”

Don MacLean is a pleasure to watch, a player with near-textbook form and a distinctive bearing, even in his stride. He has perfect posture, carrying himself stiff-backed, almost haughty, from baseline to baseline. He seems equally at home inside or outside, has the jump shot of a man with a pediatrician’s soft touch and balances himself squarely at the free-throw line, low-top shoes a yard apart, not treating free throws carelessly.

Parts of his game are just now coming around--he spent all summer working on his passing, for example--but already MacLean has become only the third player in UCLA’s storied basketball history to total at least 1,000 points in his first two varsity seasons. The other two: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton.

So, in Pauley, he is popular.

As he is with his coach.

As he is with many opposing coaches, who wish they had more like him.

To hear some people tell it, however, Don MacLean is the college level’s Bill Laimbeer.

A guy from the West Coast was having a conversation the other day with a guy from the University of Colorado, Shaun Vandiver, one of the pre-eminent college basketball players in the country. As they parted ways, Vandiver passed along a message:

“Say hello to MacLean for me.”

The last time the 6-foot-10, 220-pound Colorado center said hello to the 6-foot-10, 235-pound UCLA forward, it was with his fist. At the U.S. national team’s tryout camp in Colorado Springs last May, coaches were making their selections for the Goodwill Games. Don MacLean had to be sent home with a slight bone-chip fracture in his cheek. Shaun Vandiver was sent home for being the one who fractured it.

Vandiver apparently still takes a certain amount of pleasure in telling how he “clocked” MacLean.

Whatever attitude the UCLA player might strike that turns anyone off, he remains very much his own man, true to himself, unfazed by any such nonsense. It hasn’t affected his game, which is better than ever. It hasn’t affected UCLA, which is better than it’s been in quite a while. And it hasn’t affected his coach, who likes the way MacLean handles himself.

“He’s high-strung, sure,” Jim Harrick says. “But you have to understand something. I want high-strung players playing for me. I want them to have some fire in their bellies.”

MacLean definitely has that.

“Naturally, I want him to be a good guy,” Harrick goes on. “Nobody wants a head case. But Don is a good kid through and through. He’s an excellent student, all B’s. I’ve never heard a peep about a problem with his classwork. And as far as basketball is concerned, he’s the hardest-working individual around. Don MacLean has never missed a drill, never missed a practice. Layup drills, he’s always the first one in line.

“I’d like to have a whole team of Don MacLeans.”

From the day he left Simi Valley High with 81 victories in 89 games, MacLean has been a force for UCLA basketball. Top recruits from Tracy Murray to Shon Tarver to Ed O’Bannon have followed him there, giving the Bruins clear Final Four potential for two or three seasons to come.

Maybe not everyone who crosses his path likes him, but then again, many do. MacLean is a unique personality, colorful and charismatic and hardly standoffish. When sportscaster Jim Hill was signing off on a recent live TV interview, while a teammate was simply nodding thanks, MacLean volunteered on the air: “Hey, come on out to a game! Haven’t seen you all year!”

MacLean speaks his mind and has a lot to say. When the coach from Cal was quoted as saying something uncomplimentary about him, MacLean countered by saying that the Golden Bears would never beat UCLA again. They did, but MacLean remains no less outspoken, as he was after Thursday’s 98-81 victory over USC.

“We kept reading about how those guys were going to come in here and beat us, but there was no way we were going to let that happen,” MacLean said. “We were jacked up to play. They’re better than they used to be, but no way they’re better than us yet.”

Don, Don, Don.

“Hey, I’m not putting them down,” he said. “I’m just telling it the way it is.”