OUT OF THE BLUE : Master’s Coach Hankinson Persuaded Disillusioned Joe Jon Bryant to Bring His Division I Basketball Skills to Newhall

Three years ago, The Master’s College basketball Coach Mel Hankinson flies to Winston-Salem, N.C., to scout a player at Mt. Tabor High, the No. 2-ranked team in the state. The trip turns out better than expected. Not only does Hankinson recruit Stuart Epperson, a 6-foot-6 shooting guard, but he gets in some important networking by finding point guard Phil Glenn for his old friend, USC Coach George Raveling.

Another player on the Mt. Tabor team also catches Hankinson’s fancy. Joe Jon Bryant is a 6-7, rawboned shot-blocker with the strength and agility to go to the basket. Hankinson fantasizes seeing him in a Mustang uniform, but let’s be serious: With about 60 offers from Division I schools, Bryant wouldn’t be interested in a little Baptist college in Newhall that plays NAIA basketball.

“We couldn’t even talk to Joe Jon,” Hankinson said.

Bryant signs with Richmond University--a mid-level Division I school coming off a Sweet 16 performance in the NCAA tournament--and Hankinson forgets about him. Two years go by. Last summer, the phone rings. Hankinson gets a lump in his throat. The player he couldn’t talk to is now talking to him. Bryant is going to leave Richmond. He asks Hankinson for advice. What should he do? Where should he go?

Hankinson, a former college professor and author of basketball textbooks, doesn’t have to search for the answers. Before long, he is on a plane to Virginia to get the approval of Richmond University officials. Bryant becomes a Mustang, eligible to play this season at the start of the second semester. Hankinson, who moonlights as a basketball consultant for TV shows--”Matlock” and “Quantum Leap,” for example--cannot believe his good fortune. Hollywood itself couldn’t have come up with a better twist.

“Joe Jon will make a major, major difference in our team,” Hankinson said during semester break. “He almost scores at will.”

In his short time as a Mustang, Bryant has not really had the opportunity to live up to his billing. That’s partly because he’s still nursing a severely sprained ankle, and because the Mustangs get so far ahead of their opponents that Hankinson goes to his bench early.

Against Southwestern Baptist Bible College recently, Bryant played less than a half, scored 18 and the Mustangs won, 126-46. He clearly dominated. In one dazzling sequence, he blocked a shot to start a fast break and ended it with slam off an alley-oop pass.

“He’s a man among boys,” Hankinson said.

While Master’s is celebrating Bryant’s arrival, Richmond isn’t exactly mourning his loss. His decision to leave marked the end of a reportedly bitter relationship between Bryant and Spiders Coach Dick Tarrant. According to Bryant, “I had a problem with a guy getting in my face and cursing me out every game.”

A source close to the team said that Tarrant and Bryant “didn’t see eye to eye. Tarrant is a 60-year-old ex-Marine who runs a controlled, disciplined offense. Bryant is a baseline-to-baseline player who played very well in spurts but at other times was totally out of control. But he was totally miscast” in Tarrant’s system.

In his two years at Richmond, Bryant played in 55 games, including an NCCA tournament game, and set a school single-game record with eight blocked shots his freshman year. Last season, he averaged about four points yet scored 18 against Georgia Tech. But when the season ended, the source said, school officials “suggested Bryant find someplace else to play, although they told him he could keep his scholarship if he stayed at Richmond.”

Bryant says the root of his conflict with Tarrant goes back to his freshman year when Tarrant made the team practice twice on Sundays. “That would not allow me to go to church,” Bryant said. When Bryant protested, their relationship “went downhill from there,” he said.

Tarrant, who describes Bryant’s playing style as “wild and woolly and crazy,” denies that he made the team practice “at 11 a.m. Sunday mornings. This is a Baptist-affiliated school. I would not do that.”

Tarrant’s reasons for Bryant’s dissatisfaction: “He wanted to play more minutes . . . and a lot of kids coming out of high school aren’t real comfortable in a highly structured style of play.”

After Bryant and Epperson played for Athletes In Action in Europe last summer, Bryant made up his mind to leave Richmond. His parents wanted him to stay in Division I, but his 90-minute phone conversation with Hankinson convinced him to play at Master’s.

Bryant liked the idea of playing with Epperson, his best friend from high school. He also liked Hankinson, a former assistant to Raveling at Iowa. Hankinson, now in his third season at Master’s, had turned the Mustangs into a upper-echelon small-school team. Last season, the Mustangs won 19 games, their most since the early 1970s, and made the NAIA District 3 playoffs for the first time.

Bryant also liked the school, a Christian liberal arts college with 850 students. Formerly Los Angeles Baptist College, it was rechristened The Master’s six years ago by its then-new president, the Rev. John MacArthur, who put a large emphasis on intercollegiate sports. A newspaper article last year said the school’s identity is now “a mixture of evangelical zeal mixed with bubbly optimism and an obsession with athletics.”

Reportedly, the school’s trustees told MacArthur they wanted a basketball team capable of beating archrival Biola. That message got through. Last season, the Mustangs beat Biola three times, equaling their win total in the teams’ previous 43 games.

“By going to The Master’s,” Bryant said, “I could grow as a player and a Christian.”

Now that he no longer is playing at Richmond, Bryant must deal with many changes in his life. Los Angeles has given him “culture shock,” he said. And aside from missing Division I competition--”It’s no fun to win by 50 points”--he misses the Big Time. A year ago, he played at Madison Square Garden and before sellout crowds of 11,000 at Richmond; a few hundred fans show up at The Master’s Bross Gym.

Bryant also has had to adjust to the strict code at Master’s: no alcohol, tobacco, dancing or “viewing unwholesome motion pictures.” A curfew is also new to him.

Have the rules been a problem? “Slightly,” he said with a smile. But he adds philosophically, “There are rules everywhere you go.” Anyway, “there’s nothing to do here at night, so the curfews don’t bother me.”

The square-jawed Southerner is even talking like a true Mustang. “I can’t wait for the Biola game (Jan. 24 at Bross Gym),” he said. “That night I’m going to be on a mission.”