A Working-Class Coach Is Something to Be

Mike Bokosky stuck it out for 10 years as an assistant basketball coach at UC Irvine in hopes he would be the one to replace Bill Mulligan when Mulligan retired.

Mulligan retired in 1991.

Bokosky didn’t get the job.

Bokosky then stuck it out for one year as an assistant basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton--which only seemed like 10--and hoped he would be the one promoted after John Sneed was fired.

Bokosky didn’t get that job, either.

He did, however, land the head coaching position at Chapman University, inheriting a program that, in his words, “has finished last three years in a row, lost its entire starting front line and is dropping to Division III next year, which means we have to recruit without being able to offer any scholarships.”

Patience. Some virtue, right?

“I don’t think,” Bokosky says, “there’s a luckier guy in the world.”

Bokosky says this while sitting on a varnished wooden bench in the quad outside Chapman’s Wilkinson Hall. The sun is shining. Leaves rustle across emerald green grass. Students in short sleeves laugh and listen to the lunch-hour rock band that’s plugged in at the cafeteria patio.

This is no Logan, W.Va., home to the Appalachian coal mines that used to put food on the Bokosky family table.

Bokosky, 37, is a coal miner’s son. His father, Paul, worked the earth for a mining company, for script, contracting the black lung disease that would kill him at 52.

Wretched work, worse wages. “We were on federal aid,” Bokosky says. “We wouldn’t have made it if we didn’t have it.” For spending money, Bokosky and his brothers would run into town Saturday morning, buy copies of the Logan Banner for two cents apiece and sell them door-to-door for a nickel or a dime.

“We’d make 30 or 40 cents a day and spent it on candy apples and Cokes,” Bokosky says. “Then we’d turn the bottle in for the deposit. When pop bottle deposits went from two cents to three cents, I said, ‘Man, what a great investment!’ ”

Paul Bokosky used to lecture his sons. “Don’t be like me,” he’d tell them. “Go to college. Get an education.”

Mike began to get the message when a ton car derailed in the mines one day and pinned his father to the ground, crushing his back. Paul Bokosky wasn’t rendered completely disabled, but he could no longer bend over or lift groaning buckets of coal. The mining career was over, but not the parenting career. To keep his family fed, Paul Bokosky took the bus west to look for less strenuous work, which he finally found, in Santa Ana.

In a meat packing plant.

For two years, Paul Bokosky sent money back home before there was enough to send for the rest of the family. Mike was 11 when he arrived in Santa Ana, soon to enroll at Santa Ana Valley High School, where basketball became his personal tunnel out of the mines.

Bokosky played it well enough, at Valley and at Riverside City and Saddleback colleges, to earn a small-college scholarship to Ft. Lewis College in Durango, Colo.

In college, Bokosky made business contacts. One in particular--Mulligan, his coach at Riverside and Saddleback--would change his life. In 1980, when Mulligan was named head coach at UC Irvine, Bokosky, then 25, was enlisted as a full-time assistant.

From there, Bokosky would experience both ends of the Orange County Division I basketball spectrum--from upper-crust UCI and the Volvos in the parking lot to working-class Fullerton and the Hyundais, from Mulligan’s wisecracks to Sneed’s knuckle-raps.

“As different as two coaches could be,” Bokosky says. “Bill, he never sweated the big things. He’d tell me, ‘You can’t win on everything. Pick your spots.’ John wanted to win on everything.

“If you have to share facilities with other sports, Bill would say, ‘OK, we’ll practice from 4 to 6:30 so volleyball and women’s basketball can use the gym earlier.’ Then, when we’re going over the budget for the next year, Bill would win a big victory. John wanted the best practice time, all the time. He wasn’t willing to budge. And that transferred to his practice. He had to win with the players all the time.”

One more thing:

“Bill loved people. After a game, he’d love to go out, have a few drinks and shoot the breeze. John never wanted to be around people. If he had to be, he’d be looking at his watch and saying, ‘I’ve got to go.’ ”

Bokosky found himself favoring the coaching style at UC Irvine . . . and the lifestyle at Cal State Fullerton.

“At Fullerton, you get a more realistic look at real life,” he says. “You get a more varied makeup of the student body. Every race is there. There’s a wide range of students, from the average kid to the top 5%. Most of the kids have to work their way through school. They’re busting their butts.

“I can identify with that.”

So don’t tell Bokosky about “stepping down” to Chapman.

“Everyone says, ‘Why are you going Division III? You’re a D-I guy,’ ” Bokosky says, nearly wincing. “You’ve got to start somewhere. Sure, I’d like to be starting at a D-I school, but there are only so many jobs like that out there. And I’m not willing to uproot my family and go to Manhattan, Kan., or Bozeman, Mont., just to advance my career.

“Here, I get to coach good kids, real ‘student-athletes,’ and I get to live where I want. I get to stay at home.”

And some home it is. “We bought when the time was right,” Bokosky says of his current Irvine digs. “Right now, that house is worth about $600,000.”

The very thought elicits giggles from the new head coach.

“We’re yuppies ,” he says with a shake of his head.

Bokosky figures he can handle life among the Occidentals and the Cal Lutherans. Logan, W.Va., isn’t on the schedule anymore.