Happy, No Matter What the Ending : From Being a Small-College Guard to Coaching the Lakers Is a Dream

It was 1977, pre-Laker dynasty. Pat Riley was among the nation’s unemployed. Magic Johnson was a college freshman. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had hair.

Randy Pfund was a 25-year-old teacher from Chicago, driving through the Mojave Desert to a new job in California.

If this quartet was destined to meet, it was a surprise to them all, but to none more than the pilgrim.

Had Pfund encountered Johnson, he would have been intrigued. Had he met Riley, the former Kentucky star and NBA journeyman, he would have been respectful. Had he met Abdul-Jabbar, he might have asked for an autograph.

Had Pfund envisioned what awaited him, he would have thought the heat had gotten to him and pulled over for iced tea.

“To me, the real dream come true was to get with the Lakers to start with,” Pfund said the other day.

“If you look back at that, a guy driving out in a Fiat X19 with all his possessions in the car and crossing the border at Blythe, and then turn forward the clock a little bit. . . .”

This is Randy Pfund’s Incredible Adventure. From little Wheaton College, where he played basketball for his father; to Glenbard South High School, where he coached and taught history; to Westmont College in Santa Barbara, where he landed an unpaid job as a graduate basketball assistant . . . to the Lakers?

It’s a heartwarming story of fathers and sons and father figures. It has a happy ending, too, except that it isn’t over.

The Lakers are his now. They’re older than they used to be and Pfund pfaces pfacts.

“If you look at the big picture, right now this is a franchise that is trying to fight a trend that is kind of almost inevitable in sport,” he says.

“And that is, the great teams have a run and then there’s a down time. And most of ‘em hit rock bottom. Look at the Yankees and the Packers and the Steelers, the Canadiens, the Dallas Cowboys. Unfortunately, even in L.A. the Dodgers had a real bad year this year. Sometimes, almost all the time, that happens.

“I’ve got the job, along with our management, of trying to keep that from happening here. And I’m excited about it. It looks like we’ve added some depth, and we’ve got a team that can be real competitive. We’ve just got to try to keep this thing from heading in that other direction, which last year we got a little taste of--sliding down that ladder real quick.”

Unfortunately, that isn’t his only problem.

His best player may miss 30 games of the regular season. Don’t look to John Wooden or Red Auerbach for the answer to this problem because it never happened to them. Pfund will grapple with this one by himself, on a frontier all his own.

He asked for it, too. He might have had the Sacramento Kings’ job and relatively microscopic expectations, but when Mike Dunleavy departed suddenly, Pfund jumped at the invitation.

After seven years in the fast lane, he liked it here. But now he’s driving.

Pfund’s father, Lee, pitched briefly for the Brooklyn Dodgers and later settled in as basketball coach at Wheaton College, 25 miles west of Chicago, building a successful program and winning a small-college championship in 1957.

Randy played there in the ‘70s, leading the team in scoring as a senior while shooting only 42%. He jokes that a teammate who led the nation in rebounding did it retrieving his misses.

Lee had chances to go to bigger schools but liked the small liberal arts school with its emphasis on students’ all-around development. Randy majored in social science and moved easily into teaching and coaching after graduation.

“I just decided, ‘Hey, it’s time to get on with what I wanted to do,’ ” he says. “I had a chance to get a teaching job, and in 1974, teaching jobs weren’t that easy to come by.”

But he still wasn’t sure if that was what he wanted to do.

He began looking for a basketball graduate assistant job, writing UCLA’s Gene Bartow, among others.

Failing, he lowered his sights, then lowered them some more, until Westmont’s Chet Kammerer offered a job. There was no pay involved, but Pfund thought Santa Barbara would be a nice place to take a shot. He piled his things into his Fiat and pointed it west.

He hustled up jobs. He became a money raiser for Westmont. He knocked on the door of Laker assistant Bill Bertka, a Santa Barbara resident, and went to work for Bertka’s college scouting service.

Eight years passed. Pfund was 33 and relatively settled when Laker assistant Dave Wohl left to coach the New Jersey Nets.

Pfund didn’t even dare to think about the vacancy.

“I remember being at the Bertkas’ house one day and thinking, ‘I don’t even want to ask Bill about this because I’m sure he’s got a lot of people asking him. Maybe at some point they’ll need a part-time scout, something like that.’

“I don’t think I ever thought of the possibility of taking Dave’s spot. And I remember Bill on the phone saying, ‘Pat’s got 150 people who are after him for this job, and I think he’s got somebody in mind.’ And at that point, I’m for sure not going to say anything to him.

“And two or three weeks later, I was in the office at Westmont and the phone rang and they said Bill Bertka wanted to talk to me. And Bill said, ‘Would you be interested in coming aboard as a scout for us?’

“I said, ‘Heck yeah.’ ”

There was still the matter of the interview with the big boss, Riley.

Bertka told Pfund that Riley liked strong, decisive men and to make “bold, decisive” strokes if Pat asked him to diagram a play on the blackboard.

When the moment came, Pfund was so decisive, he broke the chalk.

Probably coincidentally, Riley hired him.

Riley wanted someone fresh--”without NBA scars,” he told Pfund--who was single and could throw himself into the job without reservation, whom he could train in the Laker system.

He had come to the right young man.

Their first season together ended with the Lakers’ upset at the hands of Houston’s Twin Towers in the 1986 Western Conference finals. Riley and owner Jerry Buss held a long post-mortem over margaritas in the dressing room. When Riley made it upstairs to his Forum office hours later, he found Pfund. Pfund told Riley’s wife, Chris, that he didn’t want him to find an empty office. Riley, moved, wrote about it a year later in his book, “Show Time.”

Four intense seasons later, Riley left.

This time Pfund could imagine applying for the job but lost out. Jerry West had long been eyeing Dunleavy and hired him, instead.

Says Pfund, “I had my first NBA scar.”

More surprises lay ahead.

Dunleavy retained Riley’s staff, including Pfund.

A year later, Riley offered to make him the highest-paid assistant in basketball, but West counter-offered and Pfund turned Riley down.

When Dunleavy rocked the Lakers with his resignation last spring, West made an exploratory call to Kansas’ Roy Williams, who wasn’t interested, and settled on Pfund.

Pfund was headed for his third interview with the Kings but did a 180-degree turn.

Sacramento offered relative safety, but for Pfund, the Lakers were the Lakers.

“What I’ve known for the seven years I’ve been here is Western Conference championships, NBA finals, NBA championships,” he says.

“I don’t want to say anything negative toward Sacramento. They have a lot of good young players. But to get Sacramento into the playoffs would have been a big step for that team. It’s a different type of challenge.”

He’s got that right. He’s a long way from Wheaton and loving it, so far.