A Score WITH Orr : Junior Forward Overcomes Adversity and Clumsiness in Leading USC to a 4-1 Start

Every day during the summer, campus workers gathered in the USC North gym for basketball.

On one hot June afternoon, however, the game was postponed because a broken rim hung from the fiberglass backboard by a single bolt.

Like detectives, the lunch-hour players tried to figure out who had so thoroughly disrupted their daily workout.

Had it been Shaquille O’Neal, filming a commercial? Could it have been Daryl Dawkins making a comeback? Maybe a displaced football player just showing off?

Charlie Parker, USC assistant basketball coach, told them the next day that the culprit was Trojan forward Lorenzo Orr.

“Skinny Lorenzo Orr?” asked one of the workers, who had never seen the 6-foot-7, 200-pound junior play. “How could he have done that?”

Orr, who also shattered a backboard before the Trojans played at Washington last season, is a dunk specialist who has quietly developed into a good all-round player.

In leading USC to a 4-1 start, he is averaging 17 points and 7.2 rebounds. He is shooting 65.3% from the field and leads the team with 10 steals and eight blocked shots.

“I think Lorenzo Orr has as much innate talent as anyone I’ve coached,” Coach George Raveling said before the season. “And, that includes Harold Miner--really.”

Orr not only has been playing well offensively for the Trojans, he also has been a force defensively. In USC’s 75-64 victory over Notre Dame last Saturday, he helped limit high-scoring Monty Williams to 17 points.

“Lorenzo is playing the best basketball (he has played) since he arrived,” Raveling said. “He’s doing it on both ends of the court. He’s playing defense now like he enjoys it.”

Being touted as an All-American candidate and compared to Miner seems to have happened overnight for Orr.

“It’s still hard for me to believe that Lorenzo is doing all of this,” said Darlene Orr, Lorenzo’s mother. “To me, he’s still my baby.”

If she is a little skeptical, it’s because she recalls that only a few years ago Lorenzo was considered too clumsy to do anything athletic while growing up in Detroit.

“When he was young, I used to worry about leaving him home alone when I went to work,” said Darlene, a single mother of four children. “I was afraid that he would hurt himself, and he often did.”

Orr’s main problem as a child was that his coordination never matched his height.

“I was very sorry as a kid,” said Orr, who will turn 23 next month. “I was just tall and real clumsy. I couldn’t do anything right.”

Without any real direction, Orr struggled before dropping out during his freshman year in high school.

“I just wasn’t inspired,” he said. “So, I dropped out for a while.”

Then, during the summer before his sophomore year, he met Johnny Goston, basketball coach at Detroit Pershing High, at a local recreational league game.

Goston saw potential in Orr and told him about his program at Pershing. He encouraged Orr to get his grades together and to give Pershing a try.

A semester later, Orr transferred and within a season became one of Detroit’s top players.

“Lorenzo just needed a change of environment,” Goston said. “I became sort of a surrogate father to him, once we established a trust in each other.”

Orr flourished under Goston. He was named all-state and all-city as a junior, after averaging 22 points and 12 rebounds.

“What we tried to do is stress discipline and education with Lorenzo,” said Goston, who has coached more than 30 Division I players in his 10 seasons at Pershing. “I told him that it was a chance of a lifetime for him to be somebody. And he jumped at the opportunity to be a better person.”

In his first season at Pershing, Orr’s basketball skills were limited. He could dunk.

“When he first came, he could flat out leap out of the gym,” Goston said. “We knew he could dunk on people, but what impressed us was his work ethic. He would be the first in the gym and the last to leave every day.”

Dropping out of school, however, cost Orr the second half of his senior basketball season. Even that did not prevent him from being heavily recruited.

After averaging 25 points, 12 rebounds and four blocks in 12 games, which included a 27-point effort against a Chris Webber-led Detroit Country Day team, Orr decided to play for the Trojans because of Raveling.

“Goston was important in that he helped me develop as an academic basketball player,” Orr said. “Then, I met Raveling and in his visit to my house, he strictly talked about academics.

“He didn’t promise me anything. Only a chance to get an education, and that impressed me. He showed the type of character that I wanted to be around.”

After graduating from Pershing in 1990, Orr had to sit out a year before enrolling at USC because he had failed to score the NCAA required 700 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Instead of staying in Detroit, Orr lived with family friends in the Los Angeles area and prepared himself for college.

“That year and a half that he didn’t play basketball was probably the toughest period of Lorenzo’s life,” Goston said. “He had to discipline himself and stay focused. He showed his love for the sport, despite some serious adversity.”

And when Orr became eligible to play at USC, he took a back seat to Miner. Orr averaged 5.4 points and 4.3 rebounds in 21 minutes a game, as the Trojans finished with a 24-6 record and advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament.

With expectations running high, Orr got off to a poor start as a sophomore, struggling to find his role. He failed to score in double figures in any of the first eight games.

“Basically, Lorenzo fought with me mentally in how he saw his game and how I saw it,” Raveling said. “He felt that he could play away from the basket, but I told him that he was best inside.”

Orr finally caught on at the end of last season. In Pacific 10 Conference play, he averaged 12 points and 6.8 rebounds, then led USC into the quarterfinals of the National Invitation Tournament.

“I was trying to do too much before Raveling got me to find my position on the floor better,” Orr said. “Once I started getting the ball and making plays, things just came together.”

Orr, who has been dating All-American Lisa Leslie of the USC women’s team for the last two years, could not be happier with his development since deciding to return to school.

“My life is really like an incredible fairy-tale,” he said. “I’m playing at a big-time school for a great coach. I’m improving as a player and as a person, and I’m doing well in school. What can be better?”