Making a Smooth Transition : Brown Easily Adjusts to Coaching After Being Filipino Basketball Star

Until a few years ago, Ricardo Brown’s path through life was unobstructed and lined with fame and prosperity.

As a superstar in the Philippines Basketball Assn., he was a highly paid hero to a multitude of wild fans in a country where basketball and military coup attempts run neck-and-neck as the national pastime.

Known there as “The Brown Fox,” a nickname the former Pepperdine guard said he got from a basketball announcer in Manila, Brown played regularly in front of crowds of 25,000 and national television and radio audiences.

He was a local celebrity as an athlete and a budding actor in feature-length comedy films.

Fast-forward to the present, to a different time and space, and Brown’s surroundings are dramatically different; the priorities considerably refocused.

There he is, the rookie walk-on coach of the girls’ basketball team at El Toro, calling defensive alignments to his players in front of, oh, about 100 people on a good night. There are no cameras; no reporters eager to hear the details of a last-second winning shot.

A pep talk to the team, a well-wisher patting him on the back or a ride back to campus on a school bus are the only residuals of another high school game.

And though he’s thousands of miles away and many emotions apart from the past, Brown said the adjustment from what he left behind to what he has now hasn’t been that difficult.

Part of his newfound happiness, he said, is working not only with his players but also with students at Santiago High, where he teaches English as a second language.

“I really enjoy what I’m doing at Santiago,” said Brown, 34. “It’s a gang-infested area where kids are looking for somebody to connect with. Those are kids in great need. I’d like to make a difference in their lives somehow. It has nothing to do with basketball.”

Brown was born in Chicago but grew up in St. Louis, where his play at Edwards High attracted recruiters from major colleges. However, he opted for Centenary College in Shreveport, La., and played his freshman season alongside Robert Parish, now the Boston Celtics’ veteran center. When the season ended, the 6-foot Brown looked to transfer. “We were on (NCAA) probation and I hated Louisiana. I couldn’t see myself there for four years,” Brown said. “My objective was to get to the West Coast.”

After a one-year stop at Yavapai College in Prescott, Ariz., Brown arrived in Malibu in 1977 with a community college All-American label. He red-shirted his first season at Pepperdine and played for former Wave Coach Gary Colson in 1978-79 and Jim Harrick, now the UCLA coach, the following season.

Brown averaged 17.4 and 19.5 points in his two seasons with the Waves and helped the team to a 22-10 record and the second round of the 1979 NCAA West Regionals, where Pepperdine lost to UCLA, 76-71. He ranks fourth on the school’s all-time assists list with 351 and 20th in career scoring with 1,104 points.

Because he red-shirted one year, Brown had “junior-eligible” status after his first season on the team--the rules have been changed since--and was drafted by the Houston Rockets. He returned to Pepperdine, however, for his senior season and to get his degree in physical education. He also wanted to learn more about basketball from Harrick, from whom he has borrowed some of his coaching philosophy.

“His influence, and Colson’s too, had a great impact on me,” Brown said. “Both were verystrong on fundamentals. Harrick is as totally organized a basketball coach as you’ll ever see. I learned organization from him.”

The Rockets still owned the rights to Brown after his last season at Pepperdine, so he went to their training camp. There was only one open spot on the roster, however, and Brown was released before the 1980-81 season. The NBA San Diego Clippers and several Continental Basketball Assn. teams contacted him, and Brown considered their offers. But then came the offer he couldn’t refuse.

A professional team in the Philippines, the Great Taste club sponsored by the coffee-making company, lured him to the islands with a six-figure salary. He couldn’t sign on the dotted line fast enough.

“The money was a big reason for going there, but my mother is from the Philippines and there was some curiosity about my past, to see part of my roots, to see the culture,” Brown said. “And I knew they played good basketball there.”

Brown arrived in the PBA, which, he said, is modeled after the NBA, as a heralded Americanimport and quickly became a favorite of the demanding Filipino fans. The league has eight corporate-backed teams (Toyota, 7-Up, San Miguel Beer) that play about 65 to 70 games from February to December.With a few exceptions, games are typically held two nights a week at the 28,000-seat Araneta Coliseum in Manila and broadcast live over radio and television.

“They (Filipinos) are basketball fanatics. They are like the Brazilians with soccer. If someone loses a big game, you might read about someone committing suicide,” Brown said. “Families separate because of basketball. The husband may back one team and the wife another. To me, it was a shock.”

By 1985, Brown was right at home in the PBA. While with the San Miguel Beer club, Brown led the league in scoring with a 27.9 average, free throws made with 313, assists with 591 and three-pointers with 84. He was voted the league’s most valuable player and was chosen All-Pro, an honor he achieved seven consecutive seasons.

The following season he again led the league in scoring with a 23.9 average and in assists with 452. When he retired two years ago, he was one of only a handful of players to score more than 10,000 points in the PBA. And the perks--a paid-for condominium for himself, his wife and two sons; three maids and a chauffeur--couldn’t be beat.

But a near-fatal heart ailment several months earlier and continuing political unrest in the Philippines prompted Brown to return to the United States. No amount of money, he said, is worth dying for--either on the basketball floor or from a stray bullet.

The heart problem developed in 1989 and came to a boiling point during a game in December of that year.

“I almost died,” Brown said. “I played 42 minutes in a game the night before I went into the hospital and had to hold my chest with one hand when I ran. My heart rate at rest was 135. My normal rate is 65. The doctors found I had three (heart) valves damaged. They finally figured it was a viral infection, but I spent 19 days in the hospital.”

Two months later, Hank Gathers collapsed and died of a heart attack while playing for Loyola Marymount, and fear gripped Brown. Still, he made a comeback late in the 1990 PBA season not only as a farewell but also to collect a few more paychecks. The money, Brown readily admits, was the motivating force behind his last few seasons overseas.

“My last couple of years it became strictly play-for-pay,” said Brown, who was on three championship teams with Great Taste and three more with San Miguel Beer. “That took a lot of fun out of it. After so many years, I think I just got a little burned out.”

And fed up with the unstable political situation.

“We have been through six military coup attempts,” Brown said. “We were right in the middle of the last coup attempt in December of ’89. Every morning we would go up to the top of the building and watch the war below. We lived about a half-mile from the two military camps that were involved in the fighting. That had a lot to do with not going back.”

With the roar of admiring throngs now a memory, Brown sits in the living room of the Mission Viejo home he purchased three years ago.

This is where the family--wife, Lorma, and sons Justin, 7, and Kevan, 4--has lived since leaving the Philippines and where Brown spent time studying for his teaching credentials. And lately thinking about his new coaching career at El Toro.

“We are in a tough league, aren’t we?” Brown said, referring to the South Coast League, which has two teams ranked among the county’s 10 best.

The Chargers are 6-9, 1-2 in league going into tonight’s game at No. 5 San Clemente and struggling to remain above water. The team is young and inexperienced and has its third coach in the past three seasons. But Brown looks at the situation optimistically.

“What we are doing is trying to make them better players for the future,” Brown said. “We are telling them to have fun but work hard at the same time. We want them to be competitive for a long time.”

Brown said he’s learning about coaching even as the girls are learning the basic skills about the game. He figures the results of how much he progresses as a coach and how much he can develop the El Toro program probably won’t show for a few years, but he looks forward to that time. It’ll help complete the transition.

“Something that would be very gratifying to me is to see a 14-year-old player who I have now and see how she’s developed when she’s 17 as a person and as a player,” Brown said. “That’s when you get your payback.”