Sound, Fury Signify Great Deal : Swimming: UCLA men hear Ballatore shout and respond with records.

Ron Ballatore is the ugliest swimming coach in America and his UCLA Bruins wear a T-shirt to prove it.

Below a picture of a bug-eyed Ballatore grabbing his ears and scrunching his face, the caption reads: “Just Another Pretty Face.”

A raging screamer and a surrogate father, Ballatore inspires uncommon loyalty with an unusual blend of hardness and humor.

As a former assistant pointed out, “His swimmers want to kill him. They would also swim through a wall for him.”

“Sticks,” the name Ballatore, 52, acquired as a skinny 8-year-old growing up on the south side of Chicago, is in his 15th year at UCLA.

He has coached 18 Olympians and more than 90% of his swimmers have graduated, yet the Westwood campus is an unlikely destination for a kid who was packing for the Marine Corps until his high school swimming coach convinced him that his poor grades were good enough for a state college.

In an old swimming pool hidden at the center of campus, Ballatore brings passion to the prospect of enticing two dozen young men to swim back and forth, hour after hour, day after day, at speeds that make their lungs ache, their sides cramp and their heads throb.

“If he knew you were having a good practice or a great practice, he was over your lane, pushing you on and on,” said Bill Barrett, a four-time NCAA champion and member of UCLA’s 1982 national championship team.

“He is like a street fighter. He challenges you to find what is deep inside of you, and he’s very blunt in the manner in which he presents that challenge.”

Blunt is a kind word for a man whose language is so blue that network television announcers interviewed a rival coach for a taped broadcast of the ’82 NCAA championships because, on take after take, Ballatore’s answer to the question, “How does winning the national title feel?” was, “How the . . . do you think it feels?”

Because of Ballatore, senior Greg Schaffer, top-ranked nationally in three events this season and a surprising NCAA runner-up in the 200-yard breaststroke last season, had to admit that he loves two daily sessions of sensory deprivation and the discomfort that comes from pushing himself to the limit.

“It used to be, at the end of a race, I hated to die, to feel the pain,” Schaffer said. “But now I go out (and swim the first part of the race) as hard as I can so I can push that pain. Now I embrace that hurt that I once feared.”

The lessons in the pool are only the beginning.

“He cares more about us out of the water than in the water,” said senior Brian Kurza, the fastest 50 freestyler in the nation this season.

“In the water, he doesn’t want to hear your hard-luck stories. He wants you to swim. And out of the water he doesn’t want to hear how fast you are going to go. That’s what I like about this program. Swimming is used to teach discipline, for you to become a better person, because Sticks knows swimming isn’t life.”

Kurza is the latest in a line of troubled young men who have turned to Ballatore.

Dependent on drugs and alcohol and consumed by depression, he confided in Ballatore, who helped him find a therapist.

During the 1991 season, Kurza went home to Illinois and entered a treatment facility.

“Sticks told me my (scholarship) would be waiting for me,” Kurza said. “He believed in me and he believed that I would be back. He called me all the time, and he had guys call me after practices. He sent me meet results. He never left me thinking I was all alone.”

In underdogs like Kurza, Ballatore sees himself.

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He grew up in a tough neighborhood. “I wasn’t very big,” Ballatore said, “so I got beat up.”

A 6-foot-1, 130-pound freshman, he went out for the Fenger High football team and was cut.

“I was knocked (unconscious) five times in a week and a half,” Ballatore recalled. “The coach said, ‘You ought to try another sport. You’re not gonna live very long out here.’ ”

The coach suggested swimming, and because Ballatore’s friend, Bob Steele, was on the swim team, Ballatore gave it a try.

As a beginning swimmer, Ballatore was afraid to put his face in the water. Had it not been for a no-cut policy, he would not have made the 70-man roster, because he couldn’t break one minute for 50 yards, a distance Kurza covers in 19.71 seconds.

But Ballatore’s desire to improve prompted him to sneak into the local YMCA after hours to swim by the illumination of the exit lights.

When his coach, Paul Lileck, could no longer resist Ballatore’s begging to swim in a meet, he told him to get into an outside lane and warned him not to disrupt the race.

In storybook fashion, Ballatore won. But in Ballatore fashion, it didn’t count because he was an exhibition swimmer.

As a senior, Ballatore won the city backstroke title and advanced to the state meet. He walked on at Southern Illinois and earned a swimming scholarship after his freshman year. As a senior there, he was an NAIA All-American and team captain.

Southern Illinois Coach Ralph Casey steered Ballatore into coaching, and after several high school and age-group jobs in the Midwest and the Southland, he became coach of Pasadena City College and the Pasadena Swimming Assn., an age-group team, in 1968.

His teams won 10 conference titles and five state junior college championships at Pasadena City, and with the Pasadena Swimming Assn. he developed American record-holder Charlie Campbell, 1971 national champion Diane Nickloff, Olympic trials finalists Billie Yoshino and Barby Darby and Ann Belikow, a national finalist who became his second wife.

Although he was training elite athletes, Ballatore didn’t forget the guys in the slow lane.

“I was pretty average, and I felt like I was just as important to the team,” said former Pasadena City College swimmer Joe Goeken. “If you trained hard and cared about the team, he’d do anything for you.”

Campbell, a San Diego lawyer, spent one summer sleeping on Ballatore’s couch.

“My dad was an ex-Marine, an alcoholic and by today’s standards what you would call an abusive father,” Campbell said. “Ballatore would offer to beat up my father. He was like a surrogate father and an older brother to me. He gave you toughness when you needed toughness, but he was also a confidant. He was particularly sensitive if you had problems at home, in school or economically.”

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Ballatore was in the vanguard of coaches who expected swimmers to take on an increased workload. For the first time, weight training, stretching and twice-daily swimming sessions became standard.

Ballatore viewed himself as not only trainer and motivator, but as entertainer, particularly during long sets at 6 a.m.

Kick-board throwing contests, contests in which Ballatore would pop out his false front tooth and races to and from the restroom filled brief rest periods.

“If someone was having a great workout, Ballatore would make a deal that if they could swim something in a certain time, everyone would get out for the rest of the day,” Campbell said. “On one occasion, a kid broke an American record. By watching one of their own swim so well, the rest of the team came back the next day inspired to do better.”

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Ballatore has built an esprit de corps at UCLA. It starts in recruiting. Those who sign on with him agree to strenuous workouts.

The T-shirts depicting Ballatore are earned by Bruins who complete the team’s annual Mt. Baldy run, a 3 1/2-hour race Ballatore dominated until last fall, when Schaffer and Sean Easton surpassed him.

A second version of the shirt, unveiled this season, shows Ballatore making a mean face with the caption: “Talk is Cheap.”

Michael Andrews, one of Ballatore’s five highly regarded freshman recruits, was attracted by the attitude he inspires.

Andrews admits that he is intimidated, particularly when he is the target of a Ballatore tirade.

Kurza has witnessed what he calls “Sticks going agro” for almost five years.

“He’s gonna get on your case. You gotta accept it,” Kurza said. “There’s days you don’t want to (accept it), so Sticks and I have been close to fistfights. But he’s one guy who does not hold a grudge. He’ll yell and yell and yell, and two minutes later he’s cracking jokes.”

Kurza says Ballatore’s tantrums are instructive.

“He does it to get the best out of the person,” Kurza said. “The only way he can make the point is to show the intensity of how much he believes it.”

Ballatore says he will quit when his barking no longer produces results.

“When you have to rip into them and you can tell it got to them, then they respond with a good workout,” he said. “I’m still able to do that. If you lose it, it is time to get out.”

In a gentler tone, Ballatore motivates his charges with tales of Civil War courage and perseverance.

He also relates stories of UCLA swimmers and emphasizes the team concept.

Shortly after he arrived on campus in 1979, he set to work with his swimmers, painting the walls of the men’s gymnasium pool, building record boards and NCAA champion boards and converting a storage room into a team room, complete with a UCLA swimming wall of fame.

Only NCAA champions, world and American record-holders and U.S. Olympians grace the wall.

It is a “Who’s Who” of swimming, including Olympic gold medalists Brian Goodell, Tom Jager, Bruce Hayes and Craig Oppel.

More than 100 framed All-American certificates fill another wall.

The Bruins finished a surprising third at the national championships last season, despite Ballatore’s inability to recruit any of the nation’s top swimmers. He lost ’92 Olympian Joe Hudepohl and Dan Kanner to Stanford and distance ace Matt Hooper to Texas.

“That’s the first time that has ever happened,” Ballatore said. “It really bothered me a lot because I don’t think I worked any harder the next year.”

Compounding matters, Ballatore was reprimanded for the first time for a recruiting violation. In attempting to help diving recruit Arsen Djavadian enroll in an English-as-a-second language course last spring in the UCLA extension program, Ballatore lent Djavadian money in violation of NCAA rules.

Ballatore said he didn’t realize he had broken the rules, and long-time associate Van Austin said it was typical Ballatore behavior.

“He was just helping,” Austin said. “It was an innocent accident. He’s good-natured that way.”

Remarkably, Ballatore rebounded in late spring and recruited an excellent freshman class. His steadfast optimism played a role.

“Nothing can get that guy down,” Kurza said. “With Sticks around, I get up on the block filled with anger and tension, ready to explode. It’s like we’re gonna knock heads. I love it. It makes it exciting. He tries to get the best out of us every single day.”