Meeting the Challenge : Against the Advice of Many, Butler Stayed at UCLA, and the Bruins Are Glad He Did

As it turned out, all those friends, teammates and relatives who urged Mitchell Butler to transfer out of UCLA last spring unknowingly acted in the Bruins’ best interests.

They persuaded him to stay.

“They said: ‘We don’t think you’ll develop there or get a chance to show your talents. You’re going to get lost in the shuffle,’ ” Butler said.

“I just wanted to prove them wrong. I wanted them to eat their words. I wanted them to step back and not count anybody out.”

In truth, though, Butler had all but counted himself out.

Out of sorts.

Out of patience.

Out of UCLA.

Before he caught himself, “I had a foot out the door,” he said.

Butler was one of the nation’s most heavily recruited

players as a senior at tiny Oakwood School in North Hollywood, where he dominated inferior competition.

Butler, however, had been slow in developing at UCLA.

Or so he thought.

A key reserve as a freshman on a team that reached the round of 16 in the NCAA tournament two years ago, he was a starter in all but four games last season.

But it wasn’t enough.

“I wasn’t extremely happy,” he said. “I expected stardom. I expected to come in and do some things right away. Coach (Jim) Harrick told me to have patience, to have faith. But (Tracy) Murray came in, and midway through our freshman seasons, it started for him and has been growing ever since.

“With me, it was a little slow. I was in hibernation.”

Butler, a 6-foot-5 junior swingman, has been anything but dormant this season, forcing Harrick to waffle on a theory he expressed last fall.

Replacing Butler as a starter in favor of Rodney Zimmerman, a 6-9 center, Harrick explained at the time: “I had enough of getting my brains beat out. When you play three guards, you’re going to be mediocre. You can get by for five (to) seven minutes a half, but you can’t win the league (championship) with that kind of (lineup).”

Last week, Harrick changed his stance, saying that he couldn’t keep Butler off the floor.

Butler was moved back into the starting lineup in favor of Zimmerman, who is averaging 4.4 points and 4.7 rebounds, joining Gerald Madkins and Shon Tarver in what is basically a three-guard alignment.

“He’s invaluable,” Harrick said. “He was playing so well that I had to have him in the lineup.

“I didn’t realize how much he had improved. He’s really, really moved his game to a different level. That’s why he’s playing.”

Only the Bruins’ high-scoring forwards, Murray and Don MacLean, have played more than Butler, who has averaged 9.7 points and 4.2 rebounds while handling a variety of often challenging defensive assignments.

Among the Bruins’ most athletic players, Butler often is asked to guard postmen who are four or five inches taller.

But he is equally adept at covering guards on the perimeter.

“He plays a complete game,” Harrick said. “He dives on the floor, he takes a charge. He does all the little things to help his team win. He can rebound. He can defend a center, forward or guard. He can play center, forward or guard (on offense) and know how to play it. He’s one of the top players on our team.”

He is among the most contented, too, although he probably would be a little more so if had made more than 43.5% of his free throws.

“Things are starting to come around for me,” Butler said. “I’m starting to do the things I wanted to do two years ago. And, hopefully, I’ll keep developing from here.”

Among the reasons for Butler’s disenchantment during his first two seasons was the presence of Madkins, whose steady play in the backcourt kept Butler out of his preferred position.

At the time he was recruited, Butler was under the impression that Madkins, seriously injured in a traffic accident the previous summer, might never return.

“If Gerald Madkins had been healthy, there was no way you were going to see me here because I thought he was a tremendous talent,” Butler said. “But (the UCLA coaches) told me, ‘We don’t know the status of Gerald Madkins. It’s a good situation for you.’ ”

Unconvinced at first, Butler almost committed to Duke.

“I wanted to go away from home,” he said. “Almost everyone from my graduating class went away to school, and I thought Duke was a great academic school, as well as a great basketball powerhouse. And Coach (Mike Krzyzewski) and his program--I thought they were just great.”

Before making one last recruiting trip to Arizona, Butler said he was phoned by Krzyzewski, who told him that Duke had one more scholarship available after receiving unwritten commitments from Bobby Hurley and Billy McCaffrey.

“I was trying to tell him that, if he waited until after my trip to Arizona, I would probably (commit to Duke),” Butler said. “But two days later, a day before I left for Arizona, he called and told me he had to take Thomas Hill because Hill was applying pressure and wanted to commit.”

Not impressed with his trip to Arizona--”There wasn’t very much to do there, outside of playing basketball,” he said--Butler committed to UCLA.

Last season, he found himself second-guessing his decision.

“I thought that I had more to give to the team, and it wasn’t really being asked of me,” he said. “I started questioning, ‘Am I good enough to play at this level? Am I good enough to play at the next level?’

“I thought I could score more points, but I passed up a lot of shots to give other people shots. But when they were in a position to give me a shot, it didn’t come back to me. It started to pull me way down. I started to worry a lot.”

While playing, he said, he constantly looked over his shoulder toward Harrick, wondering if his next missed shot would land him on the bench.

“I was being pulled in and out, depending on how well Keith Owens or Shon Tarver was playing,” he said.

At season’s end, Butler was ready to transfer.

“I just knew I wasn’t happy here, and that there were going to have to be some changes made,” he said.

He pondered his next move and thought about all the players in his class who had made what, to him, were better choices.

“I thought, ‘Were they wiser than me in choosing a school that better fit their needs?’ ” Butler said. “On my way out, I decided that if I was going to do this all over again, I was going to choose a school that was going to use me in the way I wanted them to use me.”

But with seemingly everyone encouraging him to take off, Butler chose to stay put.

“My parents told me never to walk away from a challenge,” he explained.

He met with Harrick, who told him that he would be given a chance to compete for a starting position at guard.

“Essentially what he was saying was, ‘If you’re not good enough, then you’ll know and I’ll know, and you’ll be sitting on the bench next to me and you won’t have anything to say,’ ” Butler said.

He played well, but not well enough to dislodge Madkins.

Still, “I raised some eyebrows,” Butler said. “And I think they didn’t want to accept the way I was playing until about a month and a half into the season. It was difficult for them to accept it because, for two seasons, they’d seen me come in and make the same mistakes over and over.

“This year, I came in and made very few mistakes, played like an upperclassman and caused them to step back a little bit. And I probably presented them with a problem because I’m almost sure they didn’t expect me to be where I’m at right now.”

True enough, Harrick said.

“We saw it about the third or fourth week in practice, but I had to see it in a game,” Harrick said. “I saw it in the Indiana game, and then he went (stretches) where he didn’t miss shots in practice.

“I’m saying, ‘Holy mackerel.’ And then he got better and better and I find myself saying, ‘I’ve got to have Mitchell Butler in the game.’ It’s two minutes into the game, and I had to have him in there.”

A more mature Butler never asked for it--as long as he was playing, he didn’t mind being a reserve--but Harrick made him a starter again.

“I’m very glad, but then again, I don’t know what would have happened if I’d gone elsewhere,” he said. “But I’m happy that I stayed. It’s worked out very well.”