War Horse Facing Life in Pasture? : College basketball: Bill Mulligan, in his 11th season as UC Irvine coach, is struggling through a third consecutive losing season.

Bill Mulligan was eager, a six-o’-clock-in-the-morning kind of eager, for this UC Irvine basketball season to begin.

The worst season of his career overtook him last year at the age of 60. The idea this season was to send that 5-23 mark to the archives before it sent his career there, after 11 years at Irvine and 35 in coaching.

Mulligan will be 61 Feb. 24, and when he watched the Super Bowl last month, he decided whom to root for by choosing between Buffalo Coach Marv Levy and New York Coach Bill Parcells.

“I found myself pulling for Marv Levy, because he’s 62 and Parcells is 49,” Mulligan said. “I wanted the old guy to win.”

He wants the old guy he sees in the mirror to win, too, and he set out to preserve his own coaching reputation this season by summoning the Anteaters to break-of-dawn practices, and demanding conditioning more strenuous than any of his teams had ever known.

“I want to get in there, get going and redeem ourselves,” Mulligan said as practice began in October.

For a while, it seemed as if the Anteaters would do that. They stayed with UCLA for a half in the first game of the season. They had a winning record for a brief span, when they were 3-2. At 7-9, with Ricky Butler and Jeff Herdman playing some of the best basketball of their careers, it seemed probable they would win 12 games, even 15. But now they have lost eight of their past nine games, falling to 8-17, guaranteeing a third consecutive losing season.

And as the optimism has faded, Mulligan’s future as coach has become more and more a topic of speculation.

He was given a faint show of confidence with a one-year contract extension after last season, and is signed through the end of next season. But there is no certainty that he will coach the Anteaters through 1992, by his own choice or someone else’s.

“If I could predict the future, I wouldn’t be a basketball coach,” Mulligan said. “I’d be in Vegas making money. I’m not concerned. . . . I haven’t avoided it. (But) too many important things are going on in the world to worry. If I choose to resign or they ask me to, I can do other things.”

And with a twist of the wit that has marked his career, Mulligan gets in a dig at a community he resents for not attending Irvine’s games, played in the 5,000-seat Bren Center, which is often less than half full.

Mulligan out as coach?

“There’s so much apathy,” Mulligan said. “I just hope there’s someone who cares.”

The season beyond this one doesn’t promise to be easy, and it would take some doing to muster the enthusiasm to tackle next season, when the Anteaters will be without Butler and Herdman, the two best players on this team.

Mulligan’s wife, Dorothy, sees the strain.

“He vacillates,” Dorothy Mulligan said. “There are days when he comes home and says, ‘Well, maybe that’s it. Maybe I don’t want to coach any more.’ Then a couple of days later, he’ll come in very vibrant and say, ‘I’m going to go another couple of years.’ ”

Bob Schermerhorn, a former assistant of Mulligan’s and now head coach at Riverside City College, where Mulligan coached for nine seasons, says Mulligan has told him repeatedly in the past year that he wanted to coach for two more seasons.

“I don’t think he’s lost his enthusiasm for coaching,” Schermerhorn said. “I think he’s sick and tired of losing. He’s my all-time guy. When I hear rumbles about making a change at Irvine . . . I don’t know if anybody can do what Bill Mulligan has done at Irvine.”

Mulligan has guided two teams (1982 and ‘86) to the National Invitation Tournament and has beaten Nevada Las Vegas six times. The Anteaters’ best record under Mulligan was 23-7 in 1982.

Mulligan might not be ruling out the possibility that he might resign, but those closest to him find it hard to imagine.

“I think he’d fight all the way,” his wife said. “He’s pretty determined.”

Schermerhorn said, “My money would be on fight and fight.”

Mulligan, whose record at Irvine is 200-154, would be in a more severe situation if not for the contract extension given last year while the school was without an athletic director.

Tom Ford, who was hired as athletic director after Mulligan’s extension, said Mulligan will be evaluated within the first month after the end of the season, in a process all Irvine coaches undergo.

“It will be no different than any other coach’s evaluation,” Ford said. “It will include the academic success of the team, the overall performance, how the coach relates to the community, staying within budgets.”

Irvine is particularly concerned about attendance in the Bren Center, because it is the major source of revenue for the athletic department. Ford said that could be a factor in evaluations, but acknowledged that attendance is a complex issue influenced by many factors, including the economy.

Ford admitted that, like many athletic directors, he keeps a short list of coaches he would pursue if he had an opening, but he also said that when he came to Irvine he was told there was a two-year commitment to Mulligan.

“We have a commitment to him in terms of a contract,” Ford said.

The current economic situation and expectation of substantial state budget cuts to the university might work in Mulligan’s favor. If the school were to seek a negotiated resignation, that would require paying Mulligan at least a portion of his salary for the remaining year on his contract.

Ford also said the salary at which a new coach would be hired would probably be higher than Mulligan’s (about $78,000 a year) because the salary of a coach who has been at a school for some time tends to fall below the market. Those factors combined would probably make a decision to replace Mulligan an expensive one.

There are more pressing concerns than his job security, Mulligan said.

How to beat UC Santa Barbara, Cal State Fullerton, San Jose State and Utah State, if you want to name four. Nevada Las Vegas, he’ll concede.

With the season drawing to a close, the Anteaters are trying to win enough games to make the eight-team Big West Conference tournament.

“I expected us to be better,” Mulligan said. “It’s hard to figure out. We play games, and I see four or five I think we could have won. The opposition isn’t that good. That’s not a knock. It’s just the way I see it.

“What’s happened this season is we get a solid performance just about every night from Herdman, Butler and (Craig) Marshall. When ever any other player plays well, that’s a game we might get a win. . . . It’s not that they’re not trying.”

The war in the Middle East is another worry, and a personal one for Mulligan’s family. It is a war that threatens to draw Mulligan’s son Shawn away from his wife and son, who is Mulligan’s only grandchild.

Shawn, the second of the Mulligans’ three sons, is a helicopter pilot instructor at the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station. His recent assignment is being on duty to notify the families of any Tustin Marines who become casualties, but the Mulligans expect he will be sent to the Persian Gulf once a ground war begins in earnest.

“How important is (basketball)?” Mulligan said. “You get into cancer, Vietnam or the Middle East and you see how insignificant all this is. Every day, I worry about my son, and I’ve never worried about him. I’ve never worried about Shawn. . . . I keep thinking, That’s important.”

Despite other worries, Mulligan says this season has not been as hard to take as last season, which included a 15-game losing streak.

“Last year was harder. I’d never really experienced that much failure,” Mulligan said. “I don’t think you can understand, for any coach, the difference between winning and losing and what it does to you and to your personality. What it does to you the night after the game, and the next morning. That’s not a macho thing or a sexist thing, I just don’t think anybody can understand who hasn’t been a coach.”

During 35 years of coaching, Mulligan says things have changed for him.

At 60, Mulligan says, “I’ve matured a lot.”

In particular, he says he has tried to rid himself of an old habit of criticizing players in front of the media.

“I don’t think people want to read that. I don’t think they like seeing a 60-year-old person blame it on a 19-year-old kid.

“The only factor with me is getting these kids to play better and feel better about themselves. If we can’t accomplish that, we can’t accomplish that.”