It’s Same Sloan, Different Image : Pro basketball: Tragedy has made Utah coach more mellow than he was during playing days.

Whatever happens happens, Jerry Sloan likes to say, so here are a few things that have happened:

--Five days after agreeing to become coach at the University of Evansville, his alma mater, Sloan resigned for personal reasons. It was the same Evansville program that would lose all 21 players, coaches and school officials in a plane crash 11 months later.

--Then one day, Sloan replaced Frank Layden, popular and successful, as coach of the Utah Jazz. The Jazz was swept from the opening round of the playoffs in his first year by Golden State, one of the NBA’s biggest postseason upsets.

--The next season, it ended the regular season 1-3, losing the Midwest Division title by a game, and again was bounced in the first round. Suddenly everyone was wondering what was going on.

But guess what didn’t happen. Sloan didn’t roll a grenade onto the Salt Palace court during a practice and scream at 12 guys in uniform to pounce on it. He didn’t demand that his players have personalities consumed only by basketball. He didn’t, basically, expect them to be like Jerry Sloan.

Sloan had played basketball the way Patton wanted his soldiers to fight wars. He was a 14-points-a-game scorer at guard but an all-defensive first- or second-team selection six times. Intense never seemed to do justice as a description.

Such was Sloan’s reputation in 11 seasons as a pro that he became the only player to have his uniform retired by Chicago. He also was the only Bull to arrive at the arena at 4:30 p.m. and be in uniform and have his ankles taped and be sitting at his locker when Coach Dick Motta and assistant Phil Johnson showed at 5:30, two hours before tipoff. Motta told Sloan to get a hobby.

So, of course, Sloan was supposed to be that way as a coach. He had played basketball in McLeansboro, Ill., when it meant waking at 4:30 a.m. to do chores on the family farm, walking 1 1/2 miles to the nearest main road to hitchhike to school for a 7 a.m. practice, still more than an hour too early for the first bus service, then doing it all again in reverse after the second practice to get home at 6:30 p.m. Shouldn’t the game mean at least that much to NBA players?

“The first things people expect from him, especially from a coaching standpoint, is a lack of control, or a person so aggressive that he overwhelms his players,” said Johnson, a longtime friend and now a Jazz assistant. “That’s the furthest thing from the truth.”

The players will make similar comments, just before they break into unprovoked defense of their coach for the noted past failings and the 2-5 start this season.

Said Karl Malone, without being asked: “The first person people say we should get rid of is the coach if we don’t win. I think we should get rid of the players if we don’t win. I think he’s doing a great job. I just wanted to say that.”

But Sloan, while admitting that he does enjoy coaching more than he would have expected, is not surprised by his ability to display a degree of tolerance.

“I don’t expect our players to be that way,” he said. “I’m probably more patient with the guys than most people would have expected. I remember when I first got the job here. After the first four or five practices, Mark Eaton says, ‘I’m sure glad we don’t have to do hamburger drills every time we step on the court.’

“Certain guys have a certain style and a way about them that made them good. This is the NBA. They have certain abilities. If a guy can score, I want him to be a scorer. If a guy is mainly a defender, I want him to be a defender. It just so happens I was that way. As long as they give everything . . . “

Sloan, the player, emerged from his upbringing as one of 10 kids raised by a single mother 16 miles outside a farming community of about 2,000 people in southern Illinois. Hard-working, doing whatever was needed, he attended a single-room school for eight years, becoming one of two students in his graduating class.

“I can relate to a lot of guys with tough times in their background,” he said. “As a young kid, to go to bed hungry is a tough feeling. But somewhere, a desire to want to do something came out. I think some tough times for everyone can sometimes be good.”

Basketball gave a shy, admittedly backward, kid the opportunity to bloom. He was not a natural athlete, nothing better than average in football and track, but gritty enough in his sport of choice despite being only 5 feet 6 to get a handful of scholarship offers.

Sloan chose Illinois over Evansville and Southern Illinois, and arrived in Champaign seeing the buildings on campus as if they were skyscrapers in a big city. There were a lot of people, and none looked familiar. He left after two months.

He returned to McLeansboro, worked in an oil field while gathering his thoughts and decided to try Evansville, about an hour from home. A small school. The coach there, Arad McCutcheon, placed him with a family instead of in a dormitory to help provide a comfort factor.

Something clicked, because Sloan helped the Aces win two NCAA Division II championships and became a first-round pick of the Baltimore Bullets in 1965. The next year, Chicago chose him in the expansion draft.

When a knee injury forced Sloan to retire after the 1975-76 season, he went into coaching. The Bulls asked him to stay and work for them, but Sloan wanted the job he had always looked forward to filling, as Evansville’s coach. He returned to the campus and in January of 1977 began recruiting during McCutcheon’s final season.

Less than a week later, Sloan was gone, to this day refusing to say why, other than to cite “personal reasons.” The next Dec. 13, when the plane taking the team to a game at Middle Tennessee State crashed into trees three minutes after takeoff from the Evansville airport amid heavy rain, the tragedy struck Sloan and his family in an eerie way. Sloan was supposed to have been coaching that team--riding on that plane.

The incident changed Sloan.

“I’ve always probably been a little carried away by basketball,” he acknowledged. “But at that point, I realized I needed to change and that I was wrapped too tight. I don’t think I lost any of my competitiveness; it was about how and why things happen.

“That’s when I realized basketball was just a game.”

He hasn’t been the same since, not while coaching the Bulls for nearly three seasons before being fired in 1982, not while coaching the Jazz.

“He even pets the cat now and then,” said Darl Eblen, who left a difficult home life in McLeansboro to live with the Sloans five years ago. “He relaxes a lot more when he comes home. When he gets home, he doesn’t go right for the sports section. When I first met him, he was always reading the sports.”

Said Gordon Chiesa, recalling his first reaction to becoming a Jazz assistant before the 1989-90 season: “I was amazed, truly amazed. I thought he would be so intense.”

Sloan will be fired . . . someday. That’s his prediction. All he can do is give John Stockton and Karl Malone the game plan of how best to attack the opponent and let them take it from there.

“I think it’ll happen,” Sloan said last week of his eventual departure from the Jazz. “It has to happen. I just hope it’s a cordial meeting. I don’t hope that after I’ve been here a while, I get a call and they say, ‘See ya.’ ”

He doesn’t think it will end on his terms, retiring in 10 years after a couple of championships.

“I really don’t. It might, but I don’t (think so).”

This was before Utah lost Sunday to the Golden State Warriors, a team with 10 fewer victories--a loss that cost the Jazz the Midwest title. Beyond the prestige factor, there was also the difference between the more favorable draw of playing the Warriors in the first round with the home-court advantage or facing the Phoenix Suns without it.

So Utah realistically could get dumped again in the first round, which begins tonight. And people would then call for Sloan’s job, the two-year contract extension awarded last Friday be damned.

Sloan would hate for the Jazz to lose, but sitting at his locker dressed and taped wouldn’t help anything at this point. Besides, he has a hobby: antiques.

“I’m not looking for anything and I’m not asking for anything,” he said. “I enjoy coming to work. Whatever happens, happens. I’m just trying to win some crazy basketball games.”