Home Again--and Happy : Former UCLA Player, Coach Larry Farmer Is Finding Niche as Broadcaster After Return From Kuwait

In late January, Larry Farmer was still in Kuwait, where he coaches and oversees the development of basketball.

But after returning to Los Angeles on Jan. 29, he figured it was time to get going on something he had wanted to pursue for some time--broadcasting.

His previous experience consisted of two 1987 Denver Nugget telecasts when, on Feb. 8, he worked as a commentator on an ESPN telecast of a Cal State Long Beach-Nevada Las Vegas game.

CBS was impressed. A little more than a week later, Farmer was hired to work the NCAA tournament, which begins Thursday.

In the meantime, he has worked games for Raycom, ESPN, SportsChannel America and Prime Ticket.

For the NCAA tournament, Farmer will be paired with play-by-play announcer Mike Gorman, and his producer, coincidentally, will be Roy Hamilton.

Hamilton, a 10-year CBS employee who lives in Santa Monica and will be working his third NCAA tournament as a producer, played at UCLA when Farmer was an assistant coach.

Said Hamilton: “I told Larry, ‘You used to yell at me in practice . . . now I get to yell at you . . . .’ ”

Farmer and his long-time friend and teammate, Bill Walton, attended the UCLA-Oregon State game at Pauley Pavilion on Feb. 11 and ran into their former coach, John Wooden.

Said Wooden, with a chuckle: “I told them, ‘I may have failed in teaching you how to play basketball, but I succeeded in teaching you how to talk about basketball.’ ”

Farmer’s sudden success does not surprise Wooden.

“He always spoke well, he is very intelligent and has a good vocabulary,” Wooden said.

Said Walton: “Larry is going to be very popular. He’s very congenial, a people person. He’ll do great.”

Farmer, though, has taken a strange route to broadcasting.

Farmer the player can claim a college record no one else can. The Bruins were 89-1 during his three varsity seasons--29-1 in Farmer’s sophomore season of 1970-71, and 30-0 the next two. The season after Farmer graduated, when Walton was a senior, the Bruins lost four games--to Notre Dame, Oregon State, Oregon, and, in double overtime, to North Carolina State in the NCAA title game.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then known as Lew Alcindor, was 88-2 during his UCLA varsity career.

“I think Kareem contributed to that record a little more than I contributed to mine,”Farmer quipped.

But Farmer was a starter for two years and, according to Walton, is the inventor of the lob-pass basket.

“He and Greg Lee were the first to do it,” Walton said. “I’d clear out to one side, Greg would lob the ball up to Larry and he would put it in. I saw them do that three or four times and told Greg, ‘Hey, that play has my name written all over it.’ ”

So, it might have been Walton and Lee who made the play famous, but credit Farmer for coming up with it.

“Nice of Bill to acknowledge that,” Farmer said. “I remember the first time Greg and I did it. It was during my junior year. It wasn’t anything planned or practiced, it just happened.

“I got inside my man and was expecting a pass, I just wasn’t sure from where. Greg lobbed it right up at the basket, I grabbed it and laid it in. It wasn’t a dunk.

“Coach didn’t like it, so we never got to practice it. It was just a thing where Greg and I would make eye contact and

do it.”

After his UCLA career, Farmer was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1973, but lasted only through the exhibition season.

The Denver Nuggets were interested--Farmer was from Denver--but the late Sam Gilbert told him, “Don’t go.” He also told him to stay by the phone.

The next day, Farmer had a new job--graduate assistant coach under Wooden. When Wooden retired in 1975, Farmer became a full-time assistant under Gene Bartow.

Farmer spent the next nine seasons at UCLA, the final three as head coach.

He served two seasons as an assistant under Bartow, two under Gary Cunningham and two under Larry Brown. When Brown left to coach the Nuggets, Farmer, then 30, became the youngest head coach in UCLA history.

“I never realized how moving just six inches over on the bench would impact my life,” Farmer said.

In his first season, the Bruins went 21-6, but probation kept them out of the NCAA tournament.

They were 23-6 in Farmer’s second season and won the Pacific 10 Conference title. But they lost to Utah in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

The next season, 1983-84, the Bruins were 17-11 and rumors persisted that Farmer would be fired. Instead, he was given a three-year contract extension. Three days later, Farmer changed his mind and resigned.

Farmer never said what had changed his mind.

Fearing that he indeed was about to be fired, Farmer said he requested a meeting with Chancellor Charles Young.

“We were getting beat in recruiting,” Farmer said, noting that, among others, current Clipper John Williams, then a Crenshaw High star, chose to go to Louisiana State.

“UCLA has higher academic standards than other schools,” Farmer said. “I told Chancellor Young we needed to ease up a little on academic standards, that the program was going downhill.”

Farmer said it was a positive meeting and that he came away believing Young wanted to retain him as coach. He was proved right when the contract extension was offered.

After the news conference announcing it, however, Farmer began to question himself. Was he doing the right thing? Was the pressure simply too much?

He went to Denver to talk with his parents.

He told them that the job was no longer fun, that it had become a merely a job, and he sometimes dreaded going to work. He told them of the tremendous pressure he felt. He told them his heart wasn’t in it.

“They said, ‘We loved you before you were the UCLA coach and we will love you when you are no longer the UCLA coach. If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it,’ ” Farmer said as he tried to hold back his emotions. “Excuse me. I get misty just talking about this.”

Farmer was 33 when he left UCLA.

“It’s a tough job,” he said. “You have to give 100%, to a point where there is nothing else in your life. There are no days off. And there is no sympathy.”

Farmer took his 4-year-old son, Larry III, to Pauley Pavilion recently, and they walked out to the middle of the court, where Farmer tried to tell him about playing there, about John Wooden, about coaching there, and about his love for UCLA.

Despite it all, though, Farmer says he made the right decision by leaving.

“If you had asked me a year later if I had made the right decision, I would have told you, ‘I don’t know.’ But now, I have no doubt.

“Had I stayed, I might have ended up leaving under more unpleasant circumstances,” he said. “I might have been fired, and left bitter and angry. But that didn’t happen, and I’m glad about that. To this day, I am a big supporter of UCLA.”

Walt Hazzard replaced Farmer and lasted four seasons. Jim Harrick is in his fifth.

Farmer is one who could truly sympathize with what Harrick was going through before he got his contract extension.

“People will never forget the success UCLA had in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Farmer said. “The pressure will always be there. It may subside some, but it will always be there.”

Harrick was an assistant coach at UCLA with Farmer for two years under Gary Cunningham, and the two had a heart-to-heart talk awhile back.

“I told Jimmy, ‘Just focus on what you are supposed to do, and that is to coach those 12 kids. Don’t lose that focus,’ ” Farmer said.

“Gene Bartow really let what was written and said about him get to him. He finally quit reading the papers and listening to the radio. That’s something I learned from Gene. That’s what I did, too--never reading a newspaper--and that’s what Jimmy must do.”

By the time Farmer left as coach at UCLA, he was dating Chris O’Brien, a graduate student he would eventually marry.

The job had cost him one marriage.

“I needed to focus on this relationship,” he said. “I didn’t want to make the same mistakes.”

Farmer ended up back in Denver, where the Nuggets hired him as a television commentator. He was assigned two games and thought he would get more games as a fill-in, but it turned out he wasn’t needed.

The next year, 1985, Farmer was hired to coach at Weber State in Ogden, Utah. His team won its first 10 games but finished 18-11. The Wildcats then went 7-22 and 9-21 and Farmer was fired in March of 1988.

In 1976, Farmer had met his Kuwaiti connection. A young athlete, Fahmi Al-Khadra, was sent to the United States to study basketball, and was befriended by Farmer.

Years later, shortly before Farmer was fired by Weber State, he received a call from Al-Khadra. He wanted to know if Farmer was interested in coaching in Kuwait.

“I didn’t even know where it was on the map,” Farmer said. “But I had heard it was a war zone.”

Farmer declined the offer. But after he was fired by Weber State, he changed his mind.

“I really felt jilted,” he said. “I guess I wanted to join the Foreign Legion.”

So Farmer went halfway around the globe and became a national celebrity. In Kuwait, he could do no wrong.

He coached the Qadsia team to the national championship and became coach of the country’s national team.

He and his family spent two years in Kuwait. He left a few days before Iraq invaded the country on Aug. 10, 1990.

Back in the United States, Farmer landed a job for one season as an assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors. He later worked as as assistant manager at a lamp store in Rosemead.

While with the Warriors, Farmer got to know commentator Jim Barnett, who kept telling Farmer he was a natural for broadcasting. Barnett wasn’t the only one, and Farmer eventually got an agent, Martin Mandel of San Francisco.

Mandel arranged for Farmer to fly to Bristol, Conn., for an audition with ESPN. Things went well, but Farmer was committed to go back to Kuwait in August.

“You’d hardly know that there was a war there,” Farmer said. “When I returned, I expected to see everything in ruins. But it’s not like that. The worst thing is, the roads are kind of chewed up from the tanks.”