Must-Win Situation : Basketball Is Important to Magnolia Coach Walin, but His Biggest Challenge Comes in Beating Cancer

Well past 10 on a chilly January night, Al Walin dangled his toes over the edge of the diving board at Magnolia High’s swimming pool. Thirty-feet below, several dozen players, parents and students gathered to urge their basketball coach to take a leap of faith.

So he did . . . again.

Dressed in a sweat shirt, he plunged feet first into the water and delivered on a promise he made to his players:

Play well and win your first Orange League game against Valencia, and I’ll take a dive off the high-board afterward.

“Hey, it wasn’t so bad,” Walin said. “The water was pretty warm, but it was cold once I got out.”

Amid all the laughs and jokes from his players, Walin had made his point. Work hard. Show no fear. Push your limits. And, most of all, take time to enjoy.

“I think you need to do things like that for kids,” he said. “Sometimes, they need to see you in a different light.”

Walin has learned to look at life a little differently in his 31 years as a high school coach in Colorado and Orange County. Keeping perspective has kept him on the sidelines the last 19 years as Magnolia’s coach and helped him survive some troubled times.

It helped him fight colon cancer 2 1/2 years ago. He’s beating that. It took some time, some surgery, some tough moments, but he’s back on the sidelines.

It helped him through the death of Mike Goff, one of his favorite players, in 1990. Goff’s picture and retired black-and-gold jersey No. 30 hang on the Wall of Honor on south end of Magnolia’s gym.

It helped him ignore the critics. Walin has had some. The unforgiving fans, parents, administrators and the know-it-all sportswriters have picked on his laid-back approach over the years.

And his perspective helped keep him going when an administrator was pressuring him to quit the past few seasons. Walin’s still there. The administrator isn’t.

Walin coached the Sentinels to a 16-7 record and the league title this season. His 19 years with at the school is the second-longest current tenure among Orange County coaches, trailing only Tom Danley’s 27 seasons at Katella.

Their teams meet tonight at Magnolia in a Southern Section II-A first-round game. Danley is trying for his 499th victory. Walin, who has 177 victories and 202 losses, has one of his most talented Magnolia teams.

It’s a big game for both teams, and both coaches. Yet Walin knows never to place too much emphasis on one game, or on one day. Cancer taught him that.

“There’s something within coaches that we teach others to fight,” he said, his voice trailing off.

“It’s all in perspective. It’s what (former North Carolina State Coach) Jim Valvano says. You know what’s important now, that there are a heck of a lot more important things in life than a ball going through a hole.

“Sure, people sit there and scream at you during a game. But it doesn’t matter. I figure I’m still here, and I can turn around and wave back at them.”

Walin is a cancer survivor. He has been for two years and seven months. He wants you to know that, first and foremost.

Colon cancer is the third-most common form of cancer. According to statistics from the American Cancer Society, there were more than 156,000 cases of colon cancer in the United States in 1992. Actors Cleavon Little and Audrey Hepburn are among the 58,000 Americans who died from it in the last year.

Walin listened to the statistics when the disease was diagnosed in August, 1990. Doctors told him he needed surgery, and that he had about a 50% chance of surviving. Walin was scared, but he liked his chances.

“I’m amazed at how many people have survived this,” he said. “You always hear about the people who don’t.”

During a three-hour surgery at Pacifica Hospital in Huntington Beach, doctors removed a malignant tumor about size of Walin’s small finger. The cancer also was spreading to his lymph nodes, which could have been fatal.

Walin spent eight days in the hospital, seven with no food or water after surgery. He jokes now that once doctors let him start eating, “I was out of there in 24 hours.”

But his treatment wasn’t finished. Every Monday for the next year, Walin went to an Anaheim’s doctor’s office for chemotherapy. The radiation treatments, along with medication that builds the immune system, kept the cancer from spreading.

Walin didn’t lose his hair during chemotherapy, as many cancer patients do. He lost only five pounds during the illness and recovery. But he looks at a picture of himself taken after the surgery and “I see a ghost.”

“I know what kind of hell chemotherapy is,” he said. “But I got through it each time in 24 hours. I never showed it (the pain) to the players, and I tried not to talk about it, except a couple of times explaining the situation to them.”

One of his players was his son, Andy, a junior forward who had transferred from Fountain Valley so he could play for his dad. Al missed six weeks of teaching and coaching while recovering from surgery, but he was back by the time basketball season started.

“He always said he would get through it,” Andy said. “The doctors told us it was bad, but he kept telling us he would make it. The chemotherapy was hard on him.”

“But he kept coaching and there was all that pressure from everyone to win. He didn’t yell at us in practice much that year. Some of the guys on the team took advantage of it.”

In the weeks after the surgery, Walin sought support from his family--Andy, wife Klea, and daughter Susan, a former standout player at Fountain Valley and Weber State.

He also sought advice from doctors, nurses and specialists. He wanted to know more about cancer. How should he handle it?

He wrote Missouri men’s basketball Coach Norm Stewart, who had survived colon cancer in 1989. While growing up in Lincoln, Neb., Walin had patterned his style of play after Stewart, who was an All-American at Missouri in 1955-56.

“I wanted to know more about it,” Walin said. “Did he do anything special?”

Stewart gave him a few suggestions and called a few days later. They stay in touch now and then. Walin plans to call Stewart soon about two of his top junior players--Brandon Hearvey and Frank Henderson.

“The letter from Stewart was a turning point,” Andy Walin said. “He had the same thing as dad, and you could turn on the TV and see him yelling at his players. He figured if Coach Stewart can get through it, so could he.”

Stewart’s card hangs on a bulletin board above Walin’s desk, beside a get-well card from his parents. Walin looks at the cards before every game.

“That was a real plus,” Walin said of Stewart. “That he took the time to help.”

Former Western Coach Greg Hoffman coached against Walin for eight seasons. His best memory of Walin was his first league game in 1984.

Hoffman’s Western team led Magnolia by one in the final seconds, but the Sentinels won on a miraculous shot by Mark Wiese. But what Hoffman remembers most was Walin’s reaction.

“I walked over to half court and I look over and there’s Walin jumping up and down, up and down,” Hoffman said. “It was one-hop, two-hop, three-hop. It looked like the triple jump in the Olympics.

“Then he comes over, and jumps on me. He just mauled me. That was my introduction to Al Walin.”

Few coaches have as much fun as Walin. His love for basketball stretches back to growing up in a football state: Nebraska. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, before Bob Devaney’s reign as football coach, the Walins and the other kids in Lincoln followed college basketball.

He played basketball and on a state championship baseball team at Lincoln High. He was a walk-on with the Nebraska baseball team, where he pitched and played outfield as a freshman. But basketball won out.

He was a walk-on with the Cornhuskers but landed a scholarship after his first season and became a part-time starter. He played against Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson and Dave DeBusschere.

Walin met Klea at Lincoln High School, dated through college and married in 1962 after Al graduated from Nebraska with a degree in physical education and a master’s in education.

They moved to Colorado later that year when Al landed a job teaching and coaching basketball at Estes Park High. The program was 76-46 in seven seasons under Walin.

“It was like being on a honeymoon for my wife and I,” Walin said. “We had only one bad season, and were 72-32 the other six years.”

Walin had visited Southern California several times when he lived in Colorado. He liked it so much, he began applying for jobs.

After turning down an offer from Inglewood High, Walin accepted a job at Magnolia in 1969. He teaches driver education and was an assistant basketball coach before taking over the program in 1974.

He has coached through some rough seasons at Magnolia--0-20 in 1984-85 and 1-21 in 1990-91 after forfeiting five nonleague victories for using ineligible players.

There’s modest success, winning league titles in 1987 and this season. His teams have broken 14 team and individual records. But no team has advanced past the playoff quarterfinals.

Walin said the toughest part of his job is “trying to keep your program at a level of respectability in the modern era of basketball.” When Magnolia’s enrollment dropped from 2,300 in the mid-1970s to 1,300 in the early 1980s, the school’s basketball talent pool shrunk with it.

Administrators have misunderstood Walin’s intentions, questioned his record and pressured him. One went so far as to tell him to quit. He wouldn’t.

“I’ve read a lot about coaches,” Walin said. “The things that go on around them. The people who make decisions above them that aren’t right.”

Walin once read that the expectancy of a high school coach is seven years.

“I’ve been around a heck of a lot longer than that,” he said. “I do it because I love working with kids.

“Somebody has to take the responsibility to give them proper direction. I even get into social graces, how to conduct yourself, how to be a good person.”

That’s not always easy. Some of Walin’s players come from single-parent families. Some come from low-income homes. They struggle to stay out of gangs, to make ends meet.

They come to Walin with their problems--grades, friends, family, you name it. Often, it’s just before games.

“He goes out of his way to make a relationship with his players,” Andy Walin said of his father. “There are so many players who go through there who don’t have it good at home. And there’s so much he has to do just to get them to play.”

Walin said it’s part of his job.

“If you’re an outsider looking in at me, you might wonder why I do something the way I do,” he said. “I know a lot, maybe too much about the individual players, and I’m trying to work with him to correct not just their basketball lives but their personal lives. That gets to be a real load.”

The coach doesn’t always have the answers, which bothers him.

“There’s a failure,” he said. “You can’t save them all. But I know so much about them, that I get so involved that maybe I carry it beyond where I should, to the point of where it hurts.”

One of Walin’s toughest days as a coach was Feb. 9, 1990, the day the school retired Mike Goff’s jersey. More than 1,000 students, parents, family and friends attended the ceremony in honor of Goff, who died of natural causes two months earlier.

Goff was one of Walin’s best players. A great athlete with a tremendous work ethic, Goff led Magnolia’s 1987 team to the league title and the section quarterfinals. He went on to play at Fullerton College.

“He was a very outgoing kid,” Walin said. “We were very, very close.”

Last Friday night, long after the players and fans had left to celebrate the league title and a victory over Brea-Olinda, Walin cut across the gym on his way to his car. Alone, he paused for a moment in front of the Wall of Honor.

“I stopped in front of Mike’s picture, I wanted to do that,” he said. “This year has been a very gratifying one.”

The Coaching Dean’s List

Active Orange County boys’ high school basketball coaches with longest tenures at their present schools:

Coach School Seasons Record Tom Danley Katella 27 498-201 Al Walin Magnolia 19 177-202 Steve White Sunny Hills 18 252-189 Roy Miller Huntington Beach 16 201-193 John Mayberry Kennedy 16 253-123 Jim Harris Ocean View 16 273-115 Pat Quinn Saddleback 14 189-171 Tim Travers El Toro 13 164-157 Mark Thornton Capistrano Valley 12 274-71 Gary McKnight Mater Dei 11 311-27 Steve Brooks Los Alamitos 11 200-104

Source: County coaches