Greenberg Strikes It Rich in the Gold Mine--Twice

First there was the stretch limousine.

“There aren’t too many Sunday mornings,” Seth Greenberg said, “when I wake up and a limo’s outside, waiting to pick me up to do a TV show.”

Then there was the interview with the big local television station.

“I was asked by Channel 2, ‘How big was the UNLV game for your school?’ ” Greenberg said. “I told him, ‘Well, we wouldn’t be doing this interview if we’d just beat Pacific.”

Finally, there was the booster luncheon, which brought a soggy audience of 50 or so Cal State Long Beach basketball fans tromping through the rain for a plate of lasagna and a round of question-and-answer with their suddenly Woodenesque head coach.

“Usually we get 10 or 15 people for these,” Greenberg said. “My first year, when we were struggling, it was only my wife, my daughter, my daughter-to-be and my dog. He came for the scraps.”

Seth Greenberg, Mr. Popular, Mr. Basketball, laughs in the face of the spotlight that has abruptly swung his way.

Two years ago, he was the bald guy who inherited Joe Harrington’s can’t-miss cache of young jammers and missed. No, missed wasn’t the word for it. Bricked was closer to the truth. A Top 20 team before the season opened, Greenberg’s 1990-91 Long Beach 49ers were 11-17 by the time it ended.

Two weeks ago, Greenberg was 8-0, but 8-0 with an asterisk. Whom had Long Beach beaten? Southern California College. Point Loma Nazarene. Howard. East Washington. San Jose State.

Nobody.

Then Long Beach went to Stockton and lost to the University of the Pacific. Up went another asterisk. Beaten By A Nobody.

But two nights inside the Gold Mine last week changed all that, possibly for the rest of this season, possibly for many more seasons.

On Thursday, Long Beach beat Nevada Las Vegas, the 12th-ranked team in the nation at the time, ending a 29-game UNLV winning streak, the longest in the nation.

On Saturday, with emotions still swirling above the rims, the 49ers came back and beat New Mexico State, which had been a Top 25 member and was the preseason choice to oust Nevada Las Vegas as champion of the Big West Conference.

These were no nobodies. This was a weekend sweep without precedent in the Big West--back-to-back superpowers, bounced by a cumulative margin of 33 points. This was a two-game parlay that left Long Beach at 10-1, its best start in 20 years, since the Ed Ratleff-Roscoe Pondexter-Jerry Tarkanian days.

Now, glasses are being raised around Long Beach, as well as eyebrows across the country, and everyone from CNN to Prime Ticket to The Sporting News to Sports Illustrated wants a piece of Greenberg, much to the bemusement of the coveted.

“As a coach, all this attention is nice,” Greenberg said. “But it’s a long season, and it’s just as easy to get off the bandwagon as it is to get on. What’s the old line--’The same people with you on the way up will be there on the way down.’ ”

And, as a coach, Greenberg is, of course, contractually obligated to point out in his next breath: “Seven of our next nine are on the road. At Nevada, at Utah State, at Santa Barbara, at VCU, at Kansas, at New Mexico State, at Vegas.

“That’s not exactly a pretty picture.”

The snapshot in hand, though, is the one people are talking about, and it is certainly worthy of a moment’s reflection.

Were these stunning victories? Only in the context of the timing--UNLV coming in with its winning streak and New Mexico State coming in 48 hours later.

But against the Rebels and the Aggies, Long Beach played the kind of basketball that had been anticipated two years earlier, when Greenberg had three sophomores named Lucious Harris, Byron Russell and Chris Tower, plus junior point guard Bobby Sears, with a simple set of instructions: Don’t screw it up.

But Greenberg lost the instructions, along with a lot of basketball games. A year after finishing 23-9 under Harrington, the 49ers went 11-17 under Greenberg, placing eighth in a 10-team conference.

“There’s no way to downplay it--there were great expectations that year,” Greenberg said. “There was a lot of pressure on me, self-inflicted pressure.

“I thought we had some very good athletes on that team, but we didn’t have very good basketball players . . . . They were still very young and there were some jealousies that held us back. After all, we were relying on three sophomores.”

It was an inexperienced group all around, all the way to the then-aptly named head coach. Green -berg. It took Greenberg a full year to get his coaching legs--and an 18-12 second season to restore the program’s self-confidence.

This season, then, was to be the last shot. Rival coaches knew this, too, nervously inspecting their watches and asking themselves the dread question: What’s keeping Long Beach?

What indeed.

If J.R. Rider isn’t the best player in the conference, Harris most assuredly is. Eight NBA scouts were at Saturday night’s game and they weren’t there to sample the popcorn butter. Harris had 31 points, five rebounds, five assists and two steals--increasingly common numbers for him. Scouts project him as a late to mid-first rounder.

Tower, the skyscraper from Westminster High, is the best center in the conference, and the most unique--a 6-11 post man who is 45% (13 of 29) from three-point range. Russell bends rims for a hobby. And the other two starters are Rod (Fine Young) Hannibal and Jeff Rogers, the grit and the glue in the 49er lineup.

Hannibal played Saturday’s game with a dislocated finger on his shooting hand he refused to have taped because “If you tape it, they’ll think I hurt it.” He went seven for 10 from the field with that hand. Rogers is no scorer, just 3.6 points a game, but Greenberg cites his “excellent leadership” as being “the difference for us.”

No, this team is no surprise. The word on Long Beach has been out for some time. Finally, last week, the actions caught up.

“Now, our role has changed,” Greenberg said, almost ruefully. “We’ve gone from ‘a group of pretty good athletes’ to all of a sudden ‘the team that beat Vegas, they must be an attraction.’ Now, we’re the team to beat.”

Such is the price of fame. Greenberg must have noticed when he rode in the limo. There’s a lot of room inside.

It’s there for the extra baggage.