On March 4, a Dream Became a Nightmare : Loyola: Brian Quinn was living the happy life of athletic director of the little school that could. Then Hank Gathers died.

The hurricane that swirls around Brian Quinn these days, testing his tender sensitivities and tugging at his patience, wasn’t supposed to be.

When he became athletic director at Loyola Marymount University in the summer of 1985, it was a dreamy time. He was returning to his school, to the pretty campus on the hill near the ocean in Westchester. He was going back to administer a program in which he had starred as a baseball and basketball player.

Alumni remembered him as the star point guard on the 1961 basketball team, the last Loyola basketball team to have won a conference title to that point.

He had probably been fortunate to get the job. He was jumping from assistant principal at Woodbridge High in Irvine to athletic director of a Division I athletic program. Certainly, it hadn’t hurt that he had remained a highly active alumnus while he worked his way up the ladder of the Irvine school system.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Quinn was among the most prominent athletic boosters at the school. Much like Albert Gersten recently, Quinn was in the stands, rooting on the Lions, at most home basketball games.

Universities tend to take care of their own, to feel more comfortable with those they have educated and molded. So it was natural that this Jesuit institution found such a nice fit in an athletic director who, besides his athletic background there, was also a husband of 21 years and the father of four; was a quietly religious, red-haired Irishman who would influence both of his college-age children to go to Loyola; and who had a gentle, persevering way about him.

“I never met anybody who didn’t like Brian,” said Barry Zepel, who was Loyola’s sports information director from 1979 to ’90.

Just getting the job did not end Quinn’s dreams.

Shortly before Quinn took over on July 1, 1985, Loyola’s basketball coach, Jim Lynam, became an assistant coach of the Philadelphia 76ers. Lynam had coached the Clippers and, upon being fired, had taken Loyola’s job--for 2 1/2 months.

Speculation at the time was that, had Lynam remained in Westchester, Loyola President Fr. James Loughran would have added the athletic director’s duties to the basketball coaching job.

Instead, the job fell to Quinn, who needed a basketball coach quickly. And right down the road, in Palos Verdes, lived the perfect answer.

Paul Westhead had won an NBA title as coach of the Lakers. He had extensive college coaching experience in the East and also had coached the Chicago Bulls briefly. When Lynam left, Westhead was available, and the fit was even nicer for Loyola because Westhead, besides being a fine basketball coach, was a scholarly type who could quote freely from Shakespeare and would end up teaching a course in creative writing at Loyola.

So the match was made, and although it might not have been made in heaven, it certainly looked good.

Westhead, a big name, would come to the little school and be the high-profile person in the athletic department--one whose presence would entice, for the first time, a steady stream of network television cameras and national media.

Before Westhead, Loyola’s athletic prominence was basically non-existent. With Westhead, the school was on the map. And Quinn was the detail person, the paper pusher, diplomat, official worrier and full-time public relations man to everybody from Loughran to super-boosters such as Gersten to the NCAA.

For Quinn, the dream went on. Westhead took his first team to the National Invitation Tournament, even won its first game. Attendance was good. People were happy. All the things that meant so much to Quinn--his family, his school, his work--were going well.

He even lived in Manhattan Beach, where he could indulge in frequent competitive volleyball games on the sand. It was in these games that some of the real Brian Quinn came out, some of the fire that surfaced earlier this season when Billy Tubbs and Oklahoma ran up a huge score on Loyola, leaving Quinn shaking in anger and virtually speechless afterward.

Yes, life was good for the Irish kid from Serra High in Gardena. His dream job let him play with the big boys--Oklahoma and Louisiana State and Nevada Las Vegas--without having to contend with the big-time pressure of money and alumni faced by his counterparts at those schools.

For so long, the image of Quinn’s school had been based on a self-effacing alumni joke that labeled Loyola as “the university built on a bluff and run the same way.” Now, times and perceptions had seemed to change in direct proportion to numbers of basketball victories.

The dream went on, through conference titles and NCAA tournament invitations and media exposure and packed houses at Gersten Pavilion, until March 4, 1990, when star player Hank Gathers collapsed during a game and died shortly thereafter.

Now it is January 1991, and the life of Brian Quinn is no longer dreamy. His school is being sued for millions of dollars by Gathers’ family and also is being accused, in sworn depositions taken for the lawsuit, of the kinds of institutional wrongdoing and lack of control that have gotten many other schools in big trouble with the NCAA.

At the center of the accusations is super-booster Gersten, who is being referred to among Loyola alumni, in a nonendearing way, as “our Sam Gilbert.” Gilbert, the late UCLA booster, was the central figure in an NCAA investigation that resulted in sanctions against the Bruins in the early 1980s.

Through this all, Quinn is attempting to persevere. He was in Nashville this week to attend the NCAA’s national convention. He probably would like to have hidden, but he couldn’t. Everywhere he turned, there were other athletic directors to pat him on the back knowingly and mumble when they are out of earshot, “Boy, poor little Loyola is in a ton of hurt.” And when his peers stopped coming around, newspaper reporters started.

This wouldn’t have been easy for anybody. For Quinn, it was doubly difficult.

Zepel said: “He is the kind of person who, if he has had some kind of confrontation with somebody during the day, will have trouble getting to sleep that night.”

In a brief interview here, Quinn stressed that he remained upbeat and confident that the court system will find the truth in all this, that he had no knowledge of any illegal booster contributions to Gathers or Bo Kimble or anybody else.

He was to have met with NCAA enforcement official David Berst and West Coast Conference Commissioner Mike Gilleran in an informal session, and said of that session: “I really don’t know what I’ll say to Berst. I’ve never been through anything like this. I guess I’ll just ask him for advice.”

Quinn also said he had gone way out of his way to make the rules clear to boosters. He said he had mailed out a sheet of pertinent NCAA rules to all those who purchased preferred seats for Loyola games and had even gone so far as to give Gersten an NCAA rule book. He said he did so because Gersten, being the main financial backer of the arena where the team plays and having his father’s name on the building, clearly was the most prominent booster.

Did Quinn give an NCAA rule book to any other booster?

“No, just Gersten,” he said.

Quinn said his biggest regret was that the aftermath of Gathers’ death has wiped out so many of the memories of who Gathers was and what he did. When he talked about that, Quinn got tears in his eyes.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Quinn said. “I still have a picture of Hank in my office, and it’s not coming down.

“My 14-year-old daughter still idolizes him and probably always will. He used to talk to her before all the games. On the road, he carried her suitcase for her. She has things in her room he gave her, basketball shoes he signed. No matter what is in the paper or on TV, you can’t get her to believe anything bad about Hank.”

After Gathers’ death, Loyola athletes raised money to have a huge sign placed on the scoreboard in Gersten Pavilion. The sign read: HANK’S HOUSE. Over the Thanksgiving vacation, the sign was stolen.

Quinn is very sensitive to speculation that the sign was quietly taken down by Loyola officials because of the Gathers family’s lawsuit, and said he will use athletic department funds to get a new one made as soon as possible.

But even as he battles on, it is not hard to see that some of the fight has been taken out of Brian Quinn, that some of the dream that was born in the summer of 1985 became a nightmare in March of 1990.

“I was kind of looking around the other day at some of the other people here (at the NCAA convention) and at some of the places they work,” Quinn said. “It hit me that a nice Division II job in southern Oregon or someplace like that sure looks good.”

Then he laughed, apparently knowing that tomorrow’s dream can’t start until today’s nightmare ends. And that could be a long haul.

Times staff writer Alan Drooz contributed to this story.